As the COVID lockdown lifted, John and Windy Zabojnik faced many challenges to their young Texas Cryoworks & Wellness Center business.
- How would they make their customers feel safe during their appointments?
- How do they get the word out to their customers that they are at a new location?
- How will they follow up on free trial participants and convert them into customers?
- How do they get the word out about their new state-of-the-art pain relief technologies that were remarkably effective, yet still unknown to most customers?
- How can the leverage the data in their POS system an CRM program to bring customers back and to spread “Word of Mouth” to their friends and family.
Texas Cryoworks turned to our Flawless Followup agency to help them devise a strategy. We created the “Pain Relief Challenge”. This initiative not only accomplished each and every one of their challenges but also got them an unprecedented amount of new sales in just three days.
The “Pain Relief Challenge” was a huge success. It generated 24 new appointments by segmenting customers by interest and activity. Then,Texas Cryoworks strategically communicated with their customers and emailed them only messages about topics that interest them. Customers now buy more often, and Texas Cryoworks is able to send customers the information that is relevant to them.
“Flawless Followup did an amazing job getting us new sales. Over 78% of our appointments purchased new services from us in the first 3 days alone!” — John and Windy Zabojnik, Texas Cryoworks & Wellness
Here’s the Process Texas Cryoworks Followed to Get Customers Back to Buy From Them Again
The first question Texas Cryoworks faced was “How do I contact my customers?”.
Studies show that email marketing is still the champion when it comes to getting people to buy. But like most companies, Texas Cryoworks didn’t maintain an email list.
Quickly Building an Email List From Scratch
Building and maintaining an email list is one of the most valuable tools a business can do to improve customer relations and grow sales. This process used to be a tedious task in the past. However, new technologies, like POS (Point of Sales) systems, CRMs, accounting systems, and business management systems often maintain customer data that can be used to quickly create an email list.
Texas Cryoworks did have an appointment scheduling system with the necessary information. They just hadn’t used it in the past for marketing. So, the first step was to export the customer data from the scheduling system and import it into a new list in ActiveCampaign.
Creating a Marketing Strategy That Works
In his book, The Ultimate Sales Letter, marketing expert Dan Kennedy famously said that marketing sequences, rather than sending single messages, has resulted in millions and millions of dollars for his clients.
This is where we turned to automation and designed a sequence that allowed us to maximize our results. In fact, we actually laid out several sequences to track and follow every single customer as they progressed through the challenge.
Carefully designing promotions this way also gives you significant information that you can measure so that you always know how your campaign is performing and how to improve at each and every stage.
Writing Emails That Get Customers to Take Action
Texas Cryoworks’ list was pretty cold because their customers were not used to seeing emails from them. This always makes a promotion more challenging.
To counteract this, we did several things to make sure the emails got opened and links got clicked
- Used persuasive subject lines to get the email opened without tripping spam filters.
- Used the “Urgency” of a 3 Day Sale and featured a countdown timer in each email.
- Used an eye-catching graphic to summarize the “Pain Relief Challenge” for those that did not read the text.
- Created short text.
- Had a strong “Call to Action” that prompted readers to take the next step.
The emails worked like a charm and delivered strong sales results. We also experienced some “Opt-Outs” which is to be expected any time you run a campaign. Opt-Outs are always highest when promoting to a cold list and will go down considerably when your audience gets more accustomed to your emails.
Getting Customers to “Opt-In” and Confirmed on a New List
It’s important to respect your customers’ privacy and desire to receive emails from you. Texas Cryoworks had an established relationship with their customers. Even so, we wanted the customers to know that our promotional behavior was changing and invite them to participate.
To do this, we built a landing page with an “opt-in” form. Completing the form placed the customer on a new list and “Tagged” them. This step helped us quickly identify the customers that completed this action step.
Bonus: Leveraging Social Media to Virally Grow Their List
Most businesses pay a lot of money for new leads. But Texas Cryoworks generated 11 new referrals without paying a penny!
Best of all, these new leads were highly qualified because they were referred by their friends and family on social media. We did this goal by building a contest into the promotion. Customers earned a chance to win prizes by sharing the “Pain Relief Challenge” on their social media timelines.
The typical lifetime value of a customer is about $2,500. New referrals are worth up to $27,500 to Texas Cryoworks!
Frequently Asked Questions
Is it OK to Import Contacts From Another Program
You must respect the rights and desires of the people on your list. Make sure that you only import leads that have given you their consent. In most cases, you do have implied consent to message customers that have done business with you in the past.
However, we decided to be extra careful and included a new “Opt-In” step in the “Pain Relief Challenge” just to make sure. This provides additional benefits because it sets the expectation so that customers don’t treat future messages as spam.
How Fast Will I See Results
We designed the “Pain Relief Challenge” so that we could start seeing results right away. It was literally a matter of minutes before we saw people opening emails, clicking links, completing forms, sharing on social media, and ultimately scheduling appointments.
Obviously, each and every campaign is different and will depend on things such as
- The structure of your automations.
- The quality of your copywriting.
- The effectiveness of your Calls to Action.
- More!
The quality and experience of our Flawless Followup™ team helped us achieve the best results in the shortest period of time.
Won’t people “Opt-Out”
Yes. You could and should expect to see opt outs. They will happen each and every time you send an email. They will be higher at first because your audience is not accustomed to seeing emails from you. Opt-outs are simply people telling you that they do not want to buy your product.
On the other hand, by not emailing you are missing sales.
In the case of Texas Cryoworks, they got a handful of opt-outs. They also got 24 new appointments and 11 new referrals that equate to tens of thousands of dollars in potential revenue.
The choice to be made is whether you don’t email to keep people on your list. Remember, these people don’t intend to buy,
When you do email, you provide valuable service to customers that want and need what you have. Of course, these customers are likely to buy from somebody else.
Most savvy business owners realize that email marketing is the best way to build relationships with their customers that leads to more sales and greater profits.
Will This Work for My Business
Yes. While nobody can guarantee results, a study compiled by Invesp states that email marketing is more effective at customer retention, and preferred by more marketing professionals than any other marketing tactic.
If you don’t have a consistent email marketing strategy in place, then you are likely missing sales and letting opportunities fall through the cracks.
Flawless Followup provides the most robust and cost-effective email marketing solution for small businesses and that is why we recommend it to our Flawless Followup clients.
Campaign Postmortem: Successes and Opportunities for Improvement
When it comes to measuring objectives, the “Pain Relief Challenge” hit the ball out of the park on many levels.
- Communicated how Texas Cryoworks was maximizing customer safety in the post-Covid environment.
- Quickly improved sales in just 3 days.
- Converted free trial participants into paying customers.
- Introduced new pain relief services.
- Brought customers into their new offices.
More importantly, the information and measurable results provided us with a roadmap for how to grow sales even more! We were able to measure the progress in real time and track each customer through every stage of the funnel. We provided John and Windy this spreadsheet every night, so they could see their success.
John declared after the promotion, “I’ve never felt this good about where I am because I know exactly what I need to do next.”