The world and customers are constantly evolving. The pandemic has changed the way service businesses operate. Even as the world started to open up, consumers’ buying behaviour and habits have changed due to being cooped up at home for two years.
Consumers are willing to pay for goods online and are also willing to pay for services before coming down to a physical location.
Businesses that do not adapt to bringing their products or services online and changing their marketing methods will be left behind. The days of running an advertisement on social media and getting prospects to meet face-to-face to sell them a service are outdated, ineffective, and expensive.
The biggest benefit of marketing and selling services online is working less and making more profits.
The traditional way of marketing and selling services are as follows:
- Step 1: Advertise online to gather leads
- Step 2: Call and capture a prospect’s information
- Step 3: Arrange a face-to-face meet up
- Step 4: Conduct a face-to-face sales presentation to educate and sell the services
- Step 5: Follow up manually to close sales
Each step requires optimising a moving part that bears an additional cost and increased drop-off rate. This process is not efficient.
However, choosing to sell and fulfil services online translates to fewer fulfilment costs, rental costs, and increased ability to serve more customers.
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Even traditional service businesses such as spas, facials and wellness centres can benefit from getting customers online.
As they can get customers to pay for their services beforehand, this greatly helps them manage their cash flow and secure sales as early as possible, therefore covering their advertising costs and effectively scaling their advertising campaigns faster.
Here are two simple key points on how we did it:
Using education content videos as a filter
Most businesses would educate their customers about their services before selling them their offerings.
For example, a facial parlour educates customers about their unique extraction methods before selling them a complete facial package. Before selling them a personal training package, a fitness company educates its customers about their unique weight loss methods.
These are usually done during the sales process in a one-on-one setting where it is time-consuming and not the right fit for unqualified prospects.
Instead, we at Ascend Marketing help these businesses educate 100 to 1000 people in 30 to 90 minutes by creating advertisements to promote a free educational video or a free live event using an online sales funnel. This can easily be set up in 30 minutes and done at scale or even automated.
The educational video content will function as a filter to sniff out interesting prospects and encourage them to book a video call.
This will help save time and resources doing outbound calls and increase closing rates as business owners speak to customers who are genuinely interested.
These high-quality prospects are also more willing to make a purchase right after the video call and before physically coming down.
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We also help business owners seamlessly set up payment pages, issue invoices and collect payments through integration to a payment gateway.
Strong automated follow-up systems
The fortune is in the follow-up. In today’s market, consumers prefer to be contacted on their terms and timings, and some might prefer text messages while others prefer emails. Many dislike outbound phone calls unless they are informed ahead of time.
With this in mind, we strongly recommend having automated nurture sequences such as email marketing and text marketing. The beauty of such sequences is that they are automated. Business owners only need one series of messages and automatically set it up for all prospects. This ensures a consistent sales experience.
The automated sequences we have in place are behavioural-based, meaning different sequences are sent out based on what the lead does.
For example, if a lead did not book a call, they will be sent a reminder sequence to encourage them to book a call. If a lead did not sign up, they will be sent a nurture sequence to educate them on the sales process and eventually sign up for our clients’ services.
As these sequences are automated, new leads are nurtured 24/7 into becoming paying customers. These automated sequences will reduce manpower costs and human errors.
As a result of having done many successful marketing campaigns for varying clients from different niches in the past, Ascend Marketing have created template emails and text sequences for any business owner to use for their own business. They can deploy these templates, clone and have automated follow-up campaigns ready to go.
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