Even if you have a clean lead generation email list, if people never open your emails, you’ve got a problem, and purchasing a new list isn’t the solution (although that’s often the approach many business owners take).
Here are four strategies we use with our clients to turn their email campaign results around and begin generating higher quality leads for them to call.
- Increase the percentage of nurturing content you share. You have to recapture your email list’s attention. The most effective way to do that is by consistently providing them intriguing, relevant blog content that re-establishes your expert value to them. Nurture your email list with educational blog posts about their trigger events and business issues, sprinkled with the value you provide your clients.
It will take some time to re-capture their interest, but as they notice you are no longer trying to sell to them with every email, they’ll begin to engage again.
- Incorporate sales calling into your lead generate campaign. It may seem counter intuitive to call contacts when you aren’t getting the results you want from your lead generation campaign, but maybe your contacts haven’t noticed your emails. Call the list to raise awareness and qualify that you really do have the correct contacts and companies.
Recently one our IT managed services clients started calling members of their non-responsive, targeted email list. A number of them confirmed that they hadn’t noticed the emails but that the topics were definitely of interest.
- Validate your non-responsive email list. During every campaign we run for clients, there comes a point when it’s time to validate the contact information for all non-respondents. If your data is bad you want to remove those contacts from your email list. It’s wasting resources while negatively distorting your results.
During his calling, the sales rep from our IT managed services client discovered that more than 40% of the companies who had never responded were bad data. He also discovered a large portion of the contacts on his email list were smaller than their sweet spot sales prospect. The business owner thought he had a good email list – until his sales rep started calling.
For large lists, we use ExchangeLeads to validate data. Check them out if you want to validate your list.
- Engage on social media. Social media is an effective way to connect with non-responsive contacts. Use Twitter and Linkedin to comment about relevant business issues in your target market. Offer high value custom content like your nurturing blog posts, ebooks, infographics, white papers and videos to get them to engage in a conversation or click through and re-add themselves to your email list.
On the plus side, not only will you engage with people who have previously been unresponsive, but you’ll also reach new prospects who aren’t on your email list but probably should be.
Strategies 2, 3 and 4 are time intensive when you have a large list. In that case, focus on the non-responsive contacts to carve out a test group and evaluate your findings. You can make a better decision about your next step when you have more data.
If you would like someone to ghost write your nurturing campaign and blog content, send me an email. We now create and send custom content for our clients and may be able to do the same for you.