Seamlessly Switch from Mailchimp to SalesNexus in Just 5 Minutes
For many businesses, managing and nurturing email subscribers is a critical aspect of marketing. If you’ve been using Mailchimp for this purpose but are considering a switch to SalesNexus, you’re in luck. Transitioning from Mailchimp to SalesNexus has never been easier, thanks to our streamlined process that allows you to transfer your entire subscriber list in less than five minutes. Best of all, you can keep your Mailchimp list intact and start using SalesNexus right away with a 30-day free trial.
A Smooth Transition with No Data Loss
Switching platforms can often be a daunting task, especially when it involves transferring valuable subscriber data. The last thing you want is to lose subscribers or encounter complications during the transfer process. That’s why SalesNexus has made it incredibly easy for Mailchimp users to import their subscriber list, ensuring a smooth transition with no data loss.
Our platform is designed with user-friendliness in mind, so you don’t need to be a tech expert to make the switch. In just a few simple steps, you can download your Mailchimp list, upload it into SalesNexus, and start sending emails to your audience in minutes. This ease of transition means you can continue your marketing efforts without missing a beat.
Step-by-Step Guidance with a Helpful Video Tutorial
To make the process even simpler, SalesNexus provides a helpful video tutorial that walks you through each step. This video shows you exactly how to export your subscriber list from Mailchimp, how to import that list into SalesNexus, and how to launch an email campaign—all in just a few minutes.
Here’s a quick overview of the steps:
1. Download Your Mailchimp Subscriber List:
The first step is to export your subscriber list from Mailchimp. The video tutorial will guide you through the process, ensuring that you capture all the necessary data.
2. Upload to SalesNexus:
Once your list is downloaded, uploading it to SalesNexus is as simple as a few clicks. The platform’s intuitive interface makes it easy to map your data fields and ensure everything is in place.
3. Send Your First Email Campaign:
With your list successfully imported, you can immediately start crafting and sending email campaigns using SalesNexus. The video tutorial will show you how to set up your campaign, customize your emails, and track your results.
This video tutorial is a valuable resource, especially for those who may be new to SalesNexus. It provides the confidence and clarity you need to make the transition smoothly, without any frustration or confusion.
Why Make the Switch to SalesNexus?
You might be wondering, why should you switch from Mailchimp to SalesNexus? While Mailchimp is a popular platform, SalesNexus offers unique advantages that can enhance your email marketing efforts.
Advanced CRM Integration:
SalesNexus is more than just an email marketing tool; it’s a complete CRM solution that allows you to manage your customer relationships, sales pipelines, and marketing efforts all in one place. This integration ensures that your email campaigns are aligned with your overall sales strategy.
Personalized Email Campaigns:
With SalesNexus, you can create highly personalized email campaigns that resonate with your audience. The platform’s AI-driven tools help you craft compelling messages that are tailored to each subscriber’s preferences and behavior.
Comprehensive Reporting:
Track the performance of your email campaigns with SalesNexus’s robust reporting tools. Gain insights into open rates, click-through rates, conversions, and more, allowing you to fine-tune your strategies for maximum impact.
Try SalesNexus Free for 30 Days
To make your transition even more enticing, SalesNexus offers a 30-day free trial. This gives you ample time to explore the platform, test its features, and see the impact it can have on your marketing efforts. During the trial period, you can fully experience how SalesNexus enhances your email marketing strategy and integrates seamlessly with your existing processes.
Switching from Mailchimp to SalesNexus is not only easy but also highly beneficial. With our streamlined transfer process, helpful video tutorial, and the power of a comprehensive CRM platform at your fingertips, you’ll wonder why you didn’t make the switch sooner.
Don’t wait—sign up for your free trial today and discover how SalesNexus can take your email marketing to the next level.
New to Campaigns! Along with emails, calls, and text messages, you can now add a Webhook to your campaigns.
Using the built in, ready to use PrintGenie Webhook allows users to add direct mail (postcards, letters, holiday cards and more) to their campaigns in SalesNexus.
Simply add this new option to your campaign, and fill in the details to create or edit your brand.
Create Group Lookups
New in groups: you can create groups with specific criteria and make these your group lookup.
To create group lookups, go to “Create Group Lookup” under “Groups”, add in your search criteria, and when you click the search button, the list of items that matches the criteria will show up.
You can then proceed to “Make This My Lookup” and select specific fields for that Group Lookup.
We have been working hard to improve your customer experience, prompting us to resolve issues in the onboarding experience for our new users. We put everything you need to navigate SalesNexus in a welcome page that has a brand new look.
Quicker Searches
Looking for something?
We have made it easier for you to navigate through SalesNexus.
“Our search tools have been amped up to ensure you would be able to quickly get what you need.
Save Columns with Lookups
Save time doing the same searches over and over again by saving columns with lookups.
Now you can go to contacts, create a lookup, and create and change the criteria for your fields.
Once you have made this your lookup and saved your search, you are given the option to either make it your default search, or save the current selected contact columns.
This way, when you search your lookups under your selected description, you will only see the columns that you have selected that are relevant to that list.
Do you need a way to automate cold outreach, and take a list of potential customers, and start reaching out to them to turn them into customers? I mean without cold calling!
Get all that done in an easy, automatic, and efficient system with SalesNexus. Here’s how:
Go to RampedUp and do a search for any kind of industry.
Narrow down your search criteria.
You’ll come up with names, titles, companies, contact numbers, emails, and other pertinent information.
Download that list and load it onto SalesNexus.
From there you can call, email, or message all those people individually.
Add these people onto a lead nurturing campaign.
Manage how many automatic emails get sent out for a certain period of time.
Have each email personalized for each individual on that campaign.
Get Click Notifications straight to your phone or email. These let you know who actually clicked any of the automated emails sent.
Your reps can easily call the INTERESTED prospects. All your sales reps have to do is open the profiles of those who have shown interest and give them a call.
If you don’t want to call those who showed interest in your email, you have the option to send out a follow-up email. Again, this can be done automatically, and you can add information that would allow the system to set appointments for you.
Today, SalesNexus announced the release of the latest updates to its CRM and Marketing Automation Suite.
This is scheduled to be available on Wednesday, October 20, 2022, at 8:30 pm ET / 11:30 pm Pacific.
Here’s what’s new
Enhancements:
DKIM Setup
Domain Keys Identified Mail (DKIM) allows senders to associate a domain name with an email message, thus vouching for its authenticity. It’s a security protocol through which you can give authorization/permission to another service or platform to send out emails using your email address, on your behalf.
By default, SalesNexus Sales Opportunities allow you to track one product in each sale, with a unique Quantity and Price.
Some providers sell more than one product or service to each customer. For this, you may want to use Line Items feature that has been recently developed in the SalesNexus platform.
Automatically set the Probability of Sales Opps based on Sales Stage and use Forecasted Amount to forecast revenue easily, consistently and accurately.
Enable and customize your sales stages in an opportunity and match it with a corresponding percentage here.
Schedule Campaigns over a Series of Dates
Fed up trying to divide a list into subsets so you can schedule them to go out day by day?
Now you can manage your email list to maximize delivery easily!
Use Opened Date and Clicked Date to see which contacts are engaging with emails and which are not. Stop sending to unengaged and your delivery rates improve.
Get to know SalesNexus founder and CEO Craig Klein as he shares his journey in the sales and marketing world with Alex Guz on the Revenue Engine Podcast.
Craig details how he ventured into the world of sales, the mistakes he made early on as an entrepreneur, and the lessons he learned the hard way as a sales manager, all of which eventually propelled him into launching his own CRM and Marketing business. Today he shares his wisdom with the budding entrepreneurs of the University of Houston, and spills some of the secrets he learned along the way in building a sales organization in this podcast.
Alex: How did you get started? What were the first stages of your career?
Craig: Even going back before my career, my stepdad was a salesperson. He’s a manufacturer’s rep and he worked from the home. So as a kid, I just saw him working all the time, being a salesperson. And I saw that he loved working with people, but I also saw that he had a tremendous amount of flexibility in his schedule. He was a hunter and a fisher. After he had achieved some pretty good success, he basically worked Tuesday through Thursday. Then he had long weekends to go hunting and fishing.
Once I got out of college and got into the working world, I graduated as an engineer. I went to work at NASA, for a NASA subcontractor as an electrical engineer. That was cool. It was when they were sending up the space shuttle, like every six months there was another mission going up. So it was really exciting in that regard. But the work itself, as an engineer, just didn’t work for me.
So, I started looking for something new and I found a sales job selling carwash controllers. When you go to the carwash, the one with the tunnel. Your car’s moving through there, this is the computer that tells the different brushes and sprayers to turn on at the right time. That was my first sales gig.
The owner of that company was great. He taught me a ton about sales, about good old fashioned cold calling tactics. How to be successful in cold calling. I learned a lot and I was very successful at that.
