So, this is a very, very important article. (YES, I KNOW that I say that a lot, and every time I say it, I actually MEAN it…and this time I’m just as serious as ever.) Really, this subject matter is something that ALL of you DEFINITELY will want (and NEED) to pay close attention to…
We’re going to talk about how to nurture people once they’re in your world.
I’ve been running a marketing agency a little over four years now, and in my years of experience, I have come to find that the overall reason for clients’ failure (EVEN when they have good products, services, when they have a good business across the board) is the fact that they do not nurture people.
So, What exactly does it mean when I say they’re NOT NURTURING people? It means that as people are coming into their world, these people either become leads: providing their email addresses and/or phone numbers, and yet these business owners and brands are NOT communicating to them on the back end… OR these people are actually purchasing products from them for the first time, and they’re not being properly communicated with on a consistent basis. So I’ve noticed over and over again that BOTH of these scenarios are happening all the time.
Before I go any further, let me clear the meaning of the word NURTURE first . In fact, here is a screen shot of the dictionary’s definition of nurture as both a verb and a noun:
So there you have the definition of what it means to nurture: to care for and protect something while it is growing. And what is it that you are growing and cultivating? The RELATIONSHIP between your brand and your leads as well as your customers (both new and existing). And how do you cultivate a relationship with your leads and customers? Through COMMUNICATION.
The number one reason for failure is a lack of communication after that person (lead/customer) comes into your world. The fact is that you cannot scale your business if you don’t do some heavy marketing behind the scenes after the person comes into your world. So you have to generate leads. What this means is that you have to generate a way for people to come into your business, be that through free consultations, free evaluations, maybe offer a special 50% off on ONE initial purchase of your product, do some kind of a giveaway… something attractive which generates enough interest to bring people into your world. Perhaps you could do a flash sale deal, friends hear from a friend, they come in and they purchase your product, and so on. The key to figuring out how to attract them into your world is to somehow present them with a “solution” 💡 that they actually opt in for. Now, whether the end result is that they become a lead or an actual purchaser, they are now inside your world 🌎. So, based on what I’ve observed, what happens at that point is that a lot of businesses are consistently looking for, perhaps, an “easy way out”. Meaning that “I invest a dollar, I get $5 back… I invest $2, I get $10 back.” Well, the reality is that it doesn’t work that way, and if it WERE that easy, everybody would be doing it. Statistics have shown for years that People generally don’t succeed in the business world. Were you aware of that? Did you know that MOST businesses out there fail? According to a recent article in March of this year 2019, 20% of small businesses fail in their first year, 30% of small businesses fail in their second year, and 50% of small businesses fail after five years in business. Finally, 70% of small business owners fail in their 10th year in business. Think about that. Half of businesses that open don’t last 5 years, and three-fourths of them don’t last 10 years!! It’s pretty intense. So, of the entrepreneurs who are creating businesses today, imagine that, 70 out of 100 of them are going to fail, and that’s pretty much guaranteed, per the statistics. Those numbers are not just referring to businesses in the online world. It’s an unfortunate fact that throughout the history of capitalism, most people do not succeed in the business world, period. That’s why it’s a difficult world. Now, for some people, once you have an established business like I have, it gets to a point where it “feels” like it’s easy, and those of us who have worked diligently and gained a level of mastery of our craft make it “look” easy to others who are on the outside looking in, but it’s not easy. It’s a lot of work. I work really hard, guys, really hard day in and day out, Monday through Sunday. I love it. For me it’s a passion (an OBSESSION, even)…it’s something that drives me. My son, he enjoys playing Fortnite. I enjoy playing the game of business. For me, that’s what drives me so I push hard to get results.
Learning the rules of the game of business and applying the right knowledge is what helps you to beat the odds and be a part of the 25% of businesses that continue to thrive.
Now, going back to the initial point that I set out to make here, CULTIVATION AND NURTURE OF RELATIONSHIPS and CUSTOMER RETENTION are the crucial missing elements for any brand and any business out there that truly intends to survive. That’s it, nothing else. Imagine fighting an ongoing battle every single month, just trying to get more new customers, month after month, to try to keep the trend of your numbers going up. You can’t do that. You have to bring prospects and customers, build those relationships, and make it bigger in that way. It’s very simple, right?
