September 30, 2016
How much are you willing to pay for a qualified lead?
Whether it’s $ 5 or $ 500, the real answer is “too much” if you’re overlooking one crucial step in the lead generation and nurturing process.
That step is email validation and hygiene. Here’s how ignoring it can cripple your lead generation efforts:
It’s quite simple.
- You can invest all the resources you want in Search Engine Marketing (SEM).
- You can drive all the traffic and leads in the world.
If you can’t reach your new prospects via email, you’re wasting time and money. Sure, you might capture a valid phone number for your leads but that’s just not enough these days.
Why You Need a Valid Email Address for Every Lead You Collect
1) Most Leads Aren’t Ready to Buy
Just because someone filled out a form on your website doesn’t mean they’re ready to pull the trigger. Did you know that?
- 50% of leads are qualified but not ready to buy. (Gleanstar Research)
- 63% of people requesting information on your company today won’t buy for at least three months. (Marketing Donut)
- 20% will take more than 12 months to buy. (Marketing Donut)
2) So, You Need to Nurture Them
Your prospects require a little hand-holding. It’s up to you to:
- Understand their needs;
- Convince them that they can’t live without your offering; and
- Overcome any objections that are preventing their purchase.
You need to keep the dialogue going. Doing this without a valid email addresses for your prospect is a losing proposition. Plus, it’s a proven fact: nurtured leads produce more sales than non-nurtured leads. What more reason do you need?
3) People love to buy, but hate being called by salespeople.
Most people, myself included, avoid salespeople like the plague. Also, most people are super busy and prefer to buy rather than being sold.
Email improves your chances of making contact with your prospects when they’re unwilling to pick up the phone. This in turn helps you move leads down the funnel faster. Without a good email address for your prospect, you’re dead in the water.
4 ) Salespeople hate calling unresponsive contacts
Did you know that?
- An estimated 44% of salespeople give up on their prospect after just one attempt (Scripted)
- 75% of companies drop leads who aren’t ready to buy right away.
This is unacceptable! But what do you do? You need a proven marketing channel (email!) to help you push the relationship forward. This is impossible without a valid, deliverable email address for your prospect.
Email Hygiene & Validation = Insurance for your SEM Strategy
Are you investing heavily in obtaining email addresses for your leads? If so, why not spend a penny or less to clean, correct, and validate their deliverability? Not doing so is like, buying a house or car without insurance. You’d be foolish not to have it, right? Smart marketers are adopting email hygiene and validation solutions as insurance against:
1) Wasting Money (and not making the sale)
Selling is hard enough these days. Why handicap your sales efforts before they begin? You have a much higher likelihood of making the sale if you can reach your prospect via email. If you can’t, you’re wasting all, if not a large portion of what you invested to attract them.
2) Aggravating your prospects (and not making the sale)
The goal here is to delight your prospects and nurture them from the “awareness” to “purchase’ stage. There’s no faster way to do the exact opposite and blow up a deal than to not fulfill your promises. If you can’t send me the product information I request, why would I have any faith in your ability to deliver on much bigger promises?
3) Hitting spam traps
It’s embarrassing when you capture an incorrect address for your prospect and wind up emailing the wrong person. It gets worse when the unintended recipient reports you as spam.
Capture a problematic address like a spamtrap or honeypot, however, and things get straight up apocalyptic. These addresses are like ticking time bombs that bring your email campaigns to a screeching halt. Send to one and watch your problem balloon from one rep not being able to email a prospect to your entire company not being able to reach anyone via email. For a long time. This is a mess than can take weeks and cost thousands of dollars to clean up.
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