When we were founded in 2013, like any start-up, we had an immediate need to generate leads and sales. We are experts at data-driven predictive modeling and algorithms for marketing—a complicated subject with a long sales cycle. Rather than searching, hiring and spending months teaching our business to a new Business Development Executive, we began looking to many of the popular email-marketing-automation platforms for sales and prospecting. We found they all came up short.
The Engagement Weave™ was developed to serve our desire for automated, cost-effective and intentional email-marketing automation. Today, it is used by dozens and dozens of companies to generate self-qualifying leads, so clients can spend more time talking, proposing and closing … and less time hunting for a prospect that wants to be engaged and learn more.
The platforms we looked at started at $900 or more a month, sometimes limiting us to as few as 2,500 active contacts. If we wanted to engage tens-of-thousands or hundreds-of-thousands of contacts the price escalated to $3,000 or more a month. These solutions were not scalable.
Some platforms had an add-on service to acquire prospect information and email addresses, but again the expenses were through the roof. A list of 10,000 prospect emails could cost upwards of $10,000. Now we’re out thousands a month on licensing and thousands more on data collection before we’ve sent a single email.
Regardless of which platform we picked, we were on our own in terms of finding the right content and delivery cadence. Hasn’t someone figured this out? Why pay all that money to get a fancy piece of software that still forces us to learn the hard knocks of email excellence.
A lot of platforms are impressive in function, expansive into landing pages, social media, SMS, blogs, Google AdWords, live chat. That’s great, but we just wanted to have a solid email-engagement tool that would tell our story and get prospects to self-qualify as ready to be engaged in the next step of the sales process. We didn’t want to be paying for all the R&D needed to provide a solution for a multi-million or billion dollar company.
We live and breathe data. So, it was second nature to find an Ocean of attractive Prospect companies. The trouble came when we wanted to engage that Ocean with intentional, automated email marketing. This struggle birthed the Engagement Weave™. It made more sense to hire developers and email psychologists to find the best way to promote our Brand. No pulling punches here, it was a rocky, disheveled road that first year as we learned the tricks of the trade, and what types of content and cadence ultimately led to fruitful conversations and new business.
In early 2015, a Healthcare Provider visited our office to see if we had any high-tech marketing solutions that would benefit their company. The more they talked … and the more we listened … we realized that “thing” we had developed for ourselves was exactly what they needed.
Our development team sought out too quickly to create a MVP—Minimum Viable Product—and we were shocked when we got meeting after meeting for our client. We hired a UX Designer to make this complicated content and response management system we built intuitive. We trial launched with a few select companies to validated we were sitting on a valuable tool. In 2017, we opened the Engagement Weave™ for all businesses that need leads, but don’t want or need the expensive, limitation-laden platforms so popular with the Press and Investors.