You worked hard to get a new prospect on your email list, but what do you do when someone on the list hasn’t responded to anything in a long time?

Jeannie Frantz, director of Campaigns and Operations at Corporate Visions, believes that dormant leads require more than just thought leadership content.

“A person may have come to your website, checked out your solution, and said ‘you know what, all these solutions are great but they require me to actively buy from you, and that’s more change than I can handle.’ There’s more pain in the change than there is in the gain of buying the solution,” explains Frantz, who runs inbound and outbound marketing campaigns.

Corporate Visions has a team dedicated to going after dormant accounts and dormant leads. The team has found success offering a provocative point of view that doesn’t necessarily promote the features and functions of its solution but instead details the danger of doing nothing.

“[This information] tells them exactly why not doing anything today, holding off on that decision and not buying … is not a good place to be,” Frantz says.

Explaining how changes going on in their environment and industry can potentially put their business initiatives at risk is different, and perhaps more effective, than simply sending pertinent information on succeeding in one’s industry. “You have to make them feel that there’s not an advantage to sticking with the status quo,” says Frantz.

It’s worth noting that any new solution comes with a lot of change, which isn’t always easy. Therefore, solution content isn’t enough. Information, coupled with industry insight that’s connected to a packaged story explaining why the status quo isn’t a safe place to be and what people can do instead, drives the point home.

Hitting the mark

In addition to this specific, targeted material even thought leadership content should be aligned to the pain people expressed when they initially opted in.

Some prospects may become dormant because your content isn’t hitting the mark. Corporate Visions offers the following recommendations:

• Grab their attention from the start. Make sure a key insight is at the top of every single email you send out – something that grabs people’s attention and gives them a reason to keep reading.
• Be willing to have some personality. A catchy headline or quick insight can get someone to start reading an email. Making the entire email interesting can keep them reading. “The more interesting you can make it, the more clicks you’re going to have,” Frantz says. Corporate Visions has used humor and clips from TV shows, such as “The Office,” to inject personality into its emails to create more personal engagement with its brand, though, of course, the clips are put in context and tied back to its business.
• Include video content. “Video is a great way to generate clicks and engagement with your content,” Frantz says. So consider uploading screen casts, whiteboard videos or other video content.
• Find ways to stand out. Frantz explains that Corporate Visions has re-designed its unsubscribe page to be entertaining and interesting. Instead of offering checkboxes of newsletters to unsubscribe (or worse, expecting people to log in), the company sets itself apart with an engaging video on their unsubscribe page. “Our unsubscribe emails dropped dramatically after that [the re-design],” Frantz recalls.
• Follow up. Once your dormant leads are no longer dormant, make sure someone on your sales team follows up with a phone call, when appropriate.

 This post contributed by guest author, Yael Grauer. Grauer is a Minneapolis-based freelance writer and editor. Find her online at Yaelwrites.com.

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