Transform your outbound marketing

Insight Data director of operations Jade Greenhow takes a look at how digital marketing solutions can help you to convert more prospects into customers.

Now is not the time to press pause on your marketing. In fact, our message to the fenestration and construction industries right now is that marketing should be your prime focus if you want to secure a strong and robust work pipeline.

But, if you’re still doing marketing outreach without using digital tools, you’ll most likely get beaten by the competition. Evolving the ways in which you get new customers should be something you’re investing in if you want to survive through the oncoming global recession.

As a data marketing resource company, we know that a vast proportion of businesses in the fenestration and construction industry are still using offline, quantity-based techniques to reach out to potential customers. This needs to change.

If you are reading this, I predict that your business has probably invested a lot of money and resource into quantity based outbound marketing. Traditionally, outbound marketing has mostly consisted of sales teams cold calling or emailing lots of potential customers from a data list to tell them about their products or services. While this has worked in the past, more and more businesses are now struggling to convert on quantity based outbound marketing.

Smart outbound marketing is more about using your brain over sheer strength to reach and engage prospects. Too many businesses use a ‘spray-and-pray’ strategy to try and get new customers. The blanket marketing approach is mostly about pure volume: the larger number of people we contact, the more chance we have of getting new customers.

Although this approach can be successful in some cases, it can also be a waste of valuable time and resources if you get it wrong.

Brand awareness can be achieved by spamming your prospect lists with multiple emails and phone calls. However, we’d argue that a high proportion of the resulting leads won’t convert to customers. Aggressive sales emails may get more total replies, but a targeted and helpful approach will get more positive engagement.

A lot of companies are now using sales and marketing platform software to manage outbound marketing activities. This is because they enable a greater level of customer targeting.

The most effective outbound sales strategies leverage sales intelligence and sales engagement platforms. Businesses use them to target specific customers that are ideally suited to their core proposition. An effective sales and marketing platform will allow marketers to personalise messaging to the individual needs of the prospects too.

Although every sales and marketing platform is different, most of them will offer similar functionalities. Depending on what platform you choose to use, here’s what can be achieved.

Discover the best customers. The best sales and marketing platforms enable a user to filter down large numbers of prospects. There’s no point in reaching out to prospects that aren’t suitable for your products or services. This is how you achieve a targeted approach. Finding the ideal customers for your business will mean that you’ll have a higher conversion rate on your marketing and sales activities.

Manage marketing lists and campaigns. If you want to reach prospects and convert them into customers, you’ll want to send a greater number of personalised and targeted emails or calls to specific groups. No more blanket emails to your whole prospect list. Personalisation is the key to converting customers. A great sales and marketing platform will allow you to create and manage lots of different customer lists and campaigns easily and quickly.

Keep a record of relationships. Often, the customer journey towards a sale is not instant; converting that prospect into a customer may take some time. Building a relationship with that prospect will enable you to provide what they need. A great sales and marketing platform will allow you to keep a record of evolving business relationships with your prospects so that they become hot prospects.

Outbound marketing methods are changing. Our sales and marketing platform, Salestracker, converts prospects into customers for all our clients.