Stu Heinecke is president and founder of CartoonLink Inc. He is also a well known cartoonist and marketer who uses his talents to help engage consumers and drive leads to his customers. “Readership surveys have always said that cartoons are the best read and most remembered part of anything they are in editorially. They grab your attention and remain in your memory.”

But for Heinecke, to convert his own leads is a fairly complicated process. “If I’m doing it all by hand, or personally, then I’m going to call them up and set up an appointment.” Then it’s, “Can you send me information? What about pricing? How do you do this? What about this? How do you set it up? You end up with a flurry of tasks you’ve got to do and its all done by hand, all analog.” He concludes that “the process sort of just caves in on itself, and if it doesn’t, your patience, the time that you have or the the willingness that you have to continue with it, does cave in.”

Then Heinecke found MakesBridge. “The miracle of MakesBridge and of automation is that once you get it dialed in correctly, it starts to just do all of this automatically. We’ve got a pretty complex process for following up on leads and leading them through free tests and then into conversion, so to be able to automate that is to be able to multiply your efforts by a factor of thousands! That’s a game changer.”

He goes on to explain that their first lead came down through the system, downloaded the instructions and the cartoon they decided to use on the test, and reported back to him a jump in open rate from they’re usual 25% to 40%! They were then dropped into the conversion phase of his workflow. “Just to see them get that far with automation was a miracle.”

Heinecke continues, “The thing that is cool about the workflow is that it responds to what that recipient is doing and makes it appear that someone is on the other end of all this, responding to them personally.” This then translates to better follow-up
for his potential customers. “I’ll send you these things, write a note, all of that stuff is such a lousy process. The automation that MakesBridge allows you to build into the process now makes it consistent. Consistently high level of follow-up that you don’t have to do anything to make it happen.”

He concludes, “If you’ve carefully crafted your workflow; each of the different touches, the emails, the calls, the postcards or whatever it is you’re using in the workflow,” and “lead the prospect in a certain direction and create a chute for them to pass through. Automation not only frees up a lot of your time, but it makes the process more efficient.” For these reasons, Heinecke is confident his sales will increase significantly.

Heinecke then asks, “Isn’t it much smarter to have direct contact with people who are already saying, ’I’m doing it. Here’s my credit card. Sign me up. Done.’ Those are the ones you want to spend your time with.”

When asked if he would recommend MakesBridge, he quickly responds, “Of course. I think it’s a terrific platform. If you’re generating leads it makes life ultimately much simpler.”

In my past experience, even when working closely with SEO and PPC marketing firms, our online marketing campaigns have yielded a few big ugly doughnuts. And those dog campaigns are demoralizing, even when done in the context of “testing”.

Given the amount of investment and hard work spent in building traffic to websites, it makes sense to cull value from visitors in any way possible. Yet tactics to capture visitor value, short of form and purchase conversions, is rarely considered. And when I write “value” I’m not referring to abstract insights like click path and conversion funnel analysis, I’m talking about tangible actionable assets. Also known as champions and prospects.

Visitor identification has been around for as long as I can recall and it’s common. No magic there. I’m referring to the process of deciding who to contact, what to say and write to them, and properly executing follow through to capture the asset. The process is uncommon and not widely used; so start applying the tactic before it’s completely overused. So here it is – Next time you use visitor identification, add their CEO to two separate lines of automation.

The first message wave of the first drip line is designed to win a coach. When the executive contact is added to your CRM tool, immediately trigger an email message from your senior executive to one of theirs. The personal peer-to-peer note should explain how you got their information and regrets for not having an opportunity to attend to their colleague. Then go on to request they forward your note to whomever they believe was researching your product; complete with a solemn vow of personal attention and assistance.

We suggest you also trigger a mail piece in the first wave. If your email didn’t successfully convince the executive of your sincerity, a personal note or brochure will. Given all the tweets, posts, retweets, and overwhelming “e”, a product brochure or greeting card via First-Class mail demonstrates your stability and trustworthiness. Mail makes a positive impression and I can tell you we routinely get high marks from prospects for making it easier for them to learn about us on an easily accessible paper document as opposed to an archived pdf file. And you can’t write notes on pdfs either.

Besides polish, mail also delivers an excuse to follow up; especially when it’s a glossy 16 page piece that stands out. If you haven’t gotten our Response Booster brochure, I can tell you it yields a lot of stand-out attention and product demos. What can I say, well delivered humor works, plain and simple.

Running in parallel to the coach drip is your second drip, executive information. The drip should start a day after initial contact and must contain succinct statements of unique value. Try to reach 10 messages in all, about three to four days apart. To build trust, let the coach know why you are sending the information and how many he can expect.

If these drips fail to get you the proper contact or correspondence back, try a humorous “call me” drip line. We use our Response Booster Push Play module for this purpose.

Consider the million mile per hour frenzied days of the “e” we live in. Where the focus has been on a noisy myriad of PPC, SEO, SEM, social, conversion page and email methods to connect and convert. Now consider the opinion that in the world of B2B sales, the personalization required to penetrate new accounts is a human tactile approach between individuals. Once you’ve met the challenge of getting the visit and locating the CEO’s details, the rest can be academic.

So there you have it, a tight little blue print for culling opportunity from visitors who don’t convert or otherwise make themselves known to you. Try it and let me know how it goes!