When your future customers are in the prospect stage, take special care to provide the most relevant messages possible. Doing so greatly improves your chances of helping them cross that great chasm from “just looking” to “I’ll take one of those.”

This is a difficult task. It’s rarely the case that you have a lot of data to leverage with your prospect messages. If you’re lucky, maybe you got name, title, email, company, address and topics of interest through a well-crafted lead-generation form. Or your prospect data might simply consist of email address and products abandoned during the conversion process.

Depending on your business, there are many ways to be relevant with the data you have. But there are also many ways to be irrelevant. One of these is not knowing when to let go.

It’s important to use restraint and realize that not every prospect will become a customer. But many businesses throw prospects into a never-ending marketing campaign - first promoting their core products and then partner offers. “Well, if Jane didn’t buy a laptop, maybe she’ll go for an MP3 player” loosely follows this logic. But at that point you’re just shooting in the dark.

Don’t fool yourself into believing that your privacy policy gives you free reign on a prospect’s email address. Nobody reads your privacy policy, and in the court of public opinion you’ll be viewed as pushy at best and a spammer at worst if you abuse prospects.

Either way, prospects may regret having given you their email address in the first place. Keep in mind the old saying that if someone is satisfied with your company, they’ll tell one friend. But if they’re dissatisfied they’ll tell 10.

It’s tough to just let go, but you eventually have to realize that you’re chasing after - and probably annoying - someone who’s unlikely to convert.

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