Coaches - Is This The Missing Link For Converting Leads To Paying Clients?

OK - as most coaches are now starting to realise that, in this information age, if your business can't be found online then most likely your business doesn't exist.

So, we have a website, maybe a Facebook page or group, maybe an Instagram following, perhaps a LinkedIn group etc etc.

Having established an online presence your next challenge is to drive traffic to your online shopfront so that potential clients can at least see and begin to explore what you can do for them.

Let's say then that you're successful in getting potential clients' eyes on your online space typically you'll be making some kind of enticing offer with an accompanying call to action.

What kinds of offers am I talking about? Well it could be any of the following:

• Sign up/contact me for a free 1-1 discovery call
• Sign up/contact me for free strategy session
• Sign up to my free webinar
• Sign up to get a copy of my free ebook, or short course or whatever...
• Sign up for my newsletter
• Join my group
• etc

If/when people take the required action they are leads (potential clients) - but they are not yet clients or customers (a client or customer being someone who actually pays you some money).

This suggests then that we have to do something else to encourage those leads to become clients. In fact there's quite a lot more that we need to do to transition those leads into paying customers.

Marketing Experts Say Between 7 & 13 Touches From You Before Your Message Breaks Through

If you do a bit of an online search into how many times a new lead will need a touch or nudge from you to hear your message you'll find that experienced marketers are now saying that it's between 11 and 13 touches before your message breaks through.

Thankfully social media platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram etc make it somewhat easier to get ourselves and our message in front of potential clients. But all of those places are really noisy...so it can be extremely difficult for your message to stand out from all that noise.

So, What's The Missing Link For Converting Leads Into Paying Clients?

The simple answer is you need an email marketing strategy as a follow up...more specifically you need to set up an email marketing funnel.

What is an email marketing funnel?

An email marketing funnel is a sequence of emails sent to your leads on a predefined schedule.

The aim of that series of emails is to convert leads into customers (i.e. people who purchase something from you).

The stages of the email marketing funnel refer to the degree of how likely customers on your email list are willing to make a purchase. When prospects move through towards the bottom of your marketing funnel, the chance of a lead becoming a customer increases.

Stages In An Email Marketing Funnel

Let's briefly review each of the 5 stages:

Awareness - your lead or prospect is cold at this stage. They barely know anything about your and your coaching. At this stage you'll be enticing people to sign up to your email list with some kind of incentive - a free video/ebook/webinar/pdf etc. You need to establish your credentials and authority and begin to build a relationship with your new subscriber.

Consideration - giving your new subscribers more of what they want. Typically this will be more free stuff - information, education etc which will help them with satisfying their need. You'll also be educating them about you, your journey and your understanding of their pain point.

Conversion - having warmed up your new email subscribers and through the value of the material you've provided in your earlier emails, your leads are getting to like what you can do for them. You now begin to promote your paid offer to them - emphasising the benefits to them of what your coaching are, and the results you can help them attain.

Loyalty - your new customer, having made their first purchase, or first few purchases and they like the results you have helped them to achieve you continue to nurture the relationship by providing more value. There's a very high chance that these satisfied clients will now become repeat clients.

Advocacy - having your satisfied clients promoting your product and your brand is the mark of a successful email marketing campaign. Not only are they likely to continue to purchase your upsell offers they will, with or without prompting from you, become active promoters of your business.

In Summary

Marketing professionals tell us that clients will possibly need to receive somewhere between 7 and 13 touches before they take up of an initial paid offer

Having a follow up email marketing strategy is likely to be an almost essential element in your coaching business in transitioning a client from being a prospect to being a customer.

I cover this topic in much more depth in my free video training - click here to access it.