We recently assisted a customer with a webinar that focused on reducing the total cost of support while improving the total customer experience.

 

Our customer had some great graphics and statistics on how customer service affects customer retention, and how companies can serve their customers profitably as we are now mid-way through 2008.  Back in the day, my grandparents knew of only 2 ways to approach customer service:  1:--Go to the store or place of purchase,  2:  Call the company.

Now, there are more options for assistance round the clock:   1-on-line self-help, 2-email Support, 3-Voice support, 4-fee based support, 5-on-site support, and more.

 

Ironically, I was loading his presentation into Brainshark for replay, and while I was timing the slide animations to synch with the audio, it hit me how powerful a Brainshark replay could be in customer service.

 

Searching through a company's online self-help manual can be a daunting task.  It's usually only a couple steps better than  the electronic version of the product manual that comes in the box (or in the contract), anyway.

 

How much better to have access to a presentation--complete with audio and great graphics to illustrate the points.  Because you can pick and choose which slides to view--or watch them all in succession, if you want, you now have a multi-media solution with a human voice attached to help you determine the root of your dilemma.

 

Every company already has the data---all it takes is a one-time presentation with a speaker, and you now have the tools to reach every customer with web access.

You can view sample Webinar for ONE presentations at:  http://www.riceresources.com/webinars/webinarforone_landing.html

 

 

 

It is almost 4:00 am and I have realized that I have not posted a blog lately.   The wonderful thing about blogging is that you can do it at anytime of the day.   It is best to blog when it quiet.

Now that I can get my thoughts together, I can start thnking about how I am going to put the presentation together on customer acquisition for my customer this week.   We just created a great HTML email with an embedded Brainshark presentation that was recorded by a guest speaker for our customer's event.   With this interactive web presentation we can quickly gain viewer's interest and launch a call to action for the viewer to register.   We have many types of examples we have created for the customer to create effective lead generation.   As I think more about it, the applications we have created are my presentation.

I will blog more as I travel this week and will be posting some interesting new technology that you might want to see and hear as you develop your marketing campaigns.   Is the pen mighter than the keyboard for blogging?  Stay tuned for the answer.

When you use the "Embed" command to place a Brainshark interactive web  presentation on your web site, the default background color for the introductory animation is blue, and the default background color for the slide portion of your presentation is gray. These are nice colors, but you might prefer using the background color of your web site instead.

I have made a sample page of a Brainshark presentation with the default colors on a web page with a lime green background. It takes a brave person to use lime green as a background color, but it's definitely good for demonstration purposes!

Here is a second page showing the blue and gray background colors in the presentation replaced by the lime green background color on the web page.

How is this done? First, find out the hexidecimal code for the background color on your web site. If you're not sure, see my article What the Hex?! How to Match Documents to the Colors of Your Company's Web Site for help.

Next, open the html page that contains the embedded Brainshark presentation in a plain text editor. Look for the following code snippets, and replace the highlighted six-number sequences with your chosen hexidecimal color code:
    
    

To see other modifications you can make to the code, click the link "Additional URL Parameters" when the Embed dialog box is open in Brainshark.

In the latest release of Brainshark v.16.2, Brainshark has added the ability to embed your Brainshark presentation in a web page or blog.   This is a capability that we refined while working with a joint Brainshark and Webinar Resources' customer.   Our goal was to embed a Brainshark presentation into a registration page to reduce the use of real estate on a landing page and at the same time add an engaging, interactive web presentation to create lead generation.

The early prototypes were designed to embed Brainshark presentations in different langages to support an International set of events for our customer.  Customer acquisition increased significantly as the registrant could hear and view the online event communication in their own native language.

Through the use of some HTML and Javascripting, we were able to run Brainshark presentations as soon as the landing page was opened.   The ability to appeal to more than one modality at a time (hearing, seeing), gave the landing page a greater impact and increased registration.

Now Brainshark customers can embed their own presentations using an embed command that appears in the Edit Properties window.   By using the iframe code, you can easliy embed a Brainshark presentation into a web page.   We expect to see many more creative uses of Brainshark presentations using this feature.  

You can see how we embed Brainshark presentations in our site by visting our website and selecting the Webinar for ONE tab.

