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If you hope to succeed in social entrepreneurship (conducting business with a social/environmental mission), then you must learn how to make sales online. Even if you aren’t engaged in traditional e-commerce, you may eventually need to acquire new clients, launch crowdfunding campaigns, form strategic partnerships, and/or create additional revenue streams. Your online sales and digital marketing skillset will make or break you in each of these scenarios.
5 Steps for Sales
Eden Fried provides a 5-step process for selling online courses in a brilliant post on Persuasion Nation. By making some slight tweaks and additions to her process, we believe that it can be applied to a wide range of sale-oriented activities, such as fundraising and partnership sourcing. Here is our take on Eden’s 5-step process:
1. Connect
The first step in online sales is connecting. You need to find ways to reach your target audience through online channels (see below).
- Social Media
- Forums
- Search Engines
- Referrals
- Paid Advertisements
Before you begin outreach campaigns, it is essential to define your target audience by creating user personas. Our free guide on marketing plan creation will help get you started:
2. Educate
Once your target audience is aware of your brand, you will want to begin educating them with useful content. This informative content should help your audience solve specific problems and position your organization as a credible resource. Here are some educational content mediums:
- Blog Posts
- Videos
- Infographics
- Podcasts
You may be wondering what problems you can solve with a blog post… Here are some possibilities:
- Unresolved questions about your industry or region
- Ways to support your target beneficiaries
- Guidance on your target audience’s jobs to be done
- Lists of relevant resources on audience interests
3. Convert
After establishing initial trust with your audience, it is time to convert them into leads. You can accomplish this by offering supplemental resources in exchange for email addresses, as well as other pertinent information. Potential resources include:
- Checklists
- Guides
- eBooks
- White Papers
- Worksheets
- Reports
- Mini-Courses
- Webinars
Similar to educational content, supplemental content should help your audience solve specific problems. Conversion strategies perform best when you integrate supplemental content offers into your top-performing educational content. For example, you could offer a downloadable Instagram checklist as part of a blog post that covers Instagram marketing.
4. Engage
Once people give you their email addresses, you should send them a series of engaging emails to increase credibility and trust. First, you should email them the resource that they initially requested (e.g. an Instagram checklist). After the initial email, it is useful to follow up with an email or two that provides additional solution-oriented content (e.g. Instagram photo tips). In addition to educational content, the final engagement email should include a brief teaser to build anticipation for the product/service/opportunity that you are about to pitch.
- Requested Resource
- Value Add
- Value Add
- Value Add + Teaser
You will want to prepare your messages before you begin collecting leads (step 3). Additionally, engagement is easiest when you create automated email sequences with a mass mailing service, such as MailChimp or ConvertKit.
5. Pitch
The last step in closing online sales is pitching. You must persuasively communicate the benefits of your primary product/service/opportunity. Similar to engagement, pitching consists of a four email sequence:
- Pitch
- FAQs
- Reminder
- Limited Offer
In the first email, you will want to convey key offer information, such as the unique features of your product/service/opportunity. You can strengthen your pitch by including customer testimonials. Additionally, you need to include a deadline for your offer. The second email should answer common questions, as well as address potential objections, and the third email should remind people of the upcoming deadline. Finally, your fourth email will provide a persuasive “last call” for people to get your limited offer.
How to Make Sales Online in Unconventional Scenarios
While this process makes sense for product/service sales, you may still be wondering how these strategies might be applied to other activities, such as crowdfunding campaigns and partnership sourcing. Steps 1 and 2 will essentially be the same in these situations. However, you will want to make slight alterations to the final three steps.
Since crowdfunding campaigns require coordinated timing, you will want to perform step 5 at roughly the same time for all of your leads. This may require you to extend the length of engagement for leads that you acquire early. You can do this by providing consistent value adds through a weekly newsletter until your crowdfunding campaign goes live. Additionally, you can use strategies to gather a lot of leads in a short timespan by running paid advertising campaigns in step 1.
Since partnerships require higher levels of interpersonal interaction than product/service sales, you will want to augment step 5 by requesting a call or face-to-face meeting in your pitch email. Since you may have unique specifications for partners, you will also want to collect additional lead information in step 3. By collecting pertinent information, such as people’s job functions and company sizes, you can narrow your list of potential partners.
Make Sure to Deliver Value
On a final note, it is important to ensure that your product/service/opportunity meets, and ideally exceeds, people’s expectations. Since retaining customers requires less investment than acquiring customers, you will want to ensure that your buyers, donors, and/or partners remain satisfied.
Hopefully, this post provides a new set of tools for your social entrepreneurship arsenal. If you are ready to take your digital marketing to the next level, please consider downloading our Marketing Plan Creation Guide so you can design an expert marketing strategy for your social enterprise.
Apply Our 5-Step Process to Generate Online Sales for Your Social Enterprise!
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