Marketing
is
Dead…
Email Marketing is Dead…Unless it’s Intelligent
I don’t know how many times I have heard people say ‘cold calling is dead.’ In fact, I’ve been known to say it myself, especially when my old boss asked me to hit the phones. And yet companies keep using the phone to win business. I have also heard that spam filters and general indifference have contributed to the demise of email marketing but some people have made it the core of their new business strategies. So what’s the truth? If you have set up a new email marketing system, should you abandon it now or persevere in the hope that it will help you to win new business? Or if you haven’t implemented any email marketing at all, have you missed yet another successful marketing boat? Not according to E-Consultancy who report that email marketing is growing at around 15% annually in the UK or the Direct Marketing Association who report that 54% of small businesses use email marketing as their main method of driving traffic to their website.
Timely Relevant and Personal
To some extent email marketing, in the sense of blasting out generic e-shots and hoping for the phone to start ringing, is dead. To put some perspective on this: according to the research by the Radicati Group, around 300 billion emails are sent every day worldwide. While Symantec Message Labs reported in January 2011 that although 78.6% of these emails are spam and viruses, 64 billion are actually genuine emails. However, even when bona fide B2B emails contain useful information that might help you improve your business, the sheer volume means you are still likely to mentally block them out and be unreceptive to their content. Unless they are very timely, very relevant and very personalised they don’t get a look in. Even then, should you open them when you have no engagement with the sender? You either buy or ask for more information or you move on, leaving no trace of who you are, what you do and whether you are in the market now or indeed, ever.
To counter this issue, some organisations will claim they can trace visitors by tracking who clicks on marketing emails but what do these people do after they have clicked? How can you approach them meaningfully when you don’t know what they were specifically interested in and you don’t know how interested they are because you cannot tell how long they stayed on a certain page or how often they have come back?
300 million emails
sent every day
78.6% emails are
Spam and viruses
64 million are
genuine emails
Turning Leads into Prospects
So yes, ‘Email Marketing Incarnation 1.0’ is dead, or moribund, but email marketing with intelligence is taking off in a big way. Some would say that for B2B vendors ‘Email Marketing Incarnation 2.0’ will see a revival of the art of telephone selling. This is because when sales people have valuable prospect information which allows them to convert they can to do what they do best which is building relationships and closing sales rather than wasting time prospecting for leads.
So what do you mean by intelligence in email marketing?
Intelligent email marketing is, in short, the ability to turn leads into prospects. How is this achieved? First of all by establishing who is reading your emails, what they do, what type and size of business they represent, where they are based, and what, in your portfolio of products and services, they actually want to buy either now or at some point in the future? The more information you can gather about individuals the better you can profile them. This means that you can then tailor the information you send them in your email marketing much more accurately.
shoppers and office workers walk on by. The important message they have to convey: be it ‘Save the Planet’ or ‘Stop the Cuts’ gets lost in the crowd. It’s just noise. It’s not relevant to us at that moment in time so we don’t hear it. This phenomenon is known as cognitive dissonance and the way to get round it is to make your message relevant to each individual in that crowd. Standard email marketing is based on the idea that you send emails to vast numbers of people in the hope that a small percentage is receptive to your message at the right moment. However, if you know who wants to listen and then you can email them with a tailored message then your conversations would be more relevant and your conversions much higher.
Don’t shout at me! I’m
Not Interested Right Now
Look at it this way. Walk through any city centre and some-body with a just cause will be shouting with a loud hailer while
Firms Don’t Buy Things - People Do
So, I hear you ask: can email marketing do all this for me? Well not on its own. The vital ingredient is the technology that enables you to track, profile and score visitors to your site and then develop tailored email to nurture them along the sales process. This technology is known as lead generation or marketing automation software and it is provided by companies such as Profunnel. Marketing automation tags and tracks each individual that responds to your email or future marketing. The key word here is individual. People buy things, not organisations and they buy from your people. So the best thing you can do as a sales or marketing manager is to bring together these two happy souls at the point when the buyer is ready or getting ready to buy. Some email tracking systems will tell you who opened your emails but they don’t tag and track behaviour on your website over time, so you don’t get a picture of what web visitors are interested in or how interested they actually are. Profunnel’s marketing automation system not only tells you what products your web site visitors have looked at but how often they have come back to your site and how long they stayed each time. Using this information it is possible to assign a lead score to all your web visitors and continue to track them until the timing is right to make a direct approach.
