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Once you've spent the time and money to generate quality leads for your company, having an effective crm lead management system is the best way to convert those hard-won sales leads to customers. As a busy entrepreneur, creating a lead management system to engage with your prospects consistently is the key to turning your leads into customers.
And, most entrepreneurs will tell you that while lead generation should be one of the most important priorities for a business, maintaining a consistent lead management system can be a challenge.
Until recently, a business was faced with either hiring help with contact management at a price that wasn't in their marketing budget or trying to fit lead management and tracking into an already busy day.
It is difficult to remember to reach out to the companies in your sales pipeline when you are busy working with clients, managing customer service, and tracking other sales activities.
Even if you have a sales team, your average sales rep would rather be talking to leads rather than managing a lead process or learning complicated customer relationship management software.
Connect 365 is a lead management solution that focuses on personal email outreach and follow up. Our customer relationship management solution allows you to send personalized email sequences to each business in your sales pipeline.
No more manually tracking who needs to get which email on which day. Connect 365's software solution connects with Gmail, Google Workplace, or Office 365 (Outlook.com) to automate the sending of emails to groups of contacts.
Your message is treated like an email you manually sent and has a higher likelihood of deliverability and being seen by your recipients.
Because the messages are personalized and delivered just like a manual email, Connect 365 delivers higher email open rates (on average - above 35%+).
How Many Emails Should You Send A Prospect?
Why do really good leads end up dropping out of your sales pipeline?
In most cases, they simply have not heard from your company enough for you to begin to build a relationship.
Most of the time a lead will only hear from a company when they send an initial outreach message. Since a typical open rate for a business email is less than 20% - there is a good chance that message was not even read.
Want to stand out even more?
Send more messages.
Microsoft conducted a study that shows that by the fourth contact, a full 89% of sales people have given up.
The good news is that all of the touches can take place in multiple marketing channels. Touches can come from email, but they can also happen via social media, phone calls or even from your website.
Connect 365 includes social media integration with LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter so that you can stay top of mind 24/7 and make the sale
Sending just 3 or 4 emails in a campaign will help you stand out above the 89% of sales people who have given up. Consistent contact over time is the way to stay top of mind with your prospects.
The more consistently you email over time, the greater the chance that you’ll be the company your lead calls in a month or a year when they need your service.
The reason that most businesses don’t email more often is because they don’t have the right pipeline management and lead tracking software to send relevant messages to businesses over time.
Campaign management can seem like a full time job - good lead management software -like Connect 365 can make the job a lot easier.
Two Different Types of Email Campaigns To Know
Connect 365 can be used to send messages that work for all stages of the business lead lifecycle. Whether you are just getting to know your lead or following up with past customers, we have campaign templates available in the software. Read on for recommendations on what kind of campaign to send.
There are two main types of email campaigns that can be sent through Connect 365.
- Sequential campaign. In this type of campaign, The messages are sent based on the number of days since the last campaign message. The first message gets sent immediately, the next message would get sent X days later.
- Scheduled campaign. This is when the messages are sent on a specific date. When you add a lead to this type of campaign, they may not get a message right away. Instead, they'll get the next scheduled message in the sequence.
Sequential Email Outreach and Lead Management Campaigns
The most common type of lead management campaign businesses use is a sequential campaign. This type of campaign is not date-specific.
This is the best type of campaign to use for general nurture campaigns, for example, one of our most effective campaign templates is the long term nurture campaign which sends a monthly message to prospects.
This type of campaign is a great investment in your lead management strategy. Once you add someone's name to the campaign, they hear from you once a month (or at whatever frequency you set) with no further effort or campaign management on your end.
Consistency is where most business owners struggle - a good evergreen campaign, like the one below, will help you keep in touch and stay top of mind.
How to Create a Sequential Email Outreach Campaign
Connect 365 comes with over two dozen proven email campaign templates that you can use to get a head start on your sequence.
To get started, go to campaigns on the main dashboard and then choose “use a template”. Choose the template you would like to use for your campaign from the menu on the right.
In this example, I’m going to create a campaign inviting people to join my LinkedIn group - so I chose the Group Invite Campaign
Step 1: Select the Campaign
Step 2: Edit the Campaign Settings and Customization Options
On the next screen, add a few details about the campaign and choose the email address your campaign will be sent from. You can also check the “high priority” box if you want this campaign to be sent before other queued campaigns in your account. You can also automatically cc or bcc each of your messages. The bcc is often used to send messages to another crm platform or to other management tools.
