Really, there are no more excuses. Why would we marketers ever spam prospects in the era of marketing automation? In the past, we had to be extremely careful with our email lists. You can’t write a white paper, then blast your entire email list with that paper. Yes, even if it’s groundbreaking and truly amazing. So the right thing to do was to write it, post it on one’s website, and hope that prospects would download it. Because the last thing you need is to send out something that a prospect would see as spam.
Now, with marketing automation, marketers don’t have to lose sleep anymore over whether to send their content to prospects. When you have the intimate knowledge of a prospect that only marketing automation can give you, you KNOW if they are interested in a certain type of content and whether they would find it useful, or bothersome. Even better: you know if the timing is right to send them that content.
Let’s go back to our white paper. We invested a lot in writing it, in making it truly useful. But not all our leads would be interested in reading it right now. As you monitor your marketing automation dashboard, you can easily see those leads that are cold (for now), and those that are getting warmer. It is especially easy to spot leads that have become quite active on your web site over the past few weeks, visiting often, downloading material, registering for webinars.
These are the leads that would welcome new material from you. Now is a good time to contact them, and timing truly is everything. Of course, the material needs to be high-quality, and it needs to relate to their specific pain point. But figuring out their pain is also fairly easy to do with marketing automation. Armed with knowledge about a prospect’s pain and about the fact that they are warming up to you, getting in touch is completely legitimate. You won’t be spamming them or annoying them – on the contrary, your input would be welcome. I can’t think of a better place to be for a marketer.
Google+Tags: Email Marketing
