What is Connect 365?

Home
/
Blog
/
Connect 365
/
What is Connect 365?

Lead Generation & Social Media Automation with a Personal Touch

One of the questions we hear fairly often is, “What is Connect 365 and how is it different from X, Y or Z email marketing system or CRM?”

At first glance, you might think it’s just another email autoresponder like Infusionsoft, Mailchimp or Active Campaign.

Peek beneath the hood and you’ll discover that there is much more to Connect 365 that helps maximize your team's email outreach efforts so your messages don't go into the email graveyard. Connect 365 is a complete lead management, email outreach, social media automation and automated sales follow-up system that will help your company build trust with people.

Most business owners agree that lead generation is one of the most important (and frustrating) aspects of owning a business, and it should be a priority to stay ahead of the competition. And, until now, most companies were faced with a stark choice between paying premium prices for a marketing agency (that they couldn’t afford), or spending a lot of time learning and trying to cobble a consistent and effective sales development strategy together manually.

To help our clients achieve lasting success we’ve combined:

Next-Level automation tools to let you accomplish more and generate better engagement with your prospect list
Done-for-you services to build high-level awareness with your market
Training & Coaching to enable you to unlock the true potential of a lead generation and sales development system

At Connect 365, we've developed an email and social media automation tool that solves many of the traditional problems presented by the alternative software, training or agency programs out there for small and medium-sized companies.

By bringing these altogether, you can develop a consistent lead generation and outreach strategy that works for you day-after-day, week-after-week, and at a fraction of the price you would pay if you hired a traditional marketing agency to handle all of your sales development campaigns for you.

So, what exactly is included and how will Connect 365 make your life easier?

Let’s jump in and take a peek.

Personalized Email Outreach at Scale

Customers often come to Connect 365 looking for a way to make their email campaigns more effective.

Although an email autoresponder like Infusionsoft or Active Campaign can seem like a magic bullet for communicating with all of your prospects at once, the truth is that delivery rates and open rates continue to decline for many of these services.

And with these large email tools that send from a supply of their own servers Google and other leading email providers have gotten great at recognizing them...often leading to being sent to the dreaded ‘Promotions’ tab.

Because Connect 365 piggybacks on your Gmail, Google Workplace or Office 365 (Outlook.com) account rather than 3rd-party servers, your message is treated like an email you manually sent. Because the messages are personalized and delivered just like a manual email, Connect 365 delivers higher email open rates (on average - above 35%+).

Emails like this…

Or this…

Can have their place. But they don’t build trust and drive responses consistently enough. And every recipient knows this was sent to a full list of people or a cold list.

In most cases...it even says so within the email.

With Connect 365's software solution, we automate the sending of emails to groups of contacts, but deliver them exactly like an email you would have manually written and sent.

This helps you stand out from the sea of big, bulk marketing emails, by being personal. And on average has a higher likelihood of deliverability and being seen by your recipients.

Build Market Awareness Through Done-for-You Social Media Automation

Studies have shown that it takes multiple touchpoints before a prospect remembers you. And, that number goes up every year as we get bombarded with more and more advertising. The good news is that those touches don’t ALL have to be via email.

In fact, the fastest way to build your reputation and your platform is if your prospects see you everywhere (especially in their inbox). Most companies report that they are most likely to open an email if they recognize the sender.

Makes sense, right?

So how do you get more of your cold prospects to recognize you and your business?

It’s hard to beat social media these days. It’s a great way to stay in front of your network without being intrusive.

If you are connecting with potential prospects on LinkedIn or Facebook, or your prospects just search for you or your business online, chances are your social media pages will be one of the first things they come across.

For most small businesses, posting consistently on platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn is a huge challenge. Finding what to share, writing a short update or blurb, and doing it daily gets to be a lot.

Especially for those who wear many hats and can’t justify the high fees of a full time social media manager.

Connect 365’s social media automation service (premium membership) leverages a talented U.S.-based writing pool to curate content and craft posts specifically for your business and your audience.

With plans starting at 30 custom social media posts per month that are unique to you, many of our clients are shocked with how quickly we write relevant updates at such an affordable monthly price.

Once you’ve approved your post schedule, your updates are posted to your chosen accounts directly through our integration with Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter. Consistent posts, over time, will build awareness and authority so that your leads are more likely to trust and engage with you.

Note: The done-for-you social media posts are part of our premium memberships that combine email + social media.

Create Effective Sales Development and Follow Up Sequences on Auto-Pilot

If you are like most entrepreneurs, you’ve tried to hustle to create sales opportunities.

Maybe you’ve been cold calling people.

Or attending networking events.

Or manually emailing potential prospects.

But you’ve found the time commitment and lack of insight into what’s really working causes more headaches than wins.

