No products in the cart.
Take a Quiz to Assess Your LinkedIn
Trade shows – the rush, the adrenaline, new leads! Oh, how many leads, and you somehow have to follow them all up. How can you follow up on all your trade show leads efficiently?!
I’ve been there, you spend months getting ready, making sure everything is just right. You’re at the booth, chatting to prospects, collecting info, exchanging business cards, handing out candy and ready to generate leads. It’s an exciting and exhausting couple of days. By the end of the trade show you just want to crawl in bed and do nothing. But alas, life isn’t fair. You have leads to follow up and hot prospects to close.
The Hard Truth About Trade Show Leads
80% of these leads don’t get followed up. It’s always the same story – you start out with good intentions to follow up with everyone you spoke to during the trade show. But you’re back in the office and get distracted by your work. There’s nothing particularly wrong about this, it happens to the best of us. It’s just a shame to let all your hard work preparing for the show go to waste.
I could write a guide about blocking out time for follow-up calls etc. But I’m sure you already know about this. Instead, I’d rather focus on a less-known follow-up strategy that has the potential to transform your trade show follow-up process: Email Automation.
Follow up Using Email Automation
Perhaps you’re not sure what this term means, even though it’s been around for a few years now it’s still not as widely known as expected. The funny thing is that the name is self-explanatory. Email automation is a set of emails that are automated to go out at set times. They can either go out on a particular day, similar to a newsletter. Or they can be set up to go out a number of days after you add an email to the sequence. They can of course be much more complex, but I won’t bore you with this.
All you need to know now is that email automation can be set up so your leads are followed up after, and potentially during, a trade show. You might balk at the thought of automatic follow-up emails since it’s just gonna be an email template that you can get from a 5-second Google search.
However, the beauty of email automation is that these emails can be VERY personalised. The whole idea is for them to work, so if they’re too generic or just a straight-out Google email template, they simply won’t work. If this means you need five different chains of emails, so be it. But these five chains will convert better than if you had just one generic one.
This is a point of difference between email marketing and email automation. Email marketing aims to send generic emails to masses of people, hoping some will convert. Email automation aims to send personalised emails to a smaller group of qualified leads, nurturing them along the buyer’s journey.
The more you delve into email automation, the more complex you will want to make it. Our suggestion is to start out modestly and build it out from there. And a trade show is a perfect excuse to start as you’ll see the enormous benefits very quickly.
So, here are some ideas for email automation specific to trade shows.
Don’t wait till after the trade show, follow up during it.
Think of what you can do to attract people back to your booth. Maybe you can offer free food or drinks the day after you connect. Or maybe you have a live business card draw and you invite them to that. At the very least you can say thank you for the connection, and at the end wish them safe travels from the trade show and suggest you’ll connect shortly. This is just one of the best practices that you can do during the trade show and before you even begin following up.
Know what your follow-up emails are for.
Before you start emailing or calling someone, be sure to have a specific goal in mind. It can be to simply clarify something about their business, what types of questions you’re hoping to answer or ask for a pain point. Maybe it’s just to set up a meeting so that you can continue the conversation and potentially work on some solutions together. It can simply be a thanks for stopping by, but it’ll definitely remind them of the interaction during the trade show. You should also consider your call-to-action.
Don’t leave leads to die in an email sequence – set up a quick call to connect personally.
Email automation should take the pressure off connecting within the first week or two. But if you really want to convert leads from the trade show into customers, you don’t want to send email after email. You need to give them a ring and qualify them. So, use the emails as an interim solution, but don’t wait too long.
You’ve put in the effort, so why waste it?
Don’t forget to use your new emails for your non-trade show leads too! You’ll only need to make slight adjustments to the follow up emails and then they can help follow up any prospect!
Don’t forget to set up some emails to invite your current customers to visit you at the trade show.
This is a great way to reconnect with customers if you haven’t spoken in a while. It shows them you’re doing things and your business is thriving. Seeing old customers in person is a great way to showcase any new products or services you may have.
While you’re having a look at email automation, consider reviewing your newsletter.
Once the sequence ends for prospects, it’s an excellent idea to stay in touch long term. A cold lead today can turn into a hot lead in a years’ time, all because you stayed in touch and they didn’t forget about you.
Hopefully, that gives you some good ideas. However, you might be too busy to implement them, and perhaps choose to put it off till next year. I’d suggest against this, next year will turn into never.
Instead, engage our team to help with this. Our service Keep in Touch is designed for busy people just like you. We take the hassle out of email automation. After getting all the info from you, we’ll go and create the emails. Then all you need to do is approve them. The process can take as little as a few weeks from start to finish.
We would love to set a meeting with you, so when you need a hand – book a time for a chat.
Help is here and our consultants love learning about new businesses like yours to suggest a solution that works. We don’t want you to miss any leads that you worked so hard for. Imagine staying in touch with the 80% of leads you would otherwise never talk to and selling more to them with little effort thanks to automated follow up.
Assia Salikhova
Smarketing Lab, Managing Director
Co-Creator of 4Rs Business Growth Framework with profitable B2B solutions
Book time with me HERE now
assia@smarketinglab.co.nz
Find out how well your LinkedIn profile stands by using our Quiz and ask for help when need it. Because the #teamtalent at Smarketing Lab is on standby ready to help you gain the full benefit from LinkedIn for your business.
