A Story of Seductive Social Media Success and Neglected Email Strategy 🏚️

As much as you love social channels, be smart by strategically optimising business operations, sales processes and leads with well-conceived website email forms.

Image of business people gathered around a hole in the ground

A client I worked with many years ago was – and still is – creating incredible custom art as part of wearable fabrics and garments. The visually-arresting photos and videos showing off each painstakingly-created bespoke clothing and apparel design were perfect for social media.

The uploaded video reel content was getting great traction on YouTube and TikTok.

The approach was simple:

Create professional photographs showcasing the products
Edit the photos into short videos
Upload the videos to social media
Respond to inbound sales enquiries via social media and email

With so much buzz around each exquisite example of her talent, it seemed there wasn’t much for this client to do other than repeat the formula.

It was all positively blowing up, and exciting, to say the least! Unfortunately, this is also how business operations issues had taken root. 😵‍💫

There Was No Defined Marketing and Sales Process

The client had contacted me with vague notions about needing a website, and understandably needed guidance/perspective on what exactly it could/should do.

After some discussion it became clear the client’s ability to fulfil orders was a bit of an admin nightmare.

How could the website play a key role here?

Devise a Strategy to Fit Customer Behaviour

Without a website, the client was being contacted by potential customers that were not being led through a process. It was stressful and hectic.

The client needed two things:

An operational website strategy to smooth out the ordering and sales process
A future sales pipeline that didn’t rely on social media

Understand the Buying Cycle

Every customer, in all industries, go through a buying cycle. Whether they’re buying food, buying clothes, buying insurance or buying a home, they arrive at final purchase decisions based on certain criteria.

This can take anything from seconds to years.

For the client, potential customers in the buying cycle existed in (roughly) three categories:

Suspect – somewhat interested; wants to know more; not ready to make purchase
Prospect – more interested; considering/comparing; ready to make purchase
Customer – made purchase; might purchase again; might refer new leads

Note: many marketers make a distinction between a marketing funnel (attract and turn people into leads) and the sales funnel (turn those leads into customers).

This example has been simplified to one funnel.

1. Sales Suspect (Not Ready to Buy)

Problem: unlikely customers (suspects) were:

Offering kind words in social/email messages but not purchasing the product
Sending rambling social/email messages as part of vague order requests

Solution: use website email newsletter opt-in form to:

Capture details of people from social channels that were interested but not ready to buy
Keep these people engaged/nurtured with email newsletter until they were ready to buy

Action taken by me:

Created an email address capture form. Set up a Mailchimp account, which would allow several thousand free subscribers bucketed into specific segments (MailChimp has a free tier). More than enough for a decent sales pipeline.
Email contact list segments were created in the MailChimp account (suspect, prospect, customer) to reflect the buying cycle, with the intention of the client managing and manually moving email addresses to the different segments.
Created email newsletter template for suspects

Screenshot of MailChimp email capture form

Action to be taken by client:

If sales suspects messaged the client, but didn’t opt in to the newsletter using the form, these suspects could be manually added to the newsletter contact list by the client within the MailChimp account.
Send a brief email newsletter to this list of contacts, say, once a month, with examples of new products with links to key website pages.

2. Sales Prospect (Ready to Buy)

Problem: potential customers (prospects) were:

Still sending rambling social/email messages but at least closer to buying
Asking too many follow up questions, possibly changing mind or not paying the deposit

Solution: use website order forms to:

Answer common questions with FAQs, blogs, audio, about page and delivery details page
Get clear, coherent, committed orders and the deposits paid

Action taken by me:

“Interviewed” client and transcribed the conversation into detailed notes. Using these notes, I co-authored informative website content to take pressure off the client and cut down on needless toing and froing with prospects.

Use your website to serve answers to common questions to save time

Multiple website order forms (using the free Contact Form 7 WordPress plugin) were configured to cover each product variation.

With complex product requirements and many attributes, a coherent, structured and declarative email order specification lessens the back and forth communication.

Also, prospects could subscribe to the email newsletter as part completing the product order form.

Action to be taken by client:

Answer any additional questions from prospects on a case by case basis and assimilate this into the existing website content.
Send an email newsletter, say, once a month, thanking the customer for buying and showcasing other similar products. Politely encourage a Google review/testimonial.

3. Sales Customer (Made a Purchase)

Problem: people who made a purchase (customers) were:

Not being reminded or given the opportunity to become a repeat customer
Not having the opportunity to forward or share examples of new products

Solution: use the email newsletter to:

Keep previous customers interested enough to buy again within the website ecosystem
Have previous customers share, comment and distribute newly-uploaded social media content

Action taken by me:

Email contact list segments were created in the MailChimp account (suspect, prospect, customer) to reflect the buying cycle, with the intention of the client managing and manually moving email addresses to the different segments.

Action to be taken by client:

The client would log in to MailChimp and ensure that the email addresses of customers existed in the customer segment (a simple spreadsheet could help with this).

Strategy and Operations: Use or Lose

Here’s where the frustration sets in. The website was built several years ago, and it was/is great, and as far as I know, everything operated like clockwork.

However, I recently checked the WordPress website… and it no longer loads!

This is what the client’s website currently looks like – always keep your content management system (CMS) up to date!

The core software powering the WordPress website had not been updated. This responsibility had been placed in the client’s hands with instructions, but, evidently, had been neglected.

I contacted the client and arranged to get the website back online. This was done. Another year went by and the same thing happened. Website down.

Screenshot of WordPress core software update button

Social Media Popularity is Not a Sales and Marketing Strategy

At present I have no idea what is happening. Hopefully, it doesn’t mean all the business leads are still coming only from social media. I mean, it doesn’t spell imminent disaster or anything.

But no diversification? No spreading of risk?

Graphic of a shadowy finger wearing coat and hat standing over a man on his knees Inevitably, the goose that craps golden eggs gets bought up, changed or killed off. It happened with Vine, and Google Plus and Twitter, and it could happen with TikTok or any of the others.

Whatever platform you imagine to be a steady future source of marketing, promo and revenue is an unmitigated assumption.

Do you think those third party platforms care about you?

Email Subscribers: Valuable “First-Party Data” Sales Opportunities

The only channel you can really trust for business revenue is the email subscriber list you build for yourself.

Email subscribers are considered first-party data, whereas messaging someone on Facebook – or whatever network it happens to be – is an example of third-party data.

Never Build Your Digital Home on Rented Land

The list of email subscribers lives on your website, and your website is your home. Because you control everything on the website, this can be thought of as owned media.

By contrast, social networks are just rented media.

Planning for the future instead of going with the flow today is not easy. As they say in investment circles, “do we think more about jam today or jam tomorrow?”

I prefer chess analogies, so I’ll simply say: be smart, be organised, think several moves ahead and capture those email addresses!