E-Mail Marketing

Sales Tools & Ideas by TJ McCue
Integrating your email strategy with your relationship strategy

Email marketing has become increasingly important in our customer dialogues. That is, if you are having a dialogue.  Some of us are still living in the world of monologues – see this viral marketing campaign for a good laugh about an advertiser and consumer.

The Break Up

With some of my client work, I’ve found companies wanting to integrate all the ways they dialogue with a customer into one framework. They want to integrate sales transactions, service requests, web inquiries, etc., into one platform. If someone comes in for service, they want to follow up with a message automatically. If someone reserves a space, they want to confirm automatically. Yes, this is the holy grail of CRM or a sales automation system, but why it isn’t out there in the mainstream via email marketing firms or CRM players is a mystery to me.

I decided to talk to a close friend of mine, Jeff Walters, who runs what I would classify as a “disruptive” relationship marketing firm – Intrasight Marketing  they specialize in multi-channel dialogues. He rightly believes you can use email marketing efforts to improve your customer relationships.

Most email campaigns are event-triggered. I view your website, click on a link, company asks for info, I share it, and I get an email. Or, company sends me a weekly email with an embedded link to some offer, I click it; I get a response. But I interact with your company, your brand, in so many other ways. How come so few companies know this and integrate it?

Jeff Walters offered these nuggets:

“Strategically, you need to integrate all customer touch points (transactions, inquiries, service, sales), so that you ‘Sense’ what is going on in the relationship. Using that real-time intelligence, you can then ‘Serve’ with subsequent messaging via any communication channel. It sounds easy, but takes the right technology.”

His other suggestion: Find a firm that doesn’t charge by the record or email – that discourages you from looking at the relationship holistically, and, of course, from growing the number of deep relationships that you have.

To your Sales Success.

TJ McCue is president of Q4 Sales, LLC – a business development and sales consulting company. He has written for the Wall Street Journal, among other publications. He can be reached at [email protected]

Comments

[Enrique Burgos]

The difficulties are implementing such new technologies to manage the multichannel response. Integrating all the company IT sistems through this marketing one. Complicate...but necesary in nowadays markets

[Elaine Fogel]

Sounds like good advice!