So it’s May 2018 and we are all experiencing a flood of marketing emails from companies asking you to stay opted into their CRM marketing database. All as a result of the new GDPR regulations. Maybe they should be pleading. Some organisations are terrified at the prospect of losing the opportunity to regularly “inform” all their hard-earned email contacts. Others view it as a good way of cleansing their marketing database, but the reality is many good contacts and senior decision makers who are still potential customers will not opt back in. Simply they just lack the time or inclination to put themselves back onto a third-party database that creates emails that for 99% of the time they have no interest. For them it’s great – it will cut a massive amount of their daily emails immediately.

But that’s the point – 99% of the time they have no interest but 1% of the time they will have, and monthly newsletters were traditionally viewed as an effective way of nurturing. And when they do become interested, then the hope was they just happen to receive the email at the right time, and they respond, and we have a lead. So how do we now nurture if they don’t want to opt in into our email company updates and promotions?

We can still call them – but with a potential massive list of contacts then that is difficult in terms of time and resource. For calling to be effective you need to be speaking to them at a time when they are genuinely interested in your products. People are notoriously difficult to get hold of and often just results in a “Call me back in 6 months because this is not a priority right now”. Not an effective use of marketing or sales resource.

Is there a better way to nurture contacts?

This is where social media can play a big part in nurturing. I once had a boss who if I called or emailed and he didn’t respond but then I posted a tweet, he would respond immediately. Admittedly I was playing to his twitter addiction and I could take advantage of that, but still it was very effective.

With many of the companies I write content for, when we post to LinkedIn, it has amazed me how many times we get “Likes” from senior people that in the past have ignored our marketing emails or you just can’t reach on the phone. Many of them do use and regularly engage with these platforms. For this to work then the content has to appeal to their interest. A good reason for continually creating content that is concise, interesting and varied for your potential customers.

My personal experience that if you can use a social media platform like LinkedIn , it is very effective in an age where people have email blindness, and becomes a great tool for nurturing accounts.

We use a third-party tool to monitor social media interactions – in fact we use a platform called HubSpot that is both a Sales CRM and Marketing tool combined. It can help you see who you have in your database and link them to people who are interacting with your social media platforms and creates a history.  When you see people becoming more interested and engaging then that may be a good time to call them, you know they are warming up in terms of interest in your solutions. I have even had senior decision makers contact me via DM on LinkedIn with their mobile rather than send an email.

So though now we are expecting less results from our e-newsletters, in fact here is an opportunity to do lead nurturing and engagement in a more productive and interesting way and to a far bigger audience. But it does require continually generated and educational content -something we at Rain Dance can help you with. Contact us – we are a friendly bunch and happy to help you improve sales through effective lead generation.

About Rain Dance NL – Rain Dance helps broadcast and technology companies with their digital marketing strategies. Companies wishing to increase revenues through on-line digital lead generation initiatives can benefit from Rain Dance and their low-cost content writing services. “New Content, New Customers” – https://rd-software.net/