Ultimately, all marketing outreach needs to pull its weight by converting prospects into suspects into sales … and CRM outreach is no different. However, email outreach has several unique factors to consider:
CRM is an accumulated investment model.
Periodic (twice or three times monthly is the sweet spot) informative or helpful emails that keep you in a positive light with your clients and prospects and at top of mind is a proven model. While you may not receive a response immediately from a new contact, your information builds over time and keeps you at top of mind when a relevant matter arises. In many service sectors, such as financial advisor and real estate, it is more about timing for these individual contacts and maintaining a connection until they are ready to make a move and connect with you.
It’s all about open rates.
Don’t be discouraged if contacts aren’t clicking on all the links you send them in your email. We are all progressively adding to our information load and so we can’t always follow up on information that comes through the inbox. What really matters is that your contacts are opening your email, or at least viewing the subject line. Rates will vary with the age and size of your list – old, large lists will have a lower open rate while smaller, newer lists will have higher opens. The industry standard is 20%, and if you are getting something lower than average with a list of 200 or less contacts that you have been actively emailing over the last year or so, your CRM may be on the ineffective side. If you have a thousand contacts from years back, you might be getting a 10% to 15% open rate initially, but a good CRM system will improve your performance over time as it weeds out the inactive and nonperforming contacts.
List quality matters.
If you are thinking of loading up a purchased list of contacts by age group and zip code that don’t know you and never requested any information about your services DON’T DO IT. CRM companies will shut your account down if they suspect you are using this type of list, and that list will never convert a single inquiry while it generates lots of spam complaints against your provider.
Return on Investment takes time.
It could take a year before your contacts respond to your outreach,and this is especially true in financial services situations. Make sure your contact information remains consistent over time – keep your phone number, email address and web site addresses consistent over time if at all possible. Some CRM’s will remove files you upload for a campaign within 30 days – if this is the situation, it may be best to use a different service or to reference images you control on your own web site. Always link directly to sites you are maintaining control of – either through your long term contract with a provider or as your own web site. If you link to a site you do not control, the URL could go away or the page could be changed into something you would not want your contacts to visit.
Investment level should be low to allow you to maintain a long term investment.
If the price of your CRM is something you can’t afford to pay for every month, you might not be ready to invest in this type of marketing. How much time are you spending managing your CRM? Ideally, you enter new contacts each month and you review your performance, but the emails are generated and sent by your service. This will free up your time to field client calls and pursue sales opportunities while the service runs in the background.
You should also be spending minimal time in generating emails and reviewing the responses from your system. Ideally, your content is generated by professionals who put your business in a good light – this is especially critical if you are receiving a free or subsidized service from your broker or another partner. Links should always be directing to your site or sites you control. Make sure that your CRM provider is not using your contact list to build their own business, especially if you are getting the service for free.
Bottom line, if the price is right, the investment is low enough to commit for an ongoing monthly service, and your open rate is good according to the type of list you have, you should expect some sort of response from your contacts and at least one inquiry within the first 6 months to year of consistent, twice monthly email outreach.
