This post was contributed by Kevin Brkal from KNB Online, an ActiveCampaign client who wants to share their experience with our audience. Thank you, Kevin, for your contribution!
When you’re running a business, finding tools to make your job easier is like finding a key to a treasure chest. However, one such tool is ActiveCampaign, which helps you keep in touch with customers and increase sales. Let’s talk about how you can use ActiveCampaign to land more deals.
Your Secret Weapon for More Sales
Every business wants to make as many sales as possible. In my own business, KNB Online, I’ve found that about 3 out of 10 people I send proposals to end up becoming customers. The secret sauce behind this success is ActiveCampaign and the automations I built.
How KNB Online Uses ActiveCampaign
The process at KNB Online is rather streamlined. Once I prepare a proposal for a potential client, their details are added to an automation in ActiveCampaign. This is not just a sequence of emails—it’s a carefully designed strategy that uses different communication channels to maintain a connection with the prospect.
This automation starts working its magic by sending the prospect a series of well-timed and personalized emails and SMS messages over several months. The content of these communications is designed to provide value, show our expertise, and subtly remind them of our proposal.
At the same time, these prospects are added to a custom audience on Facebook. This allows us to show them targeted educational video ads. These ads are not just random commercials—they are part of our engagement strategy, designed to provide helpful information while keeping KNB Online in their mind.
What Happens After They Sign
The cool thing about ActiveCampaign is that it knows when to stop. Once someone signs a proposal and becomes a customer, ActiveCampaign automatically stops sending follow-up messages. This way, customers don’t get bothered by unnecessary messages. This is done through a goal in that automation. The added benefit is that you can use goal reporting.
Creating Your Automation in ActiveCampaign
Embarking on your journey with ActiveCampaign involves setting up an automation in your account. Let’s walk through the steps.
First, navigate to the ‘Automations’ section, and click ‘Create an Automation.’ Here, you can use a template or start from scratch, which we’ll be doing. Click ‘Continue,’ and you’ll see the ‘Start Trigger’ option.
The ‘Start Trigger’ is the initiating point, the factor that propels a contact into your automation sequence. There are various ways to define this. You might set it to activate when a contact reaches a particular stage in the CRM or when a specific tag is added. In my setup at KNB Online, I trigger the automation when I move a prospect to the ‘Proposal Sent’ stage in the CRM.
Once you’ve designated your trigger, the next stage involves timing your subsequent actions. My preferred strategy is to send an email following the trigger immediately, then instigate a waiting period of a day. This pattern continues for both emails and SMS messages for the first week. As time progresses, I gradually extend the wait periods. The ultimate goal is to maintain consistent communication until the prospect makes a decision.
This method ensures that your prospects are always engaged and reminded of your offer without being overwhelmed. It’s a strategic balance that ActiveCampaign helps you strike, automating the process so you can focus on other aspects of your business.
By diligently employing this system, you can significantly boost your chances of converting your prospects to customers, demonstrating the power of a strategic follow-up.
What Makes a Good Follow-Up Message
Crafting a successful follow-up message is as much an art as a science. It’s about getting the right mix of frequency, personalization, and timing. Let’s delve into these aspects and discuss how to make them work for your business.
- Maintaining Consistent Contact: Staying in touch with prospects is critical to your follow-up strategy. Regular communication exhibits your commitment and makes a positive impression. It keeps your business on your prospects’ radar and creates a relationship of trust over time. For instance, at KNB Online, I ensure a consistent flow of messages, ranging from immediate follow-ups after proposal submission to timely check-ins over several months.
- Personalizing Your Message: Nothing beats a personalized message when establishing a solid connection with your prospects. Using their name in the correspondence and addressing their unique needs makes them feel valued and understood. For example, I tailor the content in my follow-up emails based on what I know about the prospect’s business. I aim to show them how my services can directly address their challenges, highlighting the value I bring to their specific situation.
- Optimizing the Timing: Even the best-crafted message can lose impact if not received at the right time. Fortunately, ActiveCampaign’s Predictive Sending feature makes this easy by analyzing your contact’s past interactions and determining the optimal time to send your email. By leveraging this feature, you can ensure your messages are more likely to get read and elicit responses. In my business, I’ve found that this AI-backed timing significantly boosts engagement rates and increases the chances of proposal acceptance.
Each of these aspects plays a vital role in crafting effective follow-up messages. You can dramatically enhance your prospect engagement and conversion rates by prioritizing consistent contact, personalizing your message, and optimizing the timing. With ActiveCampaign’s capabilities, this process becomes much easier and more efficient.
Never giving up
Sometimes, even after trying for several months, a prospect might not become a customer. But with ActiveCampaign, I don’t give up. I move them into a different long-term nurture automation where they keep getting emails. This way, they always remember my business, and they may still become a customer in the future. I have quite a few who have been on my list for years in that very automation that end up signing on to become a customer.
The Benefits ActiveCampaign Brings to Your Business
ActiveCampaign isn’t just a tool. It’s a growth partner that brings tangible benefits to your business. Here’s how ActiveCampaign has delivered these benefits for KNB Online and how it can do the same for you:
- Time-Saver: In business, time is money. ActiveCampaign’s automation capabilities free up valuable time that you can invest in other critical aspects of your business. For instance, at KNB Online, we’ve used ActiveCampaign automation to take care of the time-consuming task of following up with prospects, giving me more time to focus on crafting winning strategies for my clients.
- Scalability: As your business expands, you need a tool that grows with you—ActiveCampaign’s robust platform scales with your business needs. When I started KNB Online, I had a handful of clients. As my business grew, ActiveCampaign scaled alongside, allowing me to manage thousands of contacts with the same efficiency.
- Customizability: ActiveCampaign understands that no two businesses or customers are the same. It offers unparalleled customization options to tailor messages that fit each customer. I’ve used this feature extensively at KNB Online to create personalized follow-up messages for each prospect, significantly boosting my conversion rates.
- Seamless Integration: ActiveCampaign plays well with others. Its ability to integrate with numerous platforms enhances its functionality and makes it a versatile tool. For instance, I’ve linked it with Facebook to create custom audiences, allowing me to deliver targeted educational video ads to my prospects, further enhancing my engagement strategy.
These are just a few ways ActiveCampaign can benefit your business. It’s an all-in-one solution that saves time, scales with you, offers customizability, and integrates seamlessly with other platforms. With ActiveCampaign, you have a powerful ally that aids your business in achieving more efficient, personalized, and effective marketing outcomes.
The platform allows businesses to enhance their sales through well-structured, automated follow-ups. The tool is designed to engage potential customers, provide relevant information, and adapt based on the client’s actions.
The true power lies in the follow-up, and ActiveCampaign makes executing this strategy a breeze. And always remember: the money is in the follow-up.
