Webinar Resources was recently recognized for our unique, personalized, Christmas Story Photo Book application at the second annual Brainshark Sharkie awards. Our application was selected and recognized at the online Sharkie awards last week among a hundred entries of interactive Brainshark presentations.
You can view a sample Christmas Story Photo Book at the Brainshark Sharkie Gallery. This presentation is a great example of the use of effective landing pages, cross media applications and on demand presentation content. We personalized the reading experience for children with personalized text, images and audio in a unique Christmas story about Santa Claus and the Lost Dog.
Readers of our blog have seen some examples of how we have implemented cross media applications to drive the customer acquisition process. Stay tuned for more creative uses of a multi channel mix of content and solutions that will bring business opportunity to your company.
Social media applications, email accounts, blogs, web sites, shopping carts, payment gateways, CMSs, CRMs - all of these channels need feeding with new content and/or monitoring to make sure you are engaging with your audience and taking advantage of opportunities. You don't want an important email to languish in a little-used account, a sold merchandise item to go unshipped, a new lead ignored, or a question posted to a blog or Facebook page to go unanswered. How does one remember to check up on all these channels?
Most of the time when your applications need attention, you will get an alert email, but you can't count on getting all the emails you should. Email delivery is a real problem these days, even delivery of emails that you have made it very clear are wanted. To help me keep track of what I need to check on every day, I have made an html page and links to all of my email accounts, shopping carts, payment gateways, and social media applications. There is a shortcut to it on my desktop so it's always handy.
Here at Webinar Resources, I've made a similar page in a password protected area that our whole team can refer to for similar information, plus links to other things we need such as individual contact information, login pages for various hosted services that we use, and links to information important to our collective knowledge. It's a great convenience and time-saver. If you don't have such a resource for yourself, I recommend you make one or ask your web developer to create an admin page tailored to your needs.
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.
- 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.
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!
We take webinar registration tools seriously at Webinar Resources. To drive customer acquisition, you need to have the right tools to capture the right audience and provide effective reporting tools you can use for post and future webinar communications. List growth for your webinars cannot be managed without effective registration tools.
This is why there are third party vendors providing registration tools for virtual and live events. We have worked with a few of them. Some are small and some are major corporations providing services to Fortune 500 companies. As Ken Molay points out in his blog, many of the major players in web conferencing lack the registrations tools that are necessary to support customer acquisition.
I was recently cleaning out an old entertainment center in the basement to take to my son's new apartment and realized I had filed some of my old presentations about the formation of Webinar Resources in the cabinet. As I went through the papers, I found the July 24th, 2003 Live Meeting announcement from Microsoft. Here it is 2010 and Microsoft still does not offer a flexible and comprehensive registration tool. In fact, for years they have been using ViewCentral, under the the re-branded name of "RegEdit. Webinar Resources has supported major clients using ViewCentral since we started our business.
The fact remains, that marketers planning webinars need to focus on the pre-activities related to webinars which include promotion and acquisition activities like registration. Webinars are not just about the event, content and speakers. Webinars are a strategic marketing activity that should drive your customer/prospect list growth, blogging content, PR, social media, branding, thought leadership and overall marketing strategy to build and retain a loyal customer base.
Webinar Resources will be inviting guest bloggers who work in the industry, know the industry and can talk about the industry. You will hear more in coming blog posts about webinar strategies so stay tuned.
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.
During this time of year, people have a lot on their mind and buying that unique gift is always a challenge. The elves at Webinar Resources teamed up with Santa to create a unique and personalized online offering for this holiday season for young children - MyChristmasBook.com.
MyChristmasBook.com brings to life the story of "Santa Claus and the Lost Dog". It is unique as it provides personalized images, text and audio using the child's name. The Christmas Story Photo Book is delivered through a personalized, North Pole web address with an embedded Brainshark presentation.
Deliveries started over the weekend and one satisfied customer has posted her son's personalized North Pole web address on her Facebook site. It seems our mascot, Bella, is becoming a celebrity very quickly.
This is the most unique demand generation marketing activity that Webinar Resources has ever engaged in and we are pleased to have our customers boast and post about their satisfied experiences.
Go to MyChristmasBook.com to order that unique gift today.
If you read one of our more recent blogs on re-purposing content of a Brainshark presentation, then you will understand how we can drive additional lead generation by reusing existing content.
Webinar Resources recently launched the MyChristmasBook campaign and deliveries are about to begin. We repurposed content from a Brainshark presentation and created a MyChristmasBook Trailer on the MyBrainshark site. MyBrainshark provides tools to create simple Brainshark presentations and it is free.
