Carolyn Hasenfratz's Blog

In my last post I talked about how social media gives your audience more ways to receive your content. They can choose many different ways to send you information as well. In addition to calling you or filling out a form on your web site, depending on what services you make available to them, they can for example leave a comment on your blog, or write on your wall in Facebook. Effective lead generation includes giving more choices to your audience so that they can have the kind of relationship with you that suits them.

Other than the natural instinct to make it as easy to contact you as possible, what other reasons might there be for making the effort to branch out into social media? At the Connections '08 conference, I took lots of notes. Here are some excerpts from those notes:

• "Relationships with customers are one thing that competitors can't copy."
• "79% of customers buy from companies that they are in a relationship with, rather than just on price."
• "About 30% of email addresses go bad every year."
• "22% of Internet users are using social media instead of email."
• "Facebook - must be on it to understand what is going on."

Those random notations lead me to some ideas about why businesses might want to have a social media presence to help with customer acquisition. If about 30% of email addresses go bad every year, then you can't count on email alone to keep in touch with your customers. It makes sense to have other channels available.

Relationships with customers and personalized marketing campaigns are clearly important - how can social media help to build those relationships? Blogs can help a great deal by humanizing your company through informal communication that allows transparent feedback. Blogs are also a great way to possibly get on social networking and bookmarking sites without you having to do anything - for example on our Webinar Resources Blog, at the bottom of each post is a Share This chicklet. If you click it, you will see dozens of chicklets that a visitor to this blog can use to share our posts using the service of their choice. This is just one of many ways that the people who really like what you're producing can do some of your marketing for you by their own free will.

If 22% of Internet users are using social media instead of email, as effective as email is, it's clear you are going to have to reach those particular customers some other way. If your customers are looking for you, it's important to be where they are. If you are using a social networking service, are fellow users on that service manifesting their relationships with different causes, organizations, brand names or products? Can you get any ideas from how they are doing it?

Believe it or not, there ARE still some business today that don't have a web site or email yet, but these days there are even more communication choices. When doing a web marketing proposal now I would ask clients if they want, in addition to a web site, email marketing, possibly with personalized images or landing pages, a blog, interactive Brainshark presentations, and Vontoo voice messaging. I would ask them if they participate in services such as Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, or photo sharing sites and if so are they interested in those services playing a role in their overall customer acquisition strategy.
 

So now we have many more ways for people to contact each other, and yes it can be confusing. I'm still trying to sort out what all those little "chicklets" (a slang term for a button that users click on to save, catalog, and share information or to download something) you see all over the web mean. One thing I know they do mean is extra control for the consumer of your content. For example, on this Webinar Resources Blog, readers can come to this web page to read the content. Or, they can click the orange "chicklet" in the right-hand column to get the feed link to this blog, and paste that into the feed aggregator of their choice. I'm just beginning to learn myself all the things that can be done with feeds and it's entirely possible people might be reading this blog post in ways I haven't even heard of yet.

Why would a business want to get involved in social media? By nature, it is unpredictable as we human beings naturally are, and that can be scary.

At the Connections '08 conference for users and agencies that I attended in September, ExactTarget selected "Subscribers Rule!" as the theme. What does that mean? You can read Exact Target's exact definition here. ExactTarget is in the business of email marketing, so they want us to think about the needs of our email subscribers and how to keep them happy. You want to give them control, to let them "Rule" over how you communicate with them. For example, you allow subscribers to choose to get your emails instead of sending them unsolicited spam, and make sure to send them content that fits their interests.

In the early days of my web design and development career, which started 11 years ago, I encouraged clients to make it as easy as possible for customers to contact them by providing information about multiple means of doing so, such as telephone, fax, mailing address, and email. Different people have preferences for how they like to communicate. I for example, am very comfortable sending email but don't enjoy talking on the phone. A company that provides an email contact is much more likely to get my business than one providing only a phone number.

According to the ExactTarget 2008 Channel Preference Survey, the trend is for younger consumers to place less importance on email as a communication channel than older consumers. This does not mean that email is going to go away any time soon however. Among the youngest age group in the survey, 15-17 year olds, email is still the second most favored channel. All of the other groups surveyed showed email either tied for first place or in first place. And since you need an email address to register for many services, people will still need to have an email address even if it isn't used as the main form of written communication.

Mark, JoAnna and I just got back from the ExactTarget users conference, Connections '08, which was held in Indianapolis earlier this week. We brought back a lot of new information and inspiration about email marketing, lead generation, social media, customer acquisition, and more. I'll be blogging about some of the topics that inspired me soon. In the meantime, here is a link to some photos of the conference. Enjoy!

Everybody is talking about Social Media. Sites like MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, WordPress and Flickr are becoming household names. I've been curious about what is going on out there for a long time but it took me awhile to put my toe in the water of the Social Media pool. Why? I had several of my own "traditional" web sites and I didn't see the need for it at first. I added links on my sites to the blogs, MySpace pages and photo sharing sites of several friends, without feeling compelled to immediately get one of my own.

Then we started our business blog here at Webinar Resources. Blogging had become part of my job description, but it quickly became much more than that to me. Web sites are not only part of what I do for a living, they are a personal passion, and I never get tired of finding new ways to get people to come to them. With all the millions of sites out there screaming for attention, why not use whatever advantages you can find? One of the first things I did after my first blog post was to figure out how to syndicate my posts to several of my own web sites. Content is what draws visitors, and it takes valuable time to create good content, so any way to leverage what you've created is a bonus.

My next move was to respond to an invitation from a friend to get a Facebook account and join her friends list. Like many other similar services, Facebook offers the ability to create online photo albums. That's an obvious incentive for potential users of this service, as so many of us now have digital cameras or cell phones that can take pictures. Photography is one my hobbies, so with lots of content to choose from, I immediately started to upload photos, and to link to the resulting collections from one of my other web sites that already contained photo pages. And to leverage the content even more, I put a Facebook badge on some of my other web sites that contains browseable thumbnail images of photos I've recently added.

