There was a time when companies favored face-to-face meetings to establish, maintain and grow business relations. But when the economic and market conditions became volatile and unpredictable the companies and enterprises were forced to look for green pastures. The advancements in communication technology in the form of internet, email, VOIP, video conferencing, and so on made companies to look at technology as a less expensive replacement for face-to-face meetings. Advocates of virtual meetings considered it as a great time and money saver. But the fact of the matter is however cost effective or time saving option virtual meetings might be, nothing can replace the human elements that is ingrained in face-to-face meetings. These human elements go a long way in developing mutual trust, good faith and confidence, which no amount of virtual meetings can bring about. Hence, in today’s global business environment, business travels are the indispensable tools for building and fostering business relationships.
It is a fact that in a slow economy steps must be taken to cut back on costs but it should never be at the cost of company’ potential growth prospects. Business travel is definitely one of the largest corporate costs but rather than reducing business travel budgets, a proper management of business travel expenses can do the trick. Instead of taking extreme cost cutting measures that impede company’s progress and development, enterprises should look at effective business travel management to facilitate continuous growth and development.
In today’ tight unpredictable economy, most companies and enterprises cut down business travel budgets as a means to tide over financial crisis. Such a move do more harm than good since studies have proved that those companies that increase their business travels during economic slowdown succeed in making new business deals than those who cut down business travels. Hence, what is required is the development of business travel management as a core function of businesses. This would help companies to
· Properly manage company’ travel policy
· Negotiate shrewdly with vendors
· Efficiently manage day-to-day activities of the corporate travel program
· Ensure adequate levels of safety and security for travelers
· Proper credit-card management
· Effective management of travel and expenses (T&E) data
More and more companies are now depending on expense management software for effective corporate travel management. This helps them to lower direct travel costs, to speed up employee’s travel administration, to ensure that internal rules and policies are followed, and to achieve better travel spend analysis.
Also read on - Digital management, eGovernment
Drip campaign is a technique of slowly and steadily sending across messages to prospects over a certain period of time. This is done slowly to ensure that the prospect has enough time to read the message and understand why the product or offering would be suitable to his/her problem or need.
In drip campaigns it is important to understand the goal of each and individual email that is sent out. Email messages should be customized to suit the purpose of the drip campaign - whether it is for educating prospects or selling. The message must come across clear and concise and the recipients must have an idea what is to come in future emails.
The first step in drip campaigns is to establish trust. For this, every email message must have the option to unsubscribe. This is an effective way to filter out inactive or uninterested prospects as well.
Drip campaign emails must be devoid of promotional content. This will only annoy subscribers into opting out or hitting the spam button. Drip campaign is a great way to build relationships. So, email messages must be created in such a way that it creates and builds bond between the prospect and the company.
Be wary of the number of drip messages sent. Although some campaigns do require emails to be sent frequently, pace them well so that prospects have enough time for retrospection.
For effective lead management, post drip campaigns create a follow up campaign. This campaign should be nurturing in nature, till the prospect becomes sales-ready. This is highly critical since it takes care of those prospects that need to take time for making a purchase decision, especially since in B2B a purchase decision is a collective one.
Ensure that your drip campaign effectively tackles the challenges of your marketing endeavours by following these 6 essential tips for great email drip campaigns.
Don’ts of Drip Campaign
Below is a list of 10 things to avoid for every excited marketer embarking on a new drip marketing journey on a newly acquired marketing automation platform.
· Don’t keep dripping the prospects who are sales ready
· Don’t overlap the lists for different drip marketing tracks
· Don’t over-drip a prospect to annoy him/her- don’t give a chance to hit unsubscribe
· Don’t make the drip marketing template ‘sales-y’ in content
· Don’t drip a contact who is not even remotely interested- don’t give a chance to hit spam
· Don’t repeat messages/themes in drip campaigns
· Don’t repeat HTML rich emails
· Don’t make it impersonal- as drip campaign is a series of emails, it is easy to get lost
· Don’t make a list too long – segment your list and have multiple drip marketing tracks
· Don’t just send a ‘Thank You’ email in drip campaign- attach interesting content to engage further
Using marketing automation software for drip campaigns can be highly beneficial because it helps to easily tailor campaigns based on the purpose of the campaign. By making the lead generation activity of “bulk emailing” simpler and user-friendly, marketing automation software can be considered an ideal tool for drip campaign and lead generation.
