Combine your cold calling efforts with email marketing
by Brian Carroll

Many marketers with slashed budgets are looking to get more done with a smaller investment. If you're a B2B marketer you've probably contemplated email marketing. Also, you've probably received Spam from email service companies making unfounded claims about their results. That being said, one cannot deny that in a short time email marketing is impacting and changing direct marketing. My objective is to share how companies are creating good quality B2B sales leads (Spam free) with email marketing and the telephone.

Targeted email combined with outbound calling is the ideal 1-2 punch for increasing leads, sales activity and revenue.  It's long been accepted that combining outbound calling with direct mail marketing dramatically increases results in B2C and B2B programs.

Now, B2B marketers are doing the same with email and combining it  with outbound calling to get immediate results and feedback.  Every day leading companies are replacing or supplementing their direct mail with email programs.

So what's the attraction of email? There are many. For one, email gets results almost immediately. In contrast, the statistical success of a direct mail program can take days, even weeks to measure.

Alone, a targeted email campaign yields most of its results within two days. In most instances you get feedback from your prospects immediately via reply, web visit or a phone call.

Email can be sent to a prospect while still on the phone call. That's a big switch from mailing out literature, waiting a week, (hoping that it arrives and is reviewed) and then following up. Your message can be reinforced in real-time. Your target prospects will get to see and hear your position and this will help you build mindshare faster. This has been a huge help to sales people.

Also, email has powerful tracking and reporting capabilities. You can know who did what with your message. Some sophisticated marketers are even tracking when their email message is forwarded.

The killer application of email marketing and phone calling is the ability to prioritize phone calls based on the actions of the email recipient. With the tracking capabilities you can now know what link they clicked on and where they went to next. Plus, you can track many other elements as well.

At InTouch we've found that using email is a great tool to "nurture" sales leads. We often use email fulfillment for pre and post telephone call follow up. This combination has been tremendously effective by doubling our response rates at a minimum.

Email can "push" more traffic to your website and reinforce a phone call and your information can be easily shared throughout a prospect site.

You may get phone calls from people who simply got a forwarded message. Our clients are getting qualified sales leads that weren't originally on our radar because we sent email to someone else and that person forwarded that information.

A few words of advice, if you plan to tie an outbound calling program with email, you need to be aware that the email message and phone calls need to be tied closely together. Just like direct mail, you can't wait more than one or two days before your message is lost because email boxes are getting just as clogged as our other boxes.
Also, if you plan to do this yourself remember that your reps need to be trained on the dynamics of utilizing email. This includes timing their outbound calls appropriately and guiding a prospect through a review of web based information "on the fly".

If used properly, email marketing will increase your response rates and shorten your selling cycle. The bottom line is that you can know what's going on in real-time.


Brian Carroll is the CEO of InTouch Incorporated and the former President of Carroll Communications. Brian has held a wide variety of sales/marketing positions since he began his career 1989. Brian developed his marketing experience by working on programs for some of Minnesota's premier companies including Cray, Honeywell and Piper Jaffray. He speaks on subjects related to improving sales effectiveness and lead generation strategies for the complex sale.

Brian has been featured in CMO Magazine, The Wall Street Transcript, Inc. Magazine, Star Tribune, Pioneer Press, The Business Journal, Direct Marketing News, MarketingProfs, MarketingSherpa and numerous online publications.
Visit InTouch Incorporated or reach us at 800-810-7710.