Turn Email Marketing Into a Sales Conversion Machine

Thanks for stopping back to jasonverdelli.com. In this post I want to give you some of the basic tools that you will need to start turning your email marketing campaigns into a solid sales conversion machine. You want to be able to think of your email marketing campaign as a driving force to convert relationships that you have (i.e. through social networking, real-life networking, etc.) into sales. As you may already now, email marketing is a great channel to be able to bring together all of your thoughts and discussions and communicate it with a target audience. Think of it this way, imagine being away from the office with no computer and no cell phone for an entire week. Now imagine that you spend this 100% of this time away from the office at trade shows where you are constantly networking. When you return later that week you now have to devise a way to create timely communications with all of the quality people you met at the trade shows. If you have spend all week there, most likely you will have way too many people to follow up with than you can handle within a short period of time. So how do you create a timely, consistent and quality follow up with these individuals. Email marketing, if performed correctly, just happens to be one of the most effective ways to follow up.

The trade show example really is symbolic of most of our professional lives. We have a lot going on, we meet new people all of the time (at least in sales), and we are constantly driven to organize and manage our relationships. Over the past 6 years of being in this industry I have developed hundreds of different strategies to manage communications with prospects, current clients, etc. more effectively. Here is what I have found, about 90% of them don't work when applied to all of the time with every different kind of company. The real truth of the matter is that in order to be successful with email marketing you need to determine the strategies that make sense for you to employ - for example, don't send a daily auto-responder to a list of people that you know only checks email once a week. You may ask, we Jason how does someone know if their subscribers check email only once per week. My answer is, do the research. When I say do your research, think about running an online survey out to your list of prospects, clients, etc. If you ask the right questions in your online survey, you will be able to get a better idea of how your email list is going to react to your campaigns as well as knowing what kind of email campaign to send to them.

So let's now discuss ways that you can turn your email marketing campaign into a sales conversion machine.

To make it easy, I have put my thoughts in bullets below:

1. Open Excel or whatever database program you use.


2. Create columns in your database program next to the contact information. The columns need to include LIST SEGMENT, FREQUENCY and FOLLOW UP STRATEGY. As you gather more information about your list through the surveys you might want to consider to add more columns.


3. Now, think of no less than roughly 3 classifications you can put these people into - for example, prospective clients -- current client -- business partners. If you really want to get effective you can add a sub-classification - for example, current client/accounting firms -- current client/restaurants -- current client/manufacturers.


4. Now, in the next column (FREQUENCY), determine how often that you want to send to them. Again, this is going to be based on research and surveying that you have done. Think in terms of DAILY, NEW ARTICLE, WEEKLY, MONTHLY, etc.


5. Now, start thinking of different follow up strategies that you would like to employ when people react to your campaigns (i.e. open emails, click through, etc.). Follow up strategies may be SEND THANK YOU EMAIL, SEND EMAIL WITH TARGETED LINK, FOLLOW UP PHONE CALL, etc.


6. Finally, run a "sort" for each column and then copy the contact information along with the highlighted cells and paste them into a new database file. Save the file - for example, you may save one file as PROSPECTIVE CLIENT - RESTAURANT - DAILY - FOLLOW UP PHONE.

Now that you added these strategies to your list, you are better equipped an more organized to follow through with your email marketing campaign. You are essentially breaking your list down into multiple segments so you can then send more targeted information while having your campaigns scheduled out in advance. This may take a few hours to do the first time, but once you do it you will feel less stressed knowing that you have schedule your email campaigns out for the entire month or even year. This will give you more time to focus on building your list and analyzing your campaigns. Since you are taking up more of your time organizing and procuring your list, you may want to even outsource your email marketing campaign to a professional firm who knows what they are doing as far as messaging, design, sending and reporting statistics to you from your campaign.

There is a great solution that I have actually created to handle the campaign deployment called Send Email Blast.com. You can request campaigns, manage your list and view your campaigns for only $25 per email campaign. Since you have taken the time to read this email I will provide you with a code so you can receive a free email campaign upon setup of your account. In the promo code portion of the account setup use the following code: 5b8rtcv

I hope you enjoyed reading this article. If you haven't started building a list or even if you are currently doing email marketing, this is a fundamental strategy that will produce results. Remember, the more relevant the material of your campaign to the audience, the higher likelihood they will react, become engaged and of course, become clients for you.