What to expect when you are Emailing.

First things first - this post is for those still in the early days of flirting with email campaigns. There is plenty of great information out there about more advanced techniques, delivery rates, success metrics & the like but I thought it may be useful to set out first principles - well first !

For the uninitiated then there are 3 types of results that we can expect from emails - all of them useful in their own way.

You've got to Mail !

1. Email read - this is a perfectly valid response. In most cases when we first send an email this is the best result we can expect. The intention of the mail is to let new people know of us or remind people we have been in touch with in the past about us. Think of this as a Shout Out - useful to identify people with whom a longer conversation is warranted or possible but requiring follow thru'. 

2. Clicking through a link in the email - this is much more likely to happen when the email itself calls for that specific action, for eg. the mail campaign itself is talking about a whitepaper & inviting people to download it from the link. In some emails the link is provided only in support of the central message - for instance a link to a webpage. A lack of large nos. of people clicking through this should not necessarily be a cause for concern. What I would definitely recommend is staying connected with  people who do click through such. They are more likely to have some future need coming down the turnpike for which they may be at an early stage of exploration - hence the kicking of the tyres.

3. Email reply - in my personal experience follow-up campaigns sometimes stand a greater chance of eliciting this response than the initial email campaign. Broadly there are 3 kinds of replies - 

a) We like what we hear but we don't have any need right now

b) Don't bother me

c) Something specific in relation to a need or a query 

We have to take care to stay in touch & build a relationship with the people who give the first response, make sure that we do not send any more unsolicited emails to the second category & jump all over the third category. 

Something more specific, links to referenceable work, something cool to showcase etc. is much more likely to have an impact with the first category - there the need is to grow the initial interest so we should respond to their mail with something tailored to their specific area of interest.  

Coming to the dream response - people who have a specific need. To a large extent this is completely unpredictable given that this is only going to occur when there is a live opportunity at the prospect. We can only hope to maximize the probability of this response by covering as much ground as possible through well thought out & targeted email campaigns.

So to all the email campaign newbies out there - start drafting those mails & putting together those campaigns because if you are not reaching out to your prospects your competitors definitely are & chances are they're using mail to do so !  

How the butcher taught me to go up the Sales Value Chain !

Full disclosure - I have never visited a butcher but this story I heard about one tempts me to confer a Sales Guru title on the protagonist ! The story goes something like this - an old lady in a village went to the market to buy supplies for the home every week. She would buy meat from which ever butcher had the better product on the day at the best price. She was buying a Commodity which offered the sellers little opportunity for differentiation or for longer term customer retention.

Over time she started  buying meat more often than not from the same butcher because he seemed to usually have better quality goods & a reasonable price. This butcher had made the transition to selling a Product with some kind of assurance of quality & potential for garnering customer loyalty.

After a few weeks of this the butcher told the lady that he had noticed that on each visit she bought items from a few different shops & he offered that if she would give him a list of all the things she wanted in the week in advance he would buy all the items & keep them at his shop for her to pick up when she came to buy the meat. This would save her time & effort & she could still get everything she needed.  The lady eagerly accepted the Service the butcher was offering. The move from a Product to a Service allows much greater scope for differentiation & for tailoring unique benefits for customers that could potentially reduce the need for the customer to consider competitors.

It then transpired that the lady fell ill & could not make it to the market for a couple of weeks. While recuperating at home she was surprised by a visit from the butcher. He had with him a bundle of goods typical of those the lady usually ordered along with some portions of meat. In response to the lady's incredulity he said that he had inquired from one of the lady's friends at the market the reason for her recent absence & learnt of her illness. He thought of paying a visit to check how she was doing & of getting some supplies along since she would not have been able to stock up on provisions for two weeks. Clearly the butcher, apart from being a nice guy, was a true sales genius. In one move he stepped up the ladder to forming a genuine Relationship with his customer - something that most sales people dream of. After achieving this stage as long as one can consistently deliver value you could have a customer for life. 

The story of the butcher & the lady serves up a road map for those of us in sales - the aim should always be to move up the value chain from a Commodity to a Product to a Service & finally a Relationship. The higher one goes the greater the opportunity for differentiation & for cementing customer relationships that last. The other lesson to be learnt is to pay attention to those that we buy from - after all they're sales people too & may have a nugget or two of wisdom to offer !