The ACT! by Sage Journal

Today we're joined by Stacy Roach with Power of 3 Consulting.  Her informative writing style and sense of humor make for a great read!  Stacy, take it away...

How to Use a Call List with Your Drip Marketing Campaign

Learn tried and true theories from a Drip Marketing Certified Consultant on how to use a Call List stage to follow up with your hottest leads.

Wednesday, October 28, 2009 from 12PM - 1PM EDT

Register Now to Attend

ACT! E-Marketing

By: Stacy Roach, Managing Partner of Power of 3 Consulting

ACT! E-marketing provides a full range of E-marketing services with ACT! 2010. ACT! E-marketing is powered by Swiftpage, the e-mail service provider who has been supplying E-Marketing services to the ACT! market for years.

ACT! E-marketing, powered by Swiftpage, is a subscription service that allows you to send e-mail blasts to your prospects & customers and track the results right in ACT! on the History tab. You can take it one step further and automate your marketing campaigns using Drip Marketing. This fantastic service puts your marketing efforts on auto-pilot. You can reach out regularly to your contacts, thus keeping your company’s products & service top-of-mind for your prospects & customers, without having to manually manage that communication. If you are on an older version of ACT!, don’t despair, you can still use this great add-on tool. Just go to www.swiftpage.com.

The Limits of Drip Marketing
But, drip marketing will not do everything for you. For instance, I discovered that it won’t bring me coffee at my desk in the morning, although I clearly defined that as a campaign stage. Seriously though, e-mail and drip marketing campaigns can do a lot for your business, but in the end, people buy from people, and unless you have a 100% internet shopping cart driven business, you will need to occasionally call your customers & prospects. Yes, pick up the phone, dial it, and talk to someone live. Try it, its fun!

Prioritize
The big question is…who to call? You want your sales efforts focused on those opportunities that have the highest likelihood of resulting in a sale. This is where the Swiftpage Call list comes in. You can pull up a list of contacts, ranked by their interest level based on their interaction with your campaigns. This means you can prioritize your list to the folks that are the most interested, based on their own actions. Pretty powerful stuff.

Rank & Score
When you pull up the Call List, you can set the scoring parameters, which determine the ranking of your contacts into categories of Hot, Warm and Mild. Points can be assigned based on the first time a contact clicks on a link in your e-mail or the first time they open the e-mail, as well as subsequent clicks and opens. You can tweak those points to reflect the scoring that best meets your organization’s qualification process.

Divvy Up the Calls
Let’s say you have a sales team, and want to assign calls to specific sales people. As long as you have the Team level Swiftpage subscription, you can pull up your call list, filter the list (let’s say you just want to assign the Hot and Warm contacts) and then assign your sales representatives calls.  If there are 500 contacts on your call list and you have fives sales reps, ACT! E-Marketing will automatically assign and evenly distribute those contacts across your team with each rep getting 100 calls.  You can then e-mail that call list to your sales representatives right from Swiftpage, or you can sync that call list to ACT!

Keep it in Sync
You can manage the call list online, and/or you can manage it through ACT!. In ACT! 2010, go to the Marketing  Results tab. (ACT! 2009 and earlier users would go to the Swiftpage Snapshot tab) and click on the call list section. Now click the Online Call List button. This takes you to the web page with your call list. Apply the call list filters and then assign the calls to one or more of your Swiftpage Users. Now back in ACT!, click the Sync to Online Call List button. Now you are viewing your call list assignments right in ACT!. No need to leave ACT!, just scroll through the call list, and, well, make the calls, making sure to Record History with the outcome of the calls. You can also click the Lookup button and Swiftpage will create an ACT! lookup of the contacts in your call list, sorted by their call list scores.

Back to Basics
Drip marketing and e-mails are certainly effective ways of communicating with your customers & prospects, but the power and effectiveness of those live, personal connections cannot be underestimated. However, knowing who to call is critical so that you make the most of your selling time – Swiftpage’s Call List feature, used with your drip marketing campaigns gives you that important information.

How to Use a Call List with Your Drip Marketing Campaign
If you’ld like more details on using Swiftpage’s Call List feature with Drip Marketing, you can attend a webinar sponsored by Swiftpage on October 28th at 12:00 pm Eastern Daylight Time. Click here to register.  

What you’ll learn in the webinar:
•    How to close more sales by following up with your hottest leads.
•    How to automatically create Call Lists based off of your email campaigns.
•    How to assign all or portions of your Call Lists to specific sales reps.
•    How to use your Call List directly from your database.