Making Contact

Your contact strategy needs to be just right. Although there are other means of maintaining contact, it’s likely that your online ecosystem will be tied into email and/or RSS. To create the optimal contact strategy, allow your visitors to tailor their experience. After asking for first and last name, and email address, add some secondary steps for segmentation by areas of interest, and ask for a desired frequency of communications (daily, weekly, or monthly.) Remember the parameters: too many mailings and you will have high attrition; too few mailings and recognition may wane.

Depending on your content strategy, the frequency for reaching out may be predetermined. For example, if you are pushing newsworthy content daily, then a condensed daily mailing may be in order. If you find that the user checked lifestyle and left business unchecked, then make sure you design your email to bring the most relevant lifestyle information to the top of the screen page – above the fold. Also keep your typical sales cycle in mind as you craft an appropriate call-to-action. You can almost drill it down to a one-to-one level, or at least to a specific segment of the total population within your house list.

You may have predetermined actions in your CRM system that dole out emails based on certain milestones in a sales cycle or based on events in the CRM. This approach is usually most appropriate for business-to-business players with heavy lead flow and a large, fragmented sales force.

Bottom line, you want a contact strategy that will balance immersion with function. You want contact to stay on-message, even in the nooks and crannies (metatags, form validation responses, auto-responders.) And you want to make sure it: speaks to the target and their mindset; matches their place in the sales cycle appropriately; provides an appropriate experience; picks the right spots aligned with core value; and delivers on brand promise – no more, no less.