Webinar Resources just distributed the latest newsletter and it contains some exciting announcements, enhancements and tools to keep you in touch with industry news and trends as they relate to event management and customer acquisition. 
You still might have time to order your Sweetheart a personalized eCard along with their favorite audio clips from iTunes. This Valentine's Day, we are adding music to the mix and further personalizing the experience of the recipient. Provide us the name, email address, a special message and the name of your Valentine's favorite musical artist and we will deliver a personalized eCard and iTunes Preview landing page with album selections that your special Valentine can listen to. Webinar Resources will be posting an iTunes redemption code ($15 value) in ten of the lucky Valentines' personalized landing pages on February 14th.
Order now at this link.
lentine to the person of your choice. Registration ends after February 11, 2010. Get it here - Free Valentine's Day eCard
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.
Re-purposing content with Brainshark allows you to quickly recreate content for different audiences to drive lead generation. The original version of the Brainshark presentation is embedded in the MyChristmasBook.com main page. We then re-purposed the content and posted it on our Webinar Resources landing page. You will also find some of the latest Compendium webinar replays on our landing page.
There is also a MyChristmasBook Trailer posted at http://www.mybrainshark.com. It has been interesting to watch the popularity of the trailer as it has been viewed across the world.
Finally, we launched an email using ExactTarget today to our newsletter subscribers which provided a more personalized experience with a unique personalized URL or PURL. We call it a unique North Pole webpage address for the kids. You can visit and share my North Pole address to see how personalization works and hear part of the story of Santa Claus and Lost Dog - http://helper.mychristmasbook.com/NorthPole/markrice@riceresources.com.
We found after creating more content for some of the newer Brainshark presentations that we could reuse the content for earlier Brainshark presentations. So our most recent content that we created for our North Pole webpage address has been repurposed to improve the original Brainshark presentation on MyChristmasBook.com.
Launching this campaign using our partner applications from Compendium, Brainshark, ExactTarget and Vontoo has enabled us to blend the best and create an effective lead generation holiday campaign. Visit any of the links and learn more.
In my last blog post, I discussed ways of getting people to sign up for an e-newsletter. Now I will talk about how to help make sure your e-newsletter or other email sendings actually get to the people who want them.
ISPs are understandably on a mission to block the emails people don't want, and to let in the emails their customers do want. Many spam emails do get blocked through their efforts, but unfortunately some legitimate emails also get blocked accidentally. As a sender, you might know what the official definition of spam is, but to an end user, spam might just mean something they aren't interested in right now. Did you know that some users use the report spam button as a way to unsubscribe from a sending they no longer want instead of using the unsubscribe link provided in the email? Did you know that some email recipients use the report spam button on their email client as a delete key? Did you know that you can even get banned for being on the same ISP as someone else whose emails were labeled as spam, either rightly or wrongly? It's unfair, but it is possible to get on banned lists without ever doing anything wrong. The retail holiday season we're in now brings an increase in commercial email traffic, and with it more potential false spam reports as people get impatient with all the email they're getting.
What can be done to help make sure your emails are getting to your customers, and your customers' emails are getting to you? Here are some suggestions:
- If you use forms on your web site, test them using multiple email addresses from different domains. You might find that your forms will accept emails from some domains and not others. If that happens, contact your site's host for help.
- On the success pages and acknowledgement messages from your forms, suggest that users add your email address or addresses to their approved senders lists (whitelists).
- Check all the email links on your web site periodically to make sure you actually get the emails. In addition, make a list of all the email accounts you have, with login information, and keep the list in a safe place. Check the spam folders on all of them on a regular basis. Many email accounts will stop working when the spam folder or the trash folder gets full. Also some legitimate emails might be caught by your spam filter, so you'll want to add those email addresses to your lists of approved senders. Some customers will try another way to contact you if they don't get an answer from your email, but most will just give up.
- Have your web developer program an appropriate subject line in capital letters into all the email links on your site. Although use of all caps is something I normally stay away from, in this case I do use them because it makes the emails sent from my web site much easier to distinguish from all the spam.
- Examine your email sendings, including acknowledgement messages from forms, for characteristics that might cause them to be mistakenly flagged as spam. The following resources provide helpful guidelines:
- Gmail Bulk Senders Guidelines
- AOL Sender Best Practices
- Hotmail Guidelines
- Yahoo! Mail Best Practices
- Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group Sender Best Communications Practices
- Why My Emails Get Blocked or Filtered: Causes and Solutions Inside
Some email sending software, such as ExactTarget, has a built-in content checker that will alert you to possible problems in the text of your email, such as "Click here" or "Free". - Only send to engaged recipients. Believe it or not, some major ISPs are starting to flag messages as spam just because the end user doesn't open them. Consider sending periodic updates to subscribers to verify if they still want to be on your subscriber list.
