Though
this is not the most exciting video I've seen lately, it does illustrate some key lead nurturing concepts you can implement using salesforce.com.
I place intelligent emailing in one of three categories:
1) Context Sensitive Emails
This is the basic need of nurturing that the video illustrates. Easy stuff.
For example, you mass send out a web form link that asks people to register for your event.
Of course based on who filled it out you know who didn't.
You automatically send the ones who did a note of congratulations with a follow up event details.
The ones that didn't send it, you send increasingly urgent emails every other day to remind them they are supposed to register.
2) Personalized, Mail Merged Drip Campaigns
Here is a real world scenario which happens to me personally all the time. I get a non techie business person that asks me "Hey Met, all this cloud applications stuff, I just don;t get it... Do you have something you can send me that I can read?" ... Of course I know I can't educate someone with a single pdf document now can I? I have on my laptop 100s of analyst papers on cloud computing? If I only send one generic one, on say, ROI, it obviously only touches on a single isolated topic. If I send them all, he'd get information overload and probably ignore it.
So, what should I really do? Well, the answer is something that all good sales people would intuitively know... Send an initial, simple email that says ..
"Hey Mike, I'm just following up on our talk the other day on your interest in cloud computing. I have lots of material on it and will occasionally send you material that I think would interest you."
Then your supposed to proceed to follow through with your promise. The good sales people do, they always have. However, its too time consuming for the 90% of the "mediocre" sales people and they just don't do it.
That's where salesforce.com can come to the rescue. You can add these types of contacts to a "campaign" that will send them out email (with attachments) on a regular basis.
So you can take your list of 20 analyst papers covering different topics, think about the order they should be presented in and what kind of email you should use to introduce the topic... And once you add the contact to the campaign ... Wallah, Drip, Drip, Drip.. System will send out the email on your behalf as if you sent it. If you do it right, these should come from the salesperson and should be relevant and thought through, as if its old-school hard working sales person manually sent it.
3) When-U-Joined Based Subscription Content
Though I haven't yet come up with a better name for it, this is my favorite.
In the 1990s, long before permission marketing became popular, I had a friend who had started a website called dailylaff.com. It was very basic. People came onto a website, they SIGNED UP to receive a funny joke daily, and delivered by email.
Here was the problem, as was and largely still is the same problem on all of these types of subscribe-then-push content and technologies. If you sign up today to receive content, you join the list of everyone else receiving content, BUT you don't get the past content that was sent BEFORE you signed up.
So the solution is to send content based on when they signed up and go back and start from content #1 and send emails accordingly.
I was doing this with dailylaff.com, but it was a major pain to process all of those records. Salesforce.com technology makes this much easier to accomplish.
As a side note, this was the 1990s so there wasn't A LOT of this kind of stuff out there. As dumb as it might sound, this thing had the potential to become huge, just because of the permission to mail. But I was too young and impatient to grow something like that a few people at a time, so I shut it down after my friend handed it to me to run. (even though it had about 10,000 subscribers in its infancy). A few months ago Daily Candy sold for an obscene amount of money. The only asset it had was a big list of people willing to receive email from the company. This lesson always reminds me of my strategy professor during my MBA at UCI - he was a rich self made retired ex entrepreneur named Richard Chandler and the one thing that he said that always stuck with me is that the #1 mistake most entrepreneurs (aka marketers) make is that they don't give enough time for the magic of compounding to kick in. Compounding not only works for interest at the bank, it works on your careers, your campaigns, your businesses, everything. You have to give it time to play out and changing jobs/businesses/ideas/campaigns too fast hurts you in the long run.
