There are many different ways to do this, but we believe there are 4 essential fundamentals you really need to have down.
Content is almost everything
Regularly sending promotional stuff will not help you very much. But producing information rich content that the decision maker comes to find regular interest in, derive insights from, pose questions about and even come to count on is an absolute game changer for your business development efforts.
Upon producing regular content like this, you’ll see inbound leads (people calling you) and salespeople spending more time in the sales funnel than dragging people to the sales funnel
Frequency and consistency
Now that you have your content, consistency is critical. Your audience should know that every Tuesday afternoon (for example), that e-newsletter is showing up. Far too often we see people get it right for a month and then the effort fades and then try to pick it up a few months later and then it fades again. All email marketing (once you have the great content) is a momentum game. Slow down, lose focus and stop and you’ll see your ROI for the effort plummet.
On the matter of frequency, let us ask…how many emails did you get last Tuesday? 75, 100…400? So why is everybody in the commercial finance business so scared to send 2 emails per month? Most financial decision makers actually like to see e-newsletters they trust weekly. Anything else feels out of sight out of mind.
Design matters too
We can almost guarantee that 60% of everyone reading this is doing so on a mobile device. And if your email is built only for laptop, less people would read it. Common sense right? Yet most commercial finance companies send out amateurish looking emails filled with promotional content that doesn’t automagically adapt to each device (phone, tablet or laptop) for easy consumption. Don’t lose interest in your great messages over stupid design things.
Data
Got a bad CRM database? You’ll have bad email marketing. Regardless of how great your content, design and capaign management. But we would go a step further, if you have bad data you don’t just have an email problem…you have a sales problem and a pretty huge one at that. Sales Management and even senior leadership must make collecting and managing customer/prospect data a center of excellence if you are going to be a great business development organization. Period.
Constant Contact, Mailchimp, Salesforce and countless others have made the machine to send emails easy and affordable. And they are almost all really great platforms. But we emplore you to keep in mind that although you may be able to buy a Ferrari, if you can’t drive a stick…you’re gonna screw it up. It takes commitment and a little expertise to make email marketing work. If you ever wanna chat out how better email marketing can be a central cog in a business development machine…give us a holler