Tag: Drip marketing

The Importance of Always Having a Solid Email Marketing Program

As we all adjust to what may be our new normal, digital marketing becomes ever more vital. Now is not the time to go dark, even if you can’t meet with prospects and partners face-to-face as you normally do. Email marketing should already be a part of your digital arsenal.

As we all adjust to what may be our new normal, digital marketing becomes ever more vital. Now is not the time to go dark, even if you can’t meet with prospects and partners face-to-face as you normally do. A solid email marketing program should always be a part of your digital arsenal, no matter what’s going on in the world.

Email Marketing Keeps You Top of Mind

We’ve all found those prospects who are a perfect fit in every way — except they’re not ready to buy. Sometimes it’s a priorities issue. In other cases, it’s a mismatch between need and budget cycle.

When you find those prospects, stay in touch via email until their need becomes pressing enough to push those other issues aside. Nothing beats email when it comes to drip marketing.

Email Messages Are Easy to Personalize

No, we’re not talking about “Dear [your name here],” though that certainly is one type of personalization. We’re talking about a more meaningful way to connect with your audience by tailoring email to their interests. These can be self-identified or based on past behavior. You can do this on your website, too, though doing it with your email marketing is usually a little easier to wrangle. Getting your email and your website to work together this way is even better. Which is an excellent segue to our next point.

Email Is the Great Connector

Email doesn’t just connect you to your target audience. It connects various pieces of your marketing tool kit. Email can introduce prospects to your social media presence and vice versa, allowing you to meet them where they already are. Well-executed email marketing efforts can drive traffic to your website, which is likely where the conversion from possibility to prospect occurs. In both cases email is improving not only your reach but your engagement.

You Own Email

Social media channels can fall out of favor in the blink of an eye. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t invest meaningfully in those platforms that work best with our audience. But those “borrowed” platforms should not be more than a part of our overall strategy. Owning email marketing means never having to worry about what social network will fizzle or when the next search engine algorithm update might upend years of SEO gains. (Well, we still have to worry about these things, but we don’t have to worry about them being catastrophic to our marketing.)

The key to all of this email magic is relevance. No surprise there. That’s the key to all marketing today, traditional or digital. If you want to reap the benefits of email marketing’s power, don’t show up in someone’s inbox just to show up. Have something relevant to say that they want to hear.

 

Using Content to Bridge the Sales-Marketing Divide

Too often in content marketing circles — and marketing circles in general — we see a separation between the work marketers do and what their counterparts in the sales department do. That’s not healthy.

Too often in content marketing circles — and marketing circles in general — we see a separation between the work marketers do and what their counterparts in the sales department do. That’s not healthy.

Combating that issue can be a tough nut to crack — really tough if the culture in your organization is wrong. But there is something you can do to route around at least some of the problems this rift creates, even if you can’t get the Hatfields and McCoys to lay their muskets down on anything else.

Content to the Rescue

The key to getting anyone’s attention is helping them solve a problem. Reaching out to offer your sales team content can help them solve problems that they undoubtedly experience every day.

Before you start, though, you may want to assess just how relations are between sales and marketing. If the atmosphere is particularly chilly, you might try this outside official channels. That is, approach a friendlier member of the sales team and treat this as a pilot program.

Getting to Go

Your initial pitch shouldn’t be a pitch at all, but a question: When you’re able to get a prospect’s ear, what’s the one question they want to answer most urgently? If you have a piece of content that already answers that question, offer it up and suggest how the sales person might present it to a prospect based on what kind of contact, if any, has already occurred. (Being careful not to overstep your marketing bounds into sales territory, of course.)

If you have the technical capabilities, you might even customize a landing page with the content to include the prospect’s name and company logo, and tailor the offer or lead magnet to their needs specifically.

Obviously, this only works for bigger ticket sales, but the same idea can be applied to smaller, more commoditized sales if you segment your list by industry or the prospect’s role and create content or landing pages for each. (A payroll clerk is going to have different concerns about your accounting software package than a CFO will, for example.)

Drip, Drip, Drip

Once you’ve established a relationship, you’ll need to nurture that relationship — folks who are excellent prospects may not be ready to buy right when you initially connect with them.

Content comes to the rescue again as you work to stay on the prospect’s radar until he or she is ready to act. Sending content that is relevant to the prospect’s pain point is a much better way to stay in touch than the dreaded, ignored, and unproductive “just checking in” email or call. The content should also be relevant to your solutions, but this is absolutely not the place to be selling. Not even a soft sell. Focus on being useful and providing actionable information.

Track and Expand

If you undertake this behind the scenes, be sure to stay in close contact with your sales department champion. You should both be tracking what content is being used and how it is being received. With solid data in your pocket, you can expand the program and begin looking at expanding your collaboration from guiding use of content you’re already creating to creating custom content expressly for the needs of a particular part of the sales team or a particular sales effort. (Keep in mind that this isn’t a one-way street. You’ll be providing great value to your sales department and at the same time, getting great data back from them that should guide your broader content marketing efforts.)

Bridging the sales/marketing gap should improve your organization’s bottom line and increase demonstrable ROI for your marketing team.