No More Cold Calls

Looking for Retention and Lead Generation Ideas, Have an Event! Part 1

Tuesday, March 2, 2010 by Peter Muir

A basic marketing premise looks at how to retain good customers and how to acquire new ones. Acquisition and retention are a cornerstone in any business venture.

In an effort to show your existing customers how they can be more successful and show new customers new places they can go enabled by your ideas, products and services consider hosting an educational event.

I'd like you to consider 4 Planning Phases of Successful Events.
1. Planning
2. Pre-Event Efforts
3. Event Delivery
4. Post-Event Efforts and Outcomes

Below is the beginning of an Educational Event Planning Guide to Increased Sales. Whether your goal is to create an effective lead generation program, re-develop your customer acquisition process, salvage lost customers with a retention campaign or you just want to say no more to cold calls. Developing your objectives is part of the process. It may seem like the guide is a series of questions, but it's in the process of answering the questions that will help you create an event that fits your organization, your needs and the needs of your current and future customers.

We're just scratching the surface here with Phase 1 Planning. Three future posts will discuss Phase 2, 3 and 4.

Phase 1 Planning
The planning phase has two major parts. The planning process of how the event fits into the larger needs of the organization and the actual planning steps to the event itself.

Planning within the Big Picture

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.

Planning the Event

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.

Use the event itself to help you retain existing customers and acquire new ones. Use a multi channel approach to solicit input to your educational event. Post it on your blog, have sales reps call on the phone, visit face to face, Tweet about it, email it, provide a web page where people can influence the outcome. Use the multi channel mix to help you connect with people!

Let existing customers know you are hosting an educational event and you would like to invite them to "participate" early on and be part of the planning committee. Ask them what they would like to learn more about and why? What challenges are they facing, their industry, their customers facing? What opportunities would they like to go after but can't seem to get started. Why? All of these questions can apply to new customers you'd like to acquire too.

It's not really about the event itself. The event is an indirect approach to help you grow your relationship with existing customers and knock on new doors and acquire new ones. Deliver on what they ask for and you're on a new road to showing your customer why they could be doing business with you and your organization.

Stay tuned for information on Phase 2: Pre-event Efforts, Phase 3: Event Delivery and Phase 4: Post-Event Efforts and Outcomes.

If you have additional planning ideas you'd like to share or have a question about anything we've posted, just let me know!

MyChristmasBook Trailer Most Viewed/Popular Presentation on MyBrainshark

Tuesday, December 22, 2009 by Mark Rice

The elves at Webinar Resources are busting their buttons as the MyChristmasBook Trailer on MyBrainshark is now the most viewed and most popular Brainshark presentation. Says Santa, who just read this latest update in the Webinar Newsletter from Webinar Resources, "We are very proud that this on demand presentation has received such wide appeal. Rudolph told me that "rich media" was the way to reach the masses so I thought I would give it a try."

The MyChristmasBook Trailer has been viewed across the country and across the world. Webinar Resources launched this campaign to drive lead generation for North Pole IndustryCo. Every MyChristmasBook online Christmas Photo Story Book contains personalized text, images and audio using a good little boy or girl's name and is delivered on a unique personalized North Pole web page. Says Jack Frost, CMO in charge of North Pole's lead generation and personalized marketing campaigns, "We hired Webinar Resources to produce the story of Santa Claus and the Lost Dog as they are the experts in demand generation marketing and the theme song has the reindeer tapping their hoofs."

The success of the campaign can be summed up by Mrs. Claus, "Things have gotten a lot more jolly around here now that the old man is coming home from the shop at a decent hour. Thanks to Webinar Resources launching MyChristmasBook.com with their partners ExactTarget, Brainshark, Vontoo and Compendium, Santa is much more productive and best of all, there are no more cold calls which is important in the frozen North.

Online Forms: Green, with Benefits

Friday, January 16, 2009 by Carolyn Hasenfratz

Being "Green" is trendy. Being "Green" makes you feel like you're doing the right thing. Giving the impression of being "Green" makes you look good to your customers. Appearing to be "Green" is an effective marketing tool for products that, according to one study, are only 1% likely to really be beneficial for the environment. As a business person, you know that in a competitive environment you can't afford to fall for Greenwashing and hype when the time comes to find ways to make your operation more green - it makes sense to be skeptical. On the other hand, when you can find genuinely environmentally friendly practices that have additional benefits for your business, that's a win-win situation.

We've found that one such win-win situation in our work is the use of online forms for collecting information from customers. Using an online form instead of a paper form saves the paper and the resources that went into making it, transporting it, and printing on it. But there are many other benefits to an online form that have nothing to do with saving paper. For example, the data you receive is in a format that you can cut and paste, reducing retyping time and human errors that take time to correct and can cause delays in a project. If your customers are in the habit of leaving out important information on paper forms, you can make those fields required on an online form, and the customer will not be able to send the form without completing it. This not only eliminates the time it would have taken to contact the customer for the necessary information, but also you will be able to turn around projects more quickly, which improves customer service and your profits. Another productivity increase that comes with online forms is the ability to send the data to multiple recipients with one click, saving time that might otherwise be spent gathering the information and making it available to colleagues who need it. With online forms there is an opportunity to upsell or give your customers better service by providing links to information that you want your customers to have, either on the form itself or on a web page where they are directed after completion.

None of the benefits I've mentioned so far are new - online forms have been around for awhile. What is new are some of the added functions that you can add to forms and landing pages with products like email marketing by Exact Target and automated, on demand voice messaging by Vontoo. It is now possible to send a voice message or a text message to a customer's mobile device at their request with forms and other triggered sends. It's possible to show them a personalized image on a landing page that is generated by completing a form or by a click in an email - for an example see this Personalized Landing Pages demonstration - or wow them even more with a rich media Brainshark presentation with customized content that reflects the customer's input from the form.

Please contact us if you would like to deploy any of these exciting new techniques in your customer acquisition program.

Blogging and Google Alert

Monday, December 8, 2008 by Mark Rice

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.

Reach Out and Touch Your Customers--They're More Likely to Remember You!

Thursday, June 12, 2008 by joanna hamilton

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.

Open Rates and Lead Generation

Wednesday, April 9, 2008 by Mark Rice

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.