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It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas…
Whether or not you’ve got that festive feeling, there’s no way to avoid seasonality – and if you want to keep up with your competitors, you should be engaging in seasonal prospecting. It’s all about there and right now, people want to talk about Thanksgiving (hello to our American friends), Black Friday, and Christmas.
Seasonal events like these create website traffic, promote deals, and ultimately drive sales. So, how can you cash in on seasonality?
Seasonal prospecting is a way of utilising seasonality in your prospecting campaigns. For example, if it’s (approaching) December, why not wish your prospects a Merry Christmas or Happy Holidays in your prospecting emails? You can run seasonal promotions – you see them all the time in B2C marketing so why can’t we use them in B2B? Answer: you can.
Need a refresher on prospecting? Check out our blog: The beginner’s guide to B2B sales prospecting.
The first thing to consider when looking at seasonal prospecting is to ask what is seasonality in business. Business will naturally fluctuate throughout the year depending on a number of factors:
You might see your sales dip in December and August when more people are OOO and taking time off.
While it’s important to keep that in mind when prospecting, the most important thing is not to stop or pause your campaigns. Prospecting throughout the quiet months usually means your sales will be higher in the following months when people come back from holidays with a fresh mindset, ready to do some business!
As we said before, some great ways to implement seasonal prospecting is to run seasonal promotions. This can range anything from discounts and deals to competitions and giveaways.
Social media contests and giveaways aren’t just for B2C, and they can be a great tool in seasonal marketing. Getting your followers to post you on their socials in order to promote a contest can widen your brand awareness and get more people to follow your pages.
It’s also worth building a seasonal email list. Some customers will be focused on seasonality as a way to find deals and you can use this. For example, if Black Friday or Cyber Monday is coming up, consider having a pop-up on your website like this, offering people an exclusive discount or access to further discounts by entering their email address.
You can then offer email-exclusive deals to clients who are on your email list, such as:
This builds an exclusivity between you and your prospects and could make them more likely to convert – they don’t want to miss out on a deal!
Another element of seasonal prospecting is referring to and talking about seasonality or seasonal promotions in your email outreach. B2C has mastered this, using tactics like ticking clocks and countdowns in their emails.
It’s worth having a set of email templates, think about having one or two for each quarter – that way your emails will always be seasonally spot on and sound like you just wrote them that day!
Find out how to write the perfect prospecting email.
Arguably, evergreen prospecting is never going to “go out of style”. It could lead to less work for your sales team, or if you’re a start-up, for yourself. But evergreen prospecting just doesn’t hit the prospective clients in the same way. Take a look at these two examples of prospecting emails:
These subtle differences are easy to add in and urge your prospects to convert quicker. You could even take it one step further, ask how they the enjoyed X World Cup game, or ask if they’re taking any time off over the holidays – but the example above shows how you can add some small sentences to your email templates with minimal effort. Emails like the one above can go out to all your prospects in the run-up to Cyber Monday without you having to edit each one.
Outbase can house these templates for you in the deal navigator. You can create multiple templates with 37 personalisation options so every email you send will feel 121. You can make seasonal prospecting easy with the Outbase platform, find out more.
You might be a business but you’re also a customer as well so keeping an eye out for deals can benefit you too! There are many great tools out there that can help you to improve your sales and getting a discount on those tools could save you money – and make you money!
Find out more about Outbase.
