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With well over 1,000 technology vendors trying to sell some type of marketing technology in more than 40 categories, it’s no wonder that marketing specialists often describe themselves as feeling ‘overwhelmed’. To be sure, the rate of adoption of marketing technology is astonishingly low among mid-market B2B companies—except those in the software industries: other industries are using, on average, only two highly regarded marketing technologies despite the saturation of products available.

While it’s easy to say that this is a wasted opportunity, it is important to reflect on what IT professional services and IT products are available to improve the sales and marketing funnel. Here’s a look at the six most important things that every business leader should know about IT products and services that help with sales and marketing.

Utilize Email Marketing

When the Internet was still novel, the phrase ‘You’ve Got Mail’ brought squeals of joy and excitement. After decades of unsolicited spam piling up, Nigerian prince schemes, and assurances of undeserved wealth flooding the average inbox, how effective is email marketing? Is it still an effective approach to garnering sales?

The short answer is yes. With an effective email marketing campaign, the possibilities for growth are endless.

Stay connected

It’s common knowledge that many customers require several touchpoints with a company before committing to a purchase. Email marketing is an easy way to ensure this happens. To be sure, the majority of customers seek out email marketing campaigns to stay informed about their favorite businesses. Global information powerhouse Nielsen reported in 2014 that 28 percent of consumers subscribe to a company email list to stay informed about business activities.

Nearly 60 percent of moms in the United States reported to Loyalty 360 that they would sign up for email marketing if rewards were offered. And companies who do choose this route are often rewarded with increased sales and improved customer loyalty. In other words, there is a definite value in staying connected via email.

Easy integration

With the advent of IT marketing techniques and tools, email campaigns have an advantage: they are versatile enough to integrate seamlessly with most other marketing strategies. It is also an easy technique that can be used to personalize interactions with consumers. Business leaders who utilize personalization features available through modern IT see huge profit gains.

Inexpensive

Perhaps the most alluring of reasons to pursue email marketing stems from the fact that it is the least expensive IT solution available. For business owners on a budget, it can be a more effective and affordable option than direct mail, TV advertisements, or radio spots. While it is something many business owners struggle to find time for, hiring a marketing professional to undertake the process is also an option.

Engage in Analytics

The name alone suggests something far less attractive than other aspects of marketing and sales. However, it can save business leaders tremendous amounts of time and money. IT sales and marketing programs are readily available to track the performance of channels, ads, offers, and technologies.

Centuries ago, American merchant John Wanamaker said: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” Fortunately, the time of uncertainty has passed. Now, smart marketers utilize information technology to know which half is (or isn’t) working. While there are a variety of tools and techniques available, by and far the most popular one is Google Analytics.

Over 80 percent of small to mid-size websites use Google Analytics, which is completely free. Down the road, business leaders may opt for a paid service such as Adobe Analytics, but Google Analytics provides a fantastic base service. Some of the information it provides includes:

• The number of visitors to a site;
• How visitors find a site;
• Whether a mobile-friendly site would be useful;
• Ways to improve a site’s speed;
• What marketing techniques drive the most people to a site;
• What blog content is most appealing to site visitors;
• How many visitors have been converted into paying customers.

Serve Up a Dish of Artificial Intelligence

In 1983, moviegoers caught a glimpse of the potential Artificial Intelligence offers in the film “War Games.” In it, Matthew Broderick employed a software program to teach the futility of nuclear war through repeated games of Tic-Tac-Toe.

Machine learning is built on the same concept and has tremendous potential for the world of commerce. IT specialists are using it to form millions of data points regarding consumer shopping habits and preferences. With this information, businesses can offer much greater personalization to customers.

Consumers are ready and poised to respond to such sales and marketing personalization. According to Oracle Retail 2025, just under 60 percent (three out of five) of shoppers had a positive outlook about a grocer creating a suggested shopping list based on the consumer’s previous shopping habits and behaviors.

For an AI system to be effective, it must provide minimal intervention in a person’s life while maximizing the amount and quality of data provided. As customers interact with the software, more information is then gathered about their shopping habits so that even more personalization is possible.

Employ Marketing Automation & CRMs

Smart marketers understand that ad hoc advertising tools can be useful. However, an all-in-one automated marketing platform is far more beneficial. It allows companies to bring together all of their inbound and outbound marketing efforts in one place.

Additional benefits of automated marketing and CRM systems include:

Efficiency

Effective CRMs improve efficiency in several ways. For one, they replace inefficient systems that relied on manual input and endless paperwork trails. They can also integrate with other marketing tools so that companies can interact with customers on a far more comprehensive level than otherwise allowed.

Better customer relations

In a client-facing business world, CRMs are a necessity because they improve customer relations in all areas of sales and marketing by providing more mainstreamed organization. It offers companies immediate feedback so improvements can be made right away, thereby decreasing customer frustration and increasing loyalty.

Greater accountability

It’s nearly inevitable that some customers will be lost to the void when companies lack the tools to manage them effectively. CRMs add a layer of accountability to the customer relationship process. Such a system allows employees to see what their roles are in the sales process. When those responsibilities aren’t met, it’s easy to see where things went wrong, who fell short, and put into place strategies to ensure it doesn’t happen again.

Marketing optimization

The more information that marketers have available, the better their skills can be utilized. A successful CRM gives marketing specialists information so that they can better understand customer needs and behaviors, thereby choosing the optimum time and place to market products.

Get a Handle on Search Engine Marketing

Search Engine Marketing refers to paid search ads, such as Google AdWords, and search engine optimization that helps to garner organic search results based on website content. IT sales and marketing tools help people find a given company when searching for certain terms. With search ads, business people can experiment and optimize keywords on websites, advertisements, website forms, and any offers provided. Such data allows people to understand which words lead to the most prospects and revenue.

