Help, I Lost all my Marketing Contacts

With GDPR now been put into effect in the EU many companies have lost a considerable amount of their contacts. In this article, we’ll give you eight tips on how you can get them back.

The fact that a vast portion of your contacts didn’t notice, or just merely ignored your request for their opt-in has its pros and cons. The most significant benefit is that the connections you’re left with now have actively confirmed that they are genuinely interested in hearing from you. The disadvantage is the fact that you have to explain to the rest of your company why your total reach is down.

This is how you get your contacts back

1. Take the opportunity to do a contact clean-up – Look at GDPR as an opportunity to figure out which contacts are worth fighting to get back and whom you can let go. Focus your activities on the connections that have shown an interest in you. That is way more effective than trying to win back those that are ignoring you, as these contacts are not likely to be profitable prospects for you.

2. Have an effective website – Your website should be the driver in all your communication with customers, leads and stakeholders. Without a well-functioning website, it will be hard to rebuild your database. Set goals for your website and have a clear strategy on how your site can support your business goals. Define what you wish your visitors would do on your website and make sure this is easy and understandable for them to do. Your site should also serve as an information database that attracts people searching for relevant questions; this will generate relevant traffic.

3. Content, content, content – Even if you exhaust yourself in becoming GDPR compliant it will all be useless if you don’t manage to keep your audience interested. That is why good content is critical. Continue to plan, produce and execute good content and distribute it in the right channels. Without a steady stream of valuable content, your audience will lose interest, and next time you need their opt-in, they might not see the value in giving you their permission once again.

4. Deliver value – The key to getting your contacts interested in you is to know their pain points and to publish readily available content that answers the questions they have. Your communication needs to show off your knowledge, so the contact that’s consuming it will feel inclined to contact you for more information. To achieve this, you’ll need to adapt your content to where your prospects are in the sales funnel. Your blog is an excellent channel for keeping in touch with your contacts and prevents you from coming off as too pushy and annoying.

5. Be clear about what action you want from your contacts – Be sure to have clear call-to-action in your content. Make it clear why the website visitors should choose your product or service, and how to contact you. If you have managed to get a prospect interested, nothing is worse than lose them again just because they don’t know how to get in touch with you. Make sure to have at least one CTA on all product pages, in blog posts, and when you do bottom-of-funnel ads in social media.

6. Visible newsletter subscription – Make sure it’s easy for potential leads to subscribe to your newsletter. Have a clear sign-up button on your website, in social media, and on other digital platforms. Remember also to get proper opt-ins and make it easy for your subscribers to unsubscribe if they wish to do so.

7. Smart distribution – It’s essential to have a good plan for how to distribute your content, so you can reach your target audience where they are. Make sure that your website content ranks well for relevant search terms, so you can pick up relevant traffic from persons who search for your products or services (SEO). The competition for organic visibility can be hard, and it takes time and effort to build up your website to generate organic traffic. Therefore, you should also do search engine marketing (SEM) to buy visibility and traffic. You should also create awareness about your content on social media. The better your content is, the more will it engage your audience, and get shared with others. Also, good content should be promoted with ads so that it can reach an even wider audience. Ads also give you the opportunity to be even more targeted so that you can tailor your message to smaller niche audiences.

8. Put your communication in a system
To quickly adapt your content to your contacts customer journey or persona you’ll need a system. A marketing automation platform gives you the tools you need to follow up contacts and leads and lets you segment your contacts into groups based on different triggers. This will allow you to be more targeted in your messaging, and you can, of course, automate significant parts of the process. This will create a better experience for your customers and prospects and will increase the value of your interaction with your audience. An excellent marketing automation tool also helps you manage and keep track of whom that have given you consent to different parts of your marketing. This will enable you to abide by the GDPR regulations in a seamless way. Remember that you always need to be able to prove that your contacts have given active and informed consent for you to contact them through your marketing efforts. Leading marketing automation system providers like Hubspot helps you make the consent process as painless as possible for everyone involved.

 

It can feel overwhelming to lose significant parts of your contact list, but this is an opportunity for you to bounce back, stronger than ever. Get in touch with us to solve your communication needs.

Thanks for the photo Tim Gouw on Unsplash

 

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