When a sales lead opens your email marketing, you want them to feel like they are receiving a gift from you. If you provide information they need, it truly is a gift. It can save them time, educate them about making a good purchase decision or tell them insider secrets about how your industry works. Otherwise, they may perceive your email as invasive, useless or even worse…SPAM.
Small to mid-sized companies (SMB’s) have always had an advantage in one aspect of business. Because of their smaller size, they are able to really get to know their customers. If you ask a small business owner about their ideal customer, real people will come in mind. Business is that personal for them.
Big Data Marketing is an attempt to simulate that kind of intimate knowledge about the customers of large corporations and it is working well. Forbes reports a McKinsey study that revealed Big Data and analytics are increasing ROI by 15-20 per cent. With the size of the companies using these tactics, we are talking about more than $150 billion in additional marketing value to them.
SMB’s – Your Advantage is Slipping
A company simply can’t afford to sit back and find comfort in what they already know about their customers. A proactive approach to knowing what your customer really appreciate from you has never been easier. Using an online CRM to develop and monitor your email marketing campaigns, you can get to know your customers better.
The bonus to this technology is the ability to really define your ideal customer. With a rich definition of your very best client, it is a huge step toward more effective marketing automation. Companies with massive business-to-business databases allow you to search for specific types of customers and download them into your CRM software for easy email marketing campaign delivery and follow up.
The clear definition of your best clients gives you the criteria for using these databases to duplicate the kind of client that supports your business. You can’t let the massive computers and data crunching systems of big business learn more about your customers than you. In this data-driven world, every business needs to learn everything about their customers to earn their loyalty.
In recent years, marketing has become extremely personal. Here are two gift receiving situations that can shed light on giving the gift of a customer-centric email marketing campaign.
It’s Not About You
If you think that email is a great way to send your sales leads and current clients more information about your company, you miss the point. Think about it, do you want to know more about a company when you have a purchasing decision to make?
When you need to buy something, you want information that adds to your knowledge about the thing you want to buy. Any clamoring about how wonderfully qualified the company offering the item is simply distracting. You don’t appreciate it.
You know things about your industry that would make all the recipients of your email marketing campaign better at the task of making a decision. Try to remember when you were new to the industry. What did you need to know? That is what you should offer readers of your email marketing.
Details do Matter
A friend of mine recently got a gift of house slippers from her daughter. Since this woman is seen every day in slippers and they are often ragged and worn out, the gift appears to be very generous and specific to my friends needs.
However, what the daughter had not noticed is the type of house slipper worn by my friend. The gift was fuzzy, soft and extremely warm. My friend wears lightweight slippers just to keep her toes warm and protect her from the bare floors. The gift was a total disconnect.
Her daughter was quite proud about knowing what her mother would want and use. The mother was perplexed about what to do with slippers that were too warm for her to enjoy.
Your sales leads and customers may be in a similar dilemma. They may recognize that a company is paying attention and is trying to meet their needs. When the marketing message in an email campaign is generalized, it can really miss the mark. It becomes irrelevant to the need of the recipient.
A good online CRM has the capacity to track even the finest customer detail about preferences. When you use the metrics and reporting functions of the CRM and its integration with email delivery, you can carefully craft each email marketing campaign to feel like an abundant gift that is very much appreciated.