Customer Acquisition

• Why have an event, what are your goals? What do you want to get for your efforts? Develop objectives that are SMART (Specific, Measureable, Attainable, Realistic and Time Based) and align with the current or future needs of the organization.
• Having an educational event provides a reason to talk to customers and prospects. It gives you something to buzz about beyond your capabilities and need for business. It could give your customers reasons to invest in new ideas and new products and services to help them grow.

• Content: strategic, operational, sales, business processes? The content is what will be advertised and why people will attend. Theming your event and tying it to actionable outcomes changes an informative event to a results event. Types of businesses and the role of the attendee will be influenced by the content you choose.
• Type of Event: Face to Face or Webinar. Each presents its own benefits and shortcomings. Consider your content and audience along with your budget and resources as part of your thought process.
• Timing: Early in the quarter? At the beginning, middle or late in the week? Morning, afternoon or all day? What time works best for those you are looking to reach?
• Location: If face to face do you host it at your company, at a local hotel, a customers business? To feed or not to feed? Is the location part of your message? If you choose to have a web conference what are the needs of the solution? Browser, OS, phone, voice over IP, Presentation technology, presentation style, ability to interact with attendees.

Webinar Resources just distributed the latest newsletter and it contains some exciting announcements, enhancements and tools to keep you in touch with industry news and trends as they relate to event management and customer acquisition.

You still might have time to order your Sweetheart a personalized eCard along with their favorite audio clips from iTunes.   This Valentine's Day, we are adding music to the mix and further personalizing the experience of the recipient. Provide us the name, email address, a special message and the name of your Valentine's favorite musical artist and we will deliver a personalized eCard and iTunes Preview landing page with album selections that your special Valentine can listen to. Webinar Resources will be posting an iTunes redemption code ($15 value) in ten of the lucky Valentines' personalized landing pages on February 14th.

Order now at this link.

1. If you use forms on your web site, test them using multiple email addresses from different domains. You might find that your forms will accept emails from some domains and not others. If that happens, contact your site's host for help.


2. On the success pages and acknowledgement messages from your forms, suggest that users add your email address or addresses to their approved senders lists (whitelists).


3. Check all the email links on your web site periodically to make sure you actually get the emails. In addition, make a list of all the email accounts you have, with login information, and keep the list in a safe place. Check the spam folders on all of them on a regular basis. Many email accounts will stop working when the spam folder or the trash folder gets full. Also some legitimate emails might be caught by your spam filter, so you'll want to add those email addresses to your lists of approved senders. Some customers will try another way to contact you if they don't get an answer from your email, but most will just give up.


4. Have your web developer program an appropriate subject line in capital letters into all the email links on your site. Although use of all caps is something I normally stay away from, in this case I do use them because it makes the emails sent from my web site much easier to distinguish from all the spam.

Consider not having your email forwarded from one account to another, but getting all of it right from the source. The article Tips to avoid getting your server blocked by Hotmail/Yahoo/Gmail explains why.


5. Examine your email sendings, including acknowledgement messages from forms, for characteristics that might cause them to be mistakenly flagged as spam. The following resources provide helpful guidelines:
   • Gmail Bulk Senders Guidelines
   • AOL Sender Best Practices
   • Hotmail Guidelines
   • Yahoo! Mail Best Practices
   • Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group Sender Best Communications Practices
   • Why My Emails Get Blocked or Filtered: Causes and Solutions Inside 
   
   Some email sending software, such as ExactTarget, has a built-in content checker that will alert you to possible problems in the text of your email, such as "Click here" or "Free".


6. Only send to engaged recipients. Believe it or not, some major ISPs are starting to flag messages as spam just because the end user doesn't open them. Consider sending periodic updates to subscribers to verify if they still want to be on your subscriber list.


7. Open up other channels to help compensate for the people you're not reaching by email, such as blogs, Facebook, Twitter, a Webinar for One Brainshark presentation, text messaging, and voice messaging. At Webinar Resources we use ExactTarget's social forward feature to add social media links to our customers' emails to drive customer acquisition.

