Improve demand generation
In this last installment of the Seven Steps to Grow Your Business from Website to Sales Funnel, learn how to empower your sales reps with a proven demand generation process and hone your content strategy. Many companies already track clicks of links inside marketing e-mails, but to be truly effective, you need to follow these critical steps on an ongoing basis to achieve your return on sales and marketing:
- Providing sales reps with buyers’ digital body language
- Driving interested buyers to your website
- Seeing which campaigns drive the most sales
5. Provide sales reps with buyers’ web-based digital body language
Regardless of where the prospect is in the buying cycle, digital body language can ascertain and convey interest in your product or service. Selling is a science and an art. An experienced professional can read and interpret these buying signals and follow-up more appropriately in tandem with any system initiated actions. Likewise, marketers can refine their messages based on:
- E-mails opened
- Web pages visited
- Downloads or requests for information
- Buying criteria and urgency from web forms
- Event registrations
Based on your sales reps’ desire for immediate follow-up on any of these specific click-throughs, they can be alerted by e-mail or text message to their phones. As long as it is not blatantly obvious, what better timing is there than to call when you are at the top of the prospect’s mind regarding your product or service.
6. Drive interested buyers to your website through e-mail marketing
The more you know about your customers and prospects, the easier it is to relate to their needs and target more appropriately. Therefore, it is critical to identify and track segmentation information and demographics within your CRM systems. It is possible to determine specific interests of each buyer, code them appropriately and only include these buyers in your campaigns. Even programs such as ACT! and GoldMine allow you to track contacts’ buying interests, so you need not waste effort with buyers that may not be interested.
Many companies only update current customers. Others purchase new lists which include new and growing companies. But the best include demographics when purchasing new lists and frequently append them to keep their existing list from becoming stale.
Consider that many companies will purge all open leads between six months and three years old, because they believe them to be worthless. Another strategy to consider, if you use click-through data, is to purge them based on the lack of relevant click activity.
To track opens and clicks, you must encode your e-mail templates. Programs (services) such as Swiftpage (e-Marketing for ACT!) and IntelliClick allow you track these clicks in ACT! and GoldMine. Both provide online tools that integrate with your desktop CRM and send out the e-mails for you in an approved 3rd party protocol. They require subscriptions based on your usage and volume needs.
To avoid being labeled as a spammer, you must cleanup bounces and track opt-out e-mails. Both Swiftpage and IntelliClick offer these features. Additionally, tracking the cumulative clicks allows you to easily identify hot prospects for call lists – concentrating your sales reps efforts on the most interested and most likely buyers.
7. Track metrics of successful campaigns until the close of each sale
To identify and refine the best strategies, you will need to report on the results of your marketing and sales efforts, such as:
- Campaign response rates (including number of web pages visited)
- Leads pending first follow-up call
- Leads in the sales pipeline (percent from marketing vs. sales)
- Products purchased (closed sales forecasts)
- Contracts renewed
- References created
If your organization uses the CRM system diligently, then it is easier to track the outcomes of your marketing and sales activities. Some additional coding and queries or reports may be necessary to provide full details.
These methods can easily be adopted by your organization for your existing website and CRM system with the purchase of a Swiftpage account or IntelliClick software and guidance from Tempest, a Swiftpage drip marketing consultant and certified IntelliClick partner. All CRM systems and e-mail marketing services require not only proper setup, but communications that resonate with buyers and tie-in with the business strategy to outperform competitors. To remove the uncertainty of your demand generation process, content strategy and seamless hand-off between marketing and sales using digital body language, call Don Astras at 616-458-9200 or use our contact form.
This is the final installment of the Seven Steps to Grow Your Business from Website to Sales Funnel.
