Making Lead Gen Human Again

Everyone today is getting bombarded with people trying to get their attention. We all receive spam emails, phone calls, and text messages, and it can feel very overwhelming. Nico, Larissa, and Justine wanted to sit down and talk about how we can make lead gen human again in hopes of standing out in a prospect’s crowded inbox.

In today’s world, there are always people trying to sell you something. It becomes very easy as a marketer to be impersonal and not form meaningful relationships with the people you’re trying to win over. It’s incredibly important to focus on personalization if you want to stand out from the noise. Take a look at this example. You receive an email from a company that says, “Hey [first name], check out this product.” Obviously, this company only took the time to find your first name and nothing else about you. This is a very low level of personalization. Now, compare it to this message. “Hey, [first name], I saw your most recent post about your trip to California; it looks like you had a lot of fun! I would love to meet up with you when you get home to get a drink sometime! By the way, if you didn’t know, I provide this service to people just like you. Hope to hear from you soon!” That extra piece of personalization really shows that the person took the time to learn about you and cares about your time. This effort goes both ways. If you see someone put that effort into sending you a message, you’re more likely to respond and be interested in the offer.

Now, there are some strings attached to this method of personalized outreach. This method really only works if your prospect has a high LTV (aka lifetime value). Anything more than a $1,000 LTV is worth using this personalization route. If your product has an LTV of under $1000, it will be much more beneficial to focus on ads and more mass-market-style messages because it will be more cost-effective in the long run. It’s worth considering the cost and value you get from running personalized campaigns. It’s also worth noting that you won’t be the only person going after the super high-value clients, which is why it’s important to stand out to them. Whereas if it’s a lower-value client, you’re in the game of getting as many clients as possible as opposed to a few high-value clients.

So, what are some unique ways to stand out to your prospective clients? We’ve been playing around with a few different ideas and are excited to share them with you! We have prospects who are excited about what we offer and are almost ready to sign with us, but they just need a final push to get them across the finish line. We wanted to do something to stand out to them. So, what did we do? We sent them a hammer. Yes, you read that right. We sent them a hammer off Amazon with a note that said, “Hey, we’re super excited to build a partnership with you!” We admit that it’s a little bit of a cheesy pun, but it effectively got them across the finish line and signed a contract with us. Does this sound a little extra to you? It might be. But for us, it was worth the extra effort because they’re the perfect client for us and we expect them to get a lot of benefit from working with us. This effort isn’t put towards low-value clients because it takes a bit more time and money, which you only want to spend on clients with a high LTV. So if a $7 hammer will land you a $10,000 client, it might be worth doing. (We closed this client within a few days of receiving their hammer btw ;))

The second thing we did to stand out recently was for a high-value prospect who was super close to saying yes. To help show them how serious we were about working with them, we built a domain with our prospect’s name and built a landing page reiterating what we could do for them. We made this landing page super custom to them and referenced topics we had discussed earlier, or they had some questions about. We included a video of us telling them why we would be an excellent fit for them and encouraged them to reach out with any other questions or concerns they may have. So, while our competitors were following up with this prospect through email, we sent them an entire website built just for them. These are the types of hyper-custom steps you can take to stand out from the competition and show that you’re different.

A big question to ask when considering taking some of these personalized steps, is “will this effort be worth it in the long run?” To answer this question, you need to consider how much time and money you’ll spend versus how valuable the client will be if the effort is successful. Building the website for the prospect and filming the video took us roughly two hours of time and around $30. But the LTV of this particular client is projected to be about $50-$60K, so it was worth it to us to go the extra mile in this situation.

As you consider outbound and the best ways to either get people in the door or help them cross the finish line, you need to know your customer acquisition cost. You’ll want to know the amount of time, effort, and expense that goes into getting new business so that you’re actually turning a profit.

Overall, there are many ways to make outbound personal. And the steps you take at each point in the sales process should be personalized if you’re going with a personalized approach. You should take the time to figure out what will work best for your company. If you need any help setting up custom campaigns or want someone to review an email before you send it out, let us know! You can book a call here or send an email to nico@getboundlessmedia.com