Handling Prospects Who Will Need Your Services in the Future

In our last video we talked in detail about what to do when a person has an immediate need. And in this video, what we’re going to do is talk about when someone has a future need. So they don’t need your services necessarily right now or in the next week but they are beginning to build their network of trusted advisors who they might deal with as they begin to put a project together or whatever it is if they’re building that will require your professional expertise. And how do you know the difference between a now customer and a not now customer? Well, you can’t know that’s really a self-selection type of a process. The customer will behave in a certain way and that will indicate the urgency that they feel and so you need to give them an option. You need to give them a now option and a later option. We’re going to talk about the later option. So the key first of all is an understanding that whatever tactics you decide to use, you’re opening the door to re-engagement so that you can talk to them again. You may have spent no money on getting the traffic to your website or you may have spent PPC dollars trying to get people to visit your website but in either case you want the opportunity to re-engage with them because that reengagement really costs you nothing once they’ve landed on your site. So how does that re-engagement take place? One of the ways is very popular now is something called follow ads and you can set those up so that when a person lands on your site for whatever reason, a small text file called a cookie is written to their computer. And then as they wander through the internet doing things, your ad will come up on other person’s pages. There’s a vast network of participating websites that Google partners with and other advertising networks partner with that will show your ad if the cookie that was written to their computer is in evidence. So the website will read the person’s browser as in visiting and if the cookie for your website exists, there’s your ad again. So that’s a level of re-engagement and you have they have the opportunity to click back and those are actually very effective and it’s a low lower cost way of re-engaging with a prospect but it’s a little bit delicate because they might be using a different browser, maybe they’re using a different computer, maybe they’re using their cell phone instead of the desktop phone or vice versa. So there’s no guarantee that that cookie that was written during that first visit is going to trick it trigger the advertisement that you need that they need to see to re-engage with you. So that’s kind of delicate. The ideal way to re-engage with someone is by you know and to capture a person’s email address you absolutely need to provide them with a meaningful incentive to share that with you because when someone shares an email address with you they all know what’s going to happen next. You’re going to start sending stuff to them so you need to provide them with an incentive that shows that you’re not just out to spam them or drive them up the wall. You’re there to inform them and educate them and to be a partner and whatever process that they’re moving through right now. So if you are a real estate lawyer and you know that your ideal client is someone who is thinking about buying a home maybe they’re not buying one next weekend like they’ve got it all lined out that would be a now customer. But in the case of a later customer or a not now customer, they’re thinking about buying a home. Maybe they’re just starting to get an idea of what’s involved and what planning needs to happen. So that’s exactly the kind of information you can provide as an incentive free of charge which of course reverses the risk to them because it doesn’t cost them anything in exchange for their email address. An offer that works for some people. I have a customer who sells boats and they use this particular offer and I think it’s a little bit weak but it converts about half a percent so for every 200 people that visit their website, one person will put their email address in and that’s simply you know share your email address with us and we will send you regular updates on what’s going on here at our business. It’s a little weak. It’s one of those things that’s about you it’s not about me. A really good offer is one where you’re providing an exchange that helps them realize whatever it is that they’re trying to accomplish. Why do they come to you in the first place? If I’m thinking of building a house maybe I read about the top 10 pitfalls that new homeowners run into when shopping for a home. Maybe that would be something that you can put out there. So identify what it is that they’re trying to achieve by entering into a relationship with you in the future and what information would they need to know in order to avoid some of the pitfalls that might come along in that process. That’s just one of many ways of tape of creating a lead capture offer and your web designer can help you to quote a little form on your website or a pop-up that gives people that opportunity. One way to make those convert better is to process the pop up with a short survey that says something along the lines of. Let’s use the real estate lawyer as an example, someone who is searching for a home comes to your website and the pop up says: “are you one of the following: a person looking for their first home, person looking for a second home, or a person looking to buy commercial real estate or investment real estate?” So this little pop-up comes up and you haven’t asked them for their email address just yet. All you’re doing is you’re asking them a question, no harm there. So they click on which one indicates them and on the next page there is a message that says: “please fill in your email address to receive a free report on how to avoid the common pitfalls when purchasing real estate”. Now what’s happened psychologically here is that you’ve asked them to do something easy, answer the survey question and that is prime their brain to comply when you move to the next step which is the email address. So what happens is that because people are primed like that, it’s proven that those convert much much higher than other lead capture mechanisms. The other benefit of that is that your programmer or your web designer can capture which category or segment that person belongs to. So your future engagement can be that much more powerful. You can say things that are very specific to their situation because they told you what their situation is. So that is very very powerful and of course, at that point re-engagement is a matter of sending them in Gmail and what kind of email do you need to send them? You need to send them an email that is not spammy and it’s not about selling stuff, it’s something that deepens their relationship with you and implicitly indicates the kind of business person that you are. The kind of professional that you wanna indicates your expertise, educates them on things that really matter to them. Now that you’ve got their email address, you have the opportunity to re-engage with them over time and then when they’re later need or not now need becomes a now need, you’re already someone that they have a relationship with and you are the obvious choice and you don’t know when that’s going to be. So you have to keep that re-engagement pattern moving along, rolling along and building the relationships so that you’re there to help them when they’re ready to move ahead. There are other tactics for re-engagement and I’m going to talk about those in future videos but those are the fundamentals there that will help you get a leg up in re-engaging with people who are not ready to do business with you now but will be ready to do business with you in the future.