A few years ago, well, at the turn of the century, in transit at Changi airport, I had a very interesting conversation with a sales, or should it be, marketing, expert.
Her theories were sound including, I guess, “anyone who carries out cold telephone calling is a moron”. As an under-pressure sales executive looking after the ASEAN region, I had to agree with her! Cold calling is just not the way in this highly complex, culturally diverse, region.
I had been looking at direct email marketing for a while, and my fellow traveler was adamant that it was highly cost effective and provided the highest ROI for her marketing efforts.
However, apart from being indirectly called a moron, I also had some other concerns. For example, my U.K. based Plc did not have a centralized database of customers, let alone potential customers. For sure, I knew my customers, and my business partners in the region had the name of every company, by country, of the “potentials”.
And then it came to me. I needed a centralized database of customers, prospects, and suspects, categorized by country, industry type, and industry segment, and with all the contact details.
So after much pleading to my Head Office and business partners, I eventually had a central database, and started to email my customers, prospects, and suspects. With a net revenue sales target of US$1,000,000, I quickly found out that I was not going to meet it, as I was spending too much time preparing my emails.
It wasn’t long before I realized that I was still being a moron. I was cold calling again, but rather than using the telephone, I used email! This in spite of the fact that the Plc had invested heavily in a CRM application from PAS, or was it SAP?!
Then I discovered the power of a feature rich online email marketing software that totally removed these headaches. I stumbled across a SaaS product- to the uninitiated, a “Software as a Service” CRM and direct email business solution. I liked it so much that I eventually decided to become an expert and represent the software myself years later.
What SaaS means is that for a monthly fee, you not only have access to your database anywhere, anytime, with few upfront costs, and the software application is also included in the monthly fee.
Better than that, you can segment your customers, prospects and suspects in just about anyway you want, and then send segmented, targeted emails that are highly relevant to them. Importantly, with segmentation, you do not need to develop individual messages to your contacts. What this means is that you now have more time to carry out more productive work, e.g. sell, and this just has to be one of the biggest benefits resulting from CRM and email marketing applications.
Let’s take a simple example. You have a database of contacts, segmented by clients and new business prospects. With your existing clients you will want to be leveraging lifetime value by, for example, improving your upgrade and cross sales revenue steams. You will normally be concentrating on selling your products and/or solutions. With your new business prospects, whilst selling your products and/or solutions are still important, you will concentrating more on building relationships and trust.
The message that you send to these two contact segments will not be the same; there is no need to try to build confidence and trust in your company to a client that has just bought from you. Therefore you should design two distinct email marketing campaigns around these different segments.
But the really clever thing is that you can now analyze, by segment, if the target received the email and what they did with the information, e.g. did they forward it on, did they go to your website, and, if so, where did they go at the website, etc.
Now, that’s great for a business person like me. It allows us to understand the relevancy of not only your overall email campaign, but also to specific contacts allowing you to better understand individual needs and interests. And this is the real point of segmentation – increasing the relevancy of your emails to your contacts with a view that they buy from you, and, vitally, continue to buy from you.
Furthermore, email analytics will also allow you to follow up by email, or telephone, or even at the local Rotary International meeting, armed with some superb marketing information that you could not have had by cold call telephoning!
Whilst the client and prospect segment strategy is just one example it is, in most cases, the starting point for segmentation. Other segment types can be demographics, geography, lead source, major clients, products/services purchased, interest levels, etc.
Interest level segmentation is an interesting topic on its own. In order to accurately determine this segment, and again to further understand your contacts needs and interests, you should use a survey application.
In summary, forget telephone marketing campaigns, segment on a database and use inexpensive and functionally rich CRM, email marketing and survey applications.