There’s an old adage in the marketing world that says, “The Money is in the List”. That is so true. Mind you, there are a great many things in the marketing world that are false. But THIS one could not be more true. The bigger your list, the more opportunities you have to sell. That’s the reality. So, what do you do as a business? Of course, you consistently work on making your list bigger. But, if you make your list bigger and you don’t do anything with that list, if you don’t communicate with them, if you don’t send text messages, email broadcasts, Facebook Messenger broadcasts… well, frankly, WHAT’S THE POINT OF HAVING THE LIST? Seriously you guys, you’ve got to COMMUNICATE with people who are on your list! Remember, they came into your world as a result of messages that COMMUNICATED to them. So if communication was what attracted them, then of course, COMMUNICATION is what is going to keep their attention. That’s how you build a relationship. Makes sense, doesn’t it?
The money IS in the list, BUT you’ve got to NURTURE, CULTIVATE and GROW your list in order to reap the harvest.
CONSISTENT COMMUNICATION IS KEY. You can get creative in the ways you send out communication to these people in your list. Mix and match. Try different ways. Create recognition by making sure that they see your name and your messages over and over again. Remember that “REPETITION CAUSES RECOGNITION”. SO send voice messages to these people, send them the different types of communication that I mentioned earlier, whatever you do, make sure that you’re sending out MASSIVE communication. I mean a lot of it.
I was actually talking to one of my executives here in the office about a week or so ago, and I said, “Look, I need you to create a position in this company, okay? It’s a new position that has never existed before.” That position is called a Compulsive Communicator. It’s somebody that is in charge of overwhelming communication lines to customers or potential customers. If you don’t have this inside your organization, your business will not make it and that is the plain and simple truth, from my vantage point, in all of my years of experience in this area.
So my advice is THIS: Before you get any marketing strategy going, before you invest your hard earned dollars, before you get into Facebook advertising, Instagram marketing, YouTube ads, before you go into Messenger and try establish and grow your Messenger channel….BEFORE YOU DO ANY OF THAT STUFF, don’t do anything unless you know how you’re going to communicate to these people once they are inside your world and on your list.
Not being clear on how you are going to communicate with your list of people is a “formula for failure” 📉, because you all you’ll be doing is keeping on trying to invest your money, but you won’t be able to scale, you’re going to struggle to get a positive ROI (return on investment), ROAS (return on ad spend), and it’s going to be a really, really tough ordeal overall.
Okay, so a couple of things to keep in mind. How do we go ahead and do this? How do we build this flow? One thing that I can tell you is I’m not even bringing in clients today unless they implement either option A or option B. Now, allow me to tell you exactly what options A and B are:
Option A: Build the nurture sequences yourself or Option B: Hire us to build them for you. It has to be one or the other. If you don’t have this in place, you don’t qualify to be an AGM Marketing client, because we know you’re going to fail and guess what? We’d be the ones who would be blamed for that, when in fact, we know that the reason for the failure was because you didn’t do a good job of communicating to these people who were coming into your world. It’s really THAT serious. We will NOT take on a client without them having either option A or B in place. We are experts at sending you traffic, people interested in your brand, your message and what you have to offer. So let’s say for example that you didn’t opt to have us build the nurture channels for you, you chose to build it yourself (option A), and then you failed to follow through. That would make us look like we’re sending you unqualified traffic, and we would end up being the ones to blame. That’s not the way it works, guys. We are sending you real human beings, real people from the social media world who are interested in the things you are going to offer them, and how you are going to help them resolve the problems and challenges that they are facing. But, you need to be able to actually provide this information to them on the back end, and become an expert at communicating with these people once they have entered your realm.
