{the guide} MEET DAN A SMART(ER) MARKETER WITH icontact PRO
Meet Dan - A Smart(er) Marketer with icontact Pro Dan runs a busy sales training consultancy from his home office in Boise, Idaho. With help from his wife Mary, a part-time marketing assistant who helps write marketing copy, and occasional support from a freelance design agency, Dan helps businesses of all shapes and sizes develop their sales skills via a series of carefully crafted training programs, which he delivers in the classroom and online environments. Recently, Dan has widened his reach by developing a range of digital training products and downloadable guides. This has enabled him to sell his services to a wider range of clients in terms of available training budget and geographic location. Over the years, Dan has built a solid reputation for the quality of his training products and as such has clients all over the world where his expert advice is in constant demand. But Dan is never complacent. As a sales professional, he knows that in order to protect, maintain and grow his business he needs to build a strong sales funnel, delivering a constant supply of new leads, as well as generating opportunities for repeat business. What Makes Dan s Life Difficult? While Dan is a very busy man, sometimes he finds himself doing things that don t add value to the business. Things like chasing leads that go nowhere or building marketing campaigns that are used once and deliver very little in terms of the time and effort invested in creating them. Very occasionally, he makes silly mistakes like targeting the wrong people with the wrong offers at the wrong time. Sometimes he doesn t feel too smart at marketing. Dan Needs To Get Smart(er) Dan runs his business with very limited resources. He works in a highly competitive industry, where many of his peers are only too willing to undercut his prices. He s constantly on the road and when he s not in the training room he likes to devote most of his time to developing new products to ensure he stays ahead of the game. Most of Dan s business leads come from his email newsletter registrations, which he promotes via his blog articles, whitepaper and ebooks downloads, and registrations for his online webinars. With such a strong reputation, driving leads is not difficult. However, identifying the warmest and potentially most lucrative leads and engaging them in a conversation that leads to a sale can be problematic. Copyright 2014 icontact LLC www.icontact.com 2
When Dan does find the time to speak to potential clients, he cannot afford to waste his time and energy with prospects that either do not need or cannot afford his personal services. In an ideal world, he would only speak to his hottest, most lucrative leads and direct everyone else to his online educational programs where they can be nurtured and sold his lower cost digital training products. Introducing icontact Pro icontact Pro is a new service from icontact Email Marketing designed to help business owners like Dan become smart(er) marketers. icontact Pro takes everything that is great about email marketing with icontact and enhances it with sophisticated email marketing segmentation, marketing automation, CRM integration, and social media management technology. With icontact Pro, Dan can expect an intuitive, easy-to-use product that allows him to create highly effective marketing campaigns from one application. icontact Pro enables Dan to capture leads with greater efficiency, identify and target those who are most likely to buy, while nurturing and managing contacts in a carefully managed sales funnel to ensure the right content reaches the right people at the right time, delivering a constant flow of warm business leads. icontact Pro does all this without the steep learning curves and complex technical support required by many other similar marketing solutions. It puts the power to successfully market businesses firmly back into the hands of business owners and marketers like Dan. How Does icontact Pro Help Dan? icontact Pro helps Dan build better relationships based on his knowledge by enabling him to communicate more efficiently and effectively with his audience using the following mechanisms: 1. Landing Pages: icontact Pro enables Dan to quickly build his own campaign landing pages and capture leads without the support of a design team or IT resource. The WYSIWYG design tool, familiar to all icontact clients, enables Dan to simply drag and drop page elements (such as logos, images, text, and forms) onto a page which can them be linked to a campaign and published to the web. This means Dan is able to launch new, fully branded, lead generating programs (such as whitepapers, webinars) to suit his schedule. Copyright 2014 icontact LLC www.icontact.com 3
2. Lead Scoring: Dan is able to prioritize leads and identify hot prospects as and when they enter his sales funnel based on criteria, such as domain name, job title, location, etc. For example a lead from a corporate email address, identifying a Sales Director could be prioritized and targeted with more direct sales messages than those who arrive from a personal Gmail address. However, understanding that today s university student or office intern could be tomorrow s Sales Director, Dan never dismisses a lead. Lead scoring allows individuals to move higher or lower in the sales funnel depending on their engagement with Dan s content. 3. Workflow Automation (Marketing Automation): Tailoring specific content to individual subscriber activities (and lead scoring criteria) means Dan can deliver more targeted campaigns and therefore more relevant campaigns to his list. As subscribers become more engaged with Dan s email marketing content, they can be moved upwards in the sales funnel and targeted with a more pressing Call-to-Action (CTA) or presented as a sales opportunity. 4. Content Efficiency: icontact Pro allows Dan to distribute his content more efficiently. Evergreen content is constantly re-used as new subscribers enter his sales funnel meaning Dan s investment in content creation continues to work for him long into the future. 5. A/B Split Testing: Dan knows an unopened email or a missed engagement is a lost opportunity. Testing enables Dan to optimize his email marketing campaigns so he knows they are working as hard as he is. 6. CRM Integration: icontact Pro s integration with Salesforce.com enables Dan to make smarter, more informed sales calls. The ability to access his CRM on the road via his smart phone means he s always up to date with all his clients and prospects activities and is able to steer his conversations accordingly. 7. Social Media Management: Social media drives much of the traffic that converts to email subscriptions and latterly clients. icontact Pro enables Dan to manage all his campaigns from a single interface which saves time and delivers greater clarity to the success of his marketing efforts. Copyright 2014 icontact LLC www.icontact.com 4
Smart(er) Means Being Self-Sufficient Dan s main priority in life is to deliver the best possible training products he can. He is a sales professional first and foremost and a marketer second. Sometimes he views marketing as a necessary evil not that you would know from the quality of his content-led campaigns. While Dan tried other Marketing Automation services, but he was attracted to icontact Pro because it simply enabled him to get the job done, without having to invest in learning an overly complex system or paying an expert to manage his marketing programs. With icontact Pro, Dan knows that he can quickly and efficiently build campaigns that deliver real results and if he ever needs assistance, icontact s knowledgeable team is there to help. Could You Be a Smart(er) Marketer Like Dan? Have overly complex marketing systems left you confused? Do you want to deliver smart(er) marketing campaigns without hiring expert help? Would you like to take your marketing to the next level and become a smart(er) marketer like Dan? Call icontact (877) 820-7837 and to see how icontact Pro can help you become a smart(er) marketer. For more info, visit www.icontact.com. About icontact Since 2003, small and medium businesses worldwide have achieved significant results by turning to icontact s best-in-class email marketing solutions and knowledgeable team members. Made scalable to serve the needs of high-volume senders, professional marketers, and businesses new to email, icontact s easyto-use technology ensures that every customer has what they need whenever they need it to succeed. Headquartered in Morrisville, NC, icontact is an awardwinning company in the Cision family of brands. Connect with us: Copyright 2014 icontact LLC www.icontact.com 5