How do you chat to your clients?

Oooh! The thrill of 157 raving fans loving your latest hard worked-over photo, or the comments writing adoringly about your workspace and tools. Instagram and Facebook have got the ego-stroking down to a T.

Everyone raves about Instagram and Facebook as a “great place to find new clients and engage with new ones”. Clever marketers will sell you course after course on how to get the best out of both platforms, but you can get tied up in posting every day: what’s the best time to post and how best to engage with your audience, that you have no time to do anything else.

 And, does it really make you money? For some people, perhaps it does, but it’s a long haul…

You ‘like’ a few posts, read some comments, then post something which takes you ages to stage perfectly, then check back to answer the comments and see if it was popular. It’s fine, if you have infinite time, and little else to do, but it is such a time suck.

But do you step back and ask if it really does translate into new business for you?

Because it’s crucial to remember that these platforms are businesses. They exist to make money. For them, not you.

They do this by monetising, and what they really want is for you to stay on there as long as possible, luring other people to spend as long as possible on there, too. Their ideal would be us all hooked up with our credit cards loaded up and ready to go. That’s fair enough. They’re running a business; like us, they want to make money.  

Nothing inherently wrong with that, but you need to remember it’s always their rules.

Those rules change all the time and people are getting touchier, so if someone complains about you, and your account gets stopped, shut or even paused for a bit, where do all your raving fans go?

If you are shut down, you’ll lose all those fans. Instantly. Or, Insta-ntly

If you get banned by either platform you will lose those hard-earned fans in one swipe of a mouse. It’s not always that easy to get them back either.

You could complain about this – lots of people do – but it’s their platform, so their rules, and there’s little point in complaining about something you can’t change or affect. There are easier ways of spending your time, and safer too, where you own the data and are not reliant on the good will of a digital behemoth.

What you need to do is be cleverer.

You need to get those happy fans off anti-social media and onto your own mailing list. That way, if IG throws a hissy fit, you still have your fans' contact details.

The best way of doing this is with a nurture funnel.

I use a lead magnet.

Way back, before I learned about e-marketing, I thought ‘lead’ rhymed with ‘bed’, and wondered why you needed a magnet for a non-ferrous metal. Once I learned a bit more, and realised it rhymed with ‘feed’, I wrote a couple and sorted out an automated series of emails. I’ve got several now and I’ve helped others write theirs.

You can’t expect something for nothing, so to tempt possible clients in, you need to offer them a great incentive. After all, fair exchange is no robbery – they are giving you their precious email address, the least you can do is reciprocate by giving them some of your knowledge!

That’s where your lead magnet comes in.

You write some ‘top tips’ or ‘How to have happy skin/ look ten years younger now’ etc and then get it nicely formatted.

Next, you need to set up some automated emails. I initially did a month, but so bored with loading them up, that I re-did it for seven days. After they’ve completed this, the new subscriber automatically joins my daily emails list. (You can join that HERE, if you want to see how I do it. Or you just want Radiant skin! There are some top tips in there.)

Instead of being reliant on Instagram and Facebook with their ever-changing algorithms (and who really knows what an algorithm is?) I now have the contact details for my fans and clients, and I chat to them daily.

I suggest things that they might like, give them exclusive special offers and lots of info. in return, they buy my book, and my products and book in for treatments. It’s very kind of them, and so I make sure I give them loads of information as well as a modicum of amusement.

Lots of people say “Oh, my clients would unsubscribe if I emailed them so often” and some do, for sure, but what’s the point of having someone’s email if you don’t use it?

I know of people with huge lists, who email maybe once a month, sometimes. My email list is tiny – under 100 after the GDPAaarrgh debacle - but it is full of people who read those emails, learn from them, book appointments and buy from me.

It instils customer loyalty, too.

You give them stuff, and they want to reciprocate. I had an email from a lovely client last week saying “I saw Dr Hauschka in John Lewis today, and it reminded me to place an order with you!” Wasn’t that lovely of her? But the fact that she’d read an email from me that morning definitely helped jog her memory.

Please, if you do nothing else, if you have a huge fan base on IG or Facebook, make a start on getting them to sign up off those platforms. If that’s where you do the majority of your marketing, you could be in danger of losing all your future clients

Want help with creating a lead magnet? Email [email protected] and we’ll chat.

Want to read my Magical Marketing emails? They arrive once a week. You can sign up by clicking HERE