So, what does this all come down to? Nurture…Nurture…Nurture. Cultivate relationships through consistent communication. Email sequences, Facebook Messenger broadcasts. (Messenger is like email marketing on steroids.) 💪💪💪
Another channel that you may want to consider is Text Message Marketing. It actually isn’t new, but I would say that it is under-utilized. Here’s the thing: People take their phones with them EVERYWHERE they go. They’re pretty much addicted to them. AND, People like to receive communications about business that they like. Now, if there’s ever a point where they feel like they’re receiving too many messages to the point where it’s bothersome, they always have an option to unsubscribe at any time. We encounter that from some of our subscribers, and if they don’t want to receive messages from me anymore, we get them off the list…and that’s totally fine. But, you want to have a compulsive communicator in place,to be the person outflowing & sending out massive communications every day about your business overall. The thing to bear in mind here is that OUTFLOW EQUALS INFLOW. Meaning, the amount of “inflow” you receive (traffic, engagement, sales, etc.) will be reflective of the amount of “outflow” (promotion, marketing, i.e. COMMUNICATION) you put into it. So it is safe to say that your income will be directly proportional to your outflow.
One might think this is common sense, but I assure you it isn’t. I can’t count the number of times I have either worked with in some way or heard about a company who is in the financial red and the first thing they do is cut down on their promotion budget. This is the absolute wrong move to make, because that promotion is what brings in customers. And customers bring in money which is what staying in business is all about. There is no rule saying that your promotion has to be expensive or perfect, but the answer is simply to get something out there, not to stop it altogether. Economizing is important, but not at the expense of cutting your own throat.
Ok.. So back to these different channels we can use to “outflow” communication to these people who come into your world… We’ve got emails, Messenger, Texts…and there’s also Voicemail marketing.
So, let’s talk a little bit about the frequency of these communications that we’re outflowing. How many a day should we send? I’m going to say one email sent, every other day. In those emails there should be value, value, and more value via education and information.
Now for text messages, there are a variety of things that you can send. Mainly it is for promotional purposes. You can send an invitation to an upcoming webinar that you have (or a link to one that is already recorded), invite to some activity or event that you have going on such as a seminar, or it can be a special offer, a flash sale deal, some kind of special of some sort. You can even include Google map directions and the phone numbers to your office. All of that stuff can be in there on a text message, and it can even be automatically programmed to go out.
Facebook is such an amazing platform, and used correctly, it has proven time and time again to be a necessary and beneficial TOOL for brands. Because on Facebook, you can generate leads, right? And one thing to keep in mind about this is the fact that when a lead comes into your world, every single minute that passes, they are harder and harder to convert. So you want to be wise and be quick. You want to send them either an instant text message, an instant email, and Messenger broadcast a day or two from that day of the first point of contact, and then just make sure that you are always following up with additional messages through the various channels, always offering value. That way, you’ll keep your name and your messages in their eye’s view, and you’ll be at the top of these people’s minds, because if not, you’re going to miss out on an opportunity to get them interested in converting and essentially becoming a part of your overall world. Don’t forget, REPETITION CAUSES RECOGNITION. (Now I’m not talking about repeating the exact same “cookie-cutter” messages, because that will NOT work). I’m talking about repeatedly getting your name and your brand, and something of value in front of these people who have expressed some interest in your brand at some point. I believe it was a famous fashion designer (even though I don’t recall whom) who said “ Repetition makes reputation and reputation makes customers”.
Ok, now on to Voice messages…these are also great when used for promotional purposes. And, aside from being promotional, it’s just plain cool, all right? For example, the other day we set up a webinar promotion for the great, the one and only Grant Cardone. We used a tool called Sly Broadcast. If you don’t know what that is, you can look it up. (And no; I’m not affiliated with it). The URL for their site is slybroadcast.com. And, with this tool you can set up to send voice messages that get silently delivered to the user (without the phone ringing). So, now they look at their mobile phone, they see they’ve got a voicemail, and they listen to it. “Hey, it’s Grant. Just want to make sure you don’t miss the webinar that we have coming up tomorrow. Get ready to 10x your life and we’re going to go in and do this together!”, something like that. So, there you have a prime example of a voice message that is sent directly to these people. And these voicemail broadcasts are super-affordable! You can get 100 voice messages delivered for $10; 500 messages delivered is $40; 1000 messages delivered is $60. If you have 10,000 contacts that you want to send voice messages to, you can do so for somewhere around $400 a month, I believe.
