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 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!

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.

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?