Wrangle Mobile Marketing

Everywhere one turns, one is likely to discover new statistics about the benefits of mobile marketing and mobile optimization. That’s because 78 percent of mobile searches for local business information result in purchases. And the vast majority (two out of three) of these users prefer a mobile website over a mobile app. Over 70 percent of shoppers have used a mobile coupon, and one-third of all eCommerce purchases were made on a mobile device in 2013.

No matter how good a company’s IT sales and marketing software is, it only performs as well as the people using it. Therefore, it’s important to train employees to properly use the techniques and tools at hand whenever something new is implemented. To improve your selling and marketing game, utilize these six IT solutions.

Matt Goldman

Originally Published on tenfold.com

As digital engagement continues to grow, companies are turning to avenues like social selling, and the next “big thing” that will launch them into the monetary stratosphere. While it’s always proactive to be on the lookout for new technologies and strategies that can increase the productivity and success of your business, it’s equally important to stay committed to practices that are still working; namely, email marketing.

The practice began in 1978, “when Gary Thurek, a marketing manager for the now defunct computer company Digital Equipment Corporation, sent out an unsolicited mass email promoting his firm’s computer products.” While Thurek was ultimately scolded for his unauthorized email outreach, it’s hard to argue against his efforts.

As a direct result of his mass email, DEC “sold $13 million or $14 million worth” of their products. Of course, what Thurek really did was create the first spam email; although it was certainly the beginning of what we now affectionately call email marketing.

Since that time, email marketing has become more advanced, and less intrusive. Rather than collect a random sampling of contact information and fire away, companies now target specific users who have already shown an interest in their product, been flagged due to their browsing patterns, or who at the very least have visited their website. Incidentally, this is where the email marketing journey begins; collecting the right data.

In today’s age, it’s impossible to conduct a successful email marketing campaign without a populated list of users. The best (and most moral) way to accomplish this is to build a permission-based list.

“Permission-based email marketing is used effectively everyday by hundreds of thousands of organizations to build their brands, increase sales, and strengthen relationships with their client and members. Permission-based email marketing is sending messages to people who have asked to receive them.”

Lists like this can be built by offering something to individuals. Exclusive access to sales, marketing, or technical advice; a download code to an eBook; or invitations to “members only” events. If your business offers a service, you can also offer free-demos in order to attract interested users.

There are other ways to acquire a populated email marketing list; namely through purchasing them. While you can go about email marketing this way, it’s important to note that it’s always a terrible idea to do so.

For starters, a number of “reputable email marketing vendors don’t let you send emails to lists you’ve bought.” A marketing software like Hubspot simply won’t allow it, as they require that you “use opt-in email lists.” Moreover, even if you choose to use a less reputable software vendor, it’s not guaranteed that the list will work. “One customer’s ill-gotten email address list can poison the deliverability of the other customers on that shared IP address.”

Put more simply, you don’t want to take shortcuts when it comes to building an email marketing list. Take the time and effort into building a permissions-based list. Not only will you be targeting a better group of consumers, but there’s also no chance of your campaign being infected by a poisonous email address.

Selecting an email marketing provider 

Depending on how many users you want to reach, how you want to talk to them, and how much creative control you’d like to have for your email marketing campaigns, trying to find the perfect provider can be just as difficult as actually putting together your list.

Fortunately, Business News Daily has already done a significant amount of legwork, and provided detailed reviews for a number of software systems. They’ve reviewed more than 50 platforms, which should undoubtedly be more than enough for you to start the process with.

It’s also important to ask yourself the right questions to ensure you land on the right email marketing solution.

The answers to these questions will ultimately direct you to the tailored solution. While this may be time consuming, and potentially delay the start date for your email marketing campaigns, it’s vital that you put forth the time and care that these questions require. If you speed through them, and wind up with the wrong platform, you’ll need to start back at square one.

Don’t rely solely on software to track your email marketing success

Once your email marketing campaign has been set up, it’s time to monitor the results. Unfortunately, this is where a number of people begin to lose a grasp on what’s really going on with their data. Too often do email marketing users rely only on email open rates, and take the results at face value; but it’s vital to dig deeper, as Chris Woodard explains.

“What most don’t know is that the mail open rates that your email automation reports is never 100% accurate. And whether you use Streak…SugarCRM, SalesLoft, MailChimp, or any other solution, this is still the case.

Why? Because every time you send an email, these software solutions place a code snippet that gets triggered when an email gets opened. No big deal, right? Not exactly”

Ultimately, this data can be misleading due to an issue with the code snippets that are embedded.“If someone has HTML email disabled in their email client, your email automation will not register it as an ‘opened’ email.”

Fortunately, thanks to echogravity, there’s a workaround that can be used in these situations.

This simple formula “takes into account bounced emails and also eliminates the margin of error that can occur when going solely off of the ‘open rate’ numbers from other automation platforms. “

While you may prefer to simply stick with the data being returned by your specific platform, it’s important to remember that the results may not be 100 percent accurate. Don’t take them as gospel, and make sure to continually ask yourself “do these results make sense.”

With email marketing, it’s crucial that you don’t take any shortcuts. While that’s generally true for most things in life, it’s especially true for this business practice. Cutting corners and accepting data without fact-checking can lead to disastrous results. Before getting an email marketing campaign up and running, make sure that you’ve built a permission-based list to target, and that you’ve asked yourself the necessary questions to determine which platform to use.

Matt Goldman

Originally published on Tenfold.com