The From Line

As published in MediaPost

I’ve witnessed a destructive trend in the last year with lead generation. If the lead isn’t hot with an immediate readiness to convert, it is often shoved aside, long to be forgotten –leaving the person who initially made an inquiry with a bad impression. When I question marketers about this practice, the typical answer is “we simply don’t have the time and resources to call every lead.” This answer often leaves me to ponder how much waste there probably is in a typical lead generation campaign. With a simple long-term follow-up strategy I am confident you can squeeze the remaining value out of your lead gen budget using inexpensive technology such as a time released email campaign or personalized postcards. Using one of these tools will the typical excuse doesn’t hold much merit. Just think about it, you spent the time and money to educate a prospect on a product or service who indicates they aren’t ready to buy only to allow a competitor to take your future sale because you didn’t follow up. Yes, these leads are tire kickers, but tire kickers do eventually buy and research has it that after these laggards are armed with enough knowledge they will buy from whoever is the most convenient and matches their purchasing criteria.

To implement a quality follow up campaign you may first need to define what a good follow up is and then determine the good times to do it. Some companies fall short with their follow up efforts by placing their cold leads on their house e-newsletter list hoping that that if they get in front of the prospect enough times they will be top of mind when they are ready to convert. This misconception only leads to confusion and contempt by the prospect since most of the time they didn’t opt into the newsletter list and the information presented is irrelevant to their initial inquiry. Cold follow-ups should be personal, friendly, have a call to action, and most important, be relevant to the prospects initial inquiry. Once you figure out what a good cold follow-up should be, the next step is to determine the time intervals to execute them. Time intervals should be based on feedback collected from your sales team’s experience with longer sales cycles. The idea here is to try to mimic an offline follow-up approach as much possible while gaining the efficiencies of an online follow-up.

Once you have developed quality follow-up messages and determined good time intervals, the next step is to test. Just as with any other campaign the follow-up campaign needs to be tested at every time interval until a sale or a death can be determined. This is easier than it sounds since you’ll be testing messages and intervals, not lists. Eventually, you will hit a eureka moment when the right combination of message and intervals start yielding maximum conversion rates from your cold leads.

Implementing a solid follow-up campaign shouldn’t take more than a few days with a good email service provider as long as its messages and intervals are well thought out. The time invested in this exercise will not only yield higher conversion rates but also greater goodwill as prospects are reminded that you care enough to follow-up.

As published in DM News

A few weeks ago I had an Aflac agent in my office. After we closed a deal he pleasantly asked me if I knew of other business owners in need of Aflac’s products. As a result of the good sales experience, I gave him five referrals. Every sales person knows the value of a referral however the concept doesn’t resonate well with email marketing practitioners. Now is a great opportunity to change that. Instead of relying on an inadequate forward-to-a-friend process, a more formalized referral program is needed to ensure success. A good referral program is automated, timely and usually starts where the original opt-in process ends. Once a website user has gone through the motions of opting-in, it is a perfect opportunity to ask for a referral. Ask the referrer not only for an email address but also a full name. When soliciting the referee to opt-in, always personalize the message, and most importantly, reference the referrer. A reference to the referrer gives you instant credibility and will produce a much higher conversion rate.

The above tactic works well with new signups however tapping your existing subscribers for referrals takes a little more creativity since they are often an afterthought. Most existing subscribers have little incentive to give you a referral since opting-in is a distant memory for them. The simple solution here is to provide an incentive. Trade associations are notorious for doing this by turning their referral campaigns into contests, rewarding lavish prizes to individuals who recruit a large number of new members.

Referral campaigns and tactics are an effective and proven way to grow a list organically. The good thing is that a number of email service providers offer some sort of automated referral mechanism to help you implement such programs. However, just as anything worthwhile, growing lists by referrals takes planning, effort and tweaking to make perfect.

Ken Magill of Direct Magazine does it again by exposing the dirty side of email.  However this time a little bit of politics was added creating a cesspool of irony.  His recent report "Prankster Pollutes Obama's E-mail List" exactly makes my point from last night's blog post.  Even though politicians are exempt from the CAN SPAM Act they aren't immune to best practices.  As Hillary Clinton would have put it, "shame on you Barack Obama!"

As the 2008 presidential primaries come to a close, the remaining candidates' staffers are making a mad rush to expand their social networking presence.  Any medium to reach voters who were previously an afterthought in the last election has become the mantra amongst Clinton and Obama supporters in a tight Democratic primary.  However no matter how much effort goes into harnessing the power of social networking in the name of politics, email is right around the corner as an opposition's counter-measure to undermine such efforts.

One of the more popular smear campaigns this election has come in the form of an email claiming that Barak Obama is a Muslim.  This viral email attempted to establish a link of faith between Barak Obama and his paternal ancestry.  It was so successful that it garnered mainstream media attention forcing the up and coming presidential candidate to fight back and clarify false accusations.  Another email aimed at African American voters claimed to be from NAACP Chairman Julian Bond entitled "10 Reasons Not to Vote for Hillary Clinton."  The Obama campaign picked up on the hoax's momentum posting the email on the candidate's website only to quickly remove it when alerted to its true origin.

Email smear tactics are nothing new in politics but in this election it sheds light on the staying power email has as a viral tool.  As other Internet mediums such as social networking have gained popularity over the past couple of years, email marketers are failing to recognize email as a viable social medium.  This is not to say that one should ignore the social networking revolution but to find new ways to leverage the two mediums in tandem to create the ultimate viral marketing tool.

DomainKeys, OpenSPF and Sender ID – if you don’t know what these things are, find out fast! Mail server authentication, both from a marketing and corporate admin standpoint, will become a necessary defense in the spam war.  It is estimated that only 30 percent of mail servers currently use these email authentication technologies, but this number will grow quickly as email marketers rush to take advantage of technology that will help distinguish actual email from spam.
 
Review and commit these terms and definitions to memory.

DomainKeys
DomainKeys is an e-mail authentication system designed to verify the domain of an email sender and evaluate the message integrity.  Simply stated, it verifies the sender’s domain name, confirms the message hasn’t been altered somewhere along the line, matches the "from" address to the sender's domain name to sniff our forgeries, and traces the message back to the sender's domain name.

This particular form of email authentication is valuable because it positively identifies the sender’s domain, which makes domain-based blacklists and whitelists more effective. It also allows abusers to be identified more easily. 

OpenSPF
A large problem in the complicated world of SPAM is the use of fake or forged sender addresses. The innocent marketers who fall victim to forgery pay heavy consequences for this stealthy activity.  Sender Policy Framework (or SPF) protects the envelope sender address, which is used for the delivery of messages and is often not seen by the receiver.

Sender ID
Sender ID is another authentication tool that is built on the idea of verifying the domain name from which email messages are sent. It validates the origin of a message by checking the IP address of the sender against the owner of the sending domain. Using this tool requires that e-mail senders and domain owners publish or declare all of the Internet Protocol (IP) addresses used by their outbound e-mail servers, or the IPs authorized to send e-mail on their behalf, in the Domain Name System (DNS).

Gold Lasso uses all three of these technologies already, but don’t be surprised if the FTC made these a mandatory practice as part of compliance with the CAN SPAM Act.