Adding Sales to the Green Marketing Process
July 21, 2010 by admin
Filed under Blog, The Lowdown on Green Marketing
Once you have acquired a new email address what do you do next? . Green marketing professionals should think about how the whole sales process and how they can convert their prospects into sales. Unfortunately, many green branding and green marketing entrepreneurs feel negatively about selling, and will go to great lengths to avoid closing the prospect.
This does not mean that the web is the right place for hard selling It’s much better for relationship building. Typically, you need to have an average of five to seven interactions with a prospect before they will be ready to buy something. Amazon and other major online brands will convert new visitors to customers but you will struggle. Firt, you need to establish trust and credibility with visitors and there are four main strategies that I recommend:
Newsletters
Try to send an Email Newsletter every two weeks and include your recent blog posts, newsworthy items and reports. You can also promote your products with discounts and coupons exclusive to subscribers. Ensure the newsletter is stimulating and engaging, and try to personalize it where possible so it is from you not a faceless organization.
Invest in an autoresponder which enables you to create a series of emails to send out, and automate your list management. So, as soon as a new subscriber signs up on your website they will receive a series of welcome emails and go on to your newsletter.
Webinars
Webinars are a great tool for selling to your email list. The ideal length is 40 minutes of useful content followed by 10 minutes to pitch a special offer for attendees such as a free trial. After the webinar has been held you can send a recording to non-attendees on your list. The most popular webinar hosting is provided by GoToWebinar or WebEx, and you may get a step by step webinar checklist here.
Video
You Tube videos are excellent showcases for your green marketing campaign, especially if you include case studies of your customers using the product. Let’s say you market eco-efficiency devices to homes, a video that demonstrates the energy savings achieved in a typical family household would work well. A video is like your own infomercial and you can test several to see what works best. Look at this example from Home Depot for CFL bulbs.
Offline Integration
Ideally you want to get the phone number and address of your email subscribers so you can promote to them through more channels. In many ways, internet marketing is most effective for lead generation and you should employ other offline methods like telemarketing or events to convert leads to sales. This is more relevant if you sell high value products like solar panels.
The optimal sales processes integrate many channels and I suggest that you take the time to develop the most effective way to integrate your website with more traditional sales methods.