If you don’t do this you will never know if those people who responded to your email have gone away, come back several times but finally bought from your competitors or came back many times, downloaded resources like white papers, brochures and case studies - but you never knew about them and so you never called them. You can’t follow every lead up all the time but if you know who the hot prospects are through a scoring system it can take an awful lot of legwork out of selling.
Rapid Payback for Marketing Automation
Using marketing automation to improve the performance of your email marketing need not mean landing yourself with a whole load of work in order to get any benefits at all. I know of one client who has just sent out emails without whitepapers or case studies and has still managed to improve the results of his campaigns by threefold in three months, compared to six months of telemarketing. This success is due to the high level of personalisation and automation that is achieved with targeted, intelligent email marketing. Plus, a leading training company saw its ROI from email marketing grow by 150% in 2010 by introducing a programme of whitepapers which were promoted via email and downloaded from the website.
Visitors that do not score highly in the early days are still kept in touch with targeted and timely follow up emails. This can mean a simple monthly email to keep prospects engaged or the more sophisticated approach of sending specific emails once prospects have hit a given score in Profunnel’s scoring system. As in telephone or face to face sales, the landscape has changed, the prospect may be ready to buy and you need to move up a gear.
Activity Alerts Help You Time that Sales Call for
Maximum Effect
One great way to use marketing automation to turbo charge your email marketing and lead generation is real time web entry and exit alerts. We have all missed that big deal by phoning up the day after the customer went somewhere else. If you have tagged and tracked a lead in the first place you can set the system up to provide email alerts every time a prospect enters or leaves the site. Based on their lead score, certain prospects can be assigned to a hot list, allowing you to focus sales efforts where they are likely to have the maximum impact. If there is a frenzy of activity from one of the prospects on your hot list you can then make a direct approach, knowing that the prospect is likely to be receptive to your call. Based on their activity levels, for example the whitepapers, case studies and tip sheets they have downloaded, you know that this prospect is engaged and you can understand their profile much better. This means you are going to have far more meaningful conversations and that these conversations are much more likely to result in new business.
Global Supermarket on a Local Service
Taking it to the next level, imagine walking into your favourite supermarket and before you have even stepped through the door they had rearranged all your favourite items you buy each week into one aisle. Let’s think about it the other way. Most of us buy the same items week in week out and when doing the weekly shopping trip we go straight to the same items in the same aisles without looking at 1000s of other products and even missing out aisles, this is called blind shopping. It’s only when we are hit with an end of aisle display with a massive offer that we sometimes purchase something different. However, what if someone was looking for a new item, YOUR item, and they didn’t know where it was as they had not been looking previously. They could spend time searching and come across a competitor’s item, miss your item or give up and go as they did not have the time. Imagine if you knew what a prospect was interested in, along with when they were looking and then were able to direct them to the right area.
Just think how sales would soar for those supermarkets that could provide such a service to everyone? Through an intelligent marketing automation solution like Profunnel’s, you start to understand visitors’ patterns of interest and desires, furthermore you can start to contact them through email marketing when they are near to the point of purchase with products you know they could be interested in.
Email Marketing is Dead - Long Live Intelligent
Email Marketing
Email marketing very nearly died and, in its old form, will certainly be consigned to the nether world of ‘noise on the line’ at best and spam at worst. However, using intelligent email marketing systems or marketing automation solutions such as Profunnel’s software, businesses are starting to see real benefits and a tangible payback. Now, with better information and improved methodologies we can engage with our prospects in a more productive way and we can focus sales efforts on the hot prospects that are in a position to do business.
Mark Sceats, www.viz.co.nz/search-engine-marketing-a.htm, 3rd May 2010. Extracted from ‘American Direct Marketing Association Survey’ - August 2000
Matt Rosoff, www.businessinsider.com/it-would-take-10-years-to-read-one-days-tweets-2011-2, 28th
February 2011. Extracted from ‘Email Statistics Report’, The Radicati Group, April 2010
January 2011 Intelligence Report, MessageLabs Intelligence, Symantec. www.messagelabs.co.uk/
resources/mlireports.aspx
Contact Profunnel
If you would like further information on our solution or services call us on
01625 416 920 or visit www.profunnel.co.uk
