SMB Marketing Blog

Last week Lynn commented on the strategic merits of interoperability allowing for best-of-breed integration for your Marketing Automation solution, with a notion of ‘why fix what isn’t broken’.   The latter eluding to the point that if you’re already direct marketing through an Email Service Provider (ESP) and you want to move to include Marketing Automation, you can continue to work with your ESP.  As an SMB business you’re probably already taking advantage of one of the many ESP solutions for direct marketing in an effort to attract new customers, or simply to stay in touch with existing customers.  So when should you move to a Marketing Automation solution.

First, ESP’s provide the very basics of analytics with a direct email campaign; bounces, opens, and click-throughs.

Bounces – Hard bounces vs Soft bounces.  Always something you need to pay attention to with your house list.  This probably signals a change/ who is the new person assuming the role of your previous contact? Is the new person someone that is interested in additional services or product from you? Has a previous customer moved onto a similar role in a new company presenting the opportunity for the addition of a new customer?  Change presents opportunity for the sales person.

Opens – An open with your ESP is triggered by the ‘downloading’ of an image.  If you’re working with a marketing automation solution, the open is the point at which you establish a digital connection to the lead.  From this point on any time the lead visits your website you will have the ability to monitor the digital track they follow on your site.

Click through – Significant?  Possibly.  Did they do more than hit the landing page?  Did they navigate your site, did they convey any ‘buy signals’ through their navigation? Having visited the site, did they come back again the same day, a day later, or even weeks later?  Only with a post-click management solution are you able to determine the answers to these questions.  Questions that most would argue are key in prioritizing your lead, and ensuring your sales team are focused where the conversion to ‘qualified’ is the highest.

With post-click management you are able to evolve your ESP direct emailing campaign to the next level and gain more intelligence on your leads and understand in greater detail which of your campaigns are truly providing a return on your investment.