Technology Marketing by Tatum MarketingJust another WordPress weblog

As many of you know, I have a tendency to get very cranky about money being wasted on marketing. It’s just so dumb. With all the tools at hand for tracking, measuring, and optimizing marketing campaigns, there’s no reason to burn money.

Yet companies do it all the time.

And here’s one method that is particularly irksome: don’t follow up. Or if you do, make sure you wait a while.

Several years ago I saw a statistic on the number of companies that fail to follow up with contacts after a trade show. I don’t remember the exact number but – trust me – it was huge. Somewhere well over 50% of all the companies who spend tons of money planning and participating in trade shows simply never follow up with the prospects they meet. 

I thought this was outrageous until I saw a MarketingSherpa report containing information about how companies respond to email requests. Specifically, the report talks about marketing to engineers, but there is a message in it for all marketers.

Engineers, not surprising to anyone who has worked with them, prefer to communicate by email. So do a lot of other people. They will research products online and then send an email requesting more details. 

What happens to that email at your company?

MarketingSherpa found only 17% of suppliers responded to an email request within 24 hours. The majority (53%) took between one and two days. And everyone else took longer. 

Now think about this for a minute. I want to look at this from two angles. One, you’ve spent a lot of time and money building a solid website that addresses preliminary concerns and questions of your prospects. Your efforts have succeeded in interesting prospects enough to have them reach out, identify themselves and ASK you to contact them. Why would you wait?

The second angle is from your own perspective. Assume you’ve carefully researched a purchase. You’ve eliminated as many sources as possible and now you want some additional information from your top choices. This decision is top of mind with you right now. You send an email. Two days (or more) pass before you hear from the company. What are you thinking now? Are you still as hot to talk to a sales rep?

Probably not.

Things happen fast on the internet. We’ve become accustomed to immediate responses – even if they’re only automated ones. Other things being equal, the sale will almost always go to the team that is most responsive.

What a great opportunity! If you just make sure your marketing or sales team is responding to email requests within 24 business hours you could beat out 83% of your competitors. 

Technorati Tags: email, responsiveness, conversion