Your Sales Leads Ignore You!

4 Reasons Why Your Email Marketing is Useless

By Craig Klein, SalesNexus.com CEO

When your team spends hours to craft well-designed email marketing campaigns, you want the message to motivate sales leads to purchase.  It’s really sad to recognize that much of your email efforts are a total waste of time because the sales lead simply ignores what you have to say.

How can you build the coveted business relationship you desire if you are being ignored???

Here are the four most common reasons why you are being shut out that can be remedied or at least reduced:

1. Spam Filters

The business of monitoring email for spam is a growing industry.  According to eSecurity Planet, almost 100 billion spam emails are being sent each day.  In fact, we recognize the problem of spam filters so much that we dedicated an entire post to giving you tools for avoiding their damage to your email automation.

2. No Reason

Any time you talk about such things as your long track record of success, awards you have received, or the fabulous features of your product, you are really easy to ignore.

Buyers have a hard time seeing those factors as a reason to pay attention to your message.  Your sales leads are probably focused on their own problems.  They have absolutely no reason to pay attention to any of that blustery content.

Instead, know your ideal customer well enough to make your email about their issues and triggering events.  Offer them additional content – just a click away – that will help them solve the issues that keep them up at night.  Make them engage with you.  Measure the results.  See sales leads convert to sales closings.

2. Too Complex

Marketers used to say that it took three seconds for a buyer to decide whether to pay attention to your message.  Today, it is more like a millisecond.  With the plethora of content consumed in an average day, today’s consumers have become highly-skilled scanners.

To garner the attention of sales leads, you must be very intentional about making it simple for them.  Structure the content to make it scannable.  Mix in graphics, videos, tables, and bulleted lists.  Tell a story to make it personal.  Minimize statistics and features in your content.

3. You Don’t Ask For the Sale

While your email marketing is focused totally on the needs of the customer and not your company, you still need to ask.  The term used in direct marketing and copywriting is “call-to-action”. 

The most effective way to deepen a relationship with a sales lead is to offer valuable content that they can click to receive.  You want to make it very clear how to get the information without spending time to search for it.

Even if your email is about selling the clickable content, you still want to give the sales lead an easy way to simply purchase.  Make sure that your message includes a separate call-to-action in the email message itself.  Of course, a second call-to-action needs to be subtlety included in the content piece too.

With a powerful online CRM (Contact Relationship Manager) you can track which email messages are getting response.  Once you identify the ones that trigger action, you can adjust your campaigns to fit the proven method.  That is the beauty of having your email marketing and your CRM fully integrated and responsive to your recipients.

Craig Klein is the founder/CEO of SalesNexus.com which is a leading provider of CRM, email marketing, and lead generation solutions for business-2-business sales teams.