Quick Win + Pro Tip: Reaching Out to Leads Doesn't Need to Be Complicated

Many of us fall into a very common email blast trap: thinking that everything sent to your contact list needs to be a well-formatted newsletter with extensive links, articles, and content to be worth sending.

This misconception leads to big missed opportunities. Why? Because each and every touchpoint with a client or lead gives you the chance to activate them.

Our pro tip: take five minutes to create a list of relevant messages that would inspire, educate, and potentially activate those on your email list. As an example, if you were in the live events industry your topics might look like:

• Up and coming event trends
• Favorite venues
• Scenic inspiration
• Event pictures
• How a new technology can be used to engage audiences

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Why does this work? Two words: inspiration and value. When you provide your clients with content that is valuable and inspiring, oftentimes, they’ll take action.

The return on your time can be pretty significant, too. Again, let’s imagine you run an audio visual production company. Your clients are meeting planners producing and organizing live events. How do you picture a typical workday for these planners? What do you think is important to them? What do you offer that could bring them value?

When you make an effort to share ideas that inspire, you may just find that your messaging lands in front of a meeting planner at exactly the right time.

As we play out this scenario, pretend it’s the end of a busy year and event season and your team drafts an email to all your contacts. Current customers, past customers, and even leads. The email asks clients if they have any last-minute events they need support on before the new year, citing holiday parties or galas for non-profit organizations. This achieves the timing goal of outreach - the right message at the right time.

It’s a numbers game. In the events industry, the audio visual production of smaller events can easily range from $10k-$50k. So imagine you send out 500 emails and even one person responds with an event. That can be a nice ROI, not to mention hold the potential for even more future events.

At the beginning of every year, make sure you send every client and lead an invitation to meet up to talk about your partnership. During this meeting with existing clients, you can talk about what went well on past events, share ideas for improvement, and brainstorm ideas for the upcoming year. In meetings with leads, you’ll learn more about the needs of the client, share your creative solutions for their events, and find ways to offer unexpected value and resources to their team.

The year is full of opportunities to capture new business or expand the footprint of existing clients - and it all starts by opening a conversation.

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