Tag Archives: Webinars

5 Questions That Will Double Your Email Response Rates

Great lead nurturing content starts with great email copy. So I’ve created 5 questions to ask yourself when writing email copy. If you use these questions to optimize your emails, you’ll see a spectacular increase in response rates.

Want to see more?

In just 30 minutes, the webinar will show you how to:
– create more content than you ever thought possible
– map content to personas and buying stages
– link this all to your marketing automation processes

View the Webinar recording »

Also please let me know your comments on this video!

Social Media for B2B Lead Generation

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Earlier this year Jame-Ane Ervin wrote a great post about the results of promoting her webinar via Social Media. She got a 400% increase in leads! Now that’s effective use of social media.

A couple of weeks ago I met one of the founders of the site Social Media B2B: Jeff Cohen (@dgtlpapercuts). We started talking and he asked me to write a post about using Social Media for B2B Lead Generation, as LeadSloth has done a fair bit of work in that area.

I decided to limit myself to Blogging, LinkedIn and Twitter. I could only use 1,000 words, and in my opinion Blogging, LinkedIn and Twitter are the powerhouses of social media for B2B lead generation. Just some excerpts from the post:

  • “Always include a clear call to action at the bottom of older blog posts (…) this call to action does magic for lead generation”
  • “Twitter is getting more popular every day. That’s both a blessing and a curse. It’s great that the audience is growing, but the average Twitter user has a hard time actually reading all those tweets.”
  • “The benefit of LinkedIn is that it is a business-focused social network, so it’s usually a source of very qualified leads.”

You can read the post here: Increase B2B Lead Generation with Social Media

Let me know what you think!

Act-On Review: Demand Generation with Webinar Integration

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Webinars are a proven way to generate and nurture leads. To make webinars logistics easier, I’d love to see a proper integration between Demand Generation systems and Webinar systems such as Webex Event Center or GoToWebinar (see my comment on Ken Molay’s webinar blog). Today they are separate so you are copying information back and forth, or you have to do an expensive custom integration.

Act-On logoI’ve asked around, and today some people use the webinar system to send invitations and reminders and capture registrations, others do most of that within their demand generation system.

In the first case, you have an integrated process within the webinar system, including accurate reports on attendance. But your Demand Generation system is where you want to create a complete prospect profile, including email clicks and form submits. Also, you may want to export some campaign information (such as attendance) to Salesforce.com. This is often possible, but involves a lot of manual work.

In the second case, you capture the prospect information in the right place, but the Demand Generation system is not aware of the Webinar system. Therefore it takes more work than necessary to run your webinar campaign.

Act-On Demand Generation System

Today was the first time I saw an actual solution for this problem: Act-On is a relatively new player in the Demand Generation market. However, they come with good credentials: they’re funded by Cisco (owner of Webex), the CEO and engineering team come from Responsys (a leading marketing software vendor) and they have a seasoned executive team. Currently they have about 15 customers, from smaller companies to big names like BroadVision.

Their product is focused on small to medium size companies, so they’re not trying to compete with Eloqua or similar high-end products. Act-On Enterprise pricing starts at $500 per month (professional starts at $15 per month).

Act-On Enterprise includes most of the demand generation features that you’d expect, such as:

  • Email marketing
  • Drip email campaigns
  • Form and Landing page builder
  • Lead scoring
  • Reporting
  • Integration with Salesforce.com

But the unique feature is their integration with Webex. Read on…

Webex Webinar Integration

Act-On has a standard integration with Webex. Most of their customers use Webex Event Center. You can manage the entire webinar process from within Act-On. Only the actual delivery takes place in Webex:

  • Promotion: Act-On
  • Registration: Act-On
  • Delivery: Webex
  • Follow-up: Act-On

Normally these are silos that are disconnected, and now they are integrated, including end-to-end analytics. You can schedule the webinar from within Act-on (no need to login to Webex), and create a registration page, email invitation, repeat invitation, reminders and follow-up.

Act-On Home Screen Act-On lead source report Act-On webinar attendance report

The Act-On home screen, lead source report, and attendance report

There are several cool features, such as the automatic inclusion of the webinar details in the email invitation. Also, you can generate dedicated registration page URLs to give to partners or to use in advertising, so you can see the source of the registrations.

Another useful feature is that it can update the Salesforce.com Campaign status: sent, received, registered, attended. This requires the ‘Marketing’ add-on in the Salesforce Professional Edition.

Conclusion

This is by no means a comprehensive review of Act-On, it is based on a short demo. However, I was impressed with the breadth of functionality, the ease of use, and the unique webinar integration. So take a look at it when you’re looking for a demand generation system and you do a lot of webinars. I’ve also added them to my list of Demand Generation software vendors.

My question to you:
Is webinar integration the next required feature for Demand Generation systems?