If you’ve ever been in the business of generating leads, you’ve seen it before.

You have a potential client. They’re excited to work with you.

Then, without a word of explanation, they drop off.

Don’t feel bad. It happens to everybody.

The temptation is to look back on everything you did. Did you say something wrong? Did you do something wrong? What?

Chances are, though, that you’re missing something:

You’re not looking back far enough.

If you want to make sure that leads become customers, you have to make sure that you’re giving them opportunities at every stage—oftentimes, in every medium.

That means following up with leads via text, email, and more.

But how do you do it?

And how can you be sure that you’re doing it the right way?

Here’s everything you need to know to properly follow up on every lead:

Texting: Best Practices

Millennials are now the most “prominently represented generation in the modern workforce,” and guess what?

They text.

A lot.

If you have any notions of texting being an intrusive way to contact millennials, you’re going to have to think differently.

Texting is an effective way to follow up with people. It can feel more personal. And it’s electronic, allowing you to provide links when necessary.

In short, it’s a great way to follow up.

But that doesn’t mean you want your texts to get ignored, either.

What should you do? Here are some strategies for texting without feeling like you’re interrupting someone’s day:

• Keep it short. Think of the text as a subtle nudge. A quick reminder. An “alert” to someone that they might have filled out a form. Now, your goal is to get them to convert. Sending a brief text and keeping the message short is a great way to do this. Don’t send them “War and Peace.” Don’t try to convince them. Just try to be in their ear for a brief moment.
• Give them some time. The text reminder is a powerful tool when you make sure that the timing is right. Don’t text someone 2 seconds after they fill out a form, unless they agreed to it. You might be surprised at how many potential customers will be turned off by that. Why? Because they don’t know how many more texts you’re going to send, and it feels spammy. If you send one automatically within 2 seconds, they might assume that you send one every 2 seconds. The next thing you know, they’re opting out. Even if you’re using automation, time it so the text goes out a few minutes after the inquiry comes in so it feels more natural/real to your clients. Automation is great until your prospects feel like they’re interacting with a robot.

When you send out an automatic text, make sure it’s something light and simple. “Hey there ____, just wanted to see if you saw that last email I sent with next steps?”

Keep it informal, casual, and let them know that you don’t intend to take a lot of their time. If they really did want to become a client, but simply hadn’t gotten around to it, an automatic text is a great way to do it.

Emailing: Best Practices

In terms of ROI, emailing your potential clients has some of the best numbers of any medium. It’s inexpensive to use, easy to manage, and has dramatic effects on how many of your potential leads become true-blue clients.

Emailing gives you a chance to send some more intensive content—but again, it’s best to keep it brief. You might share a tidbit of information via email that you didn’t share via text, but it should always be aimed at converting the reader into a customer. Here are some ways to ensure you get the most out of emails:

• Measure your results. It always helps to know what you’re doing is working. And if it’s not working, you should at least know which emails tend to fail the least. This is known as A/B testing in some cases, but it may simply be that you measure your emails to get a sense of how your campaign is running. There’s an old saying in business: “what gets measured, gets managed.” If you can measure your results, you’ll be able to manage them, too.
• Spend a lot of time on the subject line. Getting someone to open your email is half the battle. So don’t be surprised if you spend about half your time working on email subject lines that you can use again and again. Something that intrigues them and introduces a need to open an email now will help your overall conversion rate by the time they read the call to action at the end of your email.
• Define what strategies work best for your market. Once you get a sense of which emails have the most dramatic effect on how your potential customers become customers, you can then start repeating those emails again and again—to other leads. This repeatable strategy will make your email campaigns that much more efficient and automatic. In turn, you can focus your energies on getting new leads into the pipeline rather than converting those already in your pipeline.

Videos, Calls, and Other Options

Texts and emails are two effective ways to capture your leads.

But what if you want to get a little more personal?

In the information age, there’s nothing more personal than a video or a call that demonstrates that you’re a real person.

It solidifies your presence in a potential lead’s mind. That’s especially important in the mortgage loan industry, where you have to come across as trustworthy and personable.

If you only ever show up in text form, it’s often not enough.

The good news is that you can automate these two tools as well—especially if you have the right platforms at your disposal.

Make sure that you take the same approach to creating video and phone call content as you did your texts.

Don’t hound people.

Just use these occasional “check-ins” to tell them what you have to offer.

Then, with your call-to-action (CTA), make sure that you hint at how simple the process is.

Tools for Following Up with Leads Across Multiple Channels

Maybe you read all of these best practices and thought something like this:

“Great. I know what to do if I ever send out a text or email now. But…how am I supposed to do it, exactly?”

That’s where the CRM tools come in.

CRM—Customer Relationship Management—is a science these days. And there are plenty of tools for automatically managing your emails, your texts, and more.

For starters, try signing up to a free trial of leadPops and see just how many more of the leads you already have start signing up for your service.

A great quote from one of our mortgage clients, Alex Doce: “This company is amazing. My team has increased mortgage origination volume by 24%+, thanks to their efforts.”

That’s not something that just happens because you change the way you do things.

You also have to change the tools you use.

Either way, you’ll bet set for a complete overhaul in the way you handle incoming leads. Using text, email, phone calls, and more, you can begin campaigns that convert people who were only “thinking” about your services to full-on customers.