We have been watching the popularity of the MyChristmasBook Trailer on the MyBrainshark site and are delighted to report that we are holding the number two position of the most viewed and most popular Brainshark presentation. MyBrainshark provides social media tools for sharing presentations and a reporting dashboard that displays a world map indicating viewing activity The MyChristmasBook trailer has been viewed across the U.S. and in China, Austrailia, and in South America.
It is exciting to watch the popularity of the trailer grow. Re-puposing existing content pays off.
The elves at Webinar Resources spent time last night blogging about our holiday offering, MyChristmasBook.com. We included a lot of information about re-purposing Brainshark presentations and creating an effective lead generation campaign using ExactTarget, Vontoo, Brainshark and Compendium Blogware.
We did an organic search this evening and were very pleased to see that MyChristmasBook.com is at the top of the organic search. We were also delighted to see the tracking results of our email campaign where many of our subscribers visited their own personal North Pole webpage to see a 2 minute demonstration. Over 25% of the recipients selected the personalized link that included their email address. Here is a sample personalized URL (PURL), that we call the North Pole web address - http://helper.mychristmasbook.com/NorthPole/personalizemybook@gmail.com.
We also spent time tweeting, posting content on Facebook sites and updating a Brainshark presentation. Of all the lead generation activities we engaged in, blogging received the fastest and most desired results.
We don't have a long-tail keyword for this campaign, but MyChristmasBook.com is unique enough that it can be found in an organic search in Google. We know as we blog about this subject this evening, we will keep our rating up and more customers will find us as they hear more about us. So blogs are faster than Santa's reindeer Virginia and they rate high on Google's naughty and nice list.
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.
The day after Bella ran away, I started using the tools and practices that we use to provide customer acquisition. Now we have blended the best of our solutions, partners and best practices and are pleased to announce the launch of MyChristmasBook.com. MyChristmasBook.com is a unique online, personalized Christmas Story Photo Book application. Personalized photo books can we ordered online and you can submit a child's name that will be inserted throughout the story in text and personalized images.
The child becomes part of the story of "Santa and the Lost Dog". Beautiful winter photos and fun animation bring the story to life through a personalized Brainshark presentation embedded in an ExactTarget landing page. Each landing page is unique and assigned a personalized URL (PURL) upon the email delivery of the link to the online book.
We are kicking off the launch with a Vontoo call from Santa himself. Just text the keyword Santa to 88769 and you will find out if you are on the naughty or nice list and will receive a call from Santa. Santa will also post notes periodically on the personalized landing pages for the children.
Social media will also play a major role in the launch and landing page activity. Each personalized Christmas story photo book can be shared through a variety of social media links - Twitter, Facebook ShareThis and Brainshark presentation emals. No doubt you will hear about MyChristmasBook.com through social media links that we have updated.
For more information, visit http://www.mychristmasbook.com or text the keyword Santa to 88769. You can even try out a sample personalized presentation on the site buy going to the Try It link on the site.
We know that every child loves Santa, our readers love social media and Webinar Resources loves personalization. Bring it all together as we blend the best in this new genre for online children's stories. Happy Holidays everyone!
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.
Mark and I returned from Indianapolis Thursday evening after attending "Connections '09: Success by Design", a one-to-one marketing conference where we learned a lot of new information about email marketing, social media integration, email + SMS, video in email, personalized marketing campaigns, and much more. In the future we'll be blogging about how we're using the new concepts and techniques that we have learned.I haven't always done the best job after a conference or trade show of absorbing everything I learned and keeping up with the contacts I made. I was determined to do a better job this time of taking advantage of the opportunity afforded me and our company, by doing the following as quickly as possible after my return home while things were still fresh in my mind:
1. I put my photos from the trip into an album on Facebook and announced the link in our Webinar Resources Twitter feed, as well as my own personal social media tools.
2. I entered the contacts I made into my database and emailed all of them a link to the photos.
3. I organized all the takeaway information from the conference and retyped my handwritten notes (20 pages worth!), cross checking and adding urls to resources whenever appropriate. There were lots of whitepapers, slide presentations, blog posts and other resources to keep track of, and putting links to them in my notes I think will help me remember the context and get more out of the information.
4. I made an action item list of all the ideas I picked up for improvements to make to our marketing materials and strategies.
5. I posted my notes and links to pertinent materials on our private company portal, and sent a notice to all of our team members, so they can benefit from what I have learned.
What do you do after a trade show or conference to help you retain all the new information you have consumed?
I recently took a vacation from our customer acquisition practice at Webinar Resources. Of all of the different modes of transportation, I have learned this Summer that taking the train across the country is a great way to meet new people. It is also an interesting opportunity to connect with people and make new contacts.
