Email: Everybody's doing it. And they're doing it a lot. A study by McKinsey Global Institute and International Data Corp. found that the average worker spends 28 percent of his or her workweek reading and answering emails. That makes email seem like an obvious choice for sales—if it's everyone's preferred method of communication, it should be your top way of reaching prospects, right?
Maybe so, but only if you do it right. We asked Tom Sather, senior director of research for New York-based Return Path, an email marketing and intelligence firm, for advice on using email as a sales tool. Here's what he had to say.
Print+Promo (P+P): What are some ways salespeople can use email to either boost or gain sales?
Tom Sather (TS): Building and maintaining extended email campaigns to nurture prospects by regularly providing valuable information about their marketplace, their challenges and the trends that affect their performance is probably the most effective way for salespeople to boost their productivity. It demonstrates expertise and reminds your contacts that you have a solution to important problems, ensuring that when they're ready to act, they know to reach out to you. It can also shorten sales cycles, especially by giving your prospects an easy way to pass your information to their colleagues as they build an internal case to move forward with your proposal.
P+P: How does using email for sales compare to using it
for marketing?
TS: They're extremely similar, with one key exception: personalization. Email for sales can and should be increasingly customized for individual prospects as you learn more about what they need, how they approach their challenges and where they are in the sales cycle. Email marketing is an extraordinarily powerful tool to connect with large audiences and deliver information to bring them into your sales pipeline. When suspects become prospects, your messages should be different-no longer about the value you offer the marketplace, but about the value you can offer them.
P+P: What are some big mistakes or things to avoid when using email for marketing or sales purposes?
TS: You can undermine your relationship in the click of a mouse by sending a generic, mass-market message to prospects who expect you to know them better. For example, don't send campaigns "introducing yourself" to longtime contacts, and don't offer demos to people who've seen them and are in later stages of consideration. Email can make highly customized, genuinely personal communication easy and efficient, but it can make it just as easy to look like you don't bother to know who you're talking to.
P+P: Can email be a viable tactic for cold calling?
TS: Not really. The equivalent of cold calling might be viable if your approach is extremely careful, courteous and unintrusive, but it's probably not the best way to use email—partly because it's so difficult to follow accepted best practices when you don't have explicit permission to send mail to someone. As a sales tool, it's a far better way to maintain contact with people who genuinely want to stay in touch.
P+P: What is the biggest key to success when using email for sales or marketing purposes?
TS: Segment. As much as you can afford to take time to create distinct groups of recipients among your email subscribers, do it. Even if it's only two groups, "know me personally" and "haven't met yet," create a system to speak differently to different people. Email can be legitimately helpful to your sales effort even if it's only a generic monthly note to your whole list, but it's an infinitely better tool if you use it to build real relationships.
P+P: Do you have any interesting statistics on email marketing or sales that might be helpful or eye-opening?
TS: It's probably more common than you think for marketing email to go undelivered. The best senders in the world lost 17
percent of the messages they sent last year to filters that either blocked them or sent email to users' spam folders. As your email marketing program grows, this can quickly become a serious problem that weakens relationships and revenue. Free tools like SenderScore.org can help you understand how mailbox providers like Yahoo! and Gmail evaluate your reputation as a sender, which influences whether they deliver your messages to users' inboxes.