Sunday, June 21, 2009

Your Business and Automated Multi-Step Marketing, Lead Generation

By Sven Makowal

When we discuss marketing we are in fact talking about relationships. We know that the favorable relationships are based on regular contact using a variety of different methods. We call our friends; send cards and flowers to our wives, and employ many other ways of demonstrating our love and affection to the people who we care about. When setting out to develop a successful Marketing Campaign we need to follow this same line of thought.

Selling today is a multi-step process because it has been demonstrated that up to 95% of the people you may touch with your advertising will not yet be in a purchasing mode. This makes it essential to maintain contact with anyone who responds to your marketing efforts. You build the relationship and condition them to the fact that you can be trusted and are knowledgeable about your product or service. This way when the time to purchase arrives, your company will be the one that they associate a solution to their need with.

Although the solution to our marketing challenges sounds simple, when we condense it into a few brief paragraphs, the reality is quite different. The following scenario is an example of what I mean. Imagine you attract 20 new prospects every month through your marketing and you touch base with each prospect 3 times every month. (Incidentally, contacting a prospect 3 times in a month is not excessive). Over a period of 6 months, following this same pattern, you would have to manage 1,260 contacts. If you are doing it properly you are also doing this via different forms of media. Imagine the time constraints managing this type of activity would put on your day. The unfortunate reality is that you cant afford not to do this - statistics show that you will close 75% more prospects when you DO stay in touch with them over the course of a year.

I recently came across a company that has spent the last 12 years developing a systematic and fully media featured marketing program that has automated a multi-step marketing capability. This company is Automated Marketing Solutions or "AMS". AMS provides a full suite of marketing technology tools and processes that allow any company to deliver a comprehensive marketing program using not only tested, but proven methods. The most exciting aspect of their development is that the entire process can be automated. They refer to it as putting your marketing on Auto-Pilot. Once a business marketing program (including voice messages, e-mails, faxes and other broadcast and mail out collateral) is compiled and sequenced, their Lead Management System or LMS provides the convenient ability to manage and control that program without any further human interaction. It captures leads that respond to marketing and places them into the appropriate program for follow up by the LMS itself. Very little, if any, human input is required. The benefits to this system are significant time savings on what would otherwise be labor intensive tasks. It also provides consistency in marketing messages.

An additional benefit of using their LMS is the retention capabilities of the system. As we know, once you have sourced and converted a prospect, your next most important task is to keep them as a customer. Using AMS Lead Management System means that businesses never need worry about losing customers who misinterpreted their lack of contact for lack of interest. Finally, because of AMS years of experience in building multi-media marketing programs they are able to assist and educate their users on the best methods to use as they build their own campaigns.

If you would like to learn more about Lead Management Systems and how it can benefit your business, visit Automated Marketing Solutions today. Discover how quickly and economically you can implement and start benefiting from AMS tested and proven technology and experience.

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