In our last webinar, we discussed lead engagement sources that marketers and business owners may not be using. In case you missed it, you can watch the recording here:
We have also compiled questions asked by attendees at the session and addressed them below.
Question 1
For an IT company, what would be the best medium to engage prospects?
Of course, email is one medium that you should try. But you have to think about the content. If you are sending emails, what is the content that you are sharing. More than the platform that you choose or the tool, it is important for you to understand what exactly does your audience want, as in the kind of content.
You would generally share white papers, and ebooks with your prospects and customers, and word it in such a manner that people are able to understand it. In case of many IT companies, I have seen that certain emails do not sound Human and are not easy to read. Such emails generally get lost in the inbox. Use email, but change the way you have been using email.
Question 2
While building customer communities looks easy, how do you build communities of prospects and should do that?
In the example quoted in the presentation, the Bhive community doesn’t just have customers. A lot of other startup founders, freelancers, and marketers are also a part of that community. They are leveraging the community, that initially may have started with customers and friends only, and extended it by providing things of value to other people who might be interested. So they are the prospects.
In other words, you start building a community and eventually if you are providing enough value, then the community becomes big enough to include people who are not your customers yet. That’s how big brands are built. It takes a lot of time and is not easy. You can get started with this webinar recording on community development.
Question 3
Do you have examples of an IT Product or IT Services company having utilized social media effectively? Do you have any case studies?
LeadSquared is a SaaS product. Right now we are not doing a lot of promotion on social media but in the past we have gotten good responses from our social media campaigns. We have started again.
Here are a few case studies on IT Products and IT Services companies who have utilized social media for their marketing:
- Enhance Your Customer Engagement With Marketing Automation, Like Uniphore Did
- From 14 to 40: IntelliGrape Scores with Email Marketing
Question 4
The risk of building a prospect community could be that if one of them buys a competitor’s product/service, he/she may sway other members of the community to competitor’s products. How do you mitigate that risk?
That risk is always going to be there. We are in a completely open environment right now. Everything is on social. We cannot really do anything sneakily. If your product is good enough and if you are providing enough value to your community, then your community would also develop some kind of loyalty towards your brand and would not be swayed so easily. You mitigate that risk by providing enough value.
Question 5
Are text emails better than the creatively done HTML emails which often land in junk box?
If you are writing emails in a conversational, human manner and they are just plain simple text emails, they will do better because they don’t have images and a million links in them. That is why such emails generally do not move to the spam box.
But it does not mean that all HTML emails land into the junk box. There are certain things you need to take care of and you have to make it personal and conversational without too many images and links. Most of the HTML emails land in the junk box because of their design – they look as if it is a bulk spam campaign.
Test it. Send a text version to a set of people and an HTML version to another set of people and see how they perform.
Question 6
What kind of coding will be required to install WebEngage? Does it work for all websites?
It’s very simple. You just need to put a simple code in. They have all the instructions there to help you do it. If you are built on a WordPress website, it will be much easier for you. Otherwise, you can just give it to your webmaster and it’s a one-step process.
Question 7
Any Indian examples for quizzes, that worked without advertising?
The education client mentioned in the presentation is an Indian client. The quizzes that we created were online tests for an IIT-JEE training institute. It was shared a lot on Facebook so we did not put any money into it. Their blog was also very popular and got us a lot of organic traction. Therefore, we didn’t need to promote it at all.
Question 8
What is the best format for sending an email so that it does not move into spam?
Emails moving into spam would depend on several factors. Take a look at this post to find out what you need to do to ensure that your emails do not hit the spam box.