• Will I give or sell their email address to someone else?
• Will the newsletter be interesting or valuable to them?
• Will they be able to unsubscribe if they decide they no longer want it?
• Will they be bombarded with a lot of email?

I recently took a vacation from our customer acquisition practice at Webinar Resources.  Of all of the different modes of transportation, I have learned this Summer that taking the train across the country is a great way to meet new people.   It is also an interesting opportunity to connect with people and make new contacts.

Think of it, passengers on a train are a lot more open as they have no other place to go
other than a dining car, sleeping berth or observation car.  People just have to interact
with each other as they are captive for the many hours it takes to reach their destination.

My wife and I joined a friend of hers to travel from St. Louis to San Francisco.   Our friend was volunteering for the 17th annual Sharkfest, where 900 brave souls swim from Alcatraz to the San Francisco shore.   See the Brainshark presentation on our webinar service portal for highlights of the event -  www.brainshark.com/webinarresources.

During our ride we met many interesting people and had some good conversations.  We met one retired couple traveling to visit their sons who work in Silicon Valley.  One of their sons works for Google and another is beginning a startup company.  I wrote down the company website www.glyde.com to look at later.   Maybe I will send them a Webinar for ONE presentation.

We met more interesting people on our 48 hr trek and I spent some time jamming with a fellow musician.  Luckily I brought my traveling mandolin and it was great to wake up to the sunrise in Colorado and be able to sing some John Denver tunes.

We had a great trip when we got to San Francisco, San Jose and Aptos.  When we headed back home on a Southwest flight, my wife commented on how people were more friendly on the train and that everyone was rushed in the airport.   We had lots of luggage in tow with souvenirs and we would have loved to have a porter help us aboard a train that would take us back home.  We took the quick way, but planes have no charm, no space and provide little opportunity for interacting with others.

We will always remember our great trip to California this year.  If you want to spend some time with people, see the scenery and possibly make a business connection, plan to take a train trip across the country.   Right now I am hearing "Flight 3346 is ready for departure.  What I would rather hear is "All Aboard!

• They fear that you will give or sell their email address to someone else
• They don't know what benefit they will get from your newsletter. Do they get something free for signing up? Is the content valuable?
• They worry that that they won't be able to unsubscribe if they decide they no longer want it.

The Carolyn Hasenfratz Design and Carolyn's Stamp Store E-Newsletter is sent to your inbox around 6-8 times a year and features articles by Carolyn about rubber stamping techniques and projects, as well as online marketing and other business tips. You will also be updated on my sales and specials, free template downloads, new products, and show appearances. Click here to view my privacy policy.

Everyday we are encountering more social media tools that allow you to quickly share information with others.   Today we launched an email campaign for one of our customers that contained a personalized video for the recipients.   Each customer received a PURL, a personalized URL, that embedded the customer's name in the video.   It was a pretty slick application.

Using ExactTarget, we launched the email movie clips through personalization strings that contained the PURLs.   This was an effective lead generation process for driving customer acquisition.   Through personalized marketing campaigns, you can capture your reader's interest and move them to take an action.

We are using Brainshark presentations to personalize on demand presentation content and further honing our abilities to deliver a Webinar for ONE.
 

Like everyone, we have some customers who come and go across our desks a couple times a year, and then we have some who are there a couple times a day to drive lead generation.

Recently we drove customer acquisition for one of our frequent customers for an event through a personalized marketing campaign.  Through a lot of work, the event sold out in two weeks and our customer was thrilled.

Because we work with this customer on an almost daily basis, we decided to go the extra mile and support the event locally, though there's nothing in our contract that defines our work in that way.  I found myself pulling what props I could from my children's closets so that I could dress like a pirate and take pictures at the event.

My thoughts were, "OK, just give me a salad at the customer dinner in exchange for these services, and we'll call it a draw."  What our team got in return was much more than a salad.

