Recently, I attended Boston Geek Girl TechCon, a local Science Technology Engineering Mathematics (S.T.E.M.) event bringing together young professionals working in tech in order to augment their digital marketing skillset. As an attendee, I sat in on several informative sessions, such as The Power of the Inbox: Tips and Tricks for Successful Email Marketing, a workshop which was sponsored by Constant Contact. Now, I’m taking the lessons I learned at Geek Girl and passing them on to you, so that you may take full advantage of our content and accelerate your own sales pipeline!
In our eBook, Email Marketing Best Practices for MSPs, we discuss how to strategically leverage the power of email marketing to grow you business, explaining how to design and what to write in the right email. But in order to nurture leads with targeted email campaigns, you have to have a list of contacts to send your messages to…
Explicit vs. Implicit Permission
So how do you get the contact information you need to be able to follow up with those key decision makers whose companies may be a good fit for your managed IT services? And even if you do get their email addresses, how do you even know they want to hear from you?
According to Suzan Czajkowski, President of TheCommCoach, there are two ways in which businesses receive permission to email people: implicitly and explicitly. Explicit consent is the most typical form of lead generation we see. This involves contacts opting in to join your company’s email list. An example of this would be submitting information or checking a box on an online form to sign up for your newsletter. In doing this, those contacts signal to you that they will allow you to send them your marketing messaging. Keep in mind that all website forms should include a disclaimer at the bottom expressing this. When you download our managed IT services email marketing eBook, for instance, you will see the following:
By completing this form you are consenting to receiving complimentary MSP educational content via email and possibly being contacted by a Continuum representative if you show interest.
Sadly, even when prospects opt in to receive your marketing emails, your commercial emails may still fall into the spam trap. To prevent this, check out HubSpot’s A Marketer’s Guide to Getting Past Email Spam Filters!
The other form of permission – one not captured by forms – is implicit permission. Czajkowski taught us that any time contacts provide email addresses, they are implicitly allowing you to email them afterward.
So besides online opt-ins and forms, how can you achieve this to build your email marketing list? Let’s look at a few examples.
Fair Play Ways to Garner Email Addresses In-Person
1. Business Cards
Attending, sponsoring and speaking at industry events is a great way to get your name out there, and no self-respecting business owner shows up to such a gathering without business cards. Make sure you always have a fresh stack on hand when networking with your peers and prospects. Once other attendees give you their business cards, you’re free to email them to continue that conversation! Other than through face-to-face interactions, you can also collect business cards via a sponsor table “fishbowl.” Offer an incentive for people who pass your booth to drop their card in. Many sponsors hold a random drawing, in which participants are entered to win a free gift card.
Pro Tip for that “Ahhh I left my business cards back at the office” moment: Create a digital business card in seconds! Apps like Zap, the Digital Business Card pull information from your social profiles.
2. Quick Response (QR) Codes
QR Codes store all sorts of useful marketing information, including email addresses! For this reason, businesses now increasingly employ them across printed assets. If you’re hosting an event or tech meet-up, consider adding a “Get All Our Latest!” QR Code on table tents or in the event program. Rather than forcing people to type in the URL to a specific landing page and then have to fill out a form, this creates a better mobile user experience for attendees who can simply scan the code with their QR reader.
3. Sign-Up Sheets
OK, so pen and paper isn’t exactly the “techiest” way to go about business and certainly isn’t meant for large crowds, but don’t deny the effectiveness of a good, old-fashioned, printed sign-up sheet! It can be used to capture additional information to use in email marketing, details that prospects might not print on their business cards, such as company size, data compliance requirements and “how’d you hear about us?” In this way, sign-up sheets act as an in-person form, providing you with everything you need to target specific prospects and tailor your message accordingly.
Pro Tip: If you have pens with your company’s logo, use them! It just helps further establish your brand and legitimacy!
Looking to learn more? Download Email Marketing Best Practices for MSPs! (http://it4msp.com/1UD4DeU)
4. Talking with Your Customers about Business Continuity
In this industry, it’s fairly well understood how crucial business continuity and disaster recovery are to modern business. Service providers are the ones constantly dealing with hardware failures, troubleshooting network outages and making sure every technological wrinkle is ironed out as quickly as possible to avoid any momentum-killing downtime at a client site. But when you’re talking to those clients, it’s important to remember what all of this looks like from their side of the relationship.
To them, “business continuity” is just an ornate little buzz word and “disaster recovery” sounds like an extremely unlikely occurrence that is worth betting against. It can be easy to forget that the business owners making IT purchasing decisions are usually a layer or two removed from the actual hands-on technical work that keeps their business going. Because of his separation, it makes sense that they might take for granted all of the precise planning and maintenance that goes on behind the curtain on a weekly or daily basis.
These misconceptions and technical illiteracies from SMB business owners are not only fair, but they should be expected. This makes it all the more important that service providers, when talking about offerings like business continuity, deliberately and accurately frame the conversation in a way that hits the sweet spot between educational and exhaustive. Explainingbackup and disaster recovery (BDR) as “insurance for your data” only skims the surface of the value that your services provide, but getting into the gritty tech specs of each server and encryption algorithm is more likely to make their eyes glaze over than their wallets open up.
There are a few ways that you can strike that balance and explain business continuity in terms that SMBs will both relate to and appreciate. Here are a few suggestions:
Ask Questions
I was tempted to go with the “save the best for last” strategy with this one, but that just didn’t seem to make sense. This is absolutely the most important thing you can do when talking to your clients, and it’s the reason that this article is titled “Talking with your customers about Business Continuity” as opposed to “Talking at your customers….”
Sitting down and asking meaningful questions to help understand the problems that your prospects and/or customers are trying to solve is the first (and best) step toward actually solving those problems. If you go into the conversation blind assuming that your tried-and-true BDR sales pitch is going to fit the needs of every potential customer then your message is likely not going to be as powerful as it needs to be to win their business.
Start by asking questions that help you understand what they’re currently working with:
- What are the main priorities as far as backup and continuity are concerned? Do they have certain regulatory commitments that they need to comply with?
- What problems have they faced in the past that could be pre-emptively addressed?
- Do they currently have offsite backup? Do they think they need it?
- What plan, if any, do they have for recovering from downtime?
I’m not saying that you need to take all of their initial answers as gospel, but if they tell you that their priorities are grounded on the ability to occasionally restore a couple of deleted files then you have an opportunity to educate them about the overall value that you can provide for them. It’s not that you need to match your service level agreements (SLAs) specifically to their perceived needs during the first meeting, but you should be willing to frame the conversation based on their understanding of what you can provide them. Not only will this help you craft a compelling sales pitch for your BDR offering, it will also set a positive tone that could last for the duration of your working relationship.
Time is Money
I don’t think it’s an overstatement that this is something that all business owners can relate to. Time is their most valuable commodity, and every hour during the day that their employees are unable to do their jobs is money flowing out of their pockets. This is why it’s effective to frame the BDR conversation around the time that is wasted in the event of a hardware failure or human error.
It’s important to get your prospects and customers thinking beyond the standard file and folder restore. Help them understand that when you say “business continuity” you’re actually talking about tangible operations that go far deeper than recovering a few lost files, and when you say “disaster recovery” you’re not necessarily talking about a once in a decade natural disaster. It’s about being able to access their data and run their business when something goes awry, whether an onsite Exchange server malfunctions or a squirrel climbing on a transformer causes a neighborhood power outage near their office.
Proving that you’ll be able to get their business up and running faster than anyone else will go a long way in highlighting the actual dollars and cents value that your offering provides.
Keep reading here! (http://it4msp.com/1UD4AQv)
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