Of all of the Digital Marketing channels available to sales people Email Marketing is still one of the most effective ways to generate sales. BUT BUT BUT, successful email marketing is about moving along a path from Quantity to Quality. In other words it's not about volume, it's not about shotgun blasts to thousands of unsegmented email addresses with no reporting or follow up. It is about the quality of the list, the quality of the content and the quality of the follow up.

A simple but extremely powerful case study to illustrate how good email marketing works.

We were recently called by a software company with 1400 customers on their books. They provided financial software and in the downturn their business pretty much fell off a cliff. The MD was scrambling for ideas and one of the staff mentioned digital marketing. The idea was dismissed as taking too much time and delivering too few results.

This sales guy was not deterred and hired us out of his own pocket to  implement an email marketing campaign. He took the 680 customers he was responsible for and through conversations with 10 close clients formed a picture of 4 issues that were dogging his customers in the changed environment. 3 of these issues he could solve by up selling add-ons from his own company and a fourth was solved with a plug in from a partner company.

We put together an email with the 4 problems and their relative solutions with links for each back to his website for further detail. We used a professional email delivery system, (easy to set up use and configure and low cost for sending see www.email-marketing.ie) and sent the email to his 680 customers.

24 hours later we reviewed the open and click through rates and got an open rate of 45% (actually that's very high for any email marketing campaign) so we had 306 people open the email. Of those 306, 40% clicked on a link that meant 122 people clicked on links. The Clicks were not evenly distributed across the four stories. The second story really resonated and had 86 people clicking on it. When we drilled in to this we saw that 30 people clicked that link more than once and 12 clicked it more than 5 times.
Those 12 people clicked on a story more than 5 times in a 24 hour period. Guess who the sales guy called?
The following morning the sales guys called the 12 people and closed 5 pieces of business.

You must understand the dynamic of Email-Marketing, its a process from quantity to quality, we started with 680 customers and called 12 and won 5 pieces of business. This was a very productive day with an almost 50% closure rate.

Quality List:
If you have customers you have a list. If you don't then get busy building one.
If you don't have a list, you need to build one. Buy a contact list from Bill Moss for your target group and ring the companies and get the email addresses for the key people. Think quality not quantity. You can generate business with 100 people on your list if its used properly.

Quality Content:
The key to good open rates and engagement is recipient centric content.
The email should not be about you, it should be about them. Get out of the way and find out whats important to your customers right now. Make the email about them. Segment the recipients into groups if necessary and send unique emails to each group.

Quality Follow Up:
The reporting in any of the comercially available Email marketing System will provide you with a clear picture of who has opened and clicked. Your task is to follow up and close the sale. We can lead a horse to water…

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