Sway Engine Marketing

A typical email content marketing strategy involves offering some free content product, usually access to a whitepaper or webinar. In many cases, recipients must give additional contact information such as their titles, companies, etc.

Many email marketers see the request as an end in itself. As soon as the recipient makes the request, email marketers think their jobs are done. They hand over the “qualified” prospects to a sales team and start planning the next campaign.

This process works in theory, but it all falls apart if the content product is weak.

What happens is that the sales team calls those prospects and finds out they’re not interested. In fact, they’re upset that they gave their personal information in exchange for something that promised value but didn’t deliver.

Now the salespeople are upset at the marketers for not delivering qualified prospects, and the marketers accuse the salespeople for not being able to close a deal. What’s the solution?

First of all, stop measuring the requests for content as ends in themselves. Start looking at how many of those requests converted into actual sales. That will give you a better sense of how qualified these prospects were in the first place.

Second, take a look at the content of your whitepapers, if that’s what you offer. The actual content of your whitepaper is not what prompts recipients to act. What prompts them to request the content is good copywriting and design in an email.

In other words, you’ve collected “qualified” prospects by promising great content in your email. Now ask yourself, do you deliver on that promise? If you’re not sure, then add another step to the sales process. Instead of immediately handing requestor information to sales, send an email to those people asking if the information in the whitepaper was useful and maybe make another free offer.

Those who respond to that email can safely be considered qualified, and you’ll get valuable feedback on your offering at the same time.