I received a note from Barry Hess at Scrawlers reminding me that I signed up for a Scrawlers account, but had yet not logged in. (Scrawlers “embraces constraints” through stories of 100 words or less). I promptly signed in and posted my first three lines to Scrawlers that afternoon.
That email was a good example of the importance of occasional updates to your leads: your new and trial users who sometimes sign up, take a quick look, make a mental note to come back later, and then just forget to. The timing, content, and delivery of these emails visits, postcards, or calls are what I refer to as lead management.
Contact Managers vs. Lead Management Software
Barry’s was a simple email from his email client, I suspect. But what happens when he grows to hundreds and thousands of new users?
Maybe you are already there. That is where you start looking for small business lead management and contact management tools.
There are hundreds of tools available for online contact management and you could use one of those as your lead management software. But then you’d miss out on features that make for more effective lead management.
I’ve put together a quick list. The image at left is a preview of lead management software features.
Click here for a comparison of lead management software and contact management software.
Useful Reminders Work
The Scrawlers reminder prompted a new active user. After we at Synap Software send emails updates to trial users we always see login activity to accounts that had been inactive for a bit. Our reminder emails typically have useful information about a lead management feature or a small tutorial on lead management. This information both informs and reminds trial users why they initially had an interest in our lead management product. [Note: We do not monitor our users’ detailed use of the system, but do monitor login activity and user counts to help provide better service and understand aggregate usage patterns.]
Do you use trail-user management, lead management, or contact management software to keep your trial- and new-users informed and reminded of your product? We’d love to hear any experiences of how it’s worked out.
Synap Software, LLC 
Thanks for the mention, Scott. You have a very good point. Clearly a personalized message is not going to work in a year when (hopefully) our user base numbers in the 100’s. Someday I’m going to have figure out the whole lead management hoo-ha. 🙂
Sure thing Barry. Cool thing is that when you do start using lead management and user management software, you can still send personalized notes by using templates in which names and other personal info is inserted. These don’t need to sound like form letters either. And if someone responds to the note, they get your personal touch then too.