And then a friend of mine was starting a software company in the energy business. At the time I was working from home and offered to help them with doing some sales, just kinda on the side. Wow, these guys had created this super cool software that all these oil exploration companies really wanted. I talked to some of them and I heard the interest that they had in it. I got really fired up about that. And the next thing you know, I’m their VP of sales. We grew that business, hired salespeople. And then I had to learn how to manage salespeople. That was a real eye-opener.
Since then, what’s really been the funnest challenge for me to work on with customers is when you have a company that’s growing and either the owner, or maybe their first salesperson is now trying to build a sales organization. And that transition is just so difficult to make successfully that I love working with companies that are at that moment in their growth, because there’s so much I can do to help them.
Most of it’s not rocket science. It’s just kind of counterintuitive things you have to learn the hard way.
Alex: SalesNexus, your company, was established in 2002. I think that’s about the same time Salesforce started. So how did you come up with this idea?
Craig: Back then, Salesforce was brand new. Most people didn’t even know who they were. The big 10 ton gorilla in the sales software industry was ACT!. I had used it for 10 plus years, I think at that point. And we were running our sales team using it, in the energy business that I was in at the time. And it was great. It was really a great tool for a salesperson. But, the bigger your organization got, the less awesome it was. In terms of the management capabilities and integration with other tools and things like that.
And so I had gotten to that point where I was getting a little frustrated with it. And Salesforce had just come out. It’s all in the cloud. Now we don’t have to sync databases and all this stuff that was kind of a nightmare with ACT! So we tried it, we tried to move our sales team to Salesforce and it was a train wreck.
I’m not trying to blame it all on Salesforce by any stretch. A lot of it was just… we didn’t know how to make that transition. That’s not easy to do. Some of it was limitations that Salesforce had.
The company I was working for at the time, they were acquired. So I had a little bit of a windfall as a small shareholder in the company. And I said,
“You know what, I’m going to build a better mousetrap. I’m going to build a Salesforce that’s easier for a sales person to use, but has the management capabilities.”
And at the time, our real vision was to mobilize it. To make it accessible on a mobile device; which, you have to remember, this is back before there were iPhones. There were just Blackberries, and Palm Treo was the cool thing at the time.
Alex: What were the biggest challenges when you started?
Craig: Well, first of all, here I am a sales manager. I was mildly accomplished as a sales leader, but I didn’t know anything about running a business, or in our case, running a software development organization.
So there’s a tremendous amount of learning there. I made a few mistakes, learned the hard way. But once we had the product ready to sell, we had to learn a lot about the best ways to demo software. Because again, this was a long time ago, things like Zoom and stuff like that, weren’t as common as they are by any stretch.
Then very quickly we started to realize that we could build with Google Ads and things like that. We could build a pretty good and consistent flow of incoming leads. People that already had a recognized need for a product like ours, these were mildly qualified leads. But we needed a system to manage those leads because they weren’t always ready to buy today.
Buying a software solution like this for your business is not, it’s not the kind of thing that people regularly do. People don’t wake up in the morning and say, “Wow, I can’t wait to go out and buy a CRM!” right? So they might have the idea that they need to start looking, but they might also just decide NOT to decide, for six months, or a year at a time.
So we really needed all those leads that we were paying to acquire through Google. We needed a way to really nurture them and maintain the relationship with them so that when they finally decided to make a purchase, we were still on their list.
Alex: Over the years how do you see SalesNexus develop into what it is right now?
Craig: The big difference between us and almost all of our direct competitors is that we are not venture funded. We had a little bit of friends and family money in the beginning that helped us get started, but ever since then, we’ve been growing organically.
What that has meant over the years is that we’ve been able to take a different approach than our competitors do to the relationship with the customer. So in a big business with millions of dollars in capital invested in it, you really don’t have any choice but to acquire customers at the most rapid rate that you possibly can, no matter what. Even if they don’t stay customers very long, you’ve got to show that you’re adding those users. Maybe that makes sense to some people, but it never did to me.
To me, the most important thing was when we’ve engaged with a customer, we want to make sure they’re successful with the tool. That’s one of the most important outcomes to me is that, six months down the road, I want to call them back and ask them, ‘How’s it going?’ And they need to be telling me, ‘Oh my God, our sales are up 10%, 20%, 50%!’ And if they’re not, then we’re doing something wrong.
So we were able to build our organization that way. SalesNexus support, our help desk has always just been in a whole different league than most of our competitors. That’s always been a real point of pride. And our customers love it, of course. But the bottom line is our customers stay with us, last time we measured it, which was about a year ago.
Our customers stay with us four times as long as they stay with Salesforce on average.
That’s because we’re helping them get it right in the beginning, and once they get it right, they don’t want to change. It’s working.
Alex: How did you find your ideal client persona?
Craig: We’re the tool for a medium sized sales team. It’s probably not the best solution for you if you just started your business as just you, trying to sell your product or service. There’s probably simpler things because you don’t really need all the management stuff.
If you though are trying to grow your sales organization to that next level, where you’re hiring your first sales team, maybe hiring your first sales manager. Maybe you got five salespeople on the team, maybe up to 50 or a hundred, that size of business – we’re a great solution for that size business, because with our tool, you don’t need three or four different tools that you bolt together.
Even in the Salesforce world, or really almost all of our competitors, they have all these different modules that you can license individually. However, they’re really separate products that they’ve acquired through acquisitions that they’ve kind of bolted them together. But they don’t really share data. That means you’ve got to have somebody on your IT staff to sit there and make sure it’s all working all the time. And it breaks sometimes, and that stops your whole sales funnel from working. In a smaller business, number one, you just don’t have that IT guy. You don’t have the resources for that guy to sit there babysitting and that stuff all day.
Alex: Your tool includes a CRM, but also it combines a very robust email and SMS platform. On a basic level, how does it all work?
Craig: Well, we do all of that. SMS marketing and email marketing services, as well as the sales and sales pipeline and relationship management. But we now also offer list building and list cleansing services.
We learned that we needed to nurture our leads. So we built that for ourselves first, and then we added it into product to sell it. Then we learned, you really need to really grow. We need to be able to build our lists and sometimes acquire lists. Doing cold outreach to a cold list, that’s pretty risky stuff if you don’t know what you’re doing, you can get yourself into trouble really fast there. So we have learned the hard way, how to do that and make it work.
When we decided, ‘Okay, now we want to help our customers do this.’ We knew that we couldn’t expect them to become experts like we have. So we wanted to build it into the product so that it took care of it for them. Now the way it works is, you know, if you said to me, ‘Hey, I want to talk to all the chief revenue officers of companies in this industry…’ We can get you that list with their email address, phone numbers, social links, and everything. And this is the important part: our system automatically does a validation of all the emails as you load it in. So that you’re not going to have a bunch of invalid addresses.
We also find what’s called a spam trap. We’re going to filter all that trash out of your email list so that when you start sending it’s as clean as possible. And then let’s say you put them on an automated drip campaign to send them an email, once a week for the next 10 weeks.. If the system sees thatI loaded 10,000 email addresses, and there’s maybe 20% or 30% of them that after maybe three or four emails into that drip campaign, they haven’t opened or clicked on it. Well, we’re just going to stop sending to those guys. Because if you don’t do that, then you’re going to get yourself in spam trouble, you know, and your emails won’t be showing up in anybody’s inbox.
So we have marketing automation software in our system that automates all of that. It just makes life so much easier. Every step that I just walked through, using most tools, someone has to sit there and manage the list and worry about all that stuff one thing at a time – which is a nightmare. It’s very time-consuming.
Alex: What is the role of SMS in B2B?
Craig: Number one, there’s a legal aspect. There are laws about who you can text and when, and there are pretty substantial fines if you violate those lines. Now it’s even getting to the point where it’s not just different laws in different countries, but it’s different laws in different states in the United States. So you gotta be careful about SMS. It’s the same thing with email. It’s just with emails, the laws are much more liberal, so you’re much less likely to get yourself in trouble.
In a B2B world, you’re interested in a long-term relationship with the customer. A customer who says no to you today, could still be a customer two years from now. So you don’t want to turn them off with your communication style.
In most cases in the B2B world, what we see working is you use B2B email campaigns to do the initial cold outreach and just kind of identify who are the people that have shown some kind of interest in what we’re sending them. And then those people, you can start switching to SMS marketing.
And so a really simple example of that would be a free download, like a white paper or maybe a video that’s kind of some educational content, it’s not really a sales pitch or anything. So I used that in my email campaign, featuring that in my campaign. Anybody that downloads that, they’re basically raising their hand and telling me, ‘I got a problem that you can solve.’ Now, once you’ve identified that person, you want to try and get an appointment set with them normally, or maybe get them to go to your site and convert, or sign up for something. Then, you can use a text message for that call to action.
So they download the free content from an email, and then some time later, they’re going to get a text message saying, “Hey, we noticed you downloaded the so-and-so. We hope you enjoyed it. We’d love to have your feedback. And Hey, if you’d like to learn more, click here to set an appointment.” Or something like that. In the B2B world, that works almost every time it’s tried.
