8 Surefire Ways to Re-Engage Cold Prospects and Recover Lost Sales

Rekindling cold prospects or customers whose enthusiasm has faded is tricky business. When nurtured relationships go cold, their radio silence is deafening.

As difficult as it is to revive these connections, re-engaging with cold leads is important to salvage your initial investment made to convert them to customers.

There are many reasons valuable contacts stop showing interest. The market is getting increasingly saturated, so they’re probably dealing with a competitor. Perhaps your sales prospecting wasn’t strong enough to lure them and keep them hooked.

Sometimes, no matter how much effort you have put into your customer engagement strategies, leads do become unresponsive eventually. 

Regardless of the reason for their disinterest, there is a lot you can do to maximize the result of your marketing and sales tactics for re-engagement. Here are eight actionable ways to ensure cold prospects find their way back to you. 

Email

The first weapon in your marketing and sales arsenal should be email.

Send a customized email with a genuine reason to contact your customers. Connecting via email makes a personal connection, and it’s best if you do it over the weekend when people get the least number of emails so that yours will get noticed. 

Try not to be too salesy. The last thing you want is for the cold prospect to go dead cold because of an impersonal and aggressive approach. Emails should have the prospect’s name and should be in the context of their buyer journey with you.

Are they a lead who never progressed into a paying customer? Or are they an old paying customer who has been out of touch? 

A good point to remember is that if a prospect went cold, it’s because you didn’t acknowledge and solve their problems.

Address customer pain points in your communication to nudge a hesitant prospect forward. Show them the value your product or service offers, especially if there has been an improvement in this regard since the last time you communicated.

Tip: Grab an email formula here:

18 Proven Email Templates for SalesWinning email templates for cold outreach, follow-ups, and nurturing relationships – backed by data and real-world examples.

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Social Media

It’s the age of social selling. 93.4% of all internet users are on social media. So if you’re trying to re-engage with cold prospects, social media can get you noticed. While social media is inundated with content and information, it’s still relatively less cluttered with promotional material. 

With many social networks out there, there are dozens of ways you can reconnect with old connections. You could use paid ads, but a quick tweet or a Facebook message could go a long way in attaining the attention you need.

Social media tends to be less official, so it’s easy to get up close and personal with customers, and you can easily find great conversation starters based on recent activities of your prospects.

Social networks allow you to befriend your customers. It gives you a chance to engage and re-engage with them regularly without having an ulterior motive. If you want to build your brand name and warm up leads, social media is the perfect place for you. 

Here are a few pointers to help build your social media strategy:

•  Join the discussion on other pages related to your industry/niche.
•  Keep track of your prospect’s interests and activities.
•  Mention them in relevant posts and comments.
•  Keep your conversations natural, at a socially acceptable level.

Content

Great content is at the heart of your email and social media re-engagement approach. You can add content such as sales videos that will interest your prospects in your email, post it on your social media pages, or post it on your blog and send a link to your prospects.

One of the most definite ways to bring traffic to your website is to have high-quality written content on it. Search engine optimized (SEO) content on your blog brings organic traffic to your website. While you might pop up in search engine results for new leads, chances are cold prospects will recognize you and land on your website again.

Blogs are a phenomenal way to inform and excite customers. You can talk about useful topics or introduce them to your brand, and you can even invite old customers to be featured in your blog post for customer testimonials. And that is just another excuse to contact them and reestablish a connection.

Calling

The more personal your approach to reigniting an old conversation, the better your chances of succeeding. The only thing better than calling your cold prospects is landing on their doorstep with a brochure in your hand.

If you’re up to date on your prospect’s social media activities, you can call and have a delightful conversation that doesn’t have to be promotional in the least. You can simply call to ask how they’re doing and let the conversation take its natural course to talk about ways you can be of help.

Tip: Ask open-ended sales questions to get the conversation going. There a tons of advantages:

Honesty is the best policy here, and just reaching out to check how they have been and why they have not reached out in a while is a thoughtful idea. Remember to make the conversation as relevant as possible and not to bore them.

If you’re having a hard time maintaining the quality of your sales calls, call monitoring could help. What is call monitoring? It’s a call management function that most cloud telephone systems offer. It includes call recording and listening to those recordings to improve customer interactions.

Prospecting made easyMulti-touch, multi-channel campaigns with email, calls, and social touchesTry Yesware Free

Chatbots

Chatbots are a marketing tool that can be used for an impressive personalized approach for re-engagement. AI-powered chatbots can quickly predict customers’ needs and engage with them based on that information.

Installing chatbots on your website can help hold the attention of old prospects who are skimming through your website.

Chatbots have the ability to filter content according to what users are looking for, and they give personalized answers to questions. Chatbots are available 24/7 and increase the trustworthiness of your brand, improving your chances for successful re-engagement. 

CRM

Customer relationship management software is crucial to apply all the above methods of re-engagement. It allows you to have full customer context, with an account of prior interactions and purchase history.

It integrates with your business phone system and call center management software to provide call center reporting metrics that can be used to improve customer service and sales calls efficiency.

CRM holds all contact information that is elemental no matter how you choose to contact cold prospects. It informs you how long it has been before your last interaction, letting you filter out prospects who need to be engaged with again. You can also automate follow-ups to improve your sales targeting strategy.

Manual data management of customer information is ineffective. Automation tools exist for a reason: to make life easier. Process automation tools have infiltrated every area of business.

You can’t imagine how to calculate inventory turnover ratio without automated inventory management, and you can’t dream of delivering orders without order management software. Similarly, CRM is an indispensable pillar of sales prospecting.

Old-School Letters

Writing a letter can grab attention like no other technique because it’s such a forgotten yet powerful way to get in touch with a customer.

Your letter can be a piece of content printed as a brochure, or you can mail your catalog with a handwritten note. It’s bound to catch a cold prospect off-guard and leave quite an impression. Handwritten messages show effort, and they don’t go unnoticed.

Even a postcard provides a personal touch that is irreplaceable. Not to mention, your emails might get caught in the spam or junk filter, which is something that direct mail doesn’t need to worry about.

Offer a Discount or a Gift

Everyone loves a free gift or a chance at a free gift. A lead that has gone cold can be warmed with a discount card, especially if it’s time-bound. Offer a free gift on a purchase done within a limited time and watch how offering such incentives brings people flocking to your store.

Your gifts and discounts need to offer value to motivate cautious and cold prospects to take a leap of faith.

Be Consistent With Your Efforts to Re-Engage Cold Prospects

80% of prospects need five follow-ups before you can succeed in making a sale. The disturbing bit is that 44% of salespeople give up after one follow-up call.

Whether you’re trying to nurture a lead for the first time or re-engaging with an old and cold one, you have to be consistent. You could choose between follow-up emails or phone calls, but you need to be regular, and your determination needs to be unswerving and unfailing.

A little perseverance can be the difference between you and your competitors. Remember, your cold leads aren’t a dead end. They just need you to implement the tactics listed above. You can use a multi-channel approach to connect with customers and engage with messages that build upon each other.

I leave you to ponder on a quote by the incredible J. R. R. Tolkien:

Not all who wander are lost.

The old that is strong does not wither.

Deep roots are not reached by the frost. 

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About the Author: Richard Conn – Senior Director, Demand Generation, 8×8

Richard Conn is the Senior Director for Demand Generation at 8×8, a leading communication platform and business phone system with integrated contact center, voice, video, and chat functionality. Richard is an analytical & results-driven digital marketing leader with a track record of achieving major ROI improvements in fast-paced, competitive B2B environments. Check out his LinkedIn.