Step 3: Create A Campaign Tag to To Add Leads to Your Campaign
The next step in the process is to select the tag you want to use to send the message. In this example, I'm setting the tag as "Group Invite".
When I add this tag to the contact details of one of my leads, they will be added to the campaign and will start receiving messages.
Step 4: Edit Your Campaign
Once you've selected the tag to add leads to the campaign, the next step is to set your message requirements. You can set the date that the campaign starts.
This is handy if you want to tag leads into the sequence after you've created it, but you don't want the messages to start immediately after you apply the tag the first time.
On this screen, you can also set how often you want Connect 365 to check for new tagged leads to add to the campaign.
Click the save button and the tag next to the first message will change from "draft" to "scheduled".
You can also choose to send yourself a test message.
Once that's done, you are now ready to continue editing the rest of the messages in the sequence.
If you would like to add additional messages click the orange compose button.
Once you've edited and saved all of the messages, your new lead management campaign is complete. The next step is to review your leads and continue tagging them to add them to the campaign.
Want a better system for getting leads and clients?
Then you need to attend our upcoming workshop that goes step by step through our lead generation process that has been so successful in our clients’ businesses -- the L.E.A.D. Blueprint. Sign up here now!
Scheduled Email Outreach and Lead Management Campaigns
Although we recommend sequential campaigns as a lead management tool most often because they are evergreen and don't expire, sometimes, you need to send a campaign to leads that are focused around a specific date or event.
Scheduled campaigns are lead management sequences where each message goes out at a specific date or time.
For example, landscape businesses might want to set up a sequence where messages are sent describing garden tasks for each month of the year because it would seem very odd to be getting messages about collecting flowers for spring bouquets in the middle of January. Setting up a scheduled lead management campaign follows many of the same steps as a scheduled campaign.
For this example, I'm setting up an email outreach campaign to recruit promotional partners for a specific event.
Step 1: Select the Campaign
Your first step is go to the campaigns window by clicking the campaigns tab and click on the orange "create campaign" button. At the pop-up window, choose "use a template".
For this example, we are using the Joint Venture Partner Recruitment Campaign.
Select the template on the left side menu and then click "start the campaign" creation to have the campaign created in your account.
Step 2: Edit the Campaign Settings and Customization Options
Once you've clicked the create the campaign button on the platform, the next step is to select the email address you want to use to send the follow up messages in your campaign.
You can also set a message as high priority if you want these campaign messages to be sent before other messages in the platform.
You can also choose to cc or bcc your campaign messages. The bcc option is often used to send messages sent through Connect 365 to your crm software.
This window varies a bit from the sequential campaign windows - since you'll be scheduling a specific date and time for the messages to send, you aren't asked for time settings during the initial set up.
The next step is adding your lead segmentation tag.
Once a tag is applied to a lead or contact, then that contact is added to the campaign. But, unlike in a sequential campaign, the lead may not receive a message right away. They'll be added to the group of contacts who gets the next scheduled message.
For example, my campaign has messages scheduled to go out on the first of each month. Whether I tag someone into the campaign on April 15 or on April 30, the first message they'll receive is on May 1.
Step 3: Edit Your Message
Once you've set your tag, your next step is to edit your campaign.
Start by clicking the edit button next to the first message on the campaign screen.
Once you've selected the campaign, it's time to edit the first message.
Choose the date you want the message to be sent and then click save.
When you save, you'll also have the option of sending the message right away.
For a final step, go through and edit the remaining messages in the campaign. Once all the messages are edited, they'll be ready to send and you'll be well on your way toward creating a task management system that brings you sales and leads all year round without additional effort or extensive tracking.
Final Thoughts on Choosing Lead Management Tools for Your Business
No matter the size of your business, there's a lot of opportunity to create a solid pipeline management system to consistently reach out to your best prospect businesses without having to pay a high price to hire an expensive sales and marketing agency.
The key is to send a sequence of email messages so that your leads hear from you consistently over time.
Either a sequential campaign (where people can join at any time) or a scheduled campaign (geared around a specific event) can work depending on your sales cycle and other other lead management systems.
Combine email campaigns with interactions on other marketing channels, and you have a recipe for sales follow up success.
To learn more about how to create a holistic system to find prospects, build awareness and convert those prospects into leads on autopilot, join us on our upcoming workshop below:
Want a better system for getting leads and clients?
Then you need to attend our upcoming workshop that goes step by step through our lead generation process that has been so successful in our clients’ businesses -- the L.E.A.D. Blueprint. Sign up here now!