Another way that it’s really valuable is when you’ve got a lead that’s gotten pretty deep into your funnel, and they go cold on you. Send them a text message. You’re going to find out, because they’re going to respond. Sometimes it’s just, “Hey, I’m getting your messages.I’m super busy. Call me in a week.” But at least now, you know.
Alex: What are your thoughts on key differences between demand generation and lead generation?
Craig: In my mind, demand generation is making the customer want what you have. Lead generation is a step further into the funnel. In other words, I could run a TV ad that millions of people are seeing. It might get a hundred thousand people excited about the product that I offer. However, not all 100,000 of those people are going to jump on the phone or go to my website and say, “Hey, how do I buy one?” Maybe 10,000 are actually wanting to buy right now.
That’s where lead generation comes in. How do I identify those 10,000 people? Because when we’re talking about salespeople, the key is you do not want to give a list of a hundred thousand people that saw a TV ad and click to download some free thing to your sales people, because they’re going to spend all this time chasing all these people who really aren’t ready to buy.
You use your lead generation campaign to filter that down to a shorter list of people that are showing they’ve done something that indicates there’s actual interest and intent to do something.
Alex: What is your approach to organizing the sales and marketing teams so they can be effective and connect to customers more easily?
Craig: There’s a lot of methodologies that have gotten popular over the last 5 or 10 years, and I’ve never really fully bought into any of them. I kind of think that every business needs a slightly different structure of their sales team.
Maybe the structure of the team and the roles of the people in the team needs to be nuanced based on the marketing channel of the lead, number one. Number two, based on industry perhaps, some kind of vertical market. Therefore you want to train to, and hire to those specific customers. To me, fundamentally as a sales manager, the best sales person that I can hire, even if they’ve actually never been a salesperson, if they got the raw talent and can be trained and they’ve lived in the world of my customer, they can really communicate and connect with my customers. That guy is golden. You can be taught to do a lot of things, and connect with my customers. Ultimately, that’s the secret to a long-term relationship.
Alex: So, let’s say for somebody who is just starting their sales organization. When they’re ready to expand and maybe to hire their first sales manager. How much process has to be in place for this person to be successful, if not right away, but in a reasonable time?
Craig: That’s a great question. It applies to everything in business. It’s not just sales, everyone wrestles with the same question. There’s this thing that I’ve been doing for a few years, and I’ve gotten pretty good at it, and I’m doing so much of it that I need some help. So I’m thinking I need to hire somebody else to take that process over for me. How do I take what I’ve been doing, and turn it into a process that someone else can follow just like a recipe in a cookbook?
Number one, that ain’t easy. It is very difficult to do because it’s so impossible for us to be objective about our own selves. So to answer your question, I would say:
You can never have enough process. You will never have enough process.
So you have to try and put it on paper and make it step-by-step. But sometimes you need to hire for the process. What I’ve seen, some of my customers do really well is at that stage when they’re hiring their first sales manager, is they bring in a sales manager who has been a sales manager in some other industry, and has the vision of the process. And they come in and create the process for them.
Because as the owner of the business, a lot of times, it’s really hard to even know what the heck the process is because so many things seem so instinctive. Sometimes you can hire a guy who just gets processing. Someone who can help you codify it if you will. In a perfect world though, before you even start that hiring process, you should try to figure out what your process is. And of course, there’s consultants that you can bring in that can help you do that.
Alex: You also teach at Wolff Center for Entrepreneurship at the University of Houston. What are the biggest lessons you’re trying to teach your students and share with them?
Craig: That’s a really fascinating institution. I went to school a long time ago and there weren’t entrepreneurship curricula within colleges at that time. I wish there had been because I learned so many things the hard way in my business. What’s just amazing about the Wolff Center for Entrepreneurship at the U of H, they are teaching those guys how to navigate all of those things that most business owners learn the hard way. They’re coming out of college, they already have the tools.
It’s really an amazing program. They bring in all these just heavy hitter experts to work directly with the students. They’re connecting them with VCs to help them get funding for their business ideas. So to me, I’m just lucky to be there. I’m just happy to be there to see the magic that’s happening there. What they do is they pair us mentors up with an individual student. And so our job is to just kinda be there with them as they go through the process, and support them in their unique needs, along the way.
One of the coolest things that you get to be involved in is they go to the engineering colleges and the science colleges within the University of Houston, and they ask all the scientists and engineers (the professors), “What technologies have you developed and patented, but not yet commercialized?” Then they put together this portfolio of uncommercialized intellectual property and they bring it to these entrepreneurship students, and they let them select a technology. Basically that’s like their senior project, trying to commercialize this intellectual property that’s already been patented and everything.
So you see them go from the ground up. Okay, we’ve got this product. You don’t have any manufacturing process. We don’t have any marketing. No marketing strategy. And they have to figure all that out. My role is to just kind of help them ask the right questions.
Alex: You just got funded, what now?
Craig: Well, keeping within the sales and marketing part of that question. Let’s assume we’ve got a product to sell, or at least a target market that we’ve identified.
To me, you want to start engaging with the community, engaging with your audience. Define who your audience is, and figure out where they live, where they hang out. Start being in those places, start figuring out how to engage them in things that are interesting to them. Not necessarily engaging them in your business or your product, but just be part of their lives and becoming kind of a trusted resource to them. Branding yourself with them essentially.
Envision all the steps in the funnel and we’re going to start building them out. One layer at a time, from the top down, not from the bottom up. We’re not going to start with: ‘Who’s our first customer?’ And ‘How are we going to meet our revenue goals this month?’ We’re going to start with: ‘How do we engage the entire universe of all of our potential customers and build a relationship with them?’ And then start making it easy for them to do business with us.
Alex: Who are your mentors, and what is the best advice they’ve given you?
Craig: Howard London helped me start SalesNexus. He was kind of a consultant to me at the time. He’s part of this really cool organization here in Houston called The Silver Foxes. It’s all retired executives who mentor business owners. He was a great mentor in my early days. He really helped me navigate some of the big decisions.
More recently, some of the folks that I’ve met at the U of H and the Center for Entrepreneurship. Dave Cook in particular, who is the executive director of the program. He’s just a genius marketer himself, and he’s just a tremendous resource. I’m always bouncing things off of him and he’s just full of great advice and always willing to help. He’s just one of those guys that you could ask to come help you change your tire and he’d be there for you. You could ask him how to start a business, or how to raise money and he’ll help you do that too.
Alex: Any sort of advice that sticks out?
Craig: We have toyed with the idea of targeting specific verticals and really going all in on a particular vertical over the years.
That’s something that I have asked a lot of people about. In fact, I forgot to mention somebody else earlier. Robin Stanaland, she’s been a mentor to me for a long time. I sat down one day and had that conversation with her about verticals. She’s really the one that helped me see the importance of seeing the overall audience and how you’re going to build that relationship with them.
It helped us realize that we were building relationships with a much broader audience of people by bringing all the expertise and experience that we have as a team in sales management and marketing and so on. And that, that was really our secret sauce. So we really doubled down on that rather than focusing in on a specific vertical, and I think that’s paid off well.
Craig Klein, CEO of SalesNexus discussed Text Message Marketing for Beginners
Text Message Marketing: What is it for? Is it legal? How do I do it right? Where do I get mobile leads? How can I set it up?
And perhaps most importantly: Does it work?
In this Text Message Marketing webinar for beginners, SalesNexus CEO Craig Klein discusses some of the basics when it comes to sending out text messages to your customers. Here’s what you need to know if you’re interested in using text messaging as part of your marketing strategy. And it’s not as daunting as you think! If done correctly, it has an effective response rate to get you engaged with your customers.
The text message marketing part of SalesNexus is something that we’ve had for over a year now. We’ve been using it ourselves. We also have been working with our customers to learn how to do it right. Yet, there are still a lot of customers that have not used it. I think it’s mostly because people are a little unsure and uncomfortable about what’s appropriate, how to use it, and other questions like that. So that’s what we’re going to address here.
First and foremost: Does it work?
Benchmarks for Email Marketing
Let’s begin with the benchmark numbers for email marketing. You’re going to get a 20% open rate in the email world is what we call it. And a 2% click rate. So that means, you send out your email to a list of a thousand customers and, 200 of them are going to even look at it.
I’m not going to get into why that is. It just is. 2% will look at your email and read it and click on whatever it is you’re wanting them to do. Go to your website, sign up for something, go to your Facebook page, whatever that is. Only 2% are going to actually do what you’re hoping they will do. Ultimately, that means you gotta have a really big list to do anything significant. You have to determine the use of text message marketing.
Depending on the business you’re in, that can be hard. You may not be in the kind of business where there’s just, you know, 50,000 customers out there. Email marketing is its own animal. Those are the typical industry benchmarks.
Benchmarks for Text Messaging
Then you look over here at text messaging, 98% get viewed. I mean, right there, that’s a win! And 15% get clicked again. So no, it’s not a hundred percent. Realistically, you can’t think of this as, “Well, I have a hundred new customers this month and I want to text them about this special offer. Therefore, I’m going to get a hundred orders or a hundred upgrades.” That’s not the way it works. You’re going to get maybe 15 upgrades or orders or sales. But that’s a lot better than two, right?
