by Will Rotondi
It’s easy to want to do things the way you’ve always done them. There’s security in having a system, where you know more or less what to expect. Take sales, for instance. You probably have a routine on how you vet a lead, what material you email them, how you encourage them to buy, and how long it takes for them to say yes.
But prospecting through email…well, that’s a whole other animal. It’s frustrating for the fact that as much as you can do with services like prospecting automation, there are still a lot of unknowns:
How do you know for certain that your email landed in a prospect’s Inbox? That they clicked a link to your website? That they viewed specific pages?
The short answer is, you can’t. But you can get a pretty good indication that they did.
Does prospecting make you feel like the lone wolf who calls out but no one seems to answer?
Not all email platforms are designed the same (Outlook, Google, etc.). Prospecting automation might communicate with these platforms differently, and interpret an electronic action – like an open, or a click – when that wasn’t the exact behavior that occurred.
That doesn’t mean the system is flawed. Think of it more as an educated guess. Chances are, if the system reports that your prospect opened an email, they (or their email platform) did something. Whether or not the message ended up directly in their Inbox, we can’t always be sure – and even if it did, we shouldn’t kid ourselves that it was remembered the first time.
Email prospecting isn’t about reaching out once and then sitting back to wait for business to come pouring in. It’s about work and repetition. Send a few messages today, send a few tomorrow, and a few the day after that. Reach out multiple times to the same prospects, but at a respectful rate.
Prospecting is one of those few activities where it takes a lot of time – and embracing the unknown – in order to see long-term results.
