5 Re-Engagement Tactics to Warm Cold Leads

As anyone in sales or marketing knows, there are plenty of issues that can derail everything from a campaign funnel to a prospect’s buying decision. Circumnavigating, or even better, mitigating these issues entirely is what keeps us on our toes.

When it comes to sales specifically, it is a common problem to see a lead go dark, and can be worrisome when you audit your prospect lists and discover just how many of them have actually gone cold. This means they have either lost interest in your product or service or they may have simply forgotten about your brand. It doesn’t have to be the end of the road for these leads, they can always be nurtured back, you just have to go about it strategically.

Check Out These Follow-Up Tactics to Revitalize Your Cold Leads

Review Your Previous Point of Contact

• To achieve a higher success rate in re-targeting your cold leads, you need to ensure that you know exactly who they are. You’ll also have to find out where you lost them along the sales funnel, so you can pick up where you left off.

• Determining your previous point of contact will depend on your current sales process. For starters, you’ll need to define what ‘cold’ contacts mean to your business. This depends on the sales cycle in your industry, product, or service, and how far you’re willing to go back in your list of old leads.

• After separating your cold leads from those that are active, and identifying where you last connected with them, you can re-engage them with the correct and relevant approach.

Make Your Message Relevant

• According to Ilya Semin, co-founder and CEO of sales prospecting tool Datanyze, trying to understand both your prospect’s current situation and his or her future needs is crucial. Not being able to do so would just make your helpful message fail to resonate.
• A good tip is to let them know you’ve done your homework by being up-to-date with recent news coverage about the company and following their social media channels. Think of creative ways to re-engage these prospects such as participating in their webinars and reading company reports.
• By doing these activities, you can get an idea of how your message will appear in your cold lead’s inbox. Keep in mind that understanding your potential customer’s needs is only half the work. What’s going to help you fill that other half is the ability to communicate clearly that you have accurate informational content about his or her needs.
• Think about this with an empathic approach: you often skip reading or even forgo responding to generic fillers in your email inbox. Remember, re-engaging your cold leads with interesting and specialized content will allow your emails to stand out above the noise.

Timing is Everything

• You can fine-tune your re-engagement strategy by sending drip emails to your cold leads using email automation software, or you can do this manually if your list is manageably small. Carly Stec, from inbound marketing agency IMPACT, suggests trying out different times in sending your remarketing emails.
• The least likely day of the week your emails get opened falls on a Monday, when your email will have to compete with the others that have accumulated over the weekend. Ideally, Thursday is optimal, between 8 and 9 A.M.

Try a Different Communication Channel

• It’s assumed that the re-engagement and relationship building you do is mostly done via email. While email is effective, there is also power in diversifying your approach and reaching out through different communication channels.
• Nextiva Chief Marketing Officer Yaniv Masjedi explains that you should try writing a nice note and send it via traditional mail. Avoid going for a hard sell, and instead engage by asking how things are going at the company before touching a topic you’ve shared with them in the past. The key is to not sound desperate, which can easily turn off any prospect you’re planning to convert.

Listen

You’re probably itching to send a new proposal or ask about it if you’ve already sent one, but this isn’t the ideal approach to warm up your cold leads. Your priority is to turn your prospect into a lead who will eventually convert, so you’ll have to be aware of three things:

• Needs. These are the primary topics that you should address. If you know what they need, you will be able to provide accurate information about your products or solutions features and differentiators.
• Demeanor. A prospect’s demeanor will give you an indication how to best approach them. This will also serve as your gauge if you’ve actually made the right move to re-engage them.
• Frustration. Listening to their frustrations gives you leverage as it helps you find the right answers to their needs and challenges.

Re-engage Cold Leads the Right Way

You shouldn’t look at your cold leads as a dead end that do not offer a chance to turn into profit. Instead, they should be perceived as potential conversions that will take a little extra nurturing. Implementing these re-engagement tactics will ensure that you are approaching your cold leads in an unobtrusive and nurturing manner. Remember, don’t count cold leads out unless you’ve tried these tactics. The results may surprise you!