What to do instead of cold calling, is the question most cold callers ponder. The soul of every business is its ability to drive sales. Marketing, in one form or the other, remains the only way to get people to know about your goods and services, and possibly get them to patronize. One of the oldest and most controversial methods or marketing is cold calling. Cold calling involves a business person placing an unsolicited call through to a potential customer in a bid to convince them to purchase a particular product or service. This method of marketing, albeit controversial, has been able to help businesses drive sales. It has also generated serious debate over the years. Many have argued about its legality. And others have spared no efforts to paint it as an invasion of privacy. When something like that becomes a public discourse, it is best for the business that one abandons it totally and seeks other methods to promote products and services.
What is warm traffic
Among the many viable alternatives to cold calling, we can find warm marketing strategies. In the case of online businesses, it is preferably called warm traffic. Warm traffic is the term used to describe the people who visit your website or any other web assets when they already know about your business, product, or services. This set of people already have prior knowledge of your business through any possible medium. Warm traffic can also be described as returning traffic because they are subscribers, or because your services were recommended to them by the people they trust. As a result of these factors, they already have a liking or level of familiarity with your business, and that makes them more likely to buy products and services displayed or recommended on your web platform.
Warm traffic vs. cold traffic
Both types of traffic are very different from each other. While warm traffic, most times, is based on a recommendation from people, cold traffic is mostly paid for. Cold traffic is generated through adverts, social media campaigns, and offline adverts and barely involves any form of targeting at all. The people seeing those adverts do not have prior knowledge of your business or products, but when they see any sort of an advert and click it through, you can be said to have generated cold traffic. However, cold traffic has meager conversion rates and returns on investment simply because trust has not yet been established between the business and the potential customers. Cold traffic is often sent to a squeeze page where an item of significant value is pitched to the customer in exchange for their contacts, which is used to build a mailing list for subsequent campaigns.
How to generate leads without cold calling
There are many more effective ways to generate leads apart from cold calling. For example, you can start a campaign to drive sales by offering people incentives for referrals. Talk to your satisfied customers, pitch the referral program and its incentives to them, and watch them go out of their way to bring you, new customers. This is a very effective strategy for any business looking to expand their customer base exponentially. This is only one out of many alternatives that you can apply to your business. There are more.
One alternative method that is worthy of mention is the art of generating leads through blogging. The reason why blogging works is that through continuous sharing of valuable information to your customers, you can get more website views, build authority, and implement strategies that help you convert your viewers to warm leads. To succeed at this, you must see to it that you maintain a standard schedule for your blogs. While it is essential to keep to this schedule, it is much more vital that you provide meaningful content to your readers. When your readers are satisfied with your content, it becomes straightforward to get them to perform specific actions that help you convert them to leads. More so, constant blogging can help you increase the ranking of your website on search engines. This means that whenever people search for answers about popular topics related to your niche, your website is likely to appear to them offering a solution. That process, in itself, is a subconscious method of generating leads.
Through a blog, you can create links that lead to landing pages where your potential leads can sign up for your email list. This is the part where you activate your email marketing strategy.
implement a successful email marketing strategy
To implement a successful email marketing strategy, you need to get email autoresponders. Using an email, autoresponder has many benefits. First, they allow you to provide automatic follow-up to your subscribers. Through these follow-up messages, you can send out marketing newsletters to promote new offers and inform them about new developments. Autoresponders also have inbuilt features that help you get essential details about your subscribers. These bits of information can help you monitor the growth of your campaign and also adjust to suit the needs of your subscribers.
Lastly, while it is essential to generate as many warm leads as you can, it is even more important than the leads generated are converted to actual customers. The cheapest and the most effective way of converting your leads to customers still remains email marketing. There are many useful email marketing techniques through which warm leads can be converted to actual sales. One of such methods is to offer your subscribers a demo or a free trial on the promoted product. A free trial gives your potential customers a chance to have a feel of the product and can help them hasten the decision-making process. If they feel like the product is worth it, they’ll definitely buy. Through email marketing, you can also drive more sales by trying out some other tricks, including free incentives, provision of social proof, among other techniques.
When you do this, it becomes easy to pick up the phone, put a call through to them, and get them to buy the product in the shortest time possible.