Think of it, passengers on a train are a lot more open as they have no other place to go
other than a dining car, sleeping berth or observation car. People just have to interact
with each other as they are captive for the many hours it takes to reach their destination.
My wife and I joined a friend of hers to travel from St. Louis to San Francisco. Our friend was volunteering for the 17th annual Sharkfest, where 900 brave souls swim from Alcatraz to the San Francisco shore. See the Brainshark presentation on our webinar service portal for highlights of the event - www.brainshark.com/webinarresources.
During our ride we met many interesting people and had some good conversations. We met one retired couple traveling to visit their sons who work in Silicon Valley. One of their sons works for Google and another is beginning a startup company. I wrote down the company website www.glyde.com to look at later. Maybe I will send them a Webinar for ONE presentation.
We met more interesting people on our 48 hr trek and I spent some time jamming with a fellow musician. Luckily I brought my traveling mandolin and it was great to wake up to the sunrise in Colorado and be able to sing some John Denver tunes.
We had a great trip when we got to San Francisco, San Jose and Aptos. When we headed back home on a Southwest flight, my wife commented on how people were more friendly on the train and that everyone was rushed in the airport. We had lots of luggage in tow with souvenirs and we would have loved to have a porter help us aboard a train that would take us back home. We took the quick way, but planes have no charm, no space and provide little opportunity for interacting with others.
We will always remember our great trip to California this year. If you want to spend some time with people, see the scenery and possibly make a business connection, plan to take a train trip across the country. Right now I am hearing "Flight 3346 is ready for departure. What I would rather hear is "All Aboard!
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!
One of the things we all love about the Internet is all the free stuff available for download. For the profit-minded, there are good reasons to make quality, helpful content available on your web site for free. Useful content gives you credibility in your field and helps to build long-term relationships with prospects. If your content is popular, you can generate revenue through advertising. If your content contains text, there are lots of good keywords for search engines to latch onto. Another benefit of good content is that it attracts incoming links, sometimes called "link bait". In checking the external links for one of my sites on which I sell craft supplies, I can see that by far the most popular individual pages are those that contain project tutorials or free templates. Given that incoming links help your site in the organic search results, and that search marketing has a very high ROI in a time when advertising budgets might be shrinking, having quality content that people want to link to is a huge advantage.
I put my web site address on the free templates available for download on one of my web sites so that users will be reminded of my business every time they see the template. Don't overlook the possibility of placing your content on specialized portals so that people who have never been to your site have the opportunity to be exposed to your content. Be sure to embed information about your company within that content. Just to name a few examples, there are portals for articles, blogs, Illustrator files, movies and RSS feeds. If you publish a Brainshark presentation, there are two types of portals provided in which you can make your content available for free or for a fee. Click here to view Webinar Resources' Brainshark content portal. Brainshark is a powerful tool that you can use to turn PowerPoint slides into multimedia presentations with many powerful features including viral marketing capability.
By giving a little, you could gain a lot!
This morning I signed up for an AddThis account. AddThis is a free bookmarking/sharing service than enables you to create a button or chicklet that empowers your site visitors to print your content, email it, or best of all send a link to the social networking service of his or her choice. It's similar to the Share This link you see right below this blog post you're reading. Would you like to have that capability to leverage your own content that you've worked so hard on? Just go to the AddThis site and follow the super-easy instructions. You don't have to register to get a button, but I did so that I could receive the additional service of analytics. What a great way to see which content is the most popular!
"Doing Well by Doing Good" is a phrase used in a slightly derisive manner to describe the actions of someone who benefits his or herself while doing something for a charitable cause. In a more positive light, you could refer to this practice by another well known phrase, a "Win-Win Situation".
I found a really good example on the soapmaking supply retailer From Nature With Love's Soap Donations page. Customers of From Nature With Love are invited to donate some of their handmade soaps to two domestic violence shelters and one homeless shelter. In return, they get a listing with a link on a donor's thank you page and the right to display a banner on their site that links back to the thank you page on From Nature With Love's site.
This is a very smart marketing program for several reasons. Web-savvy soap makers get a link from a high profile site to their own sites, which helps them greatly in the search engines. They also help build a good image with their own web site visitors by advertising their charitable act. From Nature With Love gets a boost in the search engines by having participants in the program link back to them, and the keywords contained in the donor listings are good for their search engine presence as well. And people who are down and out, perhaps at the lowest points of their lives, get to enjoy a handmade luxury personal care product, a small thing but speaking as someone who enjoys handmade personal care products myself, a potentially significant morale-booster that is good for physical and mental health. Not just a "Win-Win-Situation", but a "Win-Win-Win Situation"!
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