They tell us that the recession is over, and we’re thrilled, but companies are still very careful with their budgets. While there are certainly less layoffs, companies are not exactly back to hiring either. Companies are still under a lot of pressure to perform well, generate revenue, and survive the challenging economy, despite being short on manpower and on basic resources.

Efficient Marketing

We believe it’s possible to not just survive the economy, but to thrive. If you can make your marketing organization highly efficient, if you can create effective marketing campaigns that deliver truly qualified leads to sales, you will see increased revenue.

To do that, you need to move away from traditional, wasteful email blasts and to really focus on your prospects. Your goal is to improve your communication with your prospects and to identify those who are ready to buy.

Listen to Your Prospects

When you send a single generic message to a big list of prospects, you’re not really listening to them – so why would they listen to you, and especially when they’re watching their budgets so carefully? When you listen to your prospects and make sure you identify their pain point, then address it with your marketing communication, you will get a much higher response rate.

Give Them Value

In addition to getting people to respond, segmenting your prospects and targeting your communication to their needs is one of the best ways to give them value. In a tight economy, no one will buy from you unless you can convince them that your solution brings them near-term value. Can a generic email blast really achieve that?

Respect your Prospects

How do you feel when you receive a generic, non-personalized email? Do you open these emails? Do you read them? Click on the links they contain? We don’t know about you, but we ignore impersonal emails because to us, they seem like junk. To make sure people actually read your emails, always personalize your emails with a first name. A good marketing automation tool will take care of that for you.

Nurture, Don’t Badger

As enthusiastic as you are about your product, your prospects have other things on their minds and would appreciate it if you gave them some space. Sure, always be on their minds, but you have to space your communication in a way that respects their level of interest. If they’re obviously interested (opened your previous email, clicked on the link, spent seven minutes on your website), you should definitely follow up more often and with communication that answers the pain they demonstrated while on your site.  Marketing automation tools track down each Web visitor and provide you with this important information.

But if a prospect is obviously uninterested, or lukewarm, do tone down your communication and space it out so that it never becomes annoying and triggers an opt-out.

Demand Generation Systems More Important than Ever

Marketing automation and sales acceleration systems are essential for optimizing your marketing efforts. If you don’t know how a prospect responded to a previous campaign, it’s hard to tailor the next communication to their exact needs, and to improve your communication if the previous campaign has left them cold.

Sure, your budget is tight and you don’t have as many people as you used to have two years ago. But your marketing campaigns can still be very effective, especially if you use marketing automation solutions. A good marketing automation system tracks and nurtures your prospects, communicates with them effectively, identifies qualified leads and send alerts to sales as appropriate, prevents time wasted on chasing unqualified leads, and in general provides you with the information you need to close sales faster.