You have spent the last six months or more preparing new product differentiating enhancements over your competitors or just completed your MVP and you are ready to spread the word across the market!
Often, this is when your high-flying expectations collide with opt-in-only distribution measures. Did you hear the sigh from marketing? If you haven’t, you will.
When I started my career in software engineering, it was never my intent to become well-versed in marketing and the measures used within it.
However, from the beginning, I was engaged in authoring manuals alongside marketing materials for my products and those of the organizations I worked with, regardless of size. This is due to the fact that almost all of my work has been focused on designing and producing innovations and differentiators in the market and not existing solutions.
For my products, I immediately ran into the email distribution dilemma, whose level of difficulty has significantly increased over the last ten years, with an even greater steep increase in complexity in the last four years.
However, even in the beginning, parallel distribution measures were required for mass email distribution to blanket a market to protect your domains.
As significant as your desire to blanket the market with your product's good news as quickly as possible is the fact you need to do this when the time is right. Microsoft was able to quickly dominate the OS market, and it was not their error-prone technology that initially won market share. It was their aggressive marketing.
Having the best technology has often not been enough to win. Novell OS (75% of the K12 EdTech market) and Banyan OS (Global network for the US military) were engrained/superior products at the time and overtaken within three years.
My work with IBM, Microsoft, Xerox, and others put me in direct contact with key accounts in presales activities. My direct involvement in creating new solutions and an authentic understanding of their value to clients emersed me in creating messaging, demos, and presentations across the United States and abroad.
IBM created crates of the hardware and materials for my presentations. My presentations were so close together that several would be shipped to the different destinations where I was presenting, waiting for me when I arrived.
These were significant learning events for me. These organizations performed their own strategic “market blitz” in every form possible. Any reluctance I had in supporting marketing efforts left me after these experiences, and I have been involved in these efforts ever since.
The point is this. These organizations were successful in introducing their products to their markets and they all started these with blanket coverage across all mediums.
Conferences are good, but typically conversion rates never meet what the company attendees expected in sales, and the exposure in the market is not comprehensive.
Blanket marketing also warms up the market so when a client sees your company name or logo at a conference, they have some understanding of your products, and if they have an interest, they will come to your booth or presentation to learn more.
Good things do come from conferences, but it is very limited in comparison.
It is not a revelation. It makes complete sense. Your potential and existing clients need to understand how great your product is as soon as possible. You invested the time, resources, and capital to create your solution, so why would you let anything limit or delay your ability to introduce this to the market?
Opt-in only works for mature products where all clients of the intended personas in a market have, in fact, opted in. Otherwise, it is a limited exposure that will more than likely take years to cover your market. This is not acceptable to successful organizations.
Your solution is ready. It has an advantage over your competitors. Why would you put in a delay to give your competitors an opportunity to close the gap, reducing your market share and revenue? Nothing should dictate how and the speed by which you blanket the coverage of your market. Nothing.
If you have a quandary with this, here is my litmus test for every decision I make. “If this was my company, what would I do?” And there is your answer.
Mass Email Prospecting Scenario
For example, you are a new company with a new product, and your campaign is targeted at the US for K12 Curriculum Directors across all markets and departments of different personas, which consists of approximately 42,000 individuals.
Your marketing team informs you that your CRM will only handle Opt-In email campaigns, meaning the users you are to send emails to have had to indicate in some manner you are allowed to send emails to them.
To do this, you must coerce potential clients to Opt-in to receive emails before your CRM will allow you to send them. Ouch! Makes no sense. This can take years to obtain even a significant number of users per persona.
Couple the above with the short selling cycle of six months, which most K12 products fit into, which further emphasizes the reason you need to cover the market in a timely manner that can convert to sales.
The Opt-in requirement may work for well-established companies, but even then, it would be very few.
Why is the Opt-in option promoted and implemented?
The reason Opt-in is most often projected as a valid method of campaign distribution is that it is safe and probably, to a greater degree, because it is the easiest choice to implement.
Safe, but very slow making it ineffective. If your competitors are smart, they will understand this and embrace the more difficult measures that allow for fast, comprehensive market coverage. Who wouldn’t?
