Four Ways to Find the Right Email Marketing Solution for Your Sales Team

Four Ways to Find the Right Email Marketing Solution for Your Sales Team

Businesses large and small are making email marketing a core part of their marketing and sales strategies.  To fill this growing demand email marketing software vendors are offering a wide array of options to choose from.  Companies trying email marketing for the first time and even seasoned professionals can find these options confusing.

In fact, many first-time email marketing buyers can be steered toward unfortunate trade offs in implementing their campaigns in order to “fit” the pricing and limitations offered by their email marketing vendor.  Understanding the limitations of your email marketing solution in advance of vendor selection can prevent unnecessary delays and costs and make the difference between success and failure in email marketing.

Below are 4 questions any buyer should ask potential email marketing vendors when selecting the right fit.

#1 – How many emails can I send?  How often?

Most vendors base pricing on the volume of emails sent.  Most commonly, a monthly subscription permits sending a certain number of emails.  Plans are sometimes based on the list size.   It’s crucial to understand packages and limitations clearly.

Planning for success in email marketing means companies should expect to add every potential customer and influencer within their market segment to their email marketing list over time.  With some pricing plans, this success can be penalized.

# 2 – What are the costs of exceeding the emailing sending limits?

In order to encourage customers to opt for more expensive options, often prohibitive per email charges apply when limits are exceeded.  These charges can far exceed the base monthly subscription amount.  Charges can accrue when –

The total volume of emails sent in a month exceeds a limit.
The number of emails sent to the same recipient list in a month exceeds a limit.
When additional prospects are added to the email marketing software, regardless of whether they are sent emails.

# 3 – How difficult will it be to exchange information with the sales team?

Most solutions are designed to be used by one or two individuals, typically the marketing staff, administrative assistant and sometimes an executive.  This leaves customer facing staff like sales people and customer service reps out of the loop.  Businesses commonly rely on their sales staff to provide contact information for new leads for addition to the email marketing solution.  Even when the sales team uses a contact management or CRM solution to manage leads and customers, adding new contacts to the email marketing solution can be challenging.  A periodic export of email addresses from the CRM can be challenging.  Issues arise with duplicate contacts, contacts with changed emails and other data management problems.

In addition, changes in customer status can result in inappropriate emails being sent to customers.  For example, a new customer could receive emails offering discount pricing at a lower price point than their recent purchase.  Ideally, email marketing campaigns should be specifically geared for prospects in each “stage” of the buying process and should be changed as frequently as customer status changes.

Finally, email marketing solutions often provide valuable intelligence about customer behavior.  Who opened the email?  Who clicked on the “Buy Now” link?  This intelligence can be tremendously valuable to the sales team.  However, there must be a simple and automatic method to alert the sales team of these opportunities.  Of course, moving a list of prospects who clicked on a link in an email from the email marketing solution into the sales team’s contact management or CRM system is hindered by the same data management issues discussed above.

# 4 – Can the email marketing campaigns be automated?

Email marketing is most effective when implemented as a campaign, rather than a blast.  Mass email blasts soliciting a purchase can easily be perceived as annoying spam by customers.  However, a series of emails each highlighting common “pain points” of customers and suggesting solutions can be highly valued by a business’ target market.  Of course, a campaign requires consistency and specific timing to be most effective.  Many email marketing solutions require the user to execute a campaign as a series of individual email blasts, leaving the user to manage lists and remember schedules on their own.

Some email marketing solutions offer “schedule it and forget it” capabilities that allow the user to select a group of prospects or customers, start a multi-step email campaign one time while the email marketing system automatically sends emails at the appropriate time to the selected customers.

Even after considering these questions, choosing an email marketing solution can be daunting.  Many businesses know they need to implement email marketing but, having virtually no experience with it, just aren’t sure how they’ll create their campaigns in the first place. That’s why we’ve created the SalesNexus Sales Mastery Institute.  In the Institute, SalesNexus subscribers have access to articles, ebooks, webinars and more expertise in email marketing, selling, sales management and CRM.

