In today’s super dynamic markets, customers know exactly what they want. Nearly 50% of customers in the B2B segment look for information on line before they decide what to buy, and most of them contact a vendor only in the fourth stage of the purchasing process – that is, after they shopped around and found the relevant information on their own.

Personalized Marketing that Targets Thousands of Customers

Traditional marketing to existing and potential customers sending large quantities of emails with an identical message without analyzing market segments and preferences is a thing of the past. To generate quality leads, your marketing message and relationship with the customer must be much more personal, focused, adapted to their needs, and timed over the entire lifecycle of the relationship on all media channels – banners, marketing campaigns, direct mailings, landing pages, online and written press, television and radio.

After obtaining leads from these channels, you have to segment the data based on customer needs, and manage the interaction with them in a manner that will maximize the sale opportunity from each lead, contacting each customer whenever is most convenient for them and improving your chances for success.

Challenging, indeed, but certainly doable.

Marketing at a Click

A marketing automation system enables you to focus your marketing efforts, identify leads at the buying stage, begin your interaction with your clients even before the first sales call, time your first contact according to their needs, and cope with the amounts of mails the company sends and receives.

With today’s enterprise email systems, companies can manage complex sales and marketing processes with thousands of customers simultaneously, easily, accurately and automatically. This enables them to focus on the most ‘mature’ leads, shortening the sales cycle and reducing costs per lead. Automation enables you to manage leads and campaigns based on your specific business rules, and analyze and segment customer data to adapt your response to their needs, taking into consideration virtually any possible scenario.

In addition to segmentation of the target audience based on location and roles, marketing automation enables companies to build specific filters based on specific needs, and to segment customers according to their preferences (what they clicked, when, how many times, whether they abandoned a page, etc.). This enables you to create relevant messages that will significantly increase your chances of customers opening your mails, giving each of them personalized treatment, even if the same email was sent to thousands of customers simultaneously. This will convert them from potential clients into active paying ones.

How Does It Work?

Usually, the process begins when a customer visits your website, leaves personal details and joins a distribution list/database. To get customers to complete their details online, you have to phrase your invitation clearly, using simple language, and linking it to a confidentiality clause about how you will use their personal information. This should include an explicit statement that you will not send emails or transfer their details without authorization.

Several aids will increase the interest on the material you send. Write an appealing subject line, design and write text and content attractively and professionally, be loyal to your company’s branding, focus on your target audience, use pictures intelligently, and attach file formats that can be opened on any media (for example, PC, tablet and/or smartphone). After sending the email, review statistical reports to check how many people actually opened the mail, which links they clicked, who unsubscribed from your list and when, etc. Based on this data you can assess the effectiveness of your content, design, creative messaging and appeal of the different subject lines, and decide how to improve your next campaign.

Maximizing Your Campaign’s Effectiveness

Statistics show that, today, 10% of mails do not reach their destination and 40% are tagged as spam. Therefore, the ability of a mailing system to automatically manage return mails has a great impact on the success of your campaign. It is also recommended to follow four distinct steps:

1. Define in advance the business rules of your organization and the path the users will follow with each click (the list they will access and the mails that will be sent to them) based on your knowledge of the customers, their preferences, language, demographic segmentation, previous campaigns, website activity, etc.
2. Synchronize the automation and the information with the business rules so that you can surprise your customers with messages that really appeal to them, and that will connect them to your brand. For example, instead of sending emails timed in days, it is better to send triggers that follow the traces left by a customer.
3. Recruit your sales department. Instead of going through an infinite list of people looking for a needle in a haystack, take advantage of automatic tools and ask sales to contact customers who are willing to hear them. In your marketing capacity, you can keep nurturing those customers that still need to be encouraged and motivated.
4. Define what is important to you when tracing clicks. Do you want to gain insight into a specific behavior and into the success of a specific campaign? Or do you want to view the wider picture and improve your next campaign?

Before deploying an emailing system, remember that beyond technological changes, the process involves transforming your company’s processes and behavior. These changes take time and must be measured, improved and adapted all the time.

An electronic mailing system can optimally serve your campaign’s objectives provided the customer wants to consume your content. An offer that truly provides customers with a benefit and added value will increase your chances of motivating them and initiating a dialog. This will enrich your enterprise’s information while generating marketing and sales processes. Continuous monitoring of your communication and relationship with your customers will help you make sure that the content you are sending out is indeed relevant, and that it matches your customers’ preferences. At the same time, it improves the quality of your leads and the conversion ratio, and directly contributes to increasing profits.