A friend of mine owns a fairly large company. To maintain his anonymity, I won't name the industry. However, he has a tremendous opportunity to relay information that his firm a vast amount of knowledge about on a topic that is very hot, in an email format. I took a look at his site and the sign up form and, bottom line, it stunk.
I called him and said, ", you are missing the point here, this is not about creating a marketing survey, or generating a lead with the most information on it so that your salespeople can call with a depth of knowledge (which data shows they are unlikely to do anyway). This is about starting a relationship. There will be time to do other things later”. He got it - he said, "let me have my marketing person call you."
Today they called. You know how it is when someone makes you call someone you really don't want to talk to, but have to? That is how this call went. She had to be polite, but no matter what I said, I realized she did not want to hear it. I got responses like, "that is interesting, I will have to take that to our committee." The bottom line that I tried to convey to her was that her opt-in form is buried 3 levels into her website, and in order to receive her "alerts," a subscriber must to answer 6 questions (including if they are prepared to deal with this specific situation and who her salesforce should contact in my organization to discuss this issue in more detail). I forgot to mention...all of these are REQUIRED fields.
This is a smart marketer, however, sometimes no matter how smart they are, they just don't get it. An email signup form is not a bingo card. It is too easy to move on when the questions get too personal. It is merely an opportunity to start a relationship. As Humphrey Bogart said in Casablanca, “…this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”
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