Yes, I dressed like a pirate and managed to draw enough smiles from our client's customers to create a spiffy memory book for the occasion.  We also managed to meet with no less than 9 cricital contacts in the span of 2 business days.  As a result of these meetings- some scheduled, some by chance, we are better positioned across our client's corporation, and we were able to schedule new business.

So - while the salad and the meal were really good, what was even better was the unexpected developments with existing and new contacts.  It's definitely worth it to partner with your clients in ways you might not consider "your area"- - it was well worth our while!


 

I just had the great opportunity this past week to attend one of my customer's events onsite in NY.   My events team spent a great deal of time setting up online tools to support customer acquisition including the use of a Brainshark presentation for customers.

Through specially designed personalized marketing campaigns, we were able to draw a record crowd of customers in less than three weeks.   The event also had a "pirate-theme" and we produced personalized pirate maps with the customer's names on them.

I attended the event and was able to participate in the festivities which included wine, grog, spirited networking and the opportunity to meet my customers and their customers.   I also repurposed one of my old pirate tunes from college and added new lyrics to fit the event.   I will share the song in a future post.

What I didn't expect was that I would run into other contacts from my customer's account that I have been trying to meet for over two years.   The success of the customer event established my company's credibility for building lead generation conferences like this one and our dialogue was both positive and productive.

So next time you put a lot of effort into setting up an event or campaign for your customer. make sure you participate in the event as well.   You will learn more about your customer's business, their customer's business and you may just meet that key contact/decision maker that will influence additional business in your customer's account.   You also will be considered more of a partner than a vendor and your business relationship will continue to grow.

It's hard to believe that webinars and internet marketing tools are still relatively new concepts in some companies.  Just before my 7-year maternity leave back in 2000, I was helping my sales team at MCI Conferencing introduce the concept of "web-based data conferencing" to our customers which included Xerox.  Ironically, though we never met, within a few months of my leave, my boss, Mark, was working at Xerox on the team that was developing the Xerox Webinar program.

It's 8 years later, and we have been working together for almost a year in a much different technology and a much different world than we had in 2000 and early 2001.

What better time than now are we all positioned to make the most of this technology!  Want to really partner with your customers?  Let them know that their success is important to you!

In your customer acquisition, build a reliable and approved list of customers, and give them information, presentations, and tools to help them grow their own business while you grow yours.

Look for synergies between your customer's industry and your own, and build a presentation series around it.   Back in 2000, my VP of sales partnered with one of my customer's VP of Sales to conduct a short webinar series at both companies.

Today, we have customers who do the same, and then also bring in industry experts to a "round table."  The presentation is then broadcast on a webinar, and provide the Brainshark replay later as an on-demand "webinar for one" for those who missed the live version.

Every company should have a regularly scheduled presentation series designed to help their customers grow their own base. Your monthly or quarterly newsletter should have a dedicated space for your webinar news. 

Our customers always provide live links to register for upcoming webinars, and to go directly to the Brainshark replays of webinars that have passed.  We are also developing personalized landing pages for key customer contacts. These are like a little mini-reference books compressed down to a singular web page that provides the customer with all the tools and reference points he needs for past, current and upcoming web events.

Mark and I marvel at how closely we missed each other back in 2000, when our entire business was a budding technology.  With the tools of today, we'd be much less likely to miss each other, now.

Every year we come up with a creative way of greeting our customers and prospects for the holidays.   Our traditional use of a Brainshark presentation has been well received and has been easy to deploy.

This year, our Creative Director suggested we send out printed holiday cards to our growing list of customers, partners and prospects.   We discussed the idea and decided this would be a good opportunity to create and execute a cross-media campaign linking personalized print media with interactive, personalized digital media on the web.   We also wanted to test the effectiveness of this method as a customer acquisition strategy.

