Marketing and Conversion: Inside Baseball Stats

How We’ve Increased Our Conversion and Added Millions of Dollars in Sales Using a Single Marketing Strategy  

I have a question for you, and I want you to be perfectly honest with me. How long does your company follow up with prospects before you move on and simply start working the next prospect?

To be clear, I’m not talking about how long your email drip campaign is. I mean real follow up, using multimedia (e.g., a real person and online and offline methods) to remind the prospect who you are, what you do, and that you’re still in business.

If you look at the stats for sales people, according to Marketing Donut, 44 percent of salespeople give up after talking with a prospect one additional time after the initial sales call.

The same average sales person will only make two calls, regardless of speaking with the prospect or not, before they give up on a prospect altogether.

Take a moment and think about all the money you spend on lead generation. If you’re wasting money on bad follow-up, you’re not alone. Most companies waste vast amounts of money on poor follow-up.

And if you implement a few of the tweaks we made at my company, The Newsletter Pro, into your own business, you’ll discover an influx of new sales from leads that your salespeople had long given up on.

The Backstory

Although the ROI of a newsletter is notoriously difficult to put a number to, the last couple of years we’ve been able to track the effectiveness of our own long-term newsletter drip campaign, and here is what we found:

• 35% of new sales came from those on our list for zero to 30 days.
• 29% of new sales occurred between 31 and 90 days.
• Only 7% of sales came between 91 and 365 days.
• But 29% of prospects were sold AFTER they’d been in contact with us for OVER 366 days!

That last number is shocking: nearly a third of all sales came from people who originally contacted us 12-plus months ago and simply weren’t ready to buy at the time. Had we not been using our newsletter drip campaign, we would have lost millions in new revenue. As you can see, tracking the long-term marketing conversion is critical!

I want to ask you another question: How much money are you leaving on the table if you’re missing out on 29 percent (or more) of your total sales because you don’t have a long-term follow-up system for prospects?

Regardless of someone’s reasoning for not having bought yet, the reality of the situation is that more people are taking 31-plus days to make a buying decision. You have to adapt, because at the end of the day, people are ready to buy when they are ready to buy, NOT when you’re ready to sell to them.

This is simply the reality we live in, and it is your job to follow up with people and remind them who you are, what you do, and that you’re still in business.

If you want to see more of your leads convert into new sales, you have to set up a system to make sure you use a variety of offline and online media to engage, educate, and connect with your prospects. And if you’re willing to play the long game and create both an offline and online media campaign to nurture those prospects, build a relationship with them, and entertain and educate them, you have the opportunity to reap millions of dollars in additional new revenue.

Done correctly, you can use much of this same campaign to increase customer retentions and referrals. So, are you going to step up and turn those prospects into customers, or are your competitors going to figure this out first and beat you to the punch?

If you want more marketing and conversion case studies, check out this amazing article, Curing Your Follow up Headaches.