Are you seeing the results you expected from your direct marketing campaign? Or are you frustrated because not enough people are attending your events? Many advisors spend tens of thousands of dollars a year on direct mail to promote their seminars and other events. However, only about 3 percent of recipients are actively looking for a new advisor seriously enough that they'd actually consider attending. Which means the other 97 percent are slipping through your fingers, simply because they're not ready to commit to an in-face connection. But all is not lost. By simply executing a proper lead capture strategy, you can engage some of the other 97 percent, which is critical to feeding prospects to your future seminars and sales.
As a recap of last week's blog, we talked about the importance of having a lead capture strategy for your website. Advisors often have no clue that hundreds of prospects are visiting their website and grabbing their information for free. If you have a lead capture strategy in place, you are able to capture the visitors' information before they receive your valuable free resources, such as a report or video.
How does lead capture work with seminar and direct mail marketing?
For years now, advisors have depended heavily on direct mail. The downside of this is that you are asking a lot of someone who has never heard of you or met you before to respond to an invitation for an in-office appointment, or even to attend a public seminar. And if this is the only option you're giving them, chances are you're missing out on a large number of potential qualified prospects.
Let me clarify by using the example of buying temperature. Let's assume that every prospect falls somewhere on the scale of 1 to 10. The 9's and 10's are the ones who are ready and looking to make a change; they are "in the market" so to speak. The 1's through 8's are those who are not ready to buy today, but will be at some future date. While most of us have made a living off of the 9's and 10's, this is really only about 3 percent of the market. Many advisors are missing the boat by letting those who are in the 1 to 8 category, or the other 97 percent of the market, slip away.
What if you could capture and then nurture a portion of the remaining 97 percent as well? How do you do this? Well, instead of just having one call-to-action, what if you had an additional offer that was less threatening? Most people don't like to pick up the phone and have to speak to someone. Many fear that "calling in" will mean being tricked into a sales conversation with a salesperson who will try and talk them into something they're not ready to buy. But what if you had a second offer that allowed them to simply visit a landing page on your website and download a free helpful report? This would be much less threatening, and would align more with where these 1-8's are in the buying process.