Using specialized image personalization software from XMPie, we produced the image below with our recipients names on the images.    The image was printed on a post card and sent through the U.S. Mail (amazing how fast the mail really is) to our list of recipients.   On the back of each card was a "call to action", a URL to run a customized Brainshark presentation.   When the recipient entered their name in the Brainshark guest book, a personalized ornament appeared with music playing in the background.

Now your name may not be Steven, but if you visit http://www.brainshark.com/webinarresources/holiday and enter Steven as your first name, you will see how the application works.   You can enter your own first name and we might just have your name on the list.

This was the first application ever used to mix printed media with personalized, interactive media in a Brainshark presentation.   We were surprised by the recipients that did visit the link after receiving the post card.   Some of them were prospects that we have been trying to get in front of.  Imagine how your customer might react if they saw their name on a wine bottle or a sail on a boat in an online media application.    Would it catch their attention?   Did we capture yours?  

It is amazing to witness how quickly blogging can drive activity.   One of my team recently blogged about the Discovery Light project that we supported at a recent trade show.   Using our webinar service, we posted a Brainshark presentation about how we marketed the show and our lead generation conference exhibit.

As we were using a combination of email and personalized landing pages to drive customer acquisition, our reference to the words "landing page" triggered a Google Alert for another company, ExactTarget.   Within one week of posting our blog, ExactTarget contacted us after visiting our post.   They had set up a Google alert for the words "landing page".   ExactTarget recently released their Landing Page feature and we have been putting it to good use for our demand generation marketing programs.   Make sure you opt-in to receive our next newsletter to see a great example of a personalized image marketing campaign.

Quite often we receive a Google alert after posting a blog as we also monitor keywords.    We have heard Chris Baggott, of Compendium Blogware, a number of times comment on how Google likes old content, recent content and frequent content.   We produce Webinar for ONE replays of their webinars and we hear these words in every presentaiton.  

Chris is right on target.   You can drive effective lead generation through frequent and relevant blogging.    We are witnesses to the process and we are becoming evangelists for compended blogging.    The combination of blogging and Google Alerts is another step to helping you achieve that "virtual knock" on the door and another step away from no more cold calls. 

Other people are watching and waiting for their Google Alerts to trigger a message about keywords they monitor.   The more you blog about a particular subject, the more chances you have of driving effective lead generation.

While I refused to fight the crowds to be on of the first through the door to pick up a brand new Blackberry Storm, I will be going this afternoon to make my purchase.

My boss, Mark, and I have a very un-official, un-scientific experiment (aka competition) we're conducting.  He has the new G1 (Google) phone from T-Mobile.  I'm getting the Blackberry Storm from Verizon Wireless.  We're putting the networks aside, and comparing the phones for how well they enhance our ability to conduct business.

Mark got his G1 about a month ago, and has been bragging ever since.  He L-O-V-E-S it.  Just for fun on the weekend, he creates a brainshark presentation from his phone, records the voice, and then sends a vontoo message over to us just to gloat.

I'm hoping that I will be able to return the favor with the Blackberry storm.  I know I won't have Windows mobile, but what will I be able to do?  At a minimum, I should be able to enjoy the latest and greatest in screen resolution and display options to view what our custoemrs view.  At most, will I be able to operate the Blackberry Storm as a miniature laptop, of sorts, the way that Mark has been able to do with his G1? 

Our whole business centers around effective lead generation and customer acquisition through managed services and internet marketing.  We drive personalized marketing campaigns through interactive technologies that may include any or all of the following:
  --Video Web Conferencing
  --Email Movie Clips
  --Variable Data embedded in html emails
  --Web Conferencing
  --On Demand Presentations

We are also heavy users of many interactive programs including but not limited to online calendars.

Over the next few weeks, we will be testing out these technologies with the G1 and Blackberry Storm.  Maybe we'll even keep a scorecard.  For now, I have to sign off to go place my order.

Stay tuned, and if YOU have a G1 or a piping hot new Blackberry Storm--please post and tell us about the SMS feats you've conquered.