SMB Marketing Blog

Traditionally, email marketing is something which is owned and operated by the Marketing Department.  Marketing professionals would market newsletters, event & webinar invites, press releases, etc. to leads in the marketing database.  If those in Sales were lucky, they were able to see reports from those email marketing campaigns (ex. click throughs, opens, forwards, etc.).  An overlooked application of email marketing has been the ability to allow sales professionals to ‘nurture’ their sales leads using email marketing tools as well.

Realistically sales professionals are doing this regardless, often in ways that are not “best practices” in an age where ISPs aggressively filter spam.  We have even seen some instances where sales professionals, sending their own marketing messages out of their desktop email account, have shut down their companies internal web servers or gotten their domain ‘blacklisted’ as a spam domain, something which is surprisingly easy to do.

There are tools that like the CRM SalesForce.com which allow sales professionals to send out email marketing messages to their leads or customers, but these are often limited by a maximum number of messages they can send out per day.  This is  far from ideal for professionals that cover a large territory, or have a large database of contacts they need to reach out to.

Sales professionals need to be able to easily reach out to their contacts with timely offers, to nurture them through long sales cycles, and most critically, to be notified when this strategy has worked and a contact has re-engaged. Today’s marketing automation tools like ActiveConversion partner with Email Service Providors (ESPs; the only viable way to email large lists and avoid being blacklisted as a spammer) and allow Sales professionals to do just that with a minimum of effort.  Typically there are a predefined or templated set of messages that are sent to an individual engaged in an evaluation of your solution (ex. whitepapers, spec sheets, etc), and a different set for those in long term nurture campaigns.  With tools like ActiveConversion|SalesView, salespeople can decide with the click of a mouse which messages they want their prospects to receive and how frequently they are touched.  This helps sales to ensure no opportunities are lost and no prospects are forgotten about.

If you would like to learn more about lead nurturing, download this free whitepaper here.