by Wikus Engelbrecht - GraphicMail Marketing Team
19. julio 2010 03:14
When all’s said and done what a business needs to stay afloat is sales. Be it selling your pitch, your service or your product, you need people to buy into it.
A common problem most businesses encounter in the sales process is finding a way to convert their sales leads. Your marketing efforts generate awareness and, eventually, leads, but while for some this is enough many potential clients might require a bit more convincing. So whose job is it to nurture the lead? Sales or marketing? And do you really have the time and resources to devote to these slow sales?
Jep Castelein calls it follow up failure: That moment where the sales team have an overwhelming number of leads to follow up on, many of which are bad quality leads, and don’t know which ones to focus on, i.e. which leads are more likely to be converted to a sale. So: You need a way to avoid follow up failure, to maintain steady and convincing communication with your leads until they’re ready to move on to the next stage of the buying cycle. You know where this is going don’t you?
With regular email newsletters you establish and grow your brand’s visibility and develop customer relationships – the kind of relationships that might just, today or tomorrow or next year, convert that lead into a sale. A well-strategized campaign, one that sends relevant emails to segmented lists and ensures further relevancy by setting up automated emails, can cover this gap in the sales/marketing process.
Not only that, but email marketing can give your sales team a better idea of who they should target, and how. Email can be tracked and monitored, giving you more information on which articles or products in your newsletter appealed to a particular subscriber and which links interested them enough to click on. These valuable insights can be used to target subscribers accordingly with information that’s relevant to them. You can also compare campaigns to see which one performed best, giving you a good indication of what kind of information or products appeal to your subscribers.
I think your most effective tool in nurturing these leads, however, is to set up TriggerMails to individually target a subscribers actions and interests. Say, for instance, a reader clicks on a link to acquire more information on a particular product. You can send a follow up email immediately, giving them some extra links and information, and perhaps the contact details of a member of your sales team should they want to speak to someone directly. You can even set a further follow up email to be sent a week later. Basically, it offers you the opportunity to speak to that potential client and format the email to target them according to what phase of the buying cycle they’re in.
An email marketing campaign gives you an opportunity to nurture sales leads. Just remember that both existing and potential clients respond more positively to content that’s relevant to them. Make sure that you bear in mind each subscriber’s past purchase history (if any), look into their click-throughs to see what interests them and approach them accordingly. It’s all about staying one step ahead.
