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The simple truth in sales is that not everyone is a viable lead for your business. Research shows at least 50% of your leads are not a good fit for the product or service you’re selling. In fact, only 25% of your leads are good enough to actually advance to a sale. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean your lead generation process is broken.
Ideally, you should cast a wide net to build your list of prospects and then qualify them through lead nurturing. The goal is for the sales team only to invest their time in sales qualified leads (SQL), so they can do their jobs as efficiently and successfully as possible.
In the cannabis industry, email marketing is one of the best (and most cost-effective) ways to nurture leads and identify which are unqualified, viable, marketing qualified leads (MQL) or sales qualified.
It’s important to understand the critical role that lead nurturing plays in email marketing and sales. One email message is highly unlikely to generate a sale unless that message gets to exactly the right person at the precise moment they’re ready to buy. If your product or service has a high price tag or long sales cycle, it’s even less likely for a single email message to generate a sale. That’s why lead nurturing is essential.
The Rule of 7 in sales and marketing has been around for a very long time. The rule says a prospect must be exposed to your brand, business, products/services, and messaging at least seven times before they’ll agree to buy.
Keep in mind, the Rule of 7 is actually rooted in cognitive research. In fact, new research published in January 2023, An Astonishing Regularity in Student Learning Rate, found that people’s learning rates are “astonishingly” similar. The researchers found it takes about seven sessions on average for a person to master a specific knowledge component.
When you apply that basic cognitive principle to marketing and sales, it takes an average of seven sessions for a prospect to learn the value of a product or service and understand it well enough to be motivated to buy it to satisfy a want or need.
That’s where lead nurturing comes into the picture. Marketers invest in a variety of channels to expose potential customers to their brands, products, and services, including advertising, email, direct mail, events, social media, and so on. Of those opportunities, email marketing is both affordable and cost effective. You just have to be willing to do the work to track recipient engagement so you can identify sales qualified leads.
Your hottest sales prospects have a budget to make a purchase, the authority to make the purchase decision, a need for your product or service, and a timeline to complete their purchase (BANT).
Your hottest leads already progressed through most of the buyer’s journey and are aware of your company and what you offer. They’ve also already conducted research and compared vendors. They’re at the bottom of the sales and marketing funnel and are ready to buy.
Using data, you can easily find your hottest leads based on their interactions with your email marketing messages and convert them into buying customers.
For example, the new and improved email marketing tool in the Cannabiz Media License Database puts information about your hottest leads front and center on your dashboard, so you always know who are your most interested and motivated prospects. You can instantly:
You can set your own timeframe for this data analysis within the Cannabiz Media License Database and see which recipients have been the most engaged in the past week, month, and more.
Which prospects are very engaged right now? Which have been consistently engaged over the past few months? Depending on the data, you can jumpstart sales calls or create email campaigns to nurture people in the middle of the sales funnel (warm leads) in order to turn them into hot leads.
Your hottest leads are ready to buy right now, so you need to make sure your brand is top of mind. Some effective email marketing campaigns that you can use to sell to your hottest leads in the cannabis industry include:
Be sure to personalize the email campaigns you send to your hottest leads and segment your email list to boost results.
Not only is it critical that you send the right messages to your hottest leads, but it’s also extremely important to connect with them at the right time.
This is easy to do with the email marketing tool in the Cannabiz Media License Database. Subscribers can use the built-in recipient-based performance and send time optimization tool and visual heat map to send messages at the best time of day based on prior sending results.
Subscribers can also optimize the delivery day of email campaigns sent through the Cannabiz Media License Database. The built-in artificial intelligence automatically identifies the best day over a time period of up to three days to send each message in order to maximize response rates.
By creating the best messages for your hottest leads and sending them at the best times, you’ll generate a higher return on your email marketing investments, successfully nurture leads through the marketing funnel, and turn them into hot leads whom you can then convert into buying customers!
Email marketing is not as simple as sending a message and hoping someone bites. In fact, that approach will lead your messages directly to spam folders. To get great email marketing results and actually find the right leads to sell to, you need to understand current email marketing do’s and don’ts and best practices.
You can do it by earning one or more certifications from the Cannabiz Media Email Success Academy.
The online certification courses available in the Email Success Academy are free and self-paced and teach you all aspects of email marketing in five critical knowledge areas:
Each of the courses available in the Email Success Academy is free and open to the public, so anyone can learn to be a cannabis industry email marketing expert.
Email marketing is one of the most effective tools to find and sell to your hottest leads. Use the data available in the Cannabiz Media License Database to determine who is ready to buy and focus your direct sales efforts on them while continuing to nurture warm leads and turn them into hot leads. With the right tool, strategy, and processes in place, you’ll end up closing more sales and spending less time and money to do it.
To see the Cannabiz Media License Database in action, schedule a demo and learn how it can help you connect with cannabis and hemp license holders and increase your sales and revenue.
Originally published 7/21/20. Updated 2/10/23.
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