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Do customers delete your email communications?

Wouldn't you rather have response rates your competitors would kill for?

Contextual stories are compelling. Sales pitches, well, not so much.

This is where Marketing Interactions helps you make a difference. Through numerous customer engagements we've created communication strategies, content platforms and execution plans that are compelling, highly leveraged and most importantly designed with the customer in mind. We also help create the sales tools required to evidence the key positioning points within the content platform, and we map them into a process that optimizes the transition of prospects into buying customers.

A contextual story tells the prospect why and how you can help them solve their problems in ways that bring your solution to life for each prospects' respective needs. The key is to show them real world results that they want, need or, preferably, will climb mountains to get. That's what drives them to begin interacting with you. Each subsequent email message, dialogue and exposure to your company and its solutions can then build on their specific interactions and responses. Instead of resending the same email, and irriating your prospects and customers, you send them focused, compelling stories of how you can help them - and you win.

Contextual stories empower you to gauge prospect interest and focus your attention on those leads who actively engage. Often it takes four or five communications to cause a prospect to take action, but when you do, it's worth it.

Here's an example of contextual stories in action:

The Wiz Company is launching its new WizBang 5000. It creates a multi-message positioning platform that describes the top 5 benefits of its new product, and plans a series of emails to communicate these benefits.

• Email #1 is focused on one aspect of the story theme demonstrating one of the key benefits. When a prospect clicks through on the proferred link, he or she is taken to a customized landing page featuring materials that demonstrate all 5 benefit areas.
• Let's say a prospect responds to email #1, then immediately goes to the article discussing benefit #3. He/she downloads the whitepaper that's offered along with that content.
• This activity tells you exactly where to focus your next communication to them, and you send the communication that corresponds to benefit #3, focusing specifically on the area of interest to that prospect. This personalized follow-up begins to nurture an actionable relationship with the prospect.

The benefit to you and your organization?

• You can immediately identify prospects that are ready for direct sales contact based on how they respond to your campaigns.
• You can also provide the sales force with valuable information as to the prospect's specific areas of interest.
• You provide the reps with the specific tools and evidence they need to close the business effectively, all based on the prospects response history to various campaigns and information.

Over time, as you contact the prospects regularly with compelling stories and information, prospects will contact you for your trusted advice and potential solutions.

Client Results: A recent software vendor used a 4-month email story campaign to warm up a lead list they'd let run cold. We emailed them twice per month. The first send brought an over 14% open rate, 5.6% click throughs and a topic density of 46 percent. By the last email, they saw an open rate of 52%, an over 10% click through rate and a topic density of 83 percent.

*Topic density means that the additional pages viewed beyond the email click through are focused on the same topic. This is the difference between random clicks and page views and directed interest as the driver for lead engagement. Topic density also serves to intensify the personalization options available for high-value targeted communications.

To get the optimum results from an email story campaign, marketing automation technology must be incorporated into the process. Coordinating process and people in this manner requires a different approach to CRM and automation systems, and that's another Marketing Interactions specialty.

To find out more about email story campaigns, read the blog post:

• Quit Using Email to Train Your Leads to Ignore You

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