- Open up other channels to help compensate for the people you're not reaching by email, such as blogs, Facebook, Twitter, a Webinar for One Brainshark presentation, text messaging, and voice messaging. At Webinar Resources we use ExactTarget's social forward feature to add social media links to our customers' emails to drive customer acquisition.
Consider not having your email forwarded from one account to another, but getting all of it right from the source. The article Tips to avoid getting your server blocked by Hotmail/Yahoo/Gmail explains why.
- Will I give or sell their email address to someone else?
- Will the newsletter be interesting or valuable to them?
- Will they be able to unsubscribe if they decide they no longer want it?
- Will they be bombarded with a lot of email?
Enough time has gone by now to see if the new improved process had the desired effect of getting more newsletter subscribers. I looked at data from new customer signups for an equal amount of days before and after, and was pleased to find out the following:
| Old Sign-Up Process | New Sign-Up Process | |
| Rate of customers opting in to e-newsletter | 5% | 32% |
Wow, that's a significant increase! Now I should be in a position to retain more of my most engaged customers by sending them information that they want to receive.
Do you publish an e-newsletter as part of your customer acquisition program? Are you pleased with how many subscribers you're getting, or disappointed?
If you're not getting as many subscribers as you'd like, it might help to think about some of the factors that might make potential subscribers reluctant to give you their email address.
- They fear that you will give or sell their email address to someone else
- They don't know what benefit they will get from your newsletter. Do they get something free for signing up? Is the content valuable?
- They worry that that they won't be able to unsubscribe if they decide they no longer want it.
The shopping cart software I use, osCommerce, requires customers to create a profile in order to complete a purchase. Customers can select whether or not to receive an e-newsletter during the sign-up process. I decided to pretend that I am a new customer and fill out the form to refresh my memory of what the customer sees - something I haven't done since I first set up the site.
In the box where I ask if they want the newsletter, I had links to the first three issues and the checkbox to select to opt in is worded "Sign up for Carolyn's Newsletter". There was no description of what the newsletter is about, so I have added the following descriptive paragraph:
The Carolyn Hasenfratz Design and Carolyn's Stamp Store E-Newsletter is sent to your inbox around 6-8 times a year and features articles by Carolyn about rubber stamping techniques and projects, as well as online marketing and other business tips. You will also be updated on my sales and specials, free template downloads, new products, and show appearances. Click here to view my privacy policy.In that paragraph I have attempted to answer potential concerns that customers might have about getting yet another newsletter in their already crowded inbox. "Is this newsletter of interest to me?" "How many emails will I get?" "Is it easy to unsubscribe if I change my mind?" I also changed the wording of the call to action to "Sign up for Carolyn's Email Newsletter - check box if yes"
What do you think - can I look forward to an increase in the number of customers who subscribe? We'll see!
It's hard to believe that webinars and internet marketing tools are still relatively new concepts in some companies. Just before my 7-year maternity leave back in 2000, I was helping my sales team at MCI Conferencing introduce the concept of "web-based data conferencing" to our customers which included Xerox. Ironically, though we never met, within a few months of my leave, my boss, Mark, was working at Xerox on the team that was developing the Xerox Webinar program.
It's 8 years later, and we have been working together for almost a year in a much different technology and a much different world than we had in 2000 and early 2001.
What better time than now are we all positioned to make the most of this technology! Want to really partner with your customers? Let them know that their success is important to you!
In your customer acquisition, build a reliable and approved list of customers, and give them information, presentations, and tools to help them grow their own business while you grow yours.
Look for synergies between your customer's industry and your own, and build a presentation series around it. Back in 2000, my VP of sales partnered with one of my customer's VP of Sales to conduct a short webinar series at both companies.
Today, we have customers who do the same, and then also bring in industry experts to a "round table." The presentation is then broadcast on a webinar, and provide the Brainshark replay later as an on-demand "webinar for one" for those who missed the live version.
Every company should have a regularly scheduled presentation series designed to help their customers grow their own base. Your monthly or quarterly newsletter should have a dedicated space for your webinar news.
Our customers always provide live links to register for upcoming webinars, and to go directly to the Brainshark replays of webinars that have passed. We are also developing personalized landing pages for key customer contacts. These are like a little mini-reference books compressed down to a singular web page that provides the customer with all the tools and reference points he needs for past, current and upcoming web events.
Mark and I marvel at how closely we missed each other back in 2000, when our entire business was a budding technology. With the tools of today, we'd be much less likely to miss each other, now.
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.
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
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 OneSM 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
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.
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.
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.
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