Full Transcript

Convey Channel MicroCast

Partner Marketing Tools

Sales partners expect more from their providers these days but as we all know there many complexities to building a successful channel strategy. Providers that are winning the channel game have adopted agile and innovative solutions to control their message, push their sales strategy, and provide the right tools, all while responding to constant change in their business and in the marketplace.

Most of the providers that Convey works with would love to have partners use marketing to promote their services, but the reality is that partners rarely do what we think that they should. So why is it that partners don’t use the same marketing strategies that have proven so effective in the technology marketplace?

First, partners just don’t have the time to devote to marketing. Partners are generally attached to very small agencies, so they are having to do it all. They have to secure more customers, educate them about services, manage the order and installation process, and respond to issues when the technology doesn’t work the way they expect. Marketing is generally last on the list.

Second, being creative doesn’t come easy for partners.

In a former life I was an English teacher and taught writing, among other things. I consider myself pretty good at it, but the vast majority of people I work with struggle to put the right words together. So, imagine the difficulty in creating a marketing email, a social media post or a blog if you can’t think of what to say.

Third, partners don’t know how to generate a lead list to market to.
If you are going to deliver an email campaign, target people to invite to an event or even try and influence people on social media, you have to have a way to generate a list. Partners don’t really have the understanding how to create lists of people that they can work with and then what to do even if they had a list.

Convey’s philosophy has always been that if you do the work for partners, provide them marketing tools, and then show them how to get a good list they will be much more likely to add marketing to their revenue strategy. We’ve built marketing tools inside the Convey portal designed to motivate partners to use them.

We’ve added an easy way for partners to share content.
You’ve uploaded a case study, a white paper or product information that’s meant to be shared with customers. Partners have two easy sharing options every time they access content. An obvious thing they can do is to download a file if you havean uploaded one for viewing but an even easier process is our One Touch Email Share.

Here is how it works. Partners see that case study or product literature and then click the email share button. No matter what email client they use, it opens automatically with a link to the content post already in the email. The partner just adds a personal message, then sends the email to their customer or prospect. When the prospect clicks the link, they don’t come back inside your portal, but they do come back to a landing page to view, download or reshare the content. Easy email marketing! And the best news is that our reporting tool shows you which pieces of content were shared, and which partners did that.

For partners that really want to commit to an email strategy, we have a unique service inside of every portal called Conduct.

For those of you who are now thinking that email marketing is dead, think again! Email marketing is up to 40 times more effective than social media, according to a study done by McKinsey & Company. The same study also shows that the buying process happens 3 times faster with email than in social media. Moreover, it is also said that most individuals prefer to receive business information via email.

For the “Big 3” of social media (Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter), the engagement rate isn’t even 0.6%. Compare that to email’s average open rate of 22.86% and even its click-through rate of 3.71%. Emails reach most of the people they’re intended for, so email marketing must be an essential part of a partner’s marketing strategy.

We’ve built our Conduct technology to overcome the worries that we know partners have about email marketing:

• I don’t have the time or expertise
• I am worried about adding my lead list to the portal
• I don’t know if it works

Partners don’t need the time or expertise to create campaigns because Conduct lets you create them for the partner.

Here is how it works. Login to the portal as an administrator and set up the email campaign. Add the text and graphics, the email subject line and the call to action. Conduct lets you create campaigns of up to 4 outbound emails and creates a personalized landing page for the partner.

Once the campaign is ready, deliver it to the partner dashboard and Conduct tells them it’s waiting. Partners can explore campaigns you’ve added and pick the ones they want to use. All they have to do is to add the list of contacts, tell Conduct when to launch it and sit back and collect the leads when people respond. They can create their own campaign if they want, but most choose to have you do the work.

Partners don’t have to worry about the security of their lead list.

You may have watched TV and seen a commercial on LifeLock™, the service that protects your identity. Conduct has ListLock™, the technology that secures their list and keeps it private. Once Conduct is enabled on a portal, nobody other than the partner can change their password in order to access their account and get at their list. It’s effectively locked and secured.

You can use some of the strategies I shared in my MicroCast on how to create a lead list to generate them for the partner or to teach the partner to generate them for themselves. Learn how freelancers and data scraping tools create better leads at a fraction of the cost of purchasing a list.

Neither you nor the partner have to worry about whether the campaign is working.

When emails are sent out, we don’t wait to see who signs up. We analyze what happens to each email. Conduct knows if the email was delivered or bounced, if it was opened and if so, how many times, and if the recipient clicked through. Then, of course, there are the sign-ups that show people were interested in the message, the offer or the special deal. Reports are available to the partner to show how each contact responded and available to the portal owner to see the overall performance of the campaign without looking at the exact list.

Just like any of the larger commercial email services such as Constant Contact or Mail Chimp that have been around for a while, we have tools inside of Conduct that make email campaigns easy, personalized and follow all of the email campaign rules.

• Partners add their contact information and even their logo to brand emails and sign up pages.
• We keep emails CAN/SPAM compliant by having the right information in the footer and automatically managing opt outs.
• Lists are kept in the Contact Manager and partners can easily upload their contacts, organize them into lists, keep custom data on each contact and even use the Contact Manager as an easy to use CRM system.

Takeaway

You can have the best marketing materials in the world but if the partner doesn’t have the tools to take your materials or message all the way to the prospect you can guarantee yourself that they won’t be used in the way you want them to. Convey’s marketing tools inside of our portals ensure that you can control the marketing message, make it easy for partners to actually use them to market, and analyze the result of your efforts.