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.

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

Two decades ago we used to let our fingers do the walking to find people, fast.  Now the power of the web offers many effective processes for lead generation and the telephone still plays a major role in customer acquisition.

We have customers who run a series of live training events.  The classes fill up fast, and always have a wait list, so every "no show" represents multiple lost opportunities.  In addition to the standard email reminders, we began sending Vontoo reminder calls to all class registrants the day before the training, and the customers love it.

The participants in the classes provide a preferred phone number for the reminder when they register for the class.  The director of the training series records her reminder, and through the beauty of Vontoo, we send her reminder to those specified numbers.  These calls provide another layer to your personalized marketing campaign.

So, while yes, the days of the 4-inch thick "yellow pages" are quietly slipping by, you can still ensure none of your participants have a chance to forget to attend your carefully planned event or even a web presentation by putting a ring in that ping using a Vontoo reminder call.

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!

Having just recently re-entered the job market at Webinar Resources after a 7-year maternity leave, I have been entertained by many advances in the world of telecommunications and conferencing.  Nothing has amazed me more than the advancement of video technology.  I remember PictureTel pioneer and President, Norman Gaut, telling us that video would become synonymous with the telephone call, and that the day would arrive in which the technology would resemble a tv broadcast.

Well, he was correct on one front.  The technology is astounding.  We use interactive web conferencing on our team all the time, and it does look just like a TV broadcast.  It's a simple click of the mouse, and there's Mark and Carolyn in St. Louis, while I sip my coffee in Simsbury, CT.  Our team meeting is underway, and though I've never met them, I'm part of the team.

Years ago, I always loved the "sell" for videoconferencing, because the technology was so much fun, and it truly helped the customer conduct business.  Now, the technology of video is just a given, and the aid to business is the way that Webinar Resources is able to drive customer acquisition by getting hundreds to attend a seminar that is webcast right to their laptop.  Technology aside, the sheer logistics of assembling a crowd that large, virtual or not, is amazing, but we do it all the time.

Also amazing is how that web conference crowd is a bit fluent through time.  Those who can't attend, live, at the scheduled time, are invited to attend the "webinar for one"--in which they view a video replay from their laptop, at their leisure.

We've come a long way, and who knows, in another 7 years, video may be synonymous with the phone call, but for now, I'm really stoked by the volume of people we can touch with a web presentation because of the effective lead generation we perform weeks before the event.  Seven years ago I thought it was a great time to be working with the technology.  Now, the technology is proven, and it's a great time to share it so easily with so many.

 

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.

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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Corporate Photos:

So, we all do it.  We multi-task, even at inappropriate times, such as during a meeting, or especially during a virtual meeting or webinar.  Who hasn't realized that they missed that key piece of information while responding to the fire drill of the hour, or worse, while checking scores from last night's games.  It's just too easy to claim that extra mile of "productivity" when you're not called on for direct interaction.

As a presenter, how do you get around this?  There're plenty of time-tested techniques that command direct interaction:  polls, directed Q&A, tests, etc.  However, one simple technique may be hanging from your neck:  the corporate photo.  When you attend a webinar, and the presenter's photo is displayed, you immediately have an affiliation with that person you'd never have without the photo.  Instead of tuning out a webinar, you're now turning away from Chris, the guy with the nice voice and the red tie who has all of these great tips on how to market your product.

We provide more than customer acquisition and lead generation services at Webinar Resources.  Sometimes we like to have a little fun and I like to compose music.

I am known for writing parodies of songs for business meetings and parties and have even performed in Nashville singing "O Document Where Art Thou" to a group of customers who really got into the PowerPoint presentation when I gave them their tag line, "We'll help you build your ROI" to the tune of "Man of Constant Sorrow".

Last year's Fall release of ExactTarget's permission-based email platform got me so excited; I composed a song about it.  I should have known after submitting my email and MP3 file to a rep that works for an email marketing company that the song would soon hit the charts throughout the company.

It did and you can read CEO of ExactTarget, Scott Dorsey's blog on my submission, "Ready to Rock and Roll".  Enjoy!

There is a very good discussion regarding open rates and email campaigns in a recent edition of the DMNews.  Two industry experts face off on the effectiveness of email open rates and their real value to personalized marketing campaigns.

One of the "contenders" describes the open rate as an ineffective form of measurement.  He argues that open rates are not reliable as email can be opened on mobile devices that do not download images and more web client email platforms, like Gmail, are configured to display text only.

The other contender, Morgan Stewart, Director of research and strategy at ExactTarget, places open rates into a different context,  His position is that open rates are a good measurement as they allow you to test the effectiveness of email subject lines and offer insight into "campaign optimization".

We agree with Morgan as we see open rates as a foundation to determine if your marketing and customer acquisition strategies are effective.  Every email campaign should have a "call to action" or a click-through activity.  It is not the open rate that identifies the recipient's interest, but the activity that takes place once the email is received and opened.

Embedding links to interactive web presentations that launch from the email is a very effective and reliable process to determine your recipient's interest.   We have implemented very successful email campaigns that track not only the open and click through rates, but that also provide tracking and reporting through a third party application, Brainshark, that we bundle with our Agency ExactTarget licenses.  The recipient's activity is then captured and married with the open and click through rates providing detailed results on not only the recipient's interest but their behavior as well.

In a recent campaign, we drove not only clicks but conversion as prospects became customers after viewing short five minute on demand presentations.  The prospect's behavior was tracked while they advanced through slides.   Immediate feedback was delivered to the reps that the prospect was viewing the product presentation and the reps followed up with a "warm call" to the customer.

Through our "No More Cold Calls" model, we can open new doors of opportunity for our customers and their customers and it all begins with an "opened" email.

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".

We are glad you stopped by to learn more about our services at Webinar Resources.  This blog was established to provide you industry Thought Leadership content related to lead and customer acquisition solutions.  We are here to help you make your website the "hub" of marketing and customer activity.