Recently, I was chatting with a group of senior Sales & Marketing professionals that have had a lot of success using email marketing. They we’re all very enthusiastic about the contribution that permissionbased email had made in strengthening customer relationships. The group confirmed an important insight for all marketers who are directly or indirectly responsible for revenue: there is a costeffective use of email for every step of the sales funnel. Given that all senior marketers work closely with sales professionals to acquire and retain customers, I’m going to highlight how email plays a critical role throughout the sales process.

Prospecting for new leads
It’s important to keep in-mind, as reported by research firm Ipsos-Reid, that email is the most preferred form of communications of Canadians. As such, every effort should be made to use email during the early stages of communicating with would-be customers. Some tactics include:
Email refer-a-friend techniques have become a standard and, when done properly, lead to increased brand awareness and new customer acquisition.
Email can also be used for gathering new leads through co-registration. Partner with those companies who have an existing and trusted relationship with target prospects.
Consider providing exclusive offers for customers who provide email addresses at point-of-sale.
Imperative: Collect email from multiple customer touch-points.

Conducting research for qualifying prospects
The core purpose behind a good qualification process is to establish a deep and accurate understanding of the prospect. Sales and marketing professionals collect customer data to help identify relevant characteristics such as critical demographics, psychographics and purchase-making processes and decisions. A common tactic is to use surveys or customer response forms to collect prospect data. Email related data dramatically enhances the learnings gathered through online and offline surveys because it adds the one component that is often under-utilized: actual prospect behavior. Behavioral data sheds more light on a prospect than their expressed surveyed responses on preferences and is a clearer indication of their intent.
Email marketing also works hand-inhand with offline qualifying initiatives. For example, recently one of the nation’s largest loyalty groups used email to help qualify prospects in their efforts to identify impending luxury car buyers. By using email in the qualifying stage, they were able to cost-effectively draw into their showrooms customers who were most likely to purchase. Their conversion rates were the highest they have ever achieved for such a campaign.
Imperative: Use email in combination with other data collection programs – online and offline.

Contacting prospects to demonstrate key benefits and features
Regardless of your industry or the audience that you’re targeting – B2B or B2C – one thing remains constant: the more customized the message and the more personalized the offering, the greater is the customer’s willingness to listen to and act upon your message.
The reason is straight forward enough: personalization helps to create relevance and relevance sells. Email is the undisputed king as far as providing timely and targeted relevant information. Part of that prominence is due to email’s capability of being easily tracked, measured and quickly modified.
Recently, one of Canada’s leading transportation providers took an industry-pioneering stance by introducing dynamic content into their email campaigns. As a result, their would-be customers received only email that reflected their preferences and behaviours. The resulting personalization and relevance injected into the communication led to dramatic increases across all targeted sales (e.g. several million dollars in new revenues) and marketing metrics (e.g. a return on marketing investment that exceeded targets by 28%).
Imperative: Use email to ensure ongoing relevance.

Closing the deal
At the end of the day, effective sales funnel activities is measured by when the prospective customer purchases your product or service. When coupled with optimized landing pages, email is a powerful tool for closing the deal – particularly when closing the deal involves customers taking several steps towards a larger transaction. For example, visiting a website, clicking on special offers, watching a particular product video, enrolling in subscriptions, printing out coupons and showing up in the store are all possible steps on route to customers making an increasing investment in your product or service.
Imperative: Use email to ask for the sale and make it easy for the customer to complete transactions.

Following up to build trust
The best customer is a repeat customer. In selling situations, for example, the lesson is to balance making the quick sale with building and maintaining long-term relationships that build repeat business. Truly this has become the mantra for all sales and marketing professionals.
When used in concert with other online and offline sales and marketing initiatives, email has proven itself to be invaluable in this regard. In fact, the Direct Marketing Association estimates that every dollar spent on email yields a return of $48. Imperative: Use email to nurture the customer relationship after the sale.
Having strong and disciplined sales funnel management is critical to increasing your revenues. And, by leveraging the unique strengths of email throughout your sales funnel processes you will achieve that discipline and its natural results.

http://dmn.ca/Articles/DM_April-2010(web).pdf