Three Ways to Rejuvenate Dead Leads

One of the most productive sources of revenue for B2B marketers is their prospect and lead database. If it costs you $100 to acquire each lead in your database and you have 10,000 names in your database, the value of this data is 1 Million dollars or more!

Consequently, if you are not actively mining this data for new opportunities you are missing out on a substantial source of revenue. However, mining your database is not as simple as sending out email blasts to the entire customer and prospect list. Doing so will not only be ineffective, it will cause people to unsubscribe to your emails and even worse -- your domain could be blacklisted.

Effective campaigns begin with segmenting the CRM (prospect and lead) database based upon the stages of your sales and marketing funnel. If you haven’t defined a sales and marketing funnel, here are the basics you need to know:

• At a very high level the core stages of a marketing funnel are based on proven AIDA marketing principles a.k.a: Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action.
• In today’s modern world of inbound marketing, these stages are now implemented as ACCLA -- Awareness, Consideration, Conversion, Loyalty and Advocacy.

Visually, the ACCLA funnel looks like this:

Once you have defined the funnel stages and have segmented your lead and prospect database accordingly you can begin crafting emails and communication based upon the funnel stage. Keep in mind, you will need to determine which data attributes of each prospect are used to determine their funnel stage.

1. For prospects in the awareness phase, consider focusing your messages on educating your prospects on the general value proposition your product or service. The focus should not be on your specific product or service. Remember it’s not about you at this point in the cycle. For example, if you are selling accounting software your message should focus on how they can more efficiently run their business with accounting software.
2. Prospects in the consideration phase would get messages that are more balanced between the benefits of your product and service and education. However you should always lead with education when constructing a subject line for your message. As always, you message should address WIFFY (What’s In It For YOU (YOU = Prospect).
3. As you get down to the conversion stage your messages should focus on the unique selling proposition of your product and service and the ROI it generates for business. At this point in the cycle, messages that focus on price, payment options, time based offers and discounts will generate the most results.

Once customers have purchased your product or service the next area to mine is customer loyalty and advocacy. Post sale customer loyalty is often overlooked as powerful channel for new business. To tap into this area consider exploring is a rewards based customer referral program. This program can take many forms ranging from regular referral email offers to the customer base to a web based game that customers can participate and win prizes and different status levels based on referrals, loyalty and social media blogging.

One last recommendation, all of the above suggestions are dependent upon having a clean CRM database with accurate and meaningful data. Put the effort into maintaining your CRM database it will more than payoff in ROI.