COMMUNICATION TIMELINES - Anatomy of an Email Inbox - 3/6/17

How long should we communicate with our prospects?

I had the opportunity to speak at a Women in Consulting event in San Francisco last week. Our topic was Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and the customer journey, but of course email marketing came up as a part of the discussion.

We talked about what kind of emails these business consultants were deploying for their prospects and customers and what they should be doing in the context of building a strong customer relationship and improving conversion rates throughout the decision funnel.

The specific question that came up was how long should they continue the conversation.  

If you put yourself in the shoes of your customers, think about why they signed up in the first place and what you had to say that meant something to them.  Couch this in the context of their journey in a relationship with you and what information is relevant at what point in that journey.

Also important in the process is determining what you want to get out of the relationship. For it to be successful, there needs to be value on both sides of the equation.  Consider these business goals:

-  To make a connection with your prospects and build a long term relationship
-  To provide the right content at the right point in the customer journey
-  To stay top of mind
-  To improve conversions through the journey (and improve ROI and the bottom line for your business).

So, back to the question of how long to communicate.  As a marketer, we build brand and awareness, drive consideration and conversion.  These are the classic decision funnel steps.  We invest sometimes millions of dollars to do this and our goal should be to give the target customers compelling reasons to "raise their hand" as early in this decision process as possible.  This is important because it allows you to:

- Take prospects out of the market
-  Influence the conversation at an early stage
-  Become a trusted expert and partner in the decision
-  Improve conversions over both the short and long term.

Depending on your product, the buying cycle could be long or short and even if it is a short cycle commodity or necessity product, you still want them to come back for repeat purchases.

If you are not top of mind and there when that trigger point happens that pushes them to the next phase in their decision process or even circles them back to an earlier stage, you will miss the opportunity for the continued conversation and conversion.

Over the past 20 years, I have mostly worked with long decision cycle consumer products.  The businesses spent millions of dollars to build large databases of prospects and often only 1-2% actually purchased in any one period.  Does that mean there is no hope for conversion over the short term? Certainly if you stop communicating, your chances for making this happen are less likely, but what if you maintain a relevant conversation over a long time?

In working with sales teams, they often focus on immediate prospects and complete their follow up over weeks or perhaps sometimes months if they are good.  Still many of those prospects don't convert.  The sales person goes on to richer opportunities and the prospect languishes in the database. Oftentimes they are still actively or passively in the market, but just not yet ready to take the next step.  With CRM and marketing automation systems, we as marketers can impact what happens.  

I have built and replicated tests in multiple industries where simply by developing an ongoing long term communications strategy, I have consistently seen 20-25% improvements in sales from these prospect databases.  Consider a known prospect akin to a nugget of gold.  Would you throw that away and ignore it?  Would it lose value to you?  Obviously, the answer is "no." 

The answer to our question then at the start this post is simple.  I often told my teams: continue to communicate with a prospect until they buy, die or unsubscribe!  And even when they buy, you continue to communicate since then you have the strongest relationship and should endeavor to continue it. Certainly, there is a lot more to how this happens and when, but some simple best practices can get you started.

Best Practices for Long Term Communications

-  Know as much as you can about your prospects and use it
-  Always personalize your communications
-  Create a two-way conversation that helps you learn more
-  Use behavioral data to further understand your prospects
-  Create simple segments, learn from them and build them over time
-  Build a customer journey map and content needs at each stage to drive the conversation
-  Don't quit communicating unless you are asked to do so
-  Treat every known prospect as the valuable gold nugget that it is and be sure you realize the value from the investment you made in it!

If you follow these best practices for customer communication, you will not be a SOUR emailer!