Now, when you combine these two things, text and email, that’s when things really start to work.
Uses of Text Message Marketing
There’s a lot of ways to use text marketing. This depends on the kind of business you’re in.
Instant Coupon
As consumers, we’ve seen instant coupons and rewards and things like that. There’s a reason people do that. It’s because it works. So if you’re in the kind of business such as a retail business, an e-commerce business, or something in that field, this is where you should put some energy.
Reviews After the Sale
This is also a super straightforward and super powerful way for people to use text marketing. Think about it like this. When you’re closing a sale, you might be all over that customer. You’re sending them lots of emails. You’ve got salespeople calling them, you’re covering them up. All of a sudden they sign up. They may have often also gotten a little bit fatigued from all the emails you’ve been shooting at them. So you send them another email after the sale and ask them to review you. Well, you’re, you’re only going to get a 2% response rate on that, best-case scenario.
Use a text message instead. You’re going to get a lot more reviews, and we all know what that can do for your business.
Customers
Obviously just staying in touch with customers is a great way to use text message marketing. Let them know new products you’re rolling out, events you’re doing, ask for reviews. For customers that have kind of gone cold on you and haven’t ordered anything in a while, text messages can be a way to reconnect.
B2B Sales
For B2B sales, salespeople need to get customers on the phone and a text message can be an excellent way to do that.
Ultimately, you’re going to get a better response rate. You’ll get better responses to your text messages than you do to your voicemails. For sure. Think about it. You’ve got somebody sitting there on the phone all day, just making outbound calls, making hundreds of calls a day. Well, if you teach them to stop leaving voicemails and then set the system up so that it sends everybody a text message, say the next morning, you’re saving them time.
Moreover, you could probably double the number of calls they make, and you’re going to get more responses.
Why aren’t you already using Text Message Marketing?
It seems like a no-brainer, text message marketing has proven to be responsive and effective. So why aren’t more people using it? Well, it’s the big part of it is you’re afraid that you are going to really piss off your customers by sending them all these text messages.
Aren’t we going to annoy our customers?
That’s what we hear a lot from customers. Well, I think the easiest way to answer this question is to ask yourself: Is it annoying to you?
When you are interacting with some vendor, some brand when you buy something, and they send you text messages, does it annoy you? I mean, we all have our own answer to that question.
Personally, it can annoy me, but most of the time is, it doesn’t. In other words, I just spent some money with you. So, if you want to send me a text message and say, “Hey Craig, what’d you think? Is there anything we can help with?” I’m not annoyed by that. That’s helpful. Because that’s the concept of text message marketing.
If I’ve never heard of you before and you send me a text message, that’s a little different story.
I think it’s all in context. You see the number there, 77% of customers have a more positive perception of businesses that are using text message marketing. It won’t really be seen as annoying unless you are really just abusing the privilege of having somebody’s mobile number and sending them a text message. With text message marketing, the impression you’re making on your customers is that you’re better than your competitors because you’re using text messages. You are more sophisticated. You are more focused on them and communicate with them. So it is a positive thing.
Is Text Message Marketing Legal?
Now the other question is that might be holding you back is, is it legal? What are the legal aspects of all this? Which is important, of course. Frankly, it’s pretty simple at a practical level. It’s the same principles apply as apply in the email world.
However, the laws that govern it are different. And you can find a lot of people out there that the kind of, for lack of a better way to say, they try to scare you. They make you think it’s really fraught with all these legal tradeoffs and liability and everything else. And really that’s because they’re trying to sell you something. It’s not.
You can go look at the law. If you want. It’s called the Telephone Consumer Protection Act. Google it, read through it. It’s not super long or crazy or anything. There’s a lot of stuff that’s not really related to, “Can I send my customer text messages?” there is more technical stuff involved.
It’s not super long or crazy or anything. There’s a lot of stuff that’s not really related to, “Can I send my customer text messages?” there is more technical stuff involved.
But this just goes to say, text message marketing is completely legal.
In terms of just practical, sending your customers a message, what it really comes down to is you’ve got to get their consent. So that’s the fundamental difference. Legally speaking between email and text. With email, the law does not require you to have an opt-in. That’s kind of a best practice, of course, but it’s not legally required. With email, you’re legally required to make it easy for them to opt-out.
Text Message Marketing Opt-out
So that’s the kind of thing that in the SalesNexus system, it does automatically. Customers and leads can click the unsubscribe button. With text messaging, legally speaking, you cannot send them a text message unless you have their written consent. When I say that you can’t send an automated or mass text message, obviously just sending somebody a text message on your phone. That’s a different story.
Bottom line is, you’ve got to get them to opt-in. Actually, it’s really not that as big a deal as you might think. When they sign up on your website, your privacy policy, your terms of service can say that they’re agreeing to receive text messages from you. If you want, when they fill out something on your website, it can come up with a check box that says “I agree to receive text messages…”
You can be subtle about it, or you can be more upfront about it.
Either way, legally speaking, you’re covered as long as they somewhere agree to receive text messages from you. And then you’re good to go. So in general, with customers, it’s not a problem. With people that come to your website and fill out a form to sign up for something, it’s not a problem texting them going forward until they say stop. And once they say “Stop,” you honor that. So that’s where emails and texts can work together. Send them emails to get them to opt-in and then you start texting them.
If you’re buying lists and things like that, that’s where it’s an issue.
How else can you use text message marketing?
Here are just some examples of text messages and what you might do.
Instant Coupon
Place a coupon code that customers can put in your shopping cart system on your website to get a discount. Here’s a text message about getting a review. It’s just a link and when they click it and it takes them to some review portal and they put in their review. You can see in the text the option of, “Hey, if you want to stop, here’s how you opt-out.”
B2B Leads
Here’s an example of a B2B text message. What texts are great for is for I’m trying to get somebody on the phone to talk to them. “Hey, I just called you. Couldn’t reach you. When’s a good time for me to call?” That’s my favorite way to use this because people just respond right there. Especially if they want to talk to you, they have an interest in your product or service. It’s just, you call them at a bad time. So it’s convenient for them to just quickly say, call me tomorrow at 3. Boom. Oh, okay. Got it. I will. You know, simple.
The other thing you can do is you can actually put a link in your text message to a Calendly type system. That’s what we use, which is one of these scheduling things and integrates with your calendar. It will let them book an appointment with you at a time that you’re currently open on your calendar. So that’s super convenient for everybody concerned. That’s a great thing to try.
What are ways to acquire mobile phone leads?
Mobile phone numbers are ultimately the magic ingredient to success for text message marketing. So where and how do we find these? Well, it depends on the industry. In some industries, there are great sources of information about those customers. But other than those specific industries. For instance, if I’m in the mortgage business, buy, sell to realtors or even to mortgage brokers. Then I can go to a couple of different industry places and get lists that are really accurate and all kept up to date and all of that. But in general, we work with RampedUp. We’ve been doing this for almost 20 years now. Not the texting, but emailing and selling. For almost 2 decades we’ve worked with all of them on Zoom Info, InfoUSA, discovery.org – all of them.
The reason that we’re working with RampedUp now is that they validate their data in a couple of different, really important ways.
Number one, they’re keeping the data up-to-date by monitoring all the contacts’ LinkedIn profiles. They’re going to see when you take a new job, you’re going to see your title change or the company you work for has changed, and that triggers them to go do the research and update their database.
Number two, they’re validating the emails when you download them. RampedUp does have mobile numbers. It’s not a hundred percent coverage or anything like that. That’s the bottom line again, if you’re not in one of these industries where there’s like a specific source for that industry, you’re not going to get a hundred percent coverage.
That’s why you got to have a multimedia strategy.
For some people, you might only have their email. For others, you might only have their office desk phone. And for the rest, you may have their mobile phones. You got to be able to communicate with all of them.
There are ways that we can make a list that you have now and infill mobile numbers for the people who, for at least some of them. I would say typically it’s going to be, you know, a 30 to 40% hit rate with mobile numbers. That’s not bad. Thinking about the fact that you’re getting a 15% you know, click-through or response rate, 30% or 40% of your list adds up to some serious business.
Text Message Marketing Best Practices
A few things that you just want to keep in mind when you’re creating your text messages.
Less is more – keep it short
Number one less is more. That’s true with everything email, especially and text message. Don’t send them a book. Don’t send don’t copy and paste something out of an email even and say, “Okay, I’m just going to text the same thing.” It’s too long. 140 characters should be your limit. You want to, you don’t want to put big, long URLs in there cause that’s, you know, you don’t have a lot of screen space to work with there.
Use URL shorteners like Bitly, or something like that. And you know, you want to keep it really focused.
In terms of tone, I think that’s the part that people struggle with a little bit is, when you send someone an email, you want to be very professional: Dear Mr. So-and-so. You’re using excellent grammar and all of that.
