You send them well-crafted emails explaining the best of your services, but they don’t respond. They have subscribed your company newsletter, but they never utter a word, and yet they have taken place in your database as leads.
You often call them dead leads.
So, how do you feel about those dead leads?
You might think that they are not interested in your brand and are just eating the space in your database or that you should remove them now, isn’t it?
However, there is another part of the story– until the moment a prospect doesn’t unsubscribe with your company newsletter, there is a possibility that they still see value in your services. Marketers just need to leverage that possibility. Here is how you can do it:
1. Stop speculating
And come out of the past!
If you want to revive the unresponsive leads, make sure your marketing approach is not affected by the ways those leads behaved in the past. Using phrases such as-
“This is regarding my previous email which went unresponsive from your end”
You are reminding them of why they didn’t respond to you. The above phrase also seems as if you are pointing out their mistakes. Also, the chances are that they might get annoyed with the assertiveness in the statement.
Instead, don’t talk about the previous emails. Send new emails referring to your new services or solutions and remind them of why they subscribed to you. This way you can get a dead lead speak and can bring them down to the sales funnel.
Explore more: 5 Ways Your Sales Team Can Win The Modern B2B Buyer
2. Talk about them not you
Probably, the reason that a lead is laying down dead in your customer database is that you always talk about your brand, your services, or how you can make a difference in their business.
- First, your potential or even existing customers didn’t come to you to listen to the grandeur of your brand or services. They came to get the solutions to their pain-points or to get information on how they can improve their business.
- Second, for example, if they have still not unsubscribed your company newsletter; they are interested in your brand.
So, find new ways to interact with them – talk about them. Some of the ideas are:
- Follow the unresponsive prospects on social media
- Know about the specific or important events of their company such as a product launch, opening of a new office-branch or receiving an award
- Send them email messages with a congratulatory note for the relevant events
Applying the above tactics, you tap into the events that can in-turn trigger their psychological behavior – they might believe that you care about them as a brand. This will build trust in them, and this trust will help you foster better relationships with them.
3. Highlight new features
Let’s accept that the initial stage of converting a prospect into a client is all about the way you approach them. When a potential prospect does not respond to the solutions that you pitch, the time has come to come-up with something new. But, that doesn’t (necessarily) mean you have to bring in new services or to create new solutions.
You don’t have to amend your services, just showcase new features of your existing services differently:
- Do some research on what kind of content your client is interested in and create a blog, article, or infographic about the same
- Send an email to the client explaining that how that content piece can help them improve their business
- Know about the questions the dead leads are most likely to ask on various social media platforms, LinkedIn groups, for example.
- Find the most suitable answers to those questions, collate them, and send to those prospects with a note that could be:
“I wrote this blog, and I think it will be helpful to you in maximizing your revenue”
4. Update the old data
Marketers often think of removing the dead leads in their database, but this can result in losing the contacts that are potential and could become long-termed clients if dealt the right way.
Thus, instead of abruptly removing contacts that no longer respond to your marketing messages; opt for the wholesome approach – update your database.
- Find the discrepancies in your customer database – duplicate contacts, domain errors, inaccuracies in email addresses, incomplete data, and spelling flaws
- Edit the contacts in the database by applying standardized validation rules
- Verify and automate the updated and cleansed data
- Marketers can also go for some reliable third-party sources that can append their data
Marketing data decays at a faster pace – businesses move, new decision makers enter, old employees leave, and new ones get hired which makes it requisite for marketers and sales professionals to ensure that the data they are using is updated. Only then they can get rid (the right way) of the leads that are dead or are no longer of their use.