By Skyler Holobach
Growing up, two of my grandmother’s favorite phrases were “You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar” and “You never get a second chance to make a first impression”. As a kid, I always hated the one about the flies – I’d rather never see a fly again so why in the world would I bother attracting them with honey?! Looking back on it however, both of those phrases make a lot of sense. You’re going to get further in life by being nice to people and making a good first impression than you would with being sour and throwing away your (sometimes only!) chance for people to form an opinion about you. The same concept applies to your email marketing.
Picture this: I’m clicking around your website, checking out your blog, and decide I’m interested enough to fill out one of your forms for information. Upon submitting, I’m met with…
OPTION 1
Silence. Um….hello? Did my form even go through? Am I supposed to be expecting someone to reach out, or am I just going to be getting automated emails later? At what frequency am I supposed to be expecting to hear from you? Leaving me completely in the dark is not only a bad practice from the client side, it’s also not a great practice from a database perspective. If someone puts a junk email address into your form and you don’t have some layer of protection against junk data, you run the risk of having high bounce rates on your list email sends. High bounce rates can affect future inbox deliverability, so it’s important from both a client and a database hygiene perspective to at least send one email to people who indicate their interest!
OPTION 2
A welcome autoresponder, a newsletter email, three emails about my new account with your site, a phone call, a letter sent to my house, a text message, a push notification, a snapchat, a Twitter mention, a Facebook message….
I’m being a bit facetious here, but there have definitely been signups where I’ve received no less than five emails from one form fill. Upon receiving those five emails, I immediately unsubscribed and marked all of those emails as junk. It was information overload from the very beginning, and all of it could have been combined into one or two emails to provide me with the information I needed to get started. The best way for you to tell if your notification system is overdoing it is to test it yourself. If you’re rolling your eyes by the time you get email number 3, it’s time to change your welcome process.
OPTION 3
A carefully crafted, thoughtful, autoresponder. This is the golden ticket to giving the best possible first impression of the marketing side of your business. The key here is to build that autoresponder with the thought that this is the only chance you possibly have to get that person to love your company and make a purchase. That isn’t to say you should agonize over every pixel and send an email that would be three printed pages long. You should be writing an autoresponder that welcomes me to your company, lets me know exactly what frequency of mailing I should expect to receive, and personalizes the content as much as it possibly can. The more personal you can make your autoresponder, the better your first impression is going to be, and you can be sure to start that relationship off on the right foot.
What’s the best autoresponder you’ve ever received, and what made it so great?
Source: Pardot
Lava is an authorised Salesforce Partner in Malaysia and has more than 9 years of cloud solutions, CRM implementation and consultation experience. We pride ourselves in not just being a CRM partner but in also understanding the needs of our customers and taking their business to the next level.