You might end up being a pretty long email as a result.
But then at the very least, you have start to apply the concept of text message marketing. And that’s appropriate in some cases. With a text message, it’s just a different medium, and people don’t want a lot. The whole beauty of text messages is that it’s short and sweet.
That’s why people read it. And respond to it because it’s easy for them. The reason we dread looking at our email inbox is that there’s all this stuff we got to read. And who’s got time for that? So don’t do that to their text message inbox. You know, respect the fact that it needs to be short and sweet.
If you’re trying to get somebody on the phone to talk to you, say that and give them a way to make that easy. If you’re trying to tell them they can sign up and get a discount on something, just get right to that point. Don’t tell them how wonderful the product is.
Just say, “Hey, do you want a discount on this product? Here’s your quote go.”
Start with company name
The other thing you can try is, use your company name in the email. I think the instinct is to make it personal by trying to make it seem like you’re sitting there on your phone texting them. So you’re texting more as an individual. But sometimes what’s lost for the customer is “Okay, Bob. Who do you work for?” You know, so make sure you’re making that clear.
Use videos
And then use videos. In one message, you can mix it up. You put some texts and then link to say a YouTube video.
It’s going to show up as a moving video on their phone. So that by itself is a nice little branding impression. Plus people like videos, and they’re going to watch videos. They’re going to click on videos at a much higher rate than they will just a general link to some page on your site or something. So it’s worth using.
B2B Online Lead Response
I did a little research in preparing myself just to see what other people recommend as good sequences and things for B2B leads. And one of the ideas that I really liked the most was making it really granular like this. So these are individual messages. This is not all one message that we’re going to send them all at once. “Hey Adam, I saw you signed up for I’m putting together my schedule…”
You know, that would be my instinct. I’m going to put all that in one simple message. The idea that I saw a lot of people talking about, and I really like it and I’m going to be trying it, is just say, “Hey, Adam.” And you wait for them to respond. So you’re going to send out, you know, maybe a thousand text messages.
Nurture Leads with Text Message Marketing
Well, we’re talking about leads. So if you’ve got a thousand leads every day, good for you, you probably don’t need my help. But, let’s say it’s 10 leads a day, right? So you send out 10 texts, “Hey Adam, or Hey, Mr. Customer.” And you know, maybe two-thirds of them, half of them respond and say “Hi!”, or “yes”. Or, you know, “What can I do for you?”
Leads and text message marketing go hand in hand.
And then the next message “I saw you signed up for so-and-so and so-and-so.” And then the next message after their response is “I’m putting together my schedule and here’s my Calendly link” and all that. Or “Are you still interested in…” And so it’s more like a conversation. Not just one big message.
I think that that makes the most sense. It creates more of a funnel with your text messages. So not everybody’s going to go all the way through the whole sequence. So you lose their attention, lose interest, but the people that go all the way through this conversation with you and have four or five texts with you. Well, that’s, that’s some serious engagement. So now, here are the people I should really get focused on.
More Text Message Marketing Best Practices
A few more best practices. We talked about this a little bit earlier, but you know, just get to the point and speak to their needs.
Hopefully, the fact that I’m texting them in the first place, they already know that. What I want to say to them is “I know you’re looking for ways to text your customers.” Or “Are you looking for ways to text your customers?” You know, in other words, speak to their problem, their need, not what I’m selling or doing.
For example
Here are some examples of that: “We’re offering 20%.” Everybody likes a discount. “Your next vacation just got 20% better.” That’s a little bit better way to say it. Because we’re offering a 20% discount on a hotel stay or something like that. Because we’re putting them in the mind of their experience of the product, not what the transaction that we want to have.
How to select a texting tool
A few things for those of you who aren’t already using SalesNexus. When looking for a tool, here are some things you need to keep in mind.
Number one is, can you easily manage multiple segments and lists? And can those be dynamic? I might have a list of people that signed up on my website this month and I want to start texting them. Okay. That’s pretty simple.
You have a list and you need to consider it.
Applying the list and text message marketing will work together, consider it.
It’s one list. But as soon as I start texting, that list will turn into several different lists. I’ll have the ones that responded and in some positive way, I’ll have the ones that said leave me alone to ever text me again. I’ll have two or three things in between. Then, I need to then have different sequences for those different little segments.
And then I got new leads coming in the next month and all of those lists keep ebbing and flowing and changing and growing.
And the system needs to be able to keep up with that without it turning into a full-time job for somebody on your team, who sits there moving people from one list to another. That’s the problem that you run into with a lot of systems.
They make it seem really easy. You can load in a list and get a text message out. So if you’re trying to send a blanket, text out to raise money for some politician or something like that. A lot of tools out there that are great for that. But if you’re actually trying to have a relationship with a customer and a conversation with them, it gets a little more complicated and you need a tool that’s going to support that.
Mail Merge to Automate your Text Message Marketing
You want to be able to mail merge. Then, personalize it so your text message, doesn’t say, “Dear Mr. Customer”, it says, “Dear Bob,”. You want to be able to use dynamic and trackable links. Also, some systems kind of have their own link-building thing within them that has its own limitations.
You want to be able to build your own links, how you build them, how you like to track what’s going on on your website and use a little shortener and put the link in there and be able to track the traffic to your website that comes from these text messages in the same way you would track, track all the rest of your traffic.
And you want to be able to automate things in customizable ways.
The way I might want to automate things if I’m trying to raise money for a politician is going to be different than if I’m trying to automate a lead process for a business — A B2B sales process.
When you sign up for a web or you sign up on my website, I might send you a text message, right away. But I also probably am going to send you an email and I might also have a sales guy call you later that same day or the next day or whatever.
Automating things is one of text message marketing’s ways.
If the sales guy gets you on the phone and he learns a whole bunch about you, well, that information that he learns needs to change the text messages that the customer is going to receive. Cause you don’t want the customer to get a message the day after they spoke to the salesperson that says, thanks for becoming a customer and treats them like, we don’t know anything about them. You want it to reflect that now there’s a relationship. We know some things about you and we’re using that information to customize the communication that we’re having with you.
List Building
There are a few things that SalesNexus can do, and there are other options out there. What we’ve done is we’ve selected the tools that we feel are the best. They may not be the cheapest always, although they’re not the most expensive by any stretch. But they’re the best you’re going to get the best results.
And that starts with accuracy. Whether it’s emails or texts or mobile numbers or anything else.
There are tools that we use to cleanse your lists so we can validate email addresses and things like that and identify the people that you know, that that email is no longer good. Text message marketing makes use of these tools.
So that means probably they don’t work there anymore. And all of your information about that customer is invalid. Unless you have a mobile number, in which case they probably still have the right or the same mobile number. But the other thing that we can do that’s relevant.
The most important thing relevant to this discussion is that we can take an existing list, whatever you have, the emails, not emails, whatever. And we can do what’s called an append. We’re going to try and match it up to the RampedUp database. And add missing information to your list.
So if you don’t have their physical address for those that we match, we can provide that, or their office phone, or their LinkedIn profile or their Facebook profile, their title, the revenue, the company, their mobile number. And then the other thing that’s can be really powerful is you take your list of say customers.
And so these are the people that like what you do and are willing to pay for it. And we load that into RampedUp and it analyzes it and it will fill in that list with missing information like we just talked about, but also it will then come back and say, “Hey, also we have 10,000 people in the database that fit the same exact demographic profile of your customers.” That’s a super valuable list. A lot of them will have mobile numbers. So that’s a reality if you haven’t if you’re a SalesNexus customer, and you haven’t done this yet, it’s time to do it cause it’s a no-brainer.
I’ll show you what I mean here. Here’s your list. I got a first name, last name. Sometimes I got the company and the title and I got emails. I don’t even have phone numbers. Maybe this is a bunch of people that signed up for a webinar that you did, or they signed up for something on your website, where all you were asking for was their name and email.
You know, so what can you do?
You can’t call, text, or see them. All you can do is email. Well, you take that list. We load it into ramped up and we do the append that we talked about a minute ago and it comes back like this. Now I know all of their companies, all of their titles. I know if the emails are valid or not, I sometimes get their personal email as well.
Now I got their mobile number. You see here, direct dial phone number. And then what kind of number is it? Sometimes it’s not always the mobile number, but in this case, it’s all mobile and I got their LinkedIn profile and a whole bunch of other stuff that we won’t get into here.
Now here’s an example of a sequence that one of our customers is. He’s in the real estate business and he really uses the heck out of all the campaign capability in SalesNexus.
And you can see their sequences, its multimedia. So they’re sending out text messages and they got tasks for, somebody to go and check on things and they got scheduling meetings and calls and all kinds of stuff.
Step one here might just be, create your first text message campaign.
It’s just one text that’s sent to a short little list of people and you just kind of see what happens and get familiar with the process. Number one, and, you know, see what kind of results you get because your customers are different than mine.
Text message marketing is surely helpful.