It's easy to see how such tools could enhance your social connections. But what about business? Can Social Media help businesses with lead generation and the customer acquisition process? I'll explore that question in a future blog post.

In "It's Time for a E-Newsletter Makeover - Part I", looked at what we were doing right with our newsletter design, using the whitepaper published by ExactTarget, Email Marketing Design & Rendering: The New Essentials as a guide.

Now I'll list the improvements I saw fit to make to our email newsletter template.

The main call to action was not formerly visible in the upper left 4-5 inch square of the email, so to fix that I modified the header to include a customizable button that will link to whatever the current call to action is.

Some email clients will not display underlined links automatically, so for maximum consistency in appearance, I set the "text-decoration" property to underline with an inline CSS style in the anchor tag of each link.

According to the Exact-Target's whitepaper, Hotmail will render all text as dark gray unless you set a specific color, so I specified what I preferred, in this case black.

Despite everything we've done to make sure our newsletter displays properly with as many email clients as possible, just in case someone might still have trouble viewing it, I added "Click here to view this email as a webpage" in small text at the top with a link to our online archive.

For comparison, here is a link to the newsletter before the makeover:
Webinar Resources Newsletter Vol 1 No 3

And now here is a link to the newsletter after the makeover:
Webinar Resources Newsletter Vol 1 No 4

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.

If your company participates in email marketing, you will be interested in knowing that some new provisions taking effect on July 7, 2008 have been added to the CAN-SPAM act of 2003. Email marketing provider Exact Target has put together an overview of the new rule provisions: Important CAN-SPAM Update: The FTC Approves New Rule Provisions Under The CAN-SPAM Act

Further information can be found at the Federal Trade Commission web site: http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2008/05/canspam.shtm

One of the reasons that businesses take part in blogging is to humanize their companies by creating a personal connection with their customers. Blogging is an informal mode of communication that can help convey the personality of a company and it's employees. A blog that I think does a good job with the personal touch is that of a supplier of items for one of my hobbies, making soap and personal care products, Wholesale Supplies Plus.

The Wholesale Supplies Plus Blog contains information related to their business, and occasionally posts about what is going on in the lives of the people who make up that company. A cute touch that I like is at the upper right, a virtual company fish tank, a web gadget that mimics the natural behavior of fish as they look for food handouts from anyone who comes by.

Some offices, mine for example, contain a real fish tank. I decided to use mine as a subject to learn how to set up a live webcam stream and embed it on a web page. No doubt my fish would like to be more like the virtual fish and get fed by every visitor to this blog!

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!

Your website is a valuable tool that can be used in concert with just about any other marketing strategy you care to employ. Do you participate in email marketing or direct mail campaigns? Use your web site to collect subscribers. Are you a presenter or speaker? Archive your presentation content or audio or video of yourself on your web site as on demand presentations. Are you participating in a trade show? Use your web site to invite visitors to your booth. I could go on and on, but you get the idea.

In order to use your web site to leverage your other marketing activities, you need visitors. Search engines are very important for bringing in web site traffic. Your website needs as many incoming links as possible to be competitive in the search engines, and there is no denying it's a lot easier to give yourself a link than to get other people to give you a link. It also helps to have good keywords inside hyperlinks, since text in hyperlinks carries more weight with search engines than plain text.

  If you have a large web site with lots of content that is updated frequently, or more than one web site, you are in a good position to take advantage of those facts about search engines.

One way to do that is by putting a site map on your site if you don't already have one. This is simply a web page with a linked outline to all the pages on your site. Here is an example of a site map.

Another way is to add a What's New page with listings of what is new on your site and links to any new content you add. I recently started updating this What's New Page again after a long period of neglect. It was foolish of me to deprive myself of the benefits of all those links. I resolve to be smarter in the future!

So why not give your visitors a break by making your content easier to find, and give yourself a break with the gift of  valuable links?

I know a lot of people who are thinking about starting an e-newsletter to add powerful support to their customer acquisition  process. Are you one of them?

When you are ready to start sending out your newsletter you will be eager to send it to as many contacts as possible. You will be tempted to add any email address you can find to your subscriber list. This is a temptation you must resist, because you do not want want to be perceived as a spammer, or get into legal trouble. Your subscribers need to be opted-in, in other words they should have given you permission to send them a newsletter.

Even if you are not ready to roll your newsletter out right now, I suggest that you start building an opt-in subscriber list as soon as possible. An easy way to do this is to ask your customers for permission whenever they are sending you information via an online form. Just add a question worded something like "Would you like to receive a newsletter from us?" and a yes/no response field to any forms you might have on your web site. This applies to forms on paper also. Whenever a customer or prospect sends you information, there might be an appropriate way to ask whether they want a newsletter or to inform them that by taking a certain action they will be added to a mailing list. Take advantage of these opportunities whenever they come up. Then when you're ready to send your newsletter, retrieve this data and you'll know who it's safe to send to.

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".

Hi, I am Creative Director for Webinar Resources. Welcome to my blog. I will discuss techniques and strategies for web site owners to improve their web sites, ways to  increase the number of visitors and lead generation, and how to use a web site as a tool for marketing campaigns over multiple channels.

Since I'm always eager to spread the word whenever I have something new for people to see, one of the the first things I did upon starting this blog was to find a way to syndicate the RSS feed from this blog to my own web sites. I accomplished that with the help of some free software called RSSinclude. If your own web site needs some more content to keep your visitors coming back, give this or a similar tool a try and include some RSS feeds on your site that your visitors might enjoy.