Get FREE Leads for Your Sign Shop from the Seat of Your Desk!

November 30th, 2020

Are you and your sign shop looking for new business-to-business leads that won’t cost you money or much time? If so, shopVOX has the answers you need to get brand new business every day, and in only five minutes! Let’s look at how to increase your sales leads for free.

Using LinkedIn, Alignable, and Hunter i.o with Gmail to Get Leads

Getting free leads is a process consisting of several steps, so let’s get into them.

LinkedIn

First is LinkedIn. This is an easy and free way to get your business out there. Maybe you want to start by simply connecting with people you know or those in your industry. Also, be sure to look at contacts of your contacts to see who you might like to know. Reach out to them, but always be honest and not spammy. Once your network is sizable enough, you need to get your sign shop on people’s minds. This is where you want to write daily posts about your business or thoughts on your industry. When you do this, keep it concise. Imagine translating a 30-second commercial into a LinkedIn post. It may take some time and a bit of research, but if you are surrounded by enough of the right people on LinkedIn, you can turn the site into a quality lead-generation center for your sign shop.

Alignable and Hunter.io

Now, we’ll move to Alignable, a free business-to-business networking site that allows you to build a community of other small businesses in your area without ever needing to leave your desk. We are going to start by looking for customers in your geographic area. These are the people you are most likely to work with as you look to expand your business. Let’s illustrate how this works with an example. Suppose you want your sign shop to use Alignable to network with real estate companies in your area. Real estate companies are often strong partners with sign and print shops because they tend to buy lots of products: business cards, open-house signs, for-sale signs, etc. Furthermore, real estate companies are always getting new agents and leads, so their business with you will tend to stay strong. In any case, your next step is to acquire the website domain of the business with which you want to network. Then, head over to hunter.io. This site takes in URLs and gives you back all the email addresses associated with that website. The site is free to use up to a certain amount of URLs.You can then save all these leads in your database and begin soliciting business from the people you have found.

Gmail

Next, head to your Gmail account and start drafting an email to one of your contacts. It is here that you will pitch your offer. Maybe you want to present the individual with a coupon for 50% off a purchase for a limited time. Be sure to include eye-catching images where appropriate. You can then repeat this process with all the other leads you acquired from hunter.io.

Gmail Templates

One tip for composing these emails: in Gmail, if you go to Settings and then Advanced, you can enable Templates. This feature allows you to create and save email pitches right in Gmail. Your templates don’t have to pitch specifically. They could be messages for solicitation, estimates, or art proof follow-ups, or to let customers know their orders are ready for delivery or pickup. When you are writing to a new lead, you just select the template that is most appropriate for the person, and the message will generate in your draft. You can probably imagine the time this will save you daily, since these emails are already done, and you can send them over and over again to new leads or existing customers. This is one way you can use technology to your advantage when managing your sign shop. Of course, don’t forget that print shop software is vital, as well. A product such as shopVOX can help you keep all your leads and customer interactions organized so you can deliver great shopping experiences for your clients. We invite you to learn more about our software to see if it’s right for your business.

What Else Can You Do?

We also recognize that there are those of you who want an easy way to automate this lead-getting process. Zapier is useful for this. The site connects apps with one another to automate marketing funnels and workflows to increase your business’s overall productivity. For instance, a feature in Zapier allows you to import the email addresses you save in hunter.io directly into your Gmail contact list. You can go into the Contacts section of your Google Workspace, or G Suite, and create a label for lead contacts. Once you save all the leads you want into your Contacts, you can then send emails to the entire group of leads rather than to individual people. This will save you a lot of time when you are soliciting new business from your leads. We hope you have learned a lot from this post on generating free leads for your sign shop. Remember that the features of the shopVOX software are there to help make things easier to run your shop. Once you start raking in those leads, you will need a place to organize them, and shopVOX can help with that. Please reach out to us if you have questions on any of this!