But once you are walking and you’re ready to start trying to run a little. Where you really get things to the next level is where you have a sequence that’s, you know, emails and texts and calls. You’re reaching out to these people in all kinds of ways. And then you eventually learn which people want to be communicated by text message and which people want to be communicated with by emails. And you treat them that way.
When you respect the way people want to be communicated with, that’s when you’re really building a strong relationship with the customer.
Craig Klein
Text Message Marketing Example
So now I am going to really quickly pull up SalesNexus and show you an example.
To get right to the meat of the matter, I want to create my first text campaign. So I go up here to campaigns and I say, create a campaign and I give it a name. I go down here and right here where it says email, instead of choosing email, I just choose SMS, then I hit add.
And just like with emails, you can choose who the text is going to come from. So you might have, you know, a separate account for each of your sales reps. And, you know, if I want the text to come from the sales rep of that customer, then I just choose this here, the contact record manager. So that’s the record manager is the owner of that customer.
And then here, I’m setting the sequence, you know, so if it’s a multi-step campaign, then I might want this to come on the fourth day.
Now I can create a new message or I can use existing messages.
You can create a lot of different campaigns and reuse the same text message. That’s an easy way to kind of broaden the funnel so to speak, but you see it works. Otherwise, it works a lot like the email templates. When you’re putting text in your emails, you have your mail merge fields and your text, and that’s really all there is to it.
You can also choose the mail merge fields.
You can personalize it a little bit. If I want to put a link in the text, I just paste it in there. You may also use text message marketing.
When it’s sent and received, you know, the person who receives it will see that link, hyperlinked. On the other hand, if it’s a video like we looked at earlier, we’ll see the actual video. It’s pretty simple to create the message and then save it. And now that’s in your campaign sequence and you save your campaign and you’re ready to roll.
So here’s one where I’ve already fleshed it out a little more and it’s more of a multimedia sequence. Text message, then an email, then the sales rep gets a reminder to call, and then another text, and another email. And you see the sequence here. So if this is for a new lead on your website. Right away, they’re going to get a text message, and right away, they’re going to get an email.
Two days later, your sales rep gets all they gotta do is be logging on and check their tests, their task lists in SalesNexus.
They’ll see it’s time to call this new customer. And then after that, the day after the customer gets another text, and then the day after that, they get an email.
Of course, this sequence can be whatever you want it to be. Now where this all, this is all great. Again, step one walk before we run, let’s create something like this. Maybe it’s just one text message and just send it out to a short little list of people and see what happens. Because once you go through the whole process like that, then you’ll start to see how things could fit together.
But when you’re ready to run, we’re going to create sequences like this. It could be just nothing but text messages in some businesses that makes sense. Or it could be a mixture like we have here, but then we’re going to go over here and we’re going to go to automation plans. And now we’re going to start triggering these things automatically.
Automation
I’ll just walk you through this a little bit new contact and the field lead source equals website.
So what that is saying is anytime a new contact is added to the database, if the lead source is a web website, then automatically trigger this campaign.
We can also change things up a bit. In another case, whenever somebody comes to your website and fills out the form and they go into SalesNexus, boom, automatically, they’re going to go on another campaign so they will get the automatic text message immediately. They’ll get the automatic email immediately. That’s all you have to do.
So it’s pretty simple, really. So when I save that. It’s working on this next lead that comes on your website. They’re getting the text and the email and everything.
So it’s really pretty easy. Remarkably, so especially given the power and the potential return. Automation and text message marketing really goes well together.
Using Ring Central
Now, one little detail. The way SalesNexus sends text messages is through Ring Central. So you need to have a RingCentral account. If you don’t already.
We use RingCentral, it’s our entire phone system. I highly recommend it for that. It’s affordable and super robust in terms of its capabilities. There’s a lot of analytics, call reports that tell you how many calls each person made, and you can listen to call recordings. Lots and lots of features that say that RingCentral has that, don’t have time to get into right now. So it’s worth considering for those reasons alone. But in order to send text messages with SalesNexus, you have to have at least one RingCentral account, one RingCentral phone number. So you can start a free trial of RingCentral. And then even if you decide to sign up after the trial’s over, it’s only 20 bucks a month.
RingCentral is one good way to apply text message marketing.
Also, but I shouldn’t say it doesn’t have to replace your phone system. You’re not ready for that. And you just want to use it for text, that’s okay, too. Well, it’s 20 bucks a month. Can it, can I use my mobile number? Yes, you can link it up with your mobile number so that when you’re sending text messages through SalesNexus, when the customer gets it, it appears to have come from your mobile number. And if they reply, you’re going to see it on your mobile number.
You’ll also see the replies in any case on the RingCentral app, which goes on your phone, which is great.
And that’s the way I do it. But some people just want to keep it simple and have their text messages on their mobile phone. And you can do that with RingCentral. It takes a little separate setup that you have to do, but there’s no extra charge for it or anything.
If you’re going to send text messages for text message marketing, it’s worth it. During your trial, you can send text messages through SalesNexus. So there’s no reason not to try it out. A couple of questions that we often hear about RingCentral, does it replace my existing phone system? It can for sure. You know, even if you’ve got that old fashion system that you’ve had in the, you know, computer closet for 10 years, it can replace, it can do everything that system does trust me.
Try Text Message Marketing for FREE!
So what happens next? If you’re not already a SalesNexus is customer, then start a trial of SalesNexus.
Start your free trial with SalesNexus and we’re going to go ahead and set you up with a RampedUp free trial. So you can do that list, cleanup that list append that we talked about, you’ll get 500 free credits.
And, we’ll set you up with a RingCentral free trial as well. So you’ll have everything you need to get going. There are more information and training videos on our website that you might find helpful. Don’t hesitate to reach out to us if you need any help in getting started.
By joining our free trial, you may end up experiencing text message marketing on a whole new different level.
With the online CRM solutions available today, you can integrate your sales and marketing strategies to nurture your leads. In this podcast, SalesNexus CEO Craig Klein speaks with MarTech Podcast host Benjamin Shapiro about the reasons small-medium businesses could take advantage of an online CRM solution to service their customers and scale their business. Learn how to connect with your customers, take them through your sales funnel, nurture your leads, and optimize your digital marketing investments with a reliable online CRM solution.
BS: The first thing that sticks out to me is that online CRM solutions are big sales-driven organization tools. Although it’s not necessarily a marketing tool, it’s a way to build relationships on the sales side of the house.
CK: You just pointed out the main problem that most organizations (regardless of size) deal with: the line between marketing and sales. When we started SalesNexus, that was the first thing that hit me over the head. I come from a sales background, and one of the uses of online CRM solutions is to organize the sales effort. However, we quickly learned that digital marketing was going to be essential to filling our funnel.
Moreover, there’s this big disconnect of measuring what was happening in the digital marketing part of things. And then what happens to those leads once they get handed off to a salesperson. We couldn’t really bring together all the data so that we could really optimize the whole process. So that’s where we’ve focused in terms of delivering solutions to that problem for smaller businesses that don’t have the huge marketing and IT staff to figure all that out for them.
Areas for growth for SMBs
BS: I feel like technology has become more advanced, right? The ‘sales forcification’ of online CRM solutions and some marketing technologies. There’s been providers like yourself, HubSpot, Pipedrive – all are a bit of a different take on how you recognize who the actual people are.
CRM is customer relationship management. It’s about building one-to-one relationships with a person and a prospect. Talk to me about why an online CRM solution is essential specifically for SMBs – for small and medium-sized businesses.
CK: Well, to me, there are two things that SMBs really don’t do well. And have a huge ROI for them if they invest even a little bit in them.
Lead Response – Most SMBs, based on our experience over the last 15 years. When you talk about the response to digital marketing, sales leads that are coming through your website, or calls that are coming in based on digital advertising, they’re doing a terrible job of responding to those leads. They are waiting too long. They’re not handling them properly. They’re not following up enough.
Lead Nurturing – They’re not nurturing the leads. The people that come into the funnel initially, and then don’t buy right away. They get thrown over the salesman’s shoulder and into the waste bucket and they forget about them.
Taking your customer through the CRM funnels
BS: You’re saying that there’s a process for the merger between marketing and sales. And I think the line is a little gray here. When somebody gets through your website, fills out a form, gives you a phone call, or leaves a message. There’s the initial onboarding. How do you make sure you’re maximizing the purchase intent or the interest that they have at the time of them filling the form and keep the iron hot? And then if you’re not able to get to the close, how do you keep a relationship with somebody? Eventually, there’s a third part of getting them across the finish line. And that is very much traditional sales. What are the stages that you set up in a CRM or the “funnels” in marketing terminology?
CK: Well, of course, it really depends on the market that you’re in. When we’re talking about salespeople, we’re mostly talking about B2B with some exceptions. With B2B, the organization typically is very sales-driven. Marketing is there because it has to be. Especially in a medium-sized company, the salespeople are what the executives envision as their connection to the marketplace.
