If you haven't ever visited our sister site: www.influenceofmarketing.com, you should take that opportunity now. AddressTwo is a powerful CRM system and database marketing tool, but if you don't have a strategy for turning your database into business, then it's not going to be that helpful for you. You need to think through your plan for building a database and for marketing to that database.
In essence, those are what we call the two dimensions of influence. In the Influence of Marketing methodology, we focus on two dimensions: breadth and depth. Breadth of influence is how many people you have in your database. Depth of influence is how much influence you have over those people. Primarily: can you affect a buying decision or not?
Now, AddressTwo offers features to help in the expansion of both dimensions. First, with breadth of influence, we offer a free contact form for your website. This simple form can be created by logging into AddressTwo, and from your dashboard, click the "How?" link atop the "Recent Website Leads" box. You can custom design a form for converting leads from your website. Another handy tool that we've created is Addy's ability to add new people to your database when you email them. If Addy is CC'ed or BCC'ed on your outbound email and the recipient is not yet in your database, then Addy will automatically take two actions: (1) create a new account for that contact and (2) send them a verification request to fill in the blanks. You can find these Addy-created accounts on your dashboard in the box called "New from Addy."
Secondly, the real power of AddressTwo as a CRM system is the tools it provides for expanding your depth of influence. This is the real bread-and-butter of what AddressTwo was designed to do. I can't even list here all the ways that AddressTwo can help with this, but to name a few high-points, let's start with drip emails.
Drip Marketing is the most important part of any Influence of Marketing methodology. Those contact forms that you install on your website can be configured to trigger an automated series of response emails (also called Autoresponders) from AddresTwo. Beyond that, you can also use the Task Manager to trigger a series of follow-up actions for sales people in your organization that is also queued automatically from a contact form. The list is endless of ways you can use AddressTwo to deepen influence. Just watch our tutorials. The program is full of them.
The most important part, though, is that you realize that these two dimensions are separate objectives. Create two strategies: one for increasing breadth, and one for increasing depth. Approach your marketing with this simple dichotomy and you will gain impressive results.
