Inside Sales Lead Management Featured Article

Companies can generate all kinds of marketing materials to drive sales leads: white papers, reports, ebooks and Web pages, but they’re no good if they don’t convert prospects to customers.

“Most B2B marketers take for granted that content marketing will, by default, generate a wide spectrum of leads – some of them qualified, perhaps, but most just conducting informal research (the proverbial ‘tire kickers’). That latter group becomes fodder for ongoing nurturing, in the hope that further education and brand awareness will ultimately result in conversion to qualified leads,” Spear Marketing Group president Howard J Sewell wrote in Business 2 Community.

A lot of prospects might sign up to receive a whitepaper or brochure and simply forget about it once they’ve skimmed the document. With the fast pace of modern business, companies will have to make an impression quickly or be left behind.

With all the metrics and analytics available to marketers, for Sewell, the best marketing tool also happens to be the simplest: email.

When a prospect signs up for content, Sewell recommends that prospects be redirected to a page thanking them for their interest, letting them know the link has been sent, and offering them other products and services they might be interested in. The email that actually delivers the content should include the same information.

A few days later, the company should send a reminder to click the link if the recipient hasn’t done so, or an invitation to share it for someone who has clicked, and an invitation to contact an inside sales rep.

Even with increasingly sophisticated tools, email remains the primary workflow tool for a lot of professionals, serving as their “to-do” list as well as their inbox. This is why email remains so important in marketing. At the same time, it’s easy to let messages slip by. Gentle, repeated reminders could help businesses turn more prospects into customers.