I don’t suppose your prospects generally take the time to tell you that your decision maker has left their company and to please redirect all future sales and marketing communications to the new person who has replaced them. (Yeah right!) Maybe your customers even forget to do this.
Suppose there was a free service that automatically gives you a list of every one of your business contacts that is no longer with the firm you knew them to be with. Wouldn’t this be handy!
People move on. And in business it’s over 30% annually. With a long sales cycle, as well as the fact that some companies may not be in the market one year and then be serious buyers the next, staying in touch for the long haul is critical to the success of marketing and sales. Furthermore, relationships with current customers can hinge on the relationship you have with one person. If they go, you now have to start building a new relationship with someone who may be predisposed to taking your account elsewhere. Suffice to say that it is essential to know when your “contacts” move on!
Email is one cost effective strategy for identifying key contacts who may have moved on. Undeliverable email will automatically bounce back to the sender. And, unlike the postal service that charges for address change notification, this way is free! Besides, with B-to-B address change notification through the Post Office is only effective for telling you that the firm has relocated. It’s not effective for personnel changes. What you need to do is email.
If you do a broadcast email, within 24 hours you’ve received notifications of not only bad addresses, but also for folks who are no longer with the company.
Using GoldMine’s email rules, you can automatically file all those bad emails into an “undeliverable folder.” By looking up email addresses (Lookup Menu > Details > email Address) or using eGrabber you can easily identify the records in GoldMine that you need to follow up and identify a replacement for, or at least a corrected email.
With this strategy in mind, “Return to Sender” takes on a new meaning and a new value!
