CRM for The Small Business Enterprise

By now you have likely heard about “Drip Marketing” – the process of creating a series of timed email touches (can include snail mail also!) for your opt-in list featuring a consistent message and high-value content for the recipient (i.e. – what’s on their mind, NOT yours) that helps them learn about your business.

Creating effective drip marketing when newly starting out is a daunting challenge for any small business teams, so I thought I would share some simple tips to help you boost your results.

• Find the right database and drip marketing tools. 
  You need this to be as easy as possible, so a well crafted leads/customer database is crucial.  |
  You also need a drip marketing management program that you can work with, and better yet, that works directly with your database. 
  We love the combination of Act! CRM and Swiftpage Drip Marketing.  This combo snaps together seamlessly so there is no uploading or exporting of contact emails, etc., and all campaign results are imported into the CRM with just a couple of mouse clicks. 
  While there are numerous solutions, if you haven’t looked at Swiftpage, you really should check out the free 60 day trial (http://bit.ly/cZan4I).

Swiftpage Drip Marketing Campaign Editor

• Clearly define your goal/”Call to Action”.
  It’s easier to map your campaign starting from the end and working back.  Ask yourself “What is my intended out come for this message stream?” 
  Are you introducing a new product or service? 
  Are you reaching out to customers you haven’t heard from in 24 months? 
  Are you introducing existing customers to another product line for cross sell?
  All of these are worthwhile objectives, but you can see how the messaging should vary accordingly.
• Be specific in your communication.
  Resist the urge to send your campaign to everyone in your list.  Whether you have 500 or 5000 in your opt-in list, you cannot effectively communicate to all of them with the same message.  Therefore, it’s important that you segregate your list into logical groupings, and this is where our first point – having a quality database – it decisive.  If you have lousy data and/or a system that is hard to generate lists, than your drip marketing efforts will suffer.
  Take the time to create finely honed lists with laser specific messages for the intended recipients.  You will see far greater click-through and response, while providing greater value. 
• Have 2 or 3 differing web capture forms on your blog or website.
  In addition to the standard “Contact Us” form, include at least two other forms that are more specific in nature.  Perhaps you sell to consumers and to businesses.  When you are on the phone with a prospect of one type or the other, you qualify their needs using different questions relevant to their context.  Your web should do the same, and the follow up campaign attached to the completion of the form/survey page should also message accordingly. 

Ok, 4 down, one to go. 
Thus far all of our tips have been kind of “high level”, conceptual stuff, so this last one is a simple technical tip that will save a lot of aggravation later:

• Define a naming convention for your email templates – and stick to it!
  As you begin filling out your drip marketing toolkit, you will end up with A LOT of templates in your campaign manager.  The last thing you want to do is include the wrong template in a campaign or waste time trying to find templates.  Name your templates in a way that makes it immediately apparent to you what they are. 
  For example:  “DM-Welcome-Cons-1-v2”.
  What this is telling me is that this is a drip marketing template (as opposed to a one-off blast template).  It is step 1 of my Consumer oriented Welcome campaign and it is revision #2.
  There is only one hard and fast rule when it comes to this naming:  define how you will do it, in a way that makes sense to you, and then do it EVERY time.

Happy drip marketing!