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We often help clients promote events they’re hosting – from conferences, to executive roundtables, to luncheons, webinars, road shows and more. We use a multi-touch marketing approach to get people to attend these events and raise awareness about a client’s brand or product. Our typical approach to event promotion is using direct mail, email, and social media in a strategic campaign.  We find excellent response rates using a multi-touch approach, and have success growing clients online community. That said, I often see email marketing standing out as a very strong element in drawing attendees to events.

Email marketing may seem like it’s receiving less attention these days, with the savvy technological advances of social media platforms and applications. However, when it comes to reaching someone with a direct message and an exclusive invitation, email can be very effective.  Here at enter:marketing, we have many internal best-practices and tried & true approaches to reaching a strong event RSVP rate.

If you don’t have a database list to send emails to promote your upcoming event, we can provide that service as well. We offer end-to-end event promotion, with strong email creative development,  outbound strategy, and follow-up, using our best practices. Just remember: when promoting an event, always include email marketing to drive your response rate.

I manage a group of people whose roles and responsibilities have changed often and dramatically over the past two years. Responding to changes in our approach, in our products, and in the market we work in, the team looks very different now than it did in 2009.

Sound familiar?

As economic uncertainty has become the new normal globally, every company has had to reconfigure or face extinction.  Simply “good enough” is no longer good enough.  Luckily, at a small, growing company like enter:marketing, change is the name of the game.

When I first joined enter:marketing, enter:techconnect, the team I head up, was only two guys and a pair of phones.  We were working out how telemarketing could be leveraged most effectively in our direct mail campaigns.  A few months after, we were sorting out the finer details of how techconnect could best usher meetings to our clients all the way from qualifying to purchasing.  Now two years later, the team is building lists, qualifying prospects, managing events, and compiling reports.  And we tweak our processes every day.

The key is to never consider your system a finished product.  The needs of your market are never static, so why ever settle on just one approach?  By staying open to new ideas and constantly critiquing our results, techconnect keeps improving.  The economy will some day be better, but a core practice of tireless invention and self-improvement brings results no matter what the economic climate.

“Today we sent out an email and it got a 20% open rate!”

“Our newsletter was forwarded to 20 people!”

“We have a monthly client event at a bar!”

“Our ‘air cover’ marketing strategy is really providing lots of coverage….in the air…..!!!!”

“We’re working on a very important deck showcasing our approach to the strategy we’re considering!”

“The last two videos we put on our YouTube channel have 231 views!”

“We’re spending a lot of time figuring out our social media strategy…”

“We sent out company wall calendars to 300 prospects!”

You get the idea….

Step up to the plate and be committed to marketing systems that are built to drive trackable revenue. Anything other than that doesn’t do our profession any favors.

Nothing is more exciting than getting a hot lead – a prospect who wants to make a fast decision. Your sales costs stay low, and you turn an opportunity into revenue as quickly as possible with little effort. If only they were all that easy, right?

Of course, it rarely works that way. Most sales opportunities take some time and planning on your part in order to become revenue. For larger sales, the cycle can take quite a while to come to a conclusion, and you may have to wait a few months before you can even get started in earnest. Since some of the best opportunities you have may not be ready right away, you need to develop a lead cultivation strategy in order to keep the opportunity warm until you can engage the decision-maker in the sales process.

It’s what you do before you get started that can turn a long-term lead into your next big opportunity. Invest your time in cultivating a lead, and you’ll be the first call when it’s time to start discussing a purchase. Also, you’ll make it harder for your competitors to swoop in and steal the opportunity from you.

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You just passed through the doors of your clients building, and you have momentum. You’ve just finished a great appointment, and while there isn’t an immediate purchase in the works, you know it will be coming six months down the road.

So, what do you do until then?

Six months can be a long time, and there’s always the risk that a competitor will work his way into your opportunity. Or, the prospect could forget about you and wind up looking for a different IT solution provider. It’s easy to see how this deal could slip through your fingers. You need a way to keep this contact engaged until the time to buy arrives.

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Long sales cycles are frustrating not only because it delays revenue but because they also introduce the risk that you won’t. The longer it takes to bring a prospect from the mouth of the funnel to a closed deal, the greater the likelihood is that you either won’t finalize the relationship or that it will come in at a much lower amount than you expected.

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Do you spend a lot of time knee-deep in Google Analytics, looking at the rise and fall of pageviews, unique visitors and referred traffic? While it pays to know your audience, focusing too much on the numbers isn’t the best use of your time. To gain more value from your marketing blog, think less about organic traffic growth and more about the impact of your blog on your pipeline.

A corporate blog’s success isn’t measured in pageviews or any other traffic metric. Why not? Well, your objectives are totally different. You aren’t trying to amass impressions to generate advertising views, which is the prevailing model used by most of the blogs you probably read. Rather, you want to attract attention that will translate to inquiries from prospects, who you then hope to advance through the sales cycle.

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If the sales cycle were kept to less than 90 days, everything would be so much simpler. Sales professionals would be able to manage their pipelines to their quarterly revenue objectives and make the decisions necessary to maximize the company’s results and their own. But, those days are long gone. This has led to a myopic perspective, in which leads that aren’t expected to close quickly are cast aside.

The result is an unfortunate dynamic, in which sales professionals are left scrambling for “hot leads” constantly. If they were to allocate some of their time for investment in lead cultivation, they would soon have a robust ongoing pipeline, allowing them to nurture every account and maximize the value of every opportunity.

The opportunity that many sales professionals miss — even purposefully skip — is substantial. Imagine how many leads are cast aside in favor of the needle-in-a-haystack that is ready to make a purchase almost immediately. These are next quarter’s hot leads — or they’ll get hot the quarter after that. In disregarding these leads now, the sales professional could be giving the opportunity to a competitor when the prospect is ready to buy.

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Before the ubiquity of information, prospects were able to get rid of the sales team with the simple demand: “Get me something in writing.” The sales professional, meanwhile, would guard information carefully, letting it slip out incrementally throughout the sales cycle, rewarding the prospect for moving each step closer to a sale. With websites, blogs and message boards available for virtually every topic imaginable, this doesn’t work any more. Most information is already out there.

Rather than give up and assume that the prospect has access to everything, however, there is still room for the controlled release of value-added information; it just has to be managed differently.

Don’t withhold information. That will lead a prospect to look elsewhere, and possibly end up in the arms of a competitor. Point your prospect to your blog, website, case studies and other information pieces — after all, this is why you’ve invested in them. But, make sure your sales professionals are equipped with additional insights — tailored to the prospect — that can be unveiled at each step in the sales cycle. This is where your marketing analytics become incredibly important.

A white paper cannot address a specific prospect’s specific pain points. That’s the domain of the sales force.

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