Partner Article

Profunnel look at online marketing

Matthew Hall, Managing Director of Profunnel, lead generation specialist, looks at why online marketing often fails.

Some say that email marketing is hugely important to lead generation and business growth. You may have a comprehensive Google Adwords campaign, a large SEO strategy, a vast social media presence and a fantastic looking website. But if you are not orchestrating these all together then you will be missing out on lost revenue potential.

You may have seen this many times before. You can see potential visitors who have visited your site but after the visit you don’t know who they were, how hot they were, how many times they have visited the site previously and where they came from.

Many companies are using email marketing to simply blast messages out and hope clicks turn to calls or enquiries. This is where email marketing fails. Companies are not using a marketing automation tool to understand who is hot or what they are interested in and then automating messages to get them back to the site where sales people are alerted to who has visited the site as they land.

You need to identify and then react in the correct manner to your best leads at the best times, giving your sales people the best possible leads to convert.

So stop your email marketing now and start to look at why nearly all standard email marketing fails.

Your powers of persuasion may be one of your strongest assets in business; but try to sell to someone who is not interested in your product, or at that moment in time, and you are dead in the water. The exact same goes for email marketing. Direct those emails to an uninterested party and guess what? They’re not interested.

As with all marketing tools, research is key to success. Put in the extra work to find out what interests your prospective customer and you are half way to converting them into a client. Sidestep this vital research stage at your peril. You’ll be left scratching your head and wondering why email marketing fails.

A marketing automation system allows you to handle all your online inbound and social marketing in a simple solution. It allows you to take all your marketing media and then understand what prospects are interested in when they get to your site. This research can then be fed back into marketing campaigns to allow tailored content to be emailed out through nurturing campaigns.

Prospects all want golden nuggets of information – little snippets of business advice, bespoke to their individual needs. But remember what you say to one customer may be a source of annoyance to another. At best, the angry prospective customer ignores the email: at worst your company’s reputation plummets. Getting that all important content just right makes your email relevant to your target audience. The journey of trust and respect starts as the email recipient knows they are being fed useful information. Study your database and feed them with good quality content and watch your click-through rates soar.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Tom Keighley .