Conversational foreplay

How do you approach the first contact with a potential customer or prospect? Do you just jump right in and start making your pitch or do you actually take the time to introduce yourself and your company?
Most good sales reps spend a little time socializing with prospects before they launch into the sales process, particularly when they are cold calling the target. This courtesy doesn’t seem to apply when cold emailing a prospect, though.
I can only imagine how Al might have reacted differently if Douglas Karr had sent a personal contact and introduced himself instead of sending out bulk mail. I know for a fact I would have reacted very differently to the email sent to my LinkedIn account address had it been even vaguely personalized and interested in me.
We even have ESPs getting into the sending cold email game. A reasonably well know ESP added me to their mailing list and sent me an advertisement for a free service they’re providing at Marketing Sherpa this year. I was grumbling about spam to a group of friends, one of whom happens to be their delivery guy. He asked for a copy and spent time chasing down how they got the address.
Evidently I sent mail to the privacy manager who left the company over 2 years ago. That puts me in the “prospect” database. Well, OK, maybe. But there are some many better ways to reactivate a prospect than just adding me to their newsletter. Would it really have taken so much work to send me a personal note from the sales person? It doesn’t have to be very long, just introducing the sales person and telling me they’d seen my inquiry about product and asking if they could talk to me about their offerings.
Had this ESP spent a little time to cultivate me, my response would have been totally different. I could have referred customers to them and given them the name of the sales person that was so helpful and respectful of me and my time. That’s not what they did. In a fit of insouciance they just grabbed a 2+ year old email address and added it to their mailing list. They didn’t bother to tell me why or introduce it to me gently.
Seriously, folks, email is about relationships. Adding someone to a mailing list without their knowledge or permission is a really, really bad way to start a relationship. Show a little respect to your prospects. Send welcome messages, even an automated one, before adding just discovered prospect addresses to mailing lists.

Related Posts

Irrelevant emails drive unsubscribes

A new study published by the Chief Marketing Officer Council and and InfoPrint shows that nearly 50% of all unsubscribes were driven by a lack of relevancy.

Read More

Integrating your email channel

I saw a nicely done example of integrating email into other marketing channels over the weekend.
I was helping a friend pick out a receiver and speakers for their home theatre system on Saturday afternoon. As we were chatting over IRC there was a lot of pasting URLs back and forth, as we tried to juggle speaker components to get a nice, balanced setup on a budget that was fairly tight for a separates system.
I like Polk speakers, and NewEgg are offering some nice deals on them right now, so a lot of the URLs were for bottom of the range Polk speakers at NewEgg.
Mid-morning on Sunday, around 16 hours later, this showed up in my inbox:

It’s mail customized for me, triggered by my browsing the site the day before with a web cookie in place that identifies me as someone who has a fairly long history of ordering from them.
I think it’s “just” targetted mail about home audio speakers, triggered by my browsing in that category and not purchasing immediately. But it’s possible that it’s cleverer than that – it’s listing solely Polk speakers, and it’s showing both the ones I was looking at and the higher end ones in the same product line. It’s nicely done, either way.
It’s a great example of an email that’s been prepared for a specific recipients interests, sent at just the right time. Even though I know that it’s a semi-customized boilerplate, sent by a piece of software in response to my browsing a web site it’s good enough that as a recipient I feel like it’s the company I have a relationship with being helpful, rather than it being intrusive upsell advertising.
It might not work so well if I were a brand new customer, or if it wasn’t quite as well tuned to my interests of the day, but it’s done well.
Nice job, NewEgg.

Read More

Cyber Monday inundation

The cyber monday inundation of mail has hit my mailbox. There’s been a clear increase in marketing mail over the last week. Unfortunately for those marketers, it’s too much and I am just scanning subject lines and marking as read. I don’t have the time to read all this mail.

Read More