If you’ve been busy building your eco-friendly business, focusing on using little water, energy and only natural raw materials, cutting carbon emissions or researching renewable and eco-friendly production methods. You’ve already go quite a lot on your plate, that’s before you even think about marketing! Eco-friendly entrepreneurs certainly have a lot to think about. Whether you’re providing a service or producing physical products, you need to retain existing customers while also engaging new ones for your operation to be sustainable.
Your business approach will no doubt centre around reducing the company’s strain on natural resources and contributions to climate change. In some cases, if waste is generated, it is reused as energy or raw material, your marketing approach can be in tune with your company ethics too.
Grow Your Email List
Finding that clients aren’t moving through your sales funnel as quickly as you’d like? Or struggling to engage clients in the first place. You can’t wow potential customers if you don’t have the means to contact them directly. Which is why your outbound marketing strategy should use a “lead magnet” to incentivise customers to give you their contact information. Gathering a list of customers doesn’t have to be spammy or feel gross. You can do this by offering a free e-book, a webinar, a downloadable guide or any other kind of online resource. If it’s engaging, useful and above all free, it may be effective in engaging potential customers who will then book your services or buy from you in the future. Perhaps you run a wicker basket company, maybe you could offer YouTube tutorials explaining why your baskets are eco-friendly and show a behind the scenes of the creative process and offer some tips for anyone looking to create a simple basket? Showing a behind-the-scenes look at your production process, demonstrates the value in your product and will be memorable for potential customers.
Connect with Clients Directly
If you’re engaging with your customers solely through their email inboxes, that might not cut it when dealing with busy clients. You’ll need to think outside the (in)box. You may find that if you Send Online SMS Messages to your clients, they respond with more immediacy. Text messages have an open rate of 98% unlike emails which struggle to achieve 20%. What’s more, recipients tend to respond to a text within 90 seconds compared to around 90 minutes for an email. If you are connecting with your existing clients, chances are they won’t mind receiving the odd text from you promoting your services or just a friendly reminder of your availability. Plus texts are totally eco-friendly, so no need for paper or wastage.
Create Valuable Content
If you want to engage new customers, you can’t expect them to give you their time and attention for free. You need to give them something for nothing. And that means investing your efforts in valuable content marketing. Creating regular blog posts, tutorials and videos can add value to your company as well as contribute towards establishing your authority and expertise. Clients need to take a leap of faith in you, so demonstrating your knowledge via blog posts or informative newsletters will help to build trust.
"Think globally, act locally!" Share on XJoin Local Groups
It’s important to connect with groups locally that are interested in the types of products or services you are offering. You could also join community groups that are creating change in a particular area, say you own a sustainable bicycle helmet company– join the local bicycle group as well as a Clean Air campaign group. This will not only enable you to run new product or service ideas by the group members, but it will also allow you to tap into an existing group of potential customers. Win-Win.
Of course, the most important opportunities for eco-friendly entrepreneurs is in developing and refining earth-friendly products and services. The innovation and creativity of eco-friendly entrepreneurs and businesses has meant hundreds, or thousands of clever ideas being brought to market every week to reduce our environmental impact every year, and this ingenuity offers the greatest hope of the human race.
