ignore your existing leads at your peril.
by jassen bowman
the most successful professional services firms in america put their marketing efforts on autopilot.
more: don’t waste your investments | you fixed their tax issues, now what? | 11 steps for handling client complaints | office safety and more: checklists for your tax resolution setup | how to build a tax resolution business
exclusively for pro members. log in here or 2022世界杯足球排名 today.
whether you have a full-time marketing assistant, do all the marketing yourself or distribute duties among your staff, using checklists to systemize your marketing is really the only way to go. using checklists ensures that your marketing gets done properly and completely.
the most important aspects of marketing your practice, in order, are:
- getting existing clients to come back
- reactivating lost clients
- converting prospects into paying customers
- new lead generation to get new prospects
why are these four things listed in this order? quite simple: it requires less time and money to get an existing client to come back in than to find new clients.
it will typically require a 5 to 10 times larger investment to acquire a brand new client than to get an existing or lost client to come back in. similarly, your investment to convert an existing prospect into a client is much less than to generate a new prospect.
keep this fundamental fact in mind as you set your marketing budget and time priorities. however, if you are growth-oriented, you must pay attention to all four areas. even if your new lead generation efforts are small, you must be filling your funnel with new leads in order to grow in the long run.
marketing to your existing leads checklist
use this checklist to market yourself consistently to the people who have already expressed interest in tax resolution in the past. this list is also referred to as your “house list.”
- verify that autoresponder messages are being sent.
- verify that blog broadcast messages are being sent.
- review email system statistics.
- send direct mail items for lead followup system.
- spend time writing portion of monthly client/prospect newsletter.
- go through your crm contact database and process approximately 1/4 of all your prospect/client direct manual followup for the week each day. this will allow you to get through all your contacts each week and spread out the work load. process them in the following order:
- all tasks that are flagged as important first
- all tasks that are not flagged as anything next
- all tasks that are flagged as flexible next
- here are some possible topics and email templates to use:
- send a note, manual email or call about a recent change in the tax code.
- send a note, manual email or call asking about any new notices they may have received for the irs and if they need assistance with those.
- send a note, manual email or call to another service professional and ask if they happen to have a client who could use some tax assistance.
- send a note, manual email or call about a new article your wrote or posted on your blog or updated stats you’ve added.