Every business today large or small is looking to build brand recognition and generate new business opportunities. This seems like an easy task. Just purchase a list of prospects, upload the file to one of the popular e-mail marketing services, select the template you wish to send and wait for the inquiries to come in. Those that have taken this shotgun approach have quickly discovered that it just does not work that way and that building an effective marketing campaign for lead generation is not as easy as they thought.

While there are several popular e-mail marketing/distribution services to help with campaignsending mass emails, most of them are missing key components for building campaigns that deliver measurable results.

Commence Corporation offers CRM software coupled with a lead generation service that fills the gap not addressed by current E-mail Distribution services. Outlined in this article are the components required to execute an effective E-mail Marketing and Lead Generation program, and how Commence is helping small to mid-size businesses build brand recognition and generate more new business opportunities.

Key Components of an Effective E-mail Marketing Campaign

Targeted List

If you plan to distribute marketing campaigns to your customer base, then you have their contact information and e-mail address. But most companies are seeking new business and need to purchase a prospect list based on specific criteria such as geography, vertical industry, title, or company size. Targeted prospect lists are not provided by most e-mail distribution services. This means you must acquire a list yourself then import the list into an Excel spreadsheet, CSV file or a CRM system so that you can upload the list to one of these e-mail marketing services. These lists can be expensive to purchase.

Commence Corporation provides a prospect list for you. The company has access to hundreds of thousands of contacts that can be filtered by numerous criteria. We start with 5,000 prospects. The list is automatically imported to our back-end servers and ready for distribution.

Your Value Proposition

Many companies struggle to identify what makes them unique, how are they different and what product or service do they provide better than everyone else? You must outline this yourself. No e-mail marketing company is going to help you here. This is a consulting service they simply do not offer.

Commence is a marketing consulting firm that often helps companies fine tune their value proposition, making it easier to understand while creating an elevator pitch that resonates with prospective new customers.

Template Creation

You need to build a series of e-mail marketing templates spanning at least 90 to 120 days and each should have a call to action such as download a free white paper, get a product trial or a free sample. E-mail marketing services often offer a template library whereby you can take a pre-built campaign and tailor it for your use. The challenge here is consistency. It takes time and effort and some level of expertise to build a series of campaigns and landing pages. Typically, companies with the help of the service provider will get the first campaign completed and out the door and maybe even a second one before they cry UNCLE. They quickly realize that they do not have the time to create a series of campaigns that cover the next 6 to 9 months. As a result, there are often huge gaps of time between mailings and therefore no consistency.

As part of the Commence lead generation service the company will build a series of campaign templates for your approval, each with a call to action. These are custom templates designed specifically for your business and can be scheduled to cover any period such as six months, nine months or one year.

Campaign Distribution

E-mail marketing services do a good job of distributing your campaigns if you provide them with an opt in mailing list. The challenge for most businesses is simply deciding what are you going to send out, when will you send the campaigns (weekly, monthly, quarterly) and to whom will you be sending them? This really requires a road map that outlines each step of the process going out several months, but do not look to the e-mail marketing company for help. They do not provide this.
Commence does. As part of the company’s lead generation service Commence will produce a road map outlining what campaigns are going out, who they are going to, along with the dates and times of the mailings.

Campaign Effectiveness

How do you plan to measure the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns? Most e-mail marketing services will provide you with reports of who opened the campaign, deleted it, or asked to unsubscribe, but there is no nurturing program or distinction between hot, warm, and cold leads.

Commence Corporation offers an automated lead scoring capability that assigns points to each prospect based on their behavior. For example, those that open a campaign are assigned two points, those that clicked on a call to action are assigned three points and those that ask to schedule a call are assigned five points. The higher the point total the more qualified the lead is. This ensures that your sales team is laser focused on the most promising new opportunities. In addition, the leads are imported and tracked in the Commence CRM system where you can add notes, schedule future activities and follow-ups and manage the new opportunity to closure.

The Bottom Line

Commence Corporation offers an “All-in-One” E-mail Marketing and Lead Generation service that is filling the gap not addressed by today’s popular E-mail Marketing services. We will provide a prospect list of up to 100,000 contacts, help define your value proposition, build custom templates for your business, create a road map for campaign distribution, and score the leads based on how qualified they are. Commence is an affordable service that is delivering substantive value to our customers. Call Commence Sales at 877-266-6362 or e-mail us at sales@commence.com.