Identifying potential prospects is easy. It can be done by filtering through industries, geographic regions, business titles and countless other criteria to build a profile of target prospects. Identifying a prospect that is open and receptive to your product or solution at the exact moment when they realize they have a need, is a much more complicated issue. Doing this requires a significant amount of preparation,the ability to monitor prospect activity for subtle clues to changes in their buying state,and the tools to react instantly when an opportunity presents itself.
Making this possible is the adoption of marketing automation solutions that incorporate sophisticated prospect tracking, profiling and drip programs. This combination of functionality makes using trigger messages to improve B2B lead generation possible and when leveraged correctly, it can significantly increase your ability to identify active sales opportunities and reduce the overall sales cycle.
Trigger messages work because they present meaningful information about your particular products and solutions at a time when your prospects will be most receptive to them. In fact, according to Epilson’s “Q3 2012 North America Email Trends and Benchmarks,” triggered messages yielded 75.1% higher open rates and 114.8% higher click rates than did non-triggered email.
This is particularly valuable in B2B lead generation where the sales cycle is long and target markets are limited. Trigger messages improve the efficiency of your marketing program and can provide a strong competitive advantage. Yes, despite their clear advantages, triggered email as a marketing tactic is still rare, accounting for just 2.6% of all emails sent. This was based on an analysis of 6.4 billion emails sent by Epsilon on behalf of 170 clients in the quarter.
Ultimately, as you build marketing processes and integrated marketing campaigns, using trigger messages to improve B2B lead generation should be a priority. Fortunately, almost all marketing automation solutions make this easy to do. And even if you haven’t yet adopted a marketing automation solution, ResponsePoint can help you get started. We offer several quick start marketing programs that can help you set up these programs and provide a low-risk way to test the performance of these tools and best practices at little cost.
