Lead Management Software Solution Part 3
“Marketing is a societal process which discerns consumers’ wants, focusing on a product or service to fulfill those wants, attempting to move the consumers toward the products or services offered.” Wikipedia.
Today’s marketer is a combination of psychiatrist, strategist and public relations expert. The need to reach an increasingly diverse online audience demands that you utilize all forms of marketing to close the gap from prospect to client. For commoditized industries like mortgage, debt settlement, education, and insurance (where competitors offer nearly identical products), marketing and adherence to best practices can be all that separates competitors.
Email
Email is especially relevant to a discussion of marketing in the context of discussing Lead Management. Most lead management systems allow for a combination of automated, templated, and manual email contact.
One challenge specific to email is the delivery failure rate. Measuring contact with prospects via email is tough. Some email solutions allow you to measure open rates but diving deeper than that is hard. What percentage of your emails landed in spam boxes? What percentage of your emails were never opened due to a poorly written subject line? Or were they sent at an inconvenient time of day? What percentage of your emails were opened but instantly deleted or ignored, and for what reason?
The bottom line is that it is difficult to know ahead of time which emails will actually reach your audience. One simple and effective way to test the delivery rate is to use personal email accounts and try different subject lines, content, text vs. HTML imaging over a period of days. Once you have identified which email format results in the highest delivery rate, roll out your specific message. This method is time consuming but it is free and gives you a fair idea of how the emails look in the end and to what extent they reach your audience.
There are myriad email testing services that try to test the deliverability and look of your email with most of the large email providers such as Gmail, MSN (LIVE), Yahoo, and AOL. These kind of automated testing regimes certainly help delivery rates. Before uploading your emails into your LMS, it is a good idea to make use of a testing tool like Campaign Monitor (http://www.campaignmonitor.com/testing/) to help ensure that you get maximum value out of the email functionalities that LMS provide.
There are paid services that will track and ID click through rates, open rates, bounce and unsubscribe rates, and LMS and CRM systems incorporate these capabilities to varying degrees. But for the average user of internet leads, these services are supplemental and not always useful. For small brokerages or individual loan officers there is rarely enough data to test different email approaches. If you are a large sender of email services and/or working in a high compliance arena then these services are obligatory.
Does email marketing work? Do prewritten automated emails generate business? YES AND YES. I am not one of the pundits out there preaching like a Baptist minister to “Stop sending out mindless emails”. I don’t buy into that mindset for one second. A new study from JupiterResearch predicts email marketing revenue will triple from $2.1 billion last year to $6.1 billion in 2008. That’s Billion with a BIG B. Automated LMS emails can be personalized by automatically incorporating lead data like name or location, and do not need to include fancy html graphics.
Best Practices for an internet environment consists of two kinds of email campaigns; Nurture and No Contact. A Nurture campaign should be informative and delivered to potential clients you have worked with or spoken to. The purpose of this campaign is to stay in touch and top of mind with prospects, until they are ready to do business. Put call to actions in your emails like offering free appraisals next time you do a loan, home valuation, or offer to add value in other ways. No Contact emails are designed to make your telephones or email inbox jingle. These emails should pitch a reason for your prospect to contact you. Try these campaigns for 90 days and evaluate. If they generate responses, keep them going; changing the message on a bi-monthly basis. If they do not work, try something else but don’t ever give up emailing your potential and past clients.
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