Transitioning customers into digital marketing
So that creates this divide between the two groups right out of the box. For example, we’re here in Houston with lots of energy-related companies. These are companies that have been hugely successful for 20 – 30 years. They’re very sales-driven. And then for whatever reason after decades of sending salespeople out to go knock on doors, the lights go on. Then they’ve decided, “You know what? We need to start investing in digital marketing.”
Now here they are trying to inject these new types of opportunities into an old-school sales team. So we find ourselves very often helping customers manage that transition. If you don’t come at it as a marketer with the perspective of a marketer. Knowing as you mentioned earlier, the mindset of a buyer when they engage with that form, and really thinking about that and building a process that’s based upon that journey that the buyer needs to go through. Then you’re really going to damage the ROI on the entire campaign. So it’s a cultural change, ultimately.
The overlap between Marketing and Sales
BS: Talk to me more about the overlap between marketing and sales. I mentioned at the beginning of the podcast that online CRM solutions are traditionally a sales-driven tool. But now there is the notion of the blending of CRM, understanding the relationship marketing email, and even prospecting is building into CRM. Where does the marketing part start? Where does it overlap with sales? And when is it really just the sales team’s responsibility?
CK: Ultimately they’re both overlapped completely. In a perfect world, that’s the way it would work. Because even when I’m closing a deal as a salesperson, there are messages that my customers are going to receive one way or the other. My retargeting ads or the email campaign they happen to be on, in a perfect world, those should all work well together.
In the end, that’s what we try to achieve. That’s kind of an ideal. And it’s not as if there’s no technology out there that does all of this. We’re different in that we’ve simplified it and combined it into one solution. That’s easy for a medium-size organization that doesn’t have the big back-office staff to manage, connect, and maintain it all.
How the sales process drives the marketing messages
The way we make things work for our customers is the sales process instantly drives the marketing messages. As soon as you come in as a conversion and engage with a salesperson, we begin to learn information about you. All that goes into the online CRM. Then that changes the messaging that you’re seeing. So even as you’re down at the closing end of the funnel, the CRM is using that information to change the messaging that you’re getting. Although that’s in a perfect world. Most companies developing all the content that would be needed to support all of the nuances in their sales process is probably a little bit beyond their scope.
BS: So what you’re saying is basically the marketing automation component of SalesNexus, the way that your platform works is as someone moves through one of the pipeline stages, it would change the language that’s being sent out to them using the marketing automation technology.
CK: That’s right. And you described it as stages. Typically what we see is at the top of the funnel is the need to focus on the customer’s pain. What is the problem that they have that drove them to fill out your form? Let’s stay focused on that at the top of the funnel.
Once you’ve uncovered an opportunity, then it’s really at that point more about establishing credibility. So that’s where things like case studies, testimonials, and things like that come into play. Just that one little change – being able to automatically switch somebody from a, “You have a problem, we have a solution” type of email campaign to a “Here’s how we’ve yielded success for our customers” type of campaign as they move through the funnel. Just that one little change can be huge.
Nurturing leads using marketing
CK: Certainly the marketing messages have to reflect the sales approach as well. We talked about earlier being able to nurture leads in this way. As when the salesperson just gives up. Once they go, “This deal’s not going to close. I’ve got to focus on the people that I am going to close this month, so I can hit my numbers.” We want to make sure that those people go on to some kind of drip campaign.
That’s where I see most companies just really are missing an opportunity because in B2B, for sure where it’s not so much of an impulse type. The reason people don’t buy is almost never because they’re saying “I don’t want to ever do business with you.” It’s almost always other things that are really out of the control of the brand. It’s things like, their budget, the unavailability of the decision-maker, or being in a contract with another vendor.
BS: I’ll use a dating metaphor: It’s the right person, right place, right time. And if one of those variables is out of whack, you’re either not getting a first date or you’re not selling your services.
CK: Therefore, you just got to be there. Six months from now, when something changes in their world, and all of a sudden it’s the right time. You want to be the last message they got.
Nurturing your leads
BS: Talk to me a little bit more about that nurture phase. When you’re going through the pipeline. You’re learning about them. You’re trying to build credibility or you’re actually getting to the point where you’re selling, and they’re just not ready at that time or there’s something that’s missing. How do you keep the relationship alive and how do you still preserve some momentum? So when they are ready, you are top of mind.
CK: It can be more nuanced than this, of course. At a really simple level, you want to go back to the pain. Additionally, just keep offering valuable content. That’s basically saying, “Hey, if you have this problem, then here are some tips. Here are some tricks. Here’s some interesting stuff that may be helpful to you.” So that’s how you’re going to keep that line of communication open as long as possible. If you keep going for the close in your email messages, eventually you’re going to annoy them and turn them off, and they unsubscribe.
Therefore, you want to go back to – “I can just be helpful here. Once your problem gets significant enough that you need more help than what I’m sending you, then call me. I’m here. We’ll talk about how it can help in other ways.”
Focusing on the customer’s pain
BS: That’s interesting. I would think that the nurture content changes depending on where someone is in the funnel, right? If somebody is in the “learn” phase, doing nurture content that talks about how to address the pain, makes sense. If somebody gets to that credibility portion, and they’re not ready to move forward, you’re not necessarily saying, “Hey, here’s more information about why we’re credible.” You’re going back and saying, “Is this still your pain point?” Is that because you’re simplifying the process here? Or is that really a best practice? No matter where someone is in the funnel, just keep reminding them that there is a way to address the pain that they’re feeling?
CK: As I said, it can be more nuanced. For instance, you may have a major competitor that when you close a deal, it’s almost always for them. Well, when you know, that’s what happened in a given deal, maybe you want a set of messages that really contrast you with that competitor.
I try to keep it pretty simple. Especially for a medium organization. Those who are just jumping into this for the first time. It doesn’t have to be very nuanced. What you’re wanting to do is just maintain brand awareness over a period of time. That’s 90% of the battle.
Reasons SMBs don’t have a CRM solution
BS: Craig, any last words for today about why SMBs need a CRM solution? What’s the biggest reason why they don’t have one?
CK: Well, the Achilles heel of the CRM world, of course, is that salespeople hate using them. So that’s the biggest reason why most companies don’t have them. The management just hasn’t figured out a way to twist anybody’s arm enough to get them to use it. So that’s another reason why doing this type of thing to me is a win-win for everybody involved. It’s a win for the business because what you’re doing is you’re giving the salespeople a reason to play the game with the CRM.
Advantages to having an online CRM solution
CK: The flip side of that is that there’s a huge win for the marketing group as well. In a small-medium-sized business, maybe they’re making that first big investment in say, Ad Words to drive traffic to the site. Well, the first thing they’re going to find out is they can drive conversions with all sorts of different techniques and tactics in Ad Words. But then they hand them off to the salespeople. However, they have absolutely no way to know whether the leads that come from that landing page or that ad campaign are the ones that the salespeople are closing. They just lose the tracking.
Then going into the board meeting at the end of the quarter and reporting on the results of your advertising. You can say “I spent a hundred thousand dollars in this quarter… I got X number of leads… I got this number of conversions.” Unfortunately, that’s all you can say because the sales guys are not going to give you credit. They’re not going to say, “We hit our numbers this quarter because of all those great leads from marketing.” Instead, they’re going to say, “It was our wonderful selling.” So you’ve got to be able to tie that together. And if you don’t have all this information in one system, you really can’t.
Optimizing your digital marketing investments
CK: That’s one thing that I’m really excited about. We just released a new capability that literally tracks the conversions coming in based on Ad words, Ad groups, and that kind of fine detail. As a result, you can do a pipeline report and a close report that says, “I might be getting a lot of conversions from this ad where I’m spending a lot of money advertising. But I’m not closing very many. But over here, I’ve got this ad campaign that I’m not really emphasizing or spending a lot of money on. Moreover, percentage-wise, I’m closing a bunch of those leads. So let’s redirect that advertising spending based on what’s happening in the sales process. That’s a huge game-changer in terms of optimizing your digital marketing investments.
BS: I think that’s a good point is that an online CRM solution allows you to capture the data. Not only from your marketing efforts but connect it to sales. So you’re able to see end-to-end from what campaign is driving impressions to web conversions and form fills, and then are those actually being closed and producing revenue.
And so that end-to-end reporting is something that’s really powerful to not just optimize, to drive people to and through your website, and make sure they’re actually creating business results.
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The MarTech Podcast tells the stories of world-class marketers who use technology to generate growth and achieve business and career success.
According to the Harvard Business Review, cold emailing can work well.
Cold emailing is when you reach out to someone for the first time via email. When you conduct cold outreach, you have yet to establish a relationship with the receiver. You also have no real-time interaction with your audience and are reliant on verbal feedback to move forward.
Cold emailing can seem a little sketchy to some. It’s garnered a bad reputation because there’s a lot of ways to mess it up. It’s also got people questioning its legitimacy.
You may wonder, Can I send out an email to someone I’ve never communicated with before? The short answer is yes, you can. People have used cold emails in email marketing, lead generation, and sales, among others. However, you need to be careful. The last thing you want is for your cold email to be dismissed as spam.