In fact, we’ve planned a webinar to eliminate the road forward in creating winning marketing campaigns – “Marketing MBA in 50 minutes for Sales Executives” will focus on the basics of targeting your market, lead generation methods and developing compelling offers that your best prospects will respond to.  You can join the webinar on Thursday, September 30, at 2pm Eastern for at no charge.  Register for the webinar here.

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The Four Truths of Network Marketing

The Four Truths of Network Marketing

Master these four fundamental steps to network marketing and be all but guaranteed both incredible wealth and great success. Fail to understand the importance of but one, and condemn your business to flounder and ultimately follow the path of so many eager, yet unprepared network marketing hopefuls.

You may be thinking at this point, only four secrets to making millions and millions of dollars? Let’s hear it then. Actually, there is really only one. Time and time again, success story after success story; all have this one truth in common. So, this particular gem I’ll save for last.

If network marketing is all about networking and of course marketing, why do so many network marketers continue to struggle to realize the infinite networking and lead generating potential of the internet? Simply put, it’s being done all wrong. How’s that?

Network marketing (also known as “Multi-Level-Marketing” or MLM) depends most heavily on…

– recruiting / lead generation / relationship-building

– sales conversion

– ongoing consumption

– replicating yourself through down line motivation and training

If your network marketing business fails to recognize the importance and any one of these fundamental elements then quite simply, you won’t have much of a business at all.

Everything starts with recruiting and lead generation. No leads means no sales. No sales means no down line. No down line means… I’m sure you get the idea here. The entire process is built upon the foundation of recruiting and relationship-building with the express intent of maximizing product consumption and the success of your down line. Your bottom line is this. If you can’t replicate your success within your down line you ultimately fail to realize the true income generating potential of network marketing.

That being said, I’ll take this opportunity to summarize my own cautionary tale for those who are new to network marketing or who are just now thinking of taking the plunge. For those who have been around the block a time or two please bear with me. Much of my story may undoubtedly sound very much like your own.

When I first made the decision to start my network marketing business, I believed that with a great product and an effective marketing system, enough hard work would guarantee me success. I had the right attitude, but the wrong impression of what made this business tick. I expected to have a great deal to learn and I was eager to do so. I attended trainings, bought books, studied sales copy, purchased leads, ran ad campaigns, the whole routine.

I managed to generate a fair number of leads, and only a few conversions. For me that was fine. I assumed that if x amount of traffic equaled y amount of conversions, all I needed to do was… You guessed it, drive more traffic. So, here I am grinding like a mad man at driving traffic, and losing all but my shirt in the process. That’s when it dawned on me. Sure things are a bit slow going, but if my real return on my investment comes with creating a successful down line… How many members of my down line can I honestly say would be willing to put in this much time, effort, and yes money, for the same results. Not a single one…

I’ll say this once more just to be absolutely clear. If you can’t easily and effectively replicate a reasonable measure of success in your network marketing down line, then you are in effect spinning your wheels without going much of anywhere. If you assume that replicated content and replicated sites are the same thing as replicated success, you may want to think again.

Think of your business like a car and the content you provide your potential prospects as the wheels. If you expect to move your business you need the content you provide about your business to stand out. You need wheels that give your business traction. That traction comes in the form of having a unique voice and providing your prospects unique content about your business.

Well that about says it… Once you do your pre-selling and your marketing to generate your leads make sure you can provide good quality content to convert those leads into sales. Create an effective method to transfer some form of ownership to your down line so that they can achieve their own unique voice and replicate your success for themselves.

Oh and as for my million dollar secret… So, what is the secret that creates truly successful businesses, not to mention truly wealthy people? Here it is…

Do what you love… If you can find a way to turn your passion, your interest, even your favorite hobby into your business, then you will be in a much better position to achieve true success. Turning an opportunity to make money into something you love is infinitely more difficult that turning something you love into an opportunity to make money.

If this information helps even one person out there find a bit of the success that we all seem to be searching for, then I’d say that this article has served it’s purpose very well. For any questions or further information, feel free to contact me.