You can often get an order contract on the spot at a trade fair, but more work needs to be done to follow up online later.
If all customers who have visited the booth and inquired about prices are considered potential customers, usually less than 1/10 or even less can place an order on the spot, and most of the rewards are a pile of business cards. Therefore, to obtain an order, it all depends on the follow-up efforts in the future. The reason why customers do not place an order on the spot is that some customers are only doing market research, usually because they are considering shopping around, or need to discuss and consider with the company’s senior management. This stage is a critical period for competing on price and service. Therefore, the following work should be done in the follow-up of online contact in the later stage:
Don’t be forgotten by the customer
(1) Be sure to record the content of the conversation with the customer at the booth.
(2) After the trade fair, send an email to the customer immediately, briefly introduce and review the meeting at the trade fair, list the customer’s inquiry and the opinions of both parties, and deepen the customer’s impression.
Supplementary information to stimulate customers’ purchasing desire
(1) Based on the information collected at the trade fair, especially the situation of peer competition, you can adjust the price or other transaction conditions appropriately according to the specific requirements of the customer, such as the minimum order quantity, and proactively send it to the customer.
(2) According to the customer’s inquiry, provide more styles and more detailed information of similar products to guide the customer’s choice.
(3) If necessary, send the customer photos of the factory, international certification status, existing transaction status and other information that are not displayed at the trade fair as a reference for the customer’s internal discussion of orders.
These tasks do not need to be completed in one email. It is better to contact them several times. Multiple contacts, each with new content and meaningful words, are more likely to make customers respond.
Slow and steady, strive for future cooperation
Don’t be discouraged if you have done enough follow-up work but have no actual results. Keep in touch regularly, such as sending an email to greet the customer and inform the company of the new situation every half a month or a month. Don’t neglect the relationship after you get to know each other. As long as the customer is still engaged in this industry, there is always hope.
Follow up in this way, the investment in the trade fair will not be wasted. The business cards and information collected at the trade fair will become the focus of online work in the next few months. Soon, the next session will begin again.
Through today’s study, we learned about the daily work content, methods and techniques of online foreign trade, as well as the connection and cooperation between traditional trade fairs and network follow-up work. All this work has only one purpose: to develop the market and find your customers.
When customers are interested in your products and express their intention to purchase, the road to the early stage of foreign trade is paved, and the technical work stage is officially entered – a stage about how to complete foreign trade export procedures that requires extreme caution and meticulousness. Because this stage is full of specific terms and rules in the foreign trade industry, and every mistake may lead to painful losses. Just as we often see similar slogans on the walls of the offices of old state-owned foreign trade enterprises: There is no trivial matter in foreign trade, be careful about everything.