Event-triggered e-mail is a ordinary inbox sight. Dissimilar from transactional e-mail, which is linked to a current or preceding sale, triggered e-mails are one part promotional and one part relationship-building. They are designed purely to build brand awareness so when marketers or salespeople follow up, the customer is previously familiar with the brand and what it does, as well as how the corporation can help them, said Luc Vezina, VP-marketing for e-mail service supplier Campaigner. Here are some easy tips to help you get in progress with your own triggered e-mail program.
- Alter your focus from pure sales to lead nurturing. Your archetypal e-mail marketing message probably includes a lot of product detail as well as special offers designed to boost sales. Triggered e-mails, however, should take a different slant, focusing instead on lead nurturing—getting the prospect or customer to feel an affinity with the salesperson and the company. “A lot of salespeople and marketing folk get leads, pounce on them and aggressively follow up. When they don’t change, they are on to the next lead,” Vezina said. “Triggered e-mails take the very soft-sell approach, as long as information that’s less sales-and-marketing-focused and more focused on the industry as a whole, or current events or just relevant information that helps someone do their job.”
- Pick your triggers. Prospects or customers might receive a triggered e-mail after participating in a Webinar or signing up for your e-mail newsletter, for instance. As long as someone has opted to receive communications from you, you’re free to send them e-mail. Plus, the more personalized that e-mail is, the better. “[These programs] don’t look like marketing campaigns,” Vezina said. “They have few graphics and little formatting. They appear to be real e-mails that someone typed out.”
- Use your salesperson’s persona. Nameless automated e-mails don’t have the same impact as communication that comes directly from someone your forecast and customers know already. Though it may take some attempt, segment your list so you can send e-mails base on sales region or salesperson liability.
- As part of that, Vezina said; personalize each segment with a custom go back address and signature file that displays the correct salesperson’s name, e-mail address and additional contact information. “You can’t wait for a salesperson to send dozens of e-mails a day, so you desire to make it as simple as you can for him or her and do it automatically,” he said. one more option is to attach a photo of the sales envoy. “We see a rise in reply and click rates when a photo is incorporated in the signature file,” he added.
- Keep the salesperson in the loop. Because salespeople have right of entry to the same e-mail and contact database as the marketing folks do, it’s not rare for their messages to overlap. This is why it’s a good practice to send your sales team copies of triggered e-mails that go out during the month to help avoid duplication and offer a starting point for in-person or over-the-phone conversations.
“If a salesperson sees the text of an e-mail, they can use that satisfied in their conversations,” Vezina said. “The realism for most organizations is that there’s a definite disconnects between sales and marketing, and doing something easy like this can bridge that divide.”