Know-How Exchange : E-Marketing

Have you considered setting up RSS feeds and allowing your sales force to subscribe to the type of detail they want to receive? This would eliminate all of these small emails going out, provide the information they prefer and make emails that are more campaign driven stand out more.

The more often you send, the less likely they are to be read. If you schedule your emails for one specific day of the week (perhaps Monday, so they can start their week with the new info), and include all new products or announcements in that email you'll get a better readership.

They are employees, right? Not independent?

Go with consistency. We do one for a customer and one group gets it week one. another week 2. another week 3 etc.

You can do the same product always on week 1, 2 and 3 and introduce a different one on week 4. Make 1,2 & 3 the major products...major being most profitable to them and you

Michael

I would think about it all together differently. As follows:

Hit them between the eyes when they are ready for your messages.

So here's how:

I assume you guys have a forecasting or CRM or pipeline registration system. I also assume the sales force is entering their opportunities in this system, including products and possibly deal size and funnel status.

As you are in a product business unit, you know best which type of information is needed in which stage of the sales funnel. I suggest you organize snippets of text, ready to be pushed out depending on product and sales funnel status. These little pieces of text point to intranet pages with more detailed info.

Now you need a way to regularly pull out the current opportunities, their products, funnel status change and account rep email address. This will be your trigger to send out the right piece of text at the right time to the right person. If you have general news, you might include that in your e-mail.

Of course this is a huge task if you need to do it manually, but maybe you can find someone to automate it.

I have done the same based on manual extracts from Siebel and ran a script on an in-house server to create the messages. The nice thing about this system is also that it shows you which sales reps are serious about their pipeline and which ones are not. The ones complaining about these messages are best left to their own devices.