You’ve got the data collected, the leads qualified and the message ready to send. It’s time to execute. How do you ensure that your campaign execution efficiently maximizes the response rate?
Timing
If you’ve collected your leads from a trade show, you’ll want to take advantage of the fresh contact and execute the campaign as soon as possible after the show. Even if it may take several days to qualify all the leads, a simple post-show communication keeps the contact cycle fresh.
Email campaigns could benefit from strategic timing as well. How do your customers use email? Are they traditional 9-to-5 workers or constant shift coverage? Are they mobile email users or traditional office email users? Think of your own inbox for a moment. How much attention does each email that is queued up from the weekend get? Can you click on links if you get your email on your phone and if so do they always work? If possible, schedule the execution so the emails do not get lost in the weekend shuffle. Also, if embedding links, take steps to ensure that the links will work on any browser platform.
Ease of responding
When your lead responds, what is their experience like? Does their response pre-populate their data in either the order form or survey form for them? Or does it require manual registration and data entry from them? The more manual intervention required, the more likely the response will go unfulfilled. Could you embed in the response URL customer ID codes for lookup or tracking purposes? Or is it a just a generic link to a site? Again, having the customer’s data already available to the lead helps increase the likelihood of a successful response. A future post will go into more detail on the technical details of embedding IDs into the URL to better populate and track your responses. Consider your own experiences with email offers you’ve received and the responses (or lack thereof) that you’ve given? Which ones did you find to be more effective?
Even if the message is the right message to the right contact at the right time, a bad response experience could jeopardize the sale.
