Every touch point with a customer or prospect should include a "call to action".   A Call to Action or CTA, as some call it, invites interaction from your visitor and promotes lead generation.  A CTA can be as simple as a form posted on your website, in a blog, and email or in an on demand presentation like a Webinar for ONE.

We always include a call to action in our Webinar newsletters.  The simplest example is to invite your reader to subscribe to your newsletter by completing a simple online form.  You are more likely to have a customer or prospect return to your cross-media communications if you invite them to take an action.  Every customer acquisition program should promote interactivity.

A common error by many who produce web conferences is to post a webcast or webinar replay that does not contain some form of a call to action.   Many web conferencing marketeers do not realize that there are tracking tools that can inform them when a viewer is watching a presentation.  Views of your presentations can take place at any time of the day and in almost any location where online content is available - which is about anywhere in the world.

The goal of any effective customer acquisition process is to connect with your customer or prospect and move them to an action where conversion takes place.  Conversion can be as simple as the completion of a subscription form or as in-depth as completing a live poll embedded in a Webinar for ONE. 

As you create your personalized marketing campaigns, make sure you include several types of call to action best practices and techniques   People like to give their input and like to be involved.  Give your customers, prospects and partners an opportunity to interact with you online and you will produce effective lead generation results.

Feel free to post your comments and/or complete our live online poll

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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.