Although cold emailing does have its challenges, it’s still a practice widely used as it can be highly effective.
When done right, cold emailing can be a powerful tool in your marketing arsenal.
It’s a great way to expand your network, reach out to your prospects, and gain traction for your business. Product Hunt, Timehop, and Storefront are just some examples of businesses that have taken advantage of cold emailing to successfully scale their products.
It is important to stress that the success of cold emailing relies on creating a connection with your audience. The reason many cold emails flop is essentially that people don’t know how to approach it. Fortunately, Tucker Max has created A Guide to Cold Calling that was featured on the Harvard Business Review.
Below are some of the key points he made to send out a cold email that garners a positive response.
Personalize your cold email
Know who it is you are writing to. Do your research and personalize the email. When conducting personal cold outreach, that means more than just placing their name at the top of the email. Indicate why you specifically chose to email them, and how their expertise is valuable to you.
“Personalization means that you’ve thought about who this person is, how they see the world, what interests them, and what they want — you’ve developed a “theory of mind” about the recipient. This shows them you have put work into understanding them.”
-Tucker Max
Make a Connection
Remember, this is the first time you’re reaching out to this person. Although you may have done your research to find out about them, they may not know that much about you. Start off with a good impression and show them that you are credible so that they could trust you.
Begin with some common ground, or establish your ties. Let them know who you are and why you are reaching out. Find the connection that will move you from being a stranger to a contact.
Focus on what you can do for them
As your reader is scanning through your email, they are likely looking for one thing: What does this have to do with me?
Give your reader a reason to continue the communication with you by emphasizing what you can do for them. Identify a pain or problem they could have, and offer a solution or a means to help. Your email should highlight how a connection would be beneficial for them, not just how it could help you.
Keep it brief and concise
People are bombarded with marketing messages on the daily. Make sure your email stands out and has value to your audience. Think of your own practices when opening emails. We don’t devote too much time reading through long emails, and we scan for important information before deciding to trash the email or not.
To keep your email from ending up in the trash, try to establish that connection with your reader. Speak to them as if you were having an actual conversation. Be clear about your intentions and show some appreciation and vulnerability. If you are asking for something from your reader, expressing your gratitude could encourage your reader to want to help you. Ultimately, you want your reader to be comfortable enough with you to respond and build on this initial communication.
Cold Emailing Effectivity
Cold emailing can be incredibly effective, but it has to be done right. Those who have mastered the cold email have seen a response rate of 1 in 5 cold emails. Many businesses have used cold emails successfully to build connections in their network, obtain traction for their products, and even make sales. Although cold outreach through email can be tricky to do, a correctly worded cold email is well worth the effort once you start receiving those warm email responses.
You can find Tucker Max’s “Guide to Cold Calling” here.
Are you looking for another way to reach out to your customers? Another way to get their attention is through SMS marketing. When done right, it could yield advantages to your B2B marketing campaigns.
In the third episode of this MarTech Podcast series, SalesNexus CEO Craig Klein and Martech Podcast host Benjamin Shapiro explore how to appropriately utilize SMS marketing to communicate with your customers.
BS: SMS is a big thing all of a sudden. And it’s starting to trickle into B2B campaigns as well. It’s something that SalesNexus recently added in their platform.
Why have you added SMS marketing into your platform and how are B2B marketers using that technology?
CK: I’ve seen it myself in my own interaction with customers. When we first introduced our email marketing capability, 10 plus years ago, one of the tactics that we would teach our customers is to send out an email. Then have your sales team contact people that are engaging with those emails really, really fast. And that works. It still works great because basically, you’re calling people while you’re on their minds. But in the last year or two, getting people on the phone has gotten even more difficult than it ever was. It’s always been challenging. And frankly, people just want to communicate in different ways and they have those options now.
What we wanted to do is add text messaging into that mix. I’m using email to get people engaged. Then if they want to talk to me on the phone, great. But if they want to have a text conversation, that’s okay too.
How does SMS marketing differ from email marketing?
BS: It’s worth having a conversation about synchronicity. I think of email as an asynchronous form of communication. I send an email. You read it whenever you want to read it. You reply to me sometime later. When it comes to a phone conversation, obviously there’s a sense of being synchronized because we both have to be on the phone at the same time. We’re talking and responding to each other in real-time.
SMS marketing is in between the two of those. I am going to send you an immediate request for your attention. That’s going to buzz in your pocket, on your wrist. It’s going to make a ding. It’s going to try to grab your attention in real-time. I could see how that’s really valuable. I could also see how it has a very high piss-you-off factor.
What’s the appropriate format for B2B communications and SMS marketing?
CK: There’s a certain etiquette to every one of these different approaches. With SMS marketing, the etiquette is such that people pay more attention to their text messages as they come in. Therefore you know you’re being more of an interruption in their day. As a marketer, that’s powerful. But you certainly don’t want to overuse it. By trying all three, what you will find is some customers just want to talk via email. Some customers just want to talk via text. Some customers only want to talk on the phone. And some people want to do a little bit of everything. That’s valuable. You can really set yourself apart from a competitive point of view, just by being able to have the conversation with your customer in the way that they want.
What are some examples of these different approaches?
CK: For instance, I’m a guy starting a business, but I still have my day job. So for that guy, email messages are probably going to be ideal. You’re going to be emailing him all day. However, he’s not gonna be able to respond until late at night after the kids are in bed. That can be an example of an asynchronous conversation. On the other hand, for a sole proprietor that just is living and breathing his business. He’s going to probably like text messages because he wants everything right now. And you know, there’s everything in between.
What we’ve also learned is that SMS marketing is great at step two of the funnel. For email: there are 10,000 people I sent this email to. 2,000 of them just clicked on it. So now I know there are 2,000 that probably have some kind of interest in whatever I’m emailing them about. Well now let’s use a text message to invite them to get on the phone. Rather than having a team of people, that’s capable of cold calling 2,000 people. Instead, let’s send 2,000 people a text message and let 200 of them raise their hand and say, “Yeah, I’d like you to call me next Tuesday at 3”.
What’s the distinction between email and SMS marketing?
BS: People hear SMS marketing and it’s like if my email campaign is about inviting you to a webinar. I’m not going to take the same message saying, “Hey, by the way, we’re doing a webinar”. I’m just going to start SMSing you because the open rates go from 30% to 99%. Because people don’t want to hear about your webinar over an SMS. They don’t want to be disrupted because you’re doing a marketing activity. That’s a message that’s appropriate for something that’s asynchronous.
Now when somebody has said, “Yes. I am interested in attending this webinar.” Maybe SMS marketing is the right way to follow up. Say, “Hey, the webinar’s about to start”. Something that requires real-time communication. A reminder that is specific to an event or a form of communication. “Hey, you mentioned that you wanted to schedule a demo. Here’s the link to schedule it using our Calendly link” or something like that. You know, there are ways to appropriately use SMS marketing, but it is not for your traditional like outbound batch and blast type messaging. That is the key to making people upset and having a bad brand affinity.
CK: Where we found it most effective is it’s a tool to facilitate the relationship. It’s not a tool to initiate the relationship.
What are some of the other key ways that B2B brands are using SMS marketing?
CK: Aside from event and scheduling reminders, you can use it to inform your customers of a new product launch. You can also utilize it for customer satisfaction or outreach. You can say, “We closed your customer support ticket yesterday. Can you tell us a little bit about how you felt about it or is there anything else we can help with?” All those transactional things, text messages are great for. We’ve all experienced it when we go to the doctor or the dentist and they’re doing that a lot.
It can be great in the sales relationship as well. Once we have a salesperson engaged with the customer. “Hey, I’ve called you a couple of times.” As a salesperson, that’s one of your greatest challenges. You have qualified sales leads. There’s definitely a need, a budget, and all those other things. And you had a great conversation with them the first time, but you just can’t get the guy back on the phone. Because he’s a super busy executive. That’s where a text message can be perfect. You’ve called them once or twice, you’ve been getting voicemail. So now you send a text message.
For the reasons that you’ve already described, that guy is about three or four times more likely to reply to that text message and say, “Hey. Sorry, I’m busy. Call me next week.” Than he is to hear your voicemail, and pick up the phone and call you as a response to the voicemail.
At the end of the day, there are multiple different ways for you to communicate with your customers.
BS: And each one has its own nuances. Email is great for asynchronous communication. People are generally more accepting of receiving marketing messages through that. And event-based triggers are great for SMS marketing. But you have to be careful to make sure that you’re not using your different forms of communication and ways that your customers are just not going to like.
One of the key points here is that you should talk to your customers. If you can build a portal or some sort of communication for them that allows them to customize the way that you’re communicating with them. “Yes, I want to receive my emails. No, I don’t want these types of text messages. Yes, you can reach out to me over the phone.” That’s going to help you build stronger relationships with your customers and inevitably drive more sales.
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The MarTech Podcast tells the stories of world-class marketers who use technology to generate growth and achieve business and career success.
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