Craig Klein/CEO, SalesNexus.com
Businesses that have a human to human sales interaction with other business customers can be somewhat traditional in their marketing approaches. Many B2B sales teams live and die by old school sales strategies – cold calling, networking and relationship building.
Those sales teams that choose to dive into the world of technology to improve their results usually start with a contact management system or CRM (Customer Relationship Management), dabble with LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. and perhaps even try some modest email marketing.
The email marketing tends to be limited to something like a quarterly newsletter. The e-newsletter is much like a “toe in the water”. However, a newsletter is not likely to generate tangible opportunity for sales people very often.
What’s worse, those bold enough to jump into the email marketing pool quickly learn that the $20/month email marketing service they signed up for gets very expensive when they start to send a lot of emails.
How Many Emails Can You Send?
If a business has 1,000 customers they may want to send an email to them once a month. Plus, they typically have 250 prospects in their sales pipeline at any given time. After a few months, they may have built up a list of potential customers that’s easily 1,000 or more contacts and prospects typically get emailed more frequently so, within 3 months the overall email volume desired could be 3,000 to more than 10,000 emails.
And surprise! This type of volume puts you squarely into the premium category of most email marketing providers’ pricing structures. A business that starts off with the entry level package from Constant Contact, Swift Page, iContact, or Vertical Response will quickly be faced with upgrading to much more expensive packages.
Who Is In Charge of Email Marketing?
Plus, most of these systems are limited to one user. That means only one person on the staff can take advantage of the service. Adding access for another user can sometimes double the cost.
So, all of a sudden, if you’re going to make it work, there’s someone on the staff spending hours per week moving in information from the sales team, creating campaigns and managing them. For a sales driven business, there is still a great challenge in simply keeping the email marketing system lists up to date based on changes in client and prospect status and new leads as the come in.
How Do I Manage Leads from My Website?
For the businesses spending money to increase the visibility of their website online and in search engines and capture leads from the website, the challenges and limitations mushroom.
Constant Contact, Swift Page, Vertical Response, iContact and virtually all email marketing providers can capture leads from your website but, additional charges apply. In addition, most businesses investing in online lead generation quickly learn the value of on-going lead nurturing campaigns. Some of the vendors mentioned above have “auto-responder” capabilities but, there are additional charges and limitations apply.
For B2B sales teams, the lead nurturing emails need to be coordinated with sales activities. That’s very time consuming and difficult in most simple email marketing systems.
Opting Out of Your Email Marketing Service is NOT Easy
A business cannot simply discontinue service with one email marketing service, export their contact list, then import it into a new service and hit go. In most cases, the new email marketing provider will require the entire list to “Opt-In” again. This is a significant risk in many ways. It will be an annoyance at best to the recipient. It may result in a diminished opt-in list and it’s a big, time consuming hassle.
Of course, every sales person is sending emails to prospects and customers every day. Businesses can improve sales results quickly by starting with managing and automating those “sales emails” and building toward more sophisticated email marketing campaigns.
SalesNexus just released an ebook called “Grow Sales with Emails, 7 Ways Sales Teams Win with Email Marketing ” that provides some simple examples of how to start leveraging email marketing to grow sales, simply and affordably.
As the founder of SalesNexus.com, Craig has been helping small businesses manage sales, customer relationships and reach new customers with email marketing for over 11 years. Craig’s published 4 ebooks on email marketing, consultative selling and small business sales management.
