With the web-hopping habits of today’s potential customers, you have got to be clear, concise and compelling. There is absolutely no room for any shades of gray in email marketing. You also need to be provocative and proactive to reach the people who will buy your product or service.
Clearly defining what you have to offer is not easy. Your value is much more than you can say in a few words on your website. WARNING: Don’t try to cram any more information on your website. That tactic will be your doom.
Internet-empowered buyers require you to give them something valuable and free. They really cannot be convinced or persuaded. The only thing that seems to work is marketing automation that uses triggered messages at regular intervals. There are many reasons why this method works.
Let’s talk about just a few of them.
Clarity of the Customer Relationship
Use your online CRM to turn up the heat in your marketing. Instead of simmering in a pool of lukewarm grayness…turn up the heat in your email marketing campaigns by defining your target sales lead. If your message goes out to some undefined everyone, few will respond.
Competition for the minds of potential customers is fierce. It will take less than a second for them to determine whether your message is worth their time to read. You can easily guess what they deem worth their time…It must be narrowly targeted to them and what they want from you.
Think about your own process of managing email. You must rapidly decide yes, no or later. Any gray matter is quickly discarded. The gray ones are messages that might be valuable, but you aren’t sure they will benefit you. You won’t take time to figure it out. You’re busy. Same with the sales leads you are trying to reach.
Constantly Readjust Your Marketing Automation
The days of setting up marketing campaigns, forgetting them and getting back to business are over. Your CRM software is a dependable guidance system for tracking and tweaking everything you do in your sales process.
In an article on Clickz, email marketing is compared to golf. Margaret Farmakis says, “There are so many things to consider, analyze, and adjust before you even swing your club (or press send) that it’s easy to experience analysis paralysis, become overwhelmed, and just keep doing what you’ve always done while hoping for a different outcome.”
Unfortunately, staying neutral “gray” about developing a responsive and profitable sales automation system is a recipe for failure. You must DO something. Even if it is wrong, you are making progress. The tracking on your CRM will show you what failed and you can try again.
Boldly Expose What You Offer
It takes courage to step out of the comfort zone of warm, unchallenged sweet ignorance about your customers. As long as it is working for you to be lukewarm about your approach, you may stay with what you have always done. For most businesses, untargeted marketing methods are losing (or have already lost) their effectiveness.
Today’s sales leads are getting a ton of offers. At the Content Marketing Institute, Jay Bauer says, “There are only two ways for companies to break through in an environment that is unprecedented in its competitiveness and cacophony: Be “amazing” or be useful (which I prefer).”
Since it might take an expensive creative advertising agency to break through the mind clutter and be “amazing”…the more reasonable approach is to be useful to the sales leads that don’t yet trust you.
Lead nurturing with email marketing campaigns is proven to be the most cost-effective way to earn trust from new sales leads. However the new prospect finds you, quickly disqualify every sales lead that is not yet ready to purchase. Put the majority of the prospective customers in a lead nurturing program and earn their trust.
Be bold enough to stand out from the crowd and teach them everything they need to know to make an educated decision. Have confidence they will choose you when they are ready to buy.