Ok, so on to the Messenger broadcast. What you’re going to do (if you haven’t already) is set up a tool that we use a lot which is called ManyChat, which I’m a very HUGE advocate of. If you want to set up your own account, which is a free account for a Messenger broadcasting, you can actually go to manuelsuarez.com/manychat, then you can set up a free account in ManyChat which is basically similar to Constant Contact, Infusionsoft, Active Campaign, Mail Chimp, any of those platforms on steroids, but for Facebook Messenger. It is a mega-powerful, very simple and easy way to set up communication.
So for the communication channels overall: for voice messages, we use Sly Broadcast. For text messages, we use TextNow, or we can also use Zapier and program them automatically, 2 options for that. TextNow rates are 1 cent per domestic (USA) text.
Zapier, on the other hand, is a tool that allows you to integrate all of the stuff. It’s a little bit more technical than the others, but once you set it up, you’re going to be able to send an instant text message out automatically when a lead comes in from Facebook. The text message can include Google map directions, phone numbers, etc., and then you can start sendiing communications to them consistently and then you can integrate with other channels, including. TextNow because Zapier can even send the phone number to TextNow!
And there are so many other things that you can do with TextNow, such as setting up phone number broadcasts to these people with more information, PDFs, instructions, vidoes, etc… all that super cool stuff. You can also even send yourself a notification so you’ll know right away when to follow up, in real time, with that person.
For example, if a lead comes in, you can have it programmed so that your sales department (or yourself) will get an instant email that is being delivered to your inbox instantly, “Hey, you got this hot lead. Come on, it’s time for you to jump all over it and get it closed”, more or less. Because again, like I said before, every single minute that passes is going to be more and more difficult to close this people. If you call them tomorrow, if you call them the next day, if you call them the next day everyday, the probabilities of closing them just are disappearing.
You’ve heard the term “The fortune is in the follow up”, haven’t you? Well, sending out communication the people who opted to come into your world in order to establish, build, cultivate and nurture these relationships are all a part of following up, and these are actions that you have to take. There are statistics that say that about 80% of sales don’t happen until after the fifth follow-up has occurred. So you just have to keep going, keep on texting them, emailing them and pretty much everything that I’ve said.
In fact, speaking of follow-up, this actually opens up another point, an observation that I made the other day. On the Messenger platform, for example, there are people that are part of my agency, one of my biggest clients, his name is Dr. Eric Berg, he has a HUGE following in social media, We’re literally talking about MILLIONS of people (not hundreds, not thousands, but MILLIONS), in the Messenger marketing world (which is one of his biggest platforms out there), We are now noticing a pattern, a behavioral pattern. What we’re noticing is that people take about 14 to 17 days before they purchase something from him. They come into his world, they spend 14 days consuming content and information, doing his FREE mini-courses, downloading the resources, and then they trust him enough for them to go and buy something. What happened there? Repetition of message, over and over again, and then they believe that what you have to say is true. And that what you have to offer is valuable. So there you go.
And you’ve got to bear in mind that email is a MAJOR, integral part of this entire follow-up “ecosystem”. Messenger is indeed one of the largest platforms out there, and it is like email on STEROIDS, like I’ve said a few times already, but email STILL has its place. You need it. There are so many different email platforms available… Infusionsoft, Constant Contact, Active Campaign, Mail Chimp, Aweber, etc. No matter which platform(s) you choose to use, Just make sure that you DO have email marketing in place, AND that you have sequences in place, so that every single day (or every other day) a person receives a new communication about your business, something that provides value and opens up the door to make sure that you have an engaged email list that you can sell things to. And that’s the idea behind it. You create an engaged list,and THEN you’re now able to promote products, flash sale deals, promotions, etc. If you don’t have this in place, I can guarantee you that you won’t make it in the social media world. Without these ever-important channels established and ready to roll out, you’re going to fail and you’re going to blame whatever agency, or strategy ,or whatever study technology that you applied, or whatever education that you got in the subject of social media. You’ll blame THEM for your lack of results instead of recognizing that you failed in fulfilling your responsibility to have built a back-end marketing world/ecosystem, which is absolutely necessary in order to be able to get people converted.
And so that’s what we’ve got. There you have it. I’m going to do a mic drop right here. In fact, let’s call that a “market drop”.
There you go. Talk to you soon.
