Effective Inbound Marketing Tips

So you’ve been engaging in email marketing for a while. You’re even using lead scoring to track the process of your sales funnel, but you notice that you’re having problems with moving leads from warm to hot. You may be experiencing customer objections or pushbacks during the sales process, but not addressing them in the content you’re creating and sharing with your audience.

This lack of attention to the objections of your customers could be halting the transition from marketing qualified lead to sales qualified lead.

In this article, we’re going to cover how to identify your customer objections, and how to use them to move leads further down your sales funnel.

First of all, objections are common during the sales process. You don’t have to view them as scary or threatening. Instead, see them as requests for more information from your customers. They are an opportunity to educate.

Bottom line: do NOT ignore them!

Enter email automation - a way to engage your contacts and nurture your leads with quality content that’s relevant to the problems they are currently facing. It allows you to establish a rapport and develop trust with your customers.

You can open up a dialogue and take advantage of the opportunity to differentiate yourself from the daily deluge of impersonal emails and spam. In other words, a perfect platform for addressing your customers’ objections.

How to Identify Your Customer Objections

- Interview current customers, customers that dropped your service, and customers that almost signed up for your service. This third group is very important for identifying pushbacks that ultimately resulted in a rejection of your product or service. Results of these interviews are a gold mine of information on how to create effective email automation that speaks directly to the pain points your customers are facing. This method of interviewing is also great for buyer persona research when you are establishing who you are speaking to.

- If you are not able to conduct live interviews, send out a comprehensive survey to these groups. This will give you a perspective on the buying psychology of these individuals, which will include the objections and pushbacks.

- If you are currently using any sort of lead scoring, whether that be through HubSpot or another CRM, pay attention to the leads that get stuck. Say for instance that there appears to be a roadblock at a certain step in your sales process that prevents warm leads from converting into hot, sales-ready leads. For whatever reason, you’re not closing. Chances are that there is an objection that is not being addressed here. Reach out to those folks and find out what it is!

Common Objections

Now we’re going to take a look at some common objections and how you can address each of them in your email automation. The table below breaks it down into the pushback, the response, and a concrete example of what addressing the objection may look like.

Creating the Emails

Now that you have identified your objections, you want to know how to set up your emails to answer these pain points, right? Of course you do! We’ve broken this down for you in 6 simple steps:

1. Subject line
   This should be direct and to the point, as well as a clear indicator of the message that they are about to open. Don’t be misleading or off-topic.
2. Be concise
   A lengthy email is intimidating and reduces the likelihood of your audience reading it all the way through. Focus on staying short and sweet, providing the essentials that your customers will want.
3. Personalize it
   An email personally addressed to the name of your customer can go a long way. It differentiates you from the humdrum of mass email blasts.
4. Answer a question, then provide the solution
   This may seem obvious, but don’t forget to actually answer to the question that your customers are facing. Take the opportunity to establish yourself as a trusted source of information.
5. Ask a question
   Turn the tables on your readers. Pose a question to them that will get them thinking about how they can take action to solve the problem that they are experiencing.
6. Create clear call-to-action
   You want a next step that they can take to engage further and move along the sales process.

Here is an example of a 98toGo email that follows the outline listed above.

Key Takeaways:

- Your leads may not be moving further down the funnel because you are not addressing the common objections along the process

- Customer objections should not be feared -- use them as opportunities to develop trust with your leads and give them more information

- You can identify your customers’ objections through methods like interviews, surveys and examining your current lead scoring

- Once you identify the objections, address them, respond to them and then provide a concrete example demonstrating this

- When constructing your emails, you want to be clear, concise, provide a solution and encourage them to engage further

So there you have it. You now know that customer objections are not to be feared, but rather embraced in order to improve your automated email process. Stay consistent in your efforts. Your customer’s questions and pushbacks can be vital pieces of information to integrate into your sales process. Now go close those deals!