Viral Relationship Marketing: Step by Step

Various studies have shown that, on average, only 11% of business-to-business leads made a purchase within three months of their inquiry. Another 42%, however, made a purchase within 4-12 months. This means that, at any given time, there are nearly four times as many qualified but longer-term prospects than there are immediate selling opportunities.

Unfortunately, these qualified but less-immediate opportunities often fall through the cracks because few companies have the time to build a personal relationship with longer-term prospects–who may include a significant portion of the 47% of leads who didn’t make a purchase within a year of their inquiry.

This is where virtual relationship marketing (VRM) comes in. The goal of VRM is to get prospects to qualify themselves and tell you when they are in the buying mode. Done correctly, VRM will create the perception of personal contact in a way that is welcomed by the prospect and establishes trusted adviser status for the salesperson. “Welcomed contact,” as defined by a prospect, is being kept informed by someone who understands his problems and offers relevant information and solutions.

Before you begin
Before proceeding with your first VRM campaign, you need to complete two critical tasks:

1) Map your VRM campaign processes. Begin by defining the sequential stages of your core marketing-sales pipeline. This typically includes marketing communications, lead generation, prospect qualification, opportunity identification, and sales conversion. Then you need to map a clear and repeatable VRM campaign process that aligns with each stage of this pipeline. If your sales channels vary by market segment, you will need to map a process for each segment.

2) Implement solutions to automate your processes. The best solutions will be designed and configured specifically for automating your VRM processes and will seamlessly integrate the following key functions in a secure and accessible marketing and sales Web portal:

* Contact management. Store and manage critical prospect and customer information. Capture online and offline leads. Alert sales force and channel partners of high-probability selling opportunities and enforce follow-up rules.

* Campaign management. Segment contact lists for targeted e-mail, direct mail, and telemarketing. Compose and deliver mass-personalized, one-to-one e-mails (not categorized as spam) and track responses to VRM campaigns.

* Content management. Easily produce custom landing pages for e-mail, direct mail, and search engine marketing campaigns. Update Website content.

* Performance metrics. View dashboard graphics and summary tables of marketing and sales performance metrics linked to detailed marketing reports.

VPM campaign workflow and best practices
By following the VRM campaign workflow and best practices below, every campaign you execute will achieve the highest level of performance possible:

1) Define the campaign objectives and strategic offer. Begin by defining a clear objective for every campaign. Is the objective to trigger a qualifying response from unverified leads or to identify qualified prospects with an immediate need? Will the campaign be timed to generate trade-show traffic or to make prospects aware of a product launch? What segment will be targeted, and what type of offer will be most relevant and of interest to that segment?

2) Search and segment to create a campaign target list. Your contact database should contain field pick lists for key market segments by region, application, industry, pipeline stage, etc. to make the creation of target lists fast and accurate. As with any direct marketing campaign, the list is one of the most critical factors to the success of a VRM campaign.

3) Compose and personalize the offer enticement e-mail. The most important principle of VRM is personalization. The e-mail must appear to be a personal message from one individual to another. It should be written in the same tone you would use when writing an e-mail to any business peer. Mass-personalization requires that you carefully craft your message and merge contact data fields that add relevance to the recipient.

4) Optimize e-mail for deliverability and reader credibility. The e-mail message must also be crafted to bypass spam filters and the recipient’s initial scrutiny in order to be opened, read. and responded to. Some key best practices for optimizing deliverability and credibility:

* Subject lines. Clear, concise, and relevant to the message. No caps, exclamation or dollar signs, or spam-triggering words such as “free” or “save.”

* From lines. Use only an individual sender’s email, not a generic like HYPERLINK “mailto:[email protected]” [email protected].

* E-mail body. Keep in mind that the purpose of the e-mail is not to provide in-depth information about the offer but simply to entice the reader to respond by clicking the tracking link if the offer is of interest, so keep the message brief. Plain-text e-mails or HTML e-mails without formatting, graphics, or colors are far more likely to be perceived as a one-to-one communication by both recipients and spam filters. If you do use HTML, be sure to create a text version for recipients who have their e-mail program default setting on text.

* Tracking link. Direct your recipient to a landing page that fulfills the offer. * Closing lines. Be sure that the name and contact information in the closing matches that of the e-mail sender.

5) Create the offer fulfillment landing page. If there isn’t an existing page on your Website that fulfills the offer, you’ll need to create a landing page specifically for the campaign. If the solution you have implemented to automate the VRM campaign processes includes a content management system, this will be a quick and easy nontechnical task.

6) Schedule, test, and deliver the e-mail campaign. B-to-b e-mail campaigns scheduled and delivered early in the week generate higher rates of response than those sent later in the week. Before delivering, it is always wise to test your e-mail and tracking link on an inhouse list. You can also test to see how well your e-mail bypasses spam filters by using one of the popular spam checker tools available free on the Web.

7) Track campaign responses and identify sales opportunities. Response tracking will show you how well the campaign performed and give you a real-time view of who responded. Depending on the objective of the campaign, tracking responses can identify the qualified and timely selling opportunities your sales force and channel partners will value and pursue.

8) Distribute sales opportunity alerts and enforce follow-up. Your campaign process may provide for either the automated distribution of respondents to the assigned salesperson or partner, or you may need to manually review the responses prior to distributing sales alerts. In either case, automated follow-up rules and enforcement reminders are suggested. Studies have shown that the most effective and welcomed follow-up contact is made by telephone or e-mail within hours of the original recipient’s response.

9) Consult and analyze key performance metrics. Many b-to-b e-marketers are overwhelmed by a flood of analytical data measuring every vagary from Website page view times to e-mail open rates. There are so much data available that many marketers can no longer see the forest for the trees. An effective strategy for VRM analytics focuses on key performance metrics that will clearly mark a path to the most important outcome of them all–sales growth. Concise dashboard graphics and summary tables of key marketing and sales performance metrics linked to detailed marketing reports are the most useful analytical tools available.

Sergio Balegno is managing partner at Ascend2 , which specializes in Web-centric marketing and technology.