In this Post:
- Learn one of the most affordable ways to Market your business.
- Learn how an ACT! addon (for marketing) has helped one customer with specific financial results.
- One click access to a special report normally reserved for customers only to help you get started.
Let’s be honest here, most of the small businesses across the country have been hit hard with the recession, quite a few have closed up altogether, while others are running very lean organizations while they endure the current economic downturn.
While it is important to make necessary adjustments and even stay ahead of the financial challenges a small business faces, it is equally important to identify new ways to get in front of customers and prospects, otherwise known as marketing.
Why Marketing is Key to Surviving Tough Times
One of the most affordable ways to get in front of customers in a personal and meaningful way is with email marketing. Done right, email marketing allows you to connect with customers on a regular timetable and in a valuable way, and is one of the reasons I’m looking forward to ACT! 2010 with its end-to-end marketing capabilities. It is the first time ACT! has included a built in tool for customers to actually build their business using the net. Customers only have to activate the SwiftPage service by choosing the appropriate level based on their needs.
Email Marketing Case Study
SwiftPage Email has been around for several years, and is the engine powering the ACT! 2010 end-to-end marketing solution. I recently encouraged a long-time ACT! client who was wanting to do more marketing with ACT! to *not* leave the product until doing a marketing test with the SwiftPage addon.
After getting him setup and started with the SwiftPage service, I let him go for a couple days, and then followed up with him. He told me that has a whole new level of activity in the office, calling on targeted leads who have a renewed interest in his company’s products and services as a result of a couple emails he sent to his database using SwiftPage. He now has the capability to interact with contacts in his ACT! database, based on their interaction (viewing, opening, clicking links) in his email.
UPDATE: I just spoke with him on the phone to get an update, and these are two results he is most excited about:
1.) Sales. In less than 1 week, his company closed 4 “deals” as a direct result of the emailing activities done with SwiftPage. This represents a 7-8% revenue increase.
2.) Cleanup. He was also able to clean up his database, and identify dead leads due to people replying, saying they already had a solution, or were no longer interested, etc. This information allowed him to redirect sales resources away from those who opted out, to those who wanted more information.
He is pleased, and needless to say, we haven’t talked about his company leaving ACT! (which, by the way, is highly customized for his business) since then.
Getting Started with Email Marketing
If you haven’t taken the time to execute an email marketing plan, this could be a great opportunity to do just that. There is special report reserved for my clients entitled:
“5 Fatal Mistakes of Publishing a Newsletter and How to Avoid Them”
I’m making available at no cost via direct download (it does require Acrobat Reader). It is a quick read, but I’ve done what I could to pack it full of content. You can get access to it here.
For many, this recession has been difficult, and the truth is, some businesses haven’t survived. It doesn’t have to be that way, with renewed effort on affordable lead generation approaches like email marketing, you can get results faster. Now with ACT! by Sage 2010 having marketing functionality built in the product, once activated, my hope is even more customers will experience increased sales and profits.
NOTE: You can get started right away with SwiftPage, they support all versions of ACT! back to version 6!
It’s Your Turn: What have you observed as effective when it comes to getting through an economic downturn in your business? What marketing tools are you using? Any experience with Swiftpage? Chime in using the comment boxes below.
*Image by lepiaf.geo
Hi, my name is Travis Campbell, I operate this site. A key to success in any business is to effectively manage your relationships. ACT! is a software product helping millions when it comes to doing just that. This Website is designed to assist both those considering ACT! software for their business, as well as to provide insight to ACT! users who want to effectively use it in their day to day operations. So login, post, browse and enjoy.
Travis:
My sales associates and I use ACT 2009 and I was considering adding Swiftpage as a means to start an e-mail campaign with our customers or prospects. As we evaluated Swiftpage it seemed as if the Swiftpages layouts only allowed embedded images to be sent requiring the recipient to click through to open the images in order to see the content. I was concerned that prospective customers would not be compelled to take this action and thereby would not evaluate our marketing message.
Is this how Swiftpage works or I am missing something. Also does Swiftpage come with ACT 2010 or is still a separate purchase.
I look foward to your input.
Thanks
Patrick Carroll
President
Westgate Products
Great Post Travis. It is always nice to hear about customers who have had a great experience working with Swiftpage.
In reply to Patrick, Swiftpage will be automatically added into ACT! 2010. It comes with a free 60 day team trial. This might give you the chance to decide for yourself if Swiftpage would be a good fit for your company.
With regards to the images, we do not embed the actual image in the body of the messages, they are all referenced to a location on our server if we are hosting, or to a customer’s server if they are hosting them. This should not be a problem really for newsletters unless the entire content is a single or multiple images, which of course it is not recommended due to so many clients by default blocking image content.
Various email clients have various settings therefore asking to download images is an email client setting not because the images are embedded.
Hope that helps!
Travis,
Sadly ACT left me with v. 6.0. I used it from its earliest days when ACT was a simple easy to use, lightweight tool in the DOS world.
I have tried newer, bloated versions with no success. Unfortunately, the system requirements of v.2009 and 2010 exceed my Thinkpad Convertible’s capabilities.
ACT keeps trying to get me to come back, but never finds the time to respond when I have let them know I can’t even use the latest version.
Perhaps there will be a cloud computing version that I can consider once again.
Resellerspanel Launches Version 2.0 of Its Control Panel and a New Web Hosting Plan…
My blog is about free hosting reseller…
Patrick-
Thanks for starting off the conversation.
I may not know the answer to your specific issue, but I know that many email programs (Outlook, Gmail, Outlook Express, and others) have HTML in emails disabled by default. If this is the case, the images don’t appear. I’m not sure how SwiftPage handles this, but I would be cautious putting marketing messages solely in images themselves, if not backing them up with standard text either below the image, or somewhere near it.
You might contact Swiftpage support directly, and see what they say (let them know I sent you).
As for ACT! 2010, their marketing is Swiftpage (powered by Swiftpage), and comes with the product already installed.
Hope that helps.
Sara-
Thanks for stopping by, and clarifying things for Patrick (and probably others).
Glad to see you are trolling the web, great to have you interacting here.
Keep up the great work.
-Travis
Newt-
You might consider giving it another look, while I’m not sure if it is supported, I have some customers running it on a netbook. If you have recent hardware it should be fine (2GB RAM preferred). Many don’t realize the that corporate edition of ACT! comes with a web edition that is supported on IE and Safari, so it doesn’t have the system requirements. Although your performance is limited by bandwidth, and server capacity, it performs pretty well and looks just like ACT!
Thanks for taking time to chime in!
You might also look at some hosted solutions, there are plenty of them to choose from.