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You are here: Home / Branding & Marketing / 4 Ways Your Inbox is Inhibiting Business Growth (& How to Fix It)

4 Ways Your Inbox is Inhibiting Business Growth (& How to Fix It)

January 8, 2019 By Melinda Emerson Leave a Comment

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gain control of your email inbox

Sponsored Post

The email inbox.

It’s still one of the most important tools in your sales process, especially for your sales team’s toolbox. That being said, inefficient use of email and the inbox can cause costly bottlenecks and inhibit long-term business growth. What’s worse, many business owners don’t even realize that they have a problem.

So, is your email the inbox inhibiting your organization’s growth?

Here are four inbox-related issues to consider.

1. Your Inbox Doesn’t Deliver Real-Time Engagement Data

Unlike your email marketing platform, which offers real-time insight into opens, clicks, conversions, and other recipient-level data, your inbox tells you almost nothing. Sure, you can see when an email was sent or received. But, how valuable is that from a sales perspective?

There’s a much deeper story that your inbox simply can’t tell. For example, you or your sales reps may send dozens of emails each week. Inevitably, a sizable percentage of leads fail to respond, which necessitates a series of follow-up calls. Knowing which leads have opened an email could be extremely useful when prioritizing next steps. Leads that have opened and clicked a link or video in the email proposal multiple times might be dragging their feet, and there could be genuine interest. Leads that have never opened the email might have simply overlooked it. Either way, you can benefit from in-depth email analytics.

To stay competitive, consider leveraging you need an integrated email tracking tool that empowers staff to know exactly when emails are opened – and by whom. Ideally, this information should be made available via real-time inbox alerts in a CRM, allowing your team to access timely information without jumping between multiple reporting systems.

2. Your Inbox Can’t Follow Up for You

Speaking of email follow-up, not every lead requires a personalized phone call from a sales rep. In fact, sending a second email is often just as effective.

Without the right tools, however, your reps must invest precious hours into a task that could be automated. For starters, they’ll need to log into your CRM and pull a lead report. From there, they’ll refine the list to include only those who failed to respond. If your CRM offers bulk email capabilities, a follow-up email could be sent in one step. Otherwise, your reps must send one-off emails by using their inboxes. Regardless, there are several steps in the process that divert your team from more valuable activities.

A better approach involves the use of an application that turns your inbox into an automated follow-up machine. Instead of wasting time to determine who has responded, your inbox can do the work for you. If no response is received within a predefined number of days, a follow-up email goes out on your behalf.

3. Appointment Scheduling is a Painful Process

How much time do you or your sales team waste on appointment scheduling? If you’ve never asked yourself this question, it’s definitely time to do so.

In today’s digital world, most appointments occur virtually through web conferencing services. Although virtual meetings are more efficient than onsite visits, your sales team must still go through several time-consuming steps, such as:

  • Coordinating a time that works for both parties
  • Creating a dial-in link via the web conferencing service
  • Pasting the web conference details into a calendar invitation
  • Sending a calendar invitation to the prospect
  • Monitoring the prospect’s response for an RSVP

When multiplied by hundreds of appointments annually, your top-tier sales talent spends a lot of time on a low-level administrative task.

By adopting a tool that supports one-1 click scheduling, however, your team can eliminate the minutiae of appointment scheduling. With a single click, sales reps can insert several options for their availability into the body of an email. Clicking on the desired time and date instantly confirms the appointment, books it to both parties’ calendars, and sends the necessary RSVPs. Integration to a web conferencing service, such as Zoom, delivers an added layer of automation and eliminates the manual creation of one-off meeting events.

4. Your Inbox Can’t Personalize at Scale

To keep pace with your rapidly expanding pipeline, your team needs a scalable solution for engaging leads and opportunities.

Not every outreach initiative is a good fit for a mass email marketing campaign. On the other hand, your CRM’s bulk email functionality lacks the customization that reps need to adequately engage prospects. As a result, your reps spend far too much time copying and pasting in their inboxes.

email inbox - overcoming challenges with mixmax

Alternatively, Mixmax offers the best of both worlds. Sales reps can easily design and create multi-step outreach sequences that send directly from their inboxes. Prior to enabling a sequence, your reps can preview (and edit) each recipient’s message to ensure a highly customized experience.

Once enabled, Mixmax ensures each message is delivered to the intended recipient and tracks his or her interaction with the message. In-depth reporting on email sequences provides at-a-glance intelligence into the campaign’s effectiveness.

Accelerate Growth with Mixmax

If you’re looking Gmail-based productivity tool that delivers real-time insights, inbox automation, and personalization at scale, consider trying Mixmax. Mixmax solves many of the inbox-related issues that modern businesses struggle to overcome. Get your 14-day trial today.

Note: While I was compensated to publish this sponsored post, the content expressed in the article is strictly my own view.

 

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Filed Under: Branding & Marketing, Business Inspiration, Featured Post, Fix Your Business, Grow Your Business, How to Start, Technology Tagged With: CRM, email, inbox management, mixmax, Productivity

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Melinda F. Emerson, “SmallBizLady” is America’s #1 Small Business Expert. She is an internationally renowned keynote speaker on small business development, social selling, and online marketing strategy. As CEO of Quintessence Group, her Philadelphia-based marketing consulting firm serves Fortune 500 brands that target the small business market. Clients include Amazon, Adobe, Verizon, VISA, Google, FedEx, Chase, American Express, The Hartford, and Pitney Bowes. She also has an online school, www.smallbizladyuniversity.com, that teaches people online marketing and how to start and grow a successful small business and publishes a blog SucceedAsYourOwnBoss.com. Her advice is widely read, reaching more than 3 million entrepreneurs each week online. She hosts The Smallbizchat Podcast and is the bestselling author of Become Your Own Boss in 12 Months, Revised and Expanded, and Fix Your Business, a 90 Day Plan to Get Back Your Life and Reduce Chaos in Your Business.

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