Accelerate the sales cycle with email: but carefully
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Jeanniey Mullen's latest column encourages us to think about the customer or prospect's buying cycle and how email can contribute at each stage of this cycle.One of her points is that as a push medium, email can and should accelerate that cycle. To do so, of course, you need to understand where each subscriber might be on that cycle.
For example, I signed up at a world-famous consultancy's website because I needed access to one story with an email statistic in it. Their first non-transactional email was a promotion inviting me to upgrade to a for-fee premium site membership.
To me, that kind of immediate hard sell is way too early in the sales cycle.
A better approach would be to send new people like me a series of valuable information-rich emails, where some of the content is for-fee only.
After they have demonstrated the value of their information and allowed me ample opportunity to see what I'm missing as a free subscriber, THEN they can hit me with the nice promotional email. By which point I'm ready to upgrade.
For more insight on that initial stream of emails, read this post.
Tags: email marketing, sales cycle
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2 Comments:
The question in my mind is, "How careful do you need to be?". As Mark notes, emails that don't directly address the reader's concerns are likely to prove ineffective. That said, many companies use mass email communications--such as newsletters--because they have limited resources. These work because some percentage of the readership is at the stage in the buying cycle where the current topic is relevant. The good news is that while a tailored message will be most effective, irrelevant messages tend to get ignored and are rarely fatal. For this reason, even mass communications will accelerate sales. The key is finding out what readers need to hear at each stage of the sales cycle and then getting these messages out--one at a time. Frequent communications--to the extent that they are relevant-- will keep senders high on prospective clients' radar--until they are ready to buy. In my opinion, this is the greatest value that email delivers.
By 
Barbara Bix, on
11 October, 2007
Thanks Barbara. I think you touch there on the reality that is the trade off between utopia and what we can actually do.
Most folk don't have enough information about subscribers to plan the content and timing exactly right. So we are forced to take a broader approach. Fortunately that can still work.
By 
Mark Brownlow - Email Marketing Reports, on
12 October, 2007
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