In our example, the marketing team is correct in that Opt-in is safer, but is it the best choice? If they had used our litmus test above, they would have never come to this conclusion as a valid means of deployment.
I understand the complexities, thoughts, and efforts required within the entire cycle of planning, preparing, and executing marketing campaigns. However, Opt-in is a major hurdle to overcome, and often there is less than full disclosure of all of its deficits to a company’s cash flow, market recognition, and market acquisition.
A Solution for Timely and Safe Mass Email Prospecting
Several years ago, it was obvious the implementation, maintenance, and management of mass email prospecting measures were outside the scope of support and available time for internal resources to implement the measures required for most medium to small organizations.
At that time, I created a complete, cost-effective service that removes this burden from a client's internal resources. This service consists of a framework of processes, procedures, industry lists, and technologies required to facilitate large email prospecting campaigns quickly and safely.
We work directly with an organization's staff to understand their campaign strategy and often provide insights to increase the campaign’s value due to our unique experience within these markets and technologies.
We convert this into a comprehensive marketing campaign roadmap of timelines, associated measures, performance analytics, and the cost of all resources that provide a safe and quick distribution.
The measures that are put in place provide a foundation that can be used for all future campaigns. The planning, campaign setup, monitoring, management, and analytics all operate on top of this foundation.
An organization can monitor all aspects of the status of a campaign and have great insights into the analytics of how it performs across regions, institution types, sizes, personas, and more. Typically, there are many different campaigns executing at the same time with AB testing implemented as well.
Client Results from Our Prospecting Measures
Below is a client's case study using these measures and their results.
First, they have a new, innovative product that benefits students in K12 and HE.
The key to any campaign is you have something clients need or want. Their product is unique and has already garnered attention within these markets.
Some competitors were starting to enter their space as well.
As with most startups, funds are tight, and people-intensive approaches drain capital quickly. They had tried a service for two plus months of the latest marketing approach of email, with SDRs also using LinkedIn, phone, and manual direct contact. The result was a slow method of prospecting with very disappointing results. The significant amount of money they had invested in these measures had produced very few leads and zero sales.
I was already assisting this company as a CPTO. The CEO asked me to review their marketing efforts and explained the difficulties they were experiencing. The result was the ideation and creation of a new comprehensive email marketing campaign for the K12 and HE markets using the framework mentioned earlier. The campaigns covered 10 personas, totaling 16K+ contacts consisting of two email sequences to be covered within five months. Important also is the fact that prospects had the ability to schedule meetings with sales directly from within the email messaging, skipping the need for SDRs in this case.
The result was eight months of client meetings scheduled from March - early December. During this time, there were 8-4 client sales meetings each workday.
The CEO is very pleased with the results. These measures blanketed both K12 and HE markets in a designated amount of time, generated qualified leads, produced great insights into their market, and populated the Opt-in CRM with these leads… all at a fraction of the costs of the previous industry state-of-the-art measures with a resulting campaign platform foundation for all future campaigns.
No domains were black-listed, email accounts across providers were replaced/repaired to where the system was running at maximum capacity at all times, and no conferences were attended.
Since the first campaign, prospects often indicate they are familiar with the company and its solutions. They are now a recognized brand in the industry within a short amount of time, helping to fend off competitors who have not used such measures and whose products are not at the same level.
Summary
There is a significant amount of thought, experience, and effort that goes into any marketing campaign. Not a question.
However, Opt-in measures are extremely limiting in effectiveness in almost all cases. The acceptance of this fact is more of an internal issue to be addressed or acknowledged with full disclosure within an organization.
Mass email prospecting measures are more complex and require significant technical measures, monitoring, and management to be successful. However, the results of such an approach should be a significant improvement over those throttled by an Opt-in approach.
If you have a great product or differentiating enhancements, and the majority of the personas within your markets are not aware of them, then you are leaving the door open to reduced earrings, delayed cash flow, and lost market share.
Please contact me if you have any questions about this topic and how you can easily implement such measures.
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