Last week I spoke about the importance of the importance of educating your referral sources as well as your prospects. In today’s Best-of Weekly, Marketing Sherpa has a case study (Open access until Oct. 29th) about a couple of companies who use automated e-mail campaigns to help educate their prospects and produce more qualified leads. Here is a quote that describes the typical frustration businesses encounter when they work at generating referrals but don’t take the time to educate people about the type of referral they are looking for:
"The good news was that both companies’ phones were ringing, sometimes off the hook, with interested prospects.
The bad news was that many of these prospects were not qualified. Nevertheless all incoming calls required personal and immediate attention from a sales rep. Sorting out the wheat from the chaff took hours more of calls and meetings … before serious negotiations could even begin."
The case study shows how these companies used automated e-mails written in friendly, conversational tone to help educate prospects and to weed out the un-qualified prospects without having to spend a large amount of resources to so.
One of the tips in the study that I like was to always have the first e-mail in the campaign to come from the actual person that the prospect first had contact with. The example given was that if someone met the company president at a trade show booth, then the first e-mail should come from the president who would personally hand them off (refer them) to someone else in the company.
You can find more information (open access until Oct. 27th) about the success of these campaigns along with samples of the e-mails used by the companies by visiting the Marketing Sherpa site.