You know email CAN work...you just didn’t have the bandwidth to make it work previously.

Connect 365 gives you the bandwidth by simplifying the entire sales development process (your sales professionals will love this).

We let you:

Easily create multiple sequences that can run simultaneously to different segments (and save time by using pre-built templates)
Automate actions to remove or add contacts into campaigns based on their engagement
Relevant reporting metrics to help you make quicker decisions about where to optimize
Drag-and-drop integration with the apps you are already using through Zapier
An emphasis on your messaging having a personal look and feel

You can follow up with hundreds of leads with just a few minutes of effort each and every month. And automate the removal or addition of contacts into unique campaigns based on opens, replies, or clicks on previous messages.

And with Connect 365's integration to Zapier, you can configure more automation to add or remove contacts from campaigns based on actions they take within the other software or applications you might be utilizing.

This is how you book more appointments, drive more engagement, and get more leads with more ease.

Simplifying Your Sales Follow Up To Get More Consistent Sales Opportunities

Studies have shown that MOST sales opportunities are created after multiple prospect outreach attempts (in many cases 5-12+ attempts).

But unless you have a rock automated sales follow up system in place, it is going to be difficult to follow up with a prospect more than a handful of times. In fact, according to the National Sales Executive Association, almost half (48%) of salespeople don’t send a single follow-up to their prospects.

Why not?

Let’s face it, effective follow-up the old way takes time.

Connect 365 allows you to set personalized follow-up to hundreds of leads in just a few minutes a month. The messages, delivered straight into your prospect’s email box, look like they were personally written by you.

Our messages can even be sent so that they look like responses in the same thread as a previous message. Replies to previously unresponded threads can have a significant effect on reply rates from your prospect list.

With Connect 365 you can create an unlimited number of email campaigns and they can be configured to send as Scheduled Campaigns (you choose the exact date and time for a specific message to be sent out) OR Sequential Campaigns which allow you to set the frequency (or delay) between each message within your campaign.

This feature allows you to drop a contact (or group of contacts) into a campaign at any time and the sequence of messages will be delivered in the proper order and frequency you choose.

Sales happen when prospects have finally reached the point where they need to solve a problem. Often closing the sales comes down to being top of mind with the client, when they make the decision they need to move forward.

Connect 365 allows you to keep in touch with your client list so that they think of you when they are ready to buy your product or service. Once the campaigns are built, your ongoing follow-up with prospects is set. All you need to do is drop them into your campaign and let Connect 365's system handle the rest.

A First-Class Training Program to Learn From Battle-Tested Coaches Where to Find Prospects, What to Send Them, and How to Close Them

One of the toughest parts of getting started with email outreach is gathering your initial lists of people (cold prospects, warm prospects, etc) and importing them into your email system. Some systems will force you to have every prospect opt in to their system. Or, they charge you additional money to add contacts to your database.

But what if you just wanted to personally reach out to new or potential customers? Where do you start?

Connect 365 lets you easily add as many contacts as you like to our system through a simple csv file import process. You can even use Zapier to bring contacts over from your existing lead page.

While we don’t limit the contacts you store within your account, we do recommend capping the amount of prospects you add into your campaigns in order to maintain optimum carriage and ideal sender reputation.

Lucky for Connect 365 members, we provide a full training program on Email Marketing and Lead Generation Mastery.

This includes training on:

The best strategies to build a database of perfect prospects
Guidelines on the right volume of prospects to add to reach your goals
Monthly workshops on the latest marketing, copywriting and lead generation strategies as a part of our Marketing Lab series
How to utilize our proven content templates to achieve the goals for your unique business
Weekly Getting Started workshops that provide a small group Zoom setting to ask questions of our coaching team

Once you’ve got your list, the next email marketing challenge is figuring out exactly what to say to your prospects to get them to open your emails and take action. We’ve got you covered there too.

Connect 365 features dozens of pre-written proven campaigns based on what has actually worked for us, our clients and our partners.

We realize that one size does not fit all, so we have coaches on staff to work with you to edit the emails to fit your business and brand voice.

Nervous about sales calls? We have you covered.

Connect 365 includes a sales mastermind training program for all of our members. We’ve partnered with one of the leading sales training organizations to teach our members how to sell more effectively.

In this twice-monthly training series, we share the playbook to sell more effectively by ignoring what 90% of salespeople do wrong.

Never jump onto a sales call without knowing the exact way to handle whatever comes at you again by following the guidance we provide within Outbound Sales Mastery.

As a member of Connect 365, you have access to these 2x-monthly training calls where you can learn, ask questions and get feedback on whatever is restricting you from turning more leads into clients. AND access to our private Outbound Sales Mastery Facebook group where our community is always available to answer your questions about sales and share our experience to help you to grow your business.