Globally Warm Up Icy Leads

Situation: You have a thousands of contacts in leads and accounts in the system gathered from years of prospecting. Most have sat on ice for awhile. It's a very common problem because contacts come from a variety of sources (marketing events, list purchases, website inquiries, contact managers, account databases, etc.). Are those leads dead? Maybe, but the hard work you and your marketing team took put in the get them in the first place is not all lost. One way to identify bad, old, and otherwise no-longer-relevant contacts is to use an email marketing campaign. It's also a great way to simultaneously stimulate your pipeline.

The Carrot: First, you need compelling content. Perhaps you have new information you want to push to your customers -- price reductions, special offers, event notice, etc. These are ideal opportunities to touch your marketable contacts because you're not actively selling and they can benefit from the information. Company newsletters also make great inbox stuffers.

The Campaign: The campaign we chose to offer up to these petrified prospects was a newsletter -- mainly because it is gives a lot of value in terms of information, a friendly presentation, and gets a lot of bite-sized messages out to a very diverse group. Because it's a compendium our blog, content to these leads is fresh and varied. It wasn't a hard sales message; just useful information. With a little help from Photoshop and Dreamweaver to create the HTML content, we used Relationals' email marketing campaign feature to send the newsletter to a targeted list.

Optimal Targeting: One of the most powerful features in Relationals is the ability to build highly filtered views and use these views within targeted campaigns. Why not just hit everyone on the list? Let's say you only want to target known cold leads, or you have multiple lead sources and want to exclude one, or you have accounts that aren't customers yet, but you only want to reach those. Trust me, everyone has their reasons for slicing and dicing up the contact pie. And here's a little secret: you can speed up campaigns by doing as much filtering as possible beforehand.

Below is an actual set of Advanced Filters we use to send out our newsletter to non-users and contacts (leads and accounts) that haven't signed up with Relationals. Why they haven't, who can really say, but we wanted to use this as a way to (A) clean out some of the bad contact data or (B) get them interested in thinking about Relationals again.

The way you'd set up your filters depends entirely on how you've set up your processes within your organization. For this situation, we used:

1. The first filter is Email. Because I know there are likely bad email addresses due to a poor merge job some time ago, I only want records that have an "@" symbol. It's not a perfect filter, but it'll do for now. This also eliminates any blank email addresses.
2. Next I've set Account No. to equal blank. We have some accounts in our database that are not customers yet, but we transitioned them into an account. But our internal policy is that if you become a customer, you get an account number. Thus if you don't have an account number, you're not a customer.
3. The next line is interesting. Related To is how we identify a contact that has a company associated with it. When we synch with Outlook, all our contacts are copied to Relationals. But we each have personal business contacts that I don't want to send to, so I make sure that this field has to have an entry. So if it's blank, I know that it won't send.
4. The Hard Bounce Count filter identifies contacts who have bounced less than 2 times. It's an arbitrary value I'm comfortable using. I could easily set it to 1, but 2 lets me know the first bounce wasn't a fluke.
5. Next I want to make sure I target users who are not opted out. The email processing engine does this automatically, but by adding this filter, I can save it a little time. In fact, the more filters you can put into the view, the shorter time the email engine will spend processing which will improve email delivery time.

The Afterglow: As the results came in from the campaign, Relationals tracked opened emails, hard bounces, click-throughs, and opt-outs. This information was invaluable because now we could create another view in contacts to clean out bad emails (those that are deader than dead). The opt-out list was automatically updated so we can reduce the number of emails needed to send in the future (and the number of people we bother). And (probably the most important), we got great visibility for our blog, webinar, and 2-day summit. The best thing is, the next newsletter we send will offer yet another opportunity to hone that list.