We will have an upcoming blog that will describe how you can hide the borders of your Brainshark presentation so that it will blend in with your website.  For now, try the embed link in your Brainshark sharkive or contact Webinar Resources if you are not a Brainshark customer and wish to test out this feature.

After reading the whitepaper published by ExactTarget, Email Marketing Design & Rendering: The New Essentials, I decided it was time for a makeover of the Webinar Resources Newsletter template. We are already using a lot of the best practices described by ExactTarget, but there is still plenty of room for improvement.

Here is what our current newsletter looks like - Webinar Resources InTouch, Volume 1 Number 3. The following are things we are currently doing right:

The maximum recommended width for an email is 600 pixels. Ours is now 580 pixels wide.

ExactTarget recommends putting your brand and a call to action into a 4-5 inch square (between 288 and 360 pixels) at the upper left corner of the email. This is the most viewed part of the message. Our logo, company name and color scheme are comfortably in the critical area, so I would say our brand is where it is supposed to be.

In order to get viewers to look at the content "below the fold", it helps to include "above the fold" links to the content below, a table of contents, or some other kind of hint of what the newsletter contains so that the recipients will want to scroll down. Our introductory paragraph describing the contents in this newsletter issue fulfills that requirement.

We have kept our branding consistent on the landing pages that viewers will reach if they click on any of the links to our web site.

It hurt to do it, but we removed CSS styles and HTML background images some time ago because many email clients do not support them.

We do not embed rich media right into the email message, rather we provide an image which links to the rich media content. In the example pictured, the featured content is a Webinar for One^SM Brainshark presentation. This is the best way to email a flash movie or a movie clip.

In my HTML coding, I have had the following habits for a long time, for other reasons:

• Providing width and height attributes for all images
• Giving alt and title tags to all images
• Specifying width and height for tables and table cells, unless there is a reason not to

In HTML email, images without size attributes can expand in unpredictable ways, images might be blocked by the email client making alt and title tags useful for helping the viewer to see what the image is supposed to be, and tables can render in unexpected ways without accurate size attributes. These habits are especially good to have when creating HTML email messages, as apparently email clients are generally a lot less forgiving than web browsers.

It sounds like we have all the bases covered doesn't it? In my next post we'll find out when I take a look at all the improvements we can make in our email newsletter template.

Would you like to view the Brainshark presentation I talked about in my last blog post? You can see an example of how Brainshark can be used for instruction, and learn how to add an HTML email signature to your outgoing messages in Outlook at the same time.

To view the presentation, click here: Creating HTML Email Signatures in Outlook

I usually use my MP3 player for rocking out, but the other day I was able to use mine (a Sansa c240) to get some work done.

I needed some voice narration for an instructional Brainshark presentation I was working on. With Brainshark, you can take a PowerPoint presentation, bring it into the Brainshark software, and add things to it such as audio, questions, polls, or guestbooks, and make it into an on-demand presentation that can be launched from or embedded in web pages or email messages. If you would like to see some sample Brainshark presentations, we have several on the Webinar For One^SM landing page on our web site.

I had not used the voice recording feature on my MP3 player yet, so I decided to try using it to narrate the slides. It was very easy to record the audio by speaking into the little microphone on the MP3 player, saving the resulting .wav files, connecting the player to the computer with the USB cable, then dragging and dropping the saved files into sound editing software on my computer. After editing, I added the sound files to my presentation in Brainshark. Now that I know how easy it is, I'll be using narration this way more often!

Do you publish an email newsletter as part of your customer acquisition program? Once your newsletter is sent out, you don't have to stop reaping the benefits of your work. I suggest that you make copies of your newsletters as web pages and archive them on your web site. That way they can continue to work for you by bringing in traffic via the search engines. Be sure to put a newsletter sign-up form on your archived newsletters to pick up new subscribers. Here is an example of a past issue of our Webinar Resources Newsletter. The sign-up form at the bottom automatically adds new subscribers to the list as they request to be added to the subscriber list. You can learn more about email marketing by viewing the Brainshark presentation "Beyond Opens and Clicks - How to Use Email to Transform Marketing Performance from Good to Great".