Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Frank Dale, CEO of Compendium (Part 7)

Frank Dale: Let me make sure I’m with on this. When you’re running these contests, are you initially acquiring the leads through the partners?

Sramana Mitra: No. We have a registration page on Eventbrite. Because we already have a large footprint plus other partners publicizing the events, people register for the events. Each session we collect a chunk of leads, and then those leads need to be moved from Eventbrite to our email marketing system, which is aWeber. AWeber will not allow us to put these leads in without double confirmation. They will have us add the leads, then they will send us a confirmation message. For most people, these emails get lost in their trash cans.

FD: I’m tracking with you now. There are a couple of different thoughts on that, and you’re definitely not the only person who runs in to this problem. One solution is to invite them to join a specific list at the time of sign-up. There are some platforms that will allow to do that. For instance, when they’re signing up for the webinar, something as simple as a check box with, potentially, an offer for a great piece of content usually works. They have to have an incentive. We’d love to share more information with you about our next webinar, something like that. In addition, here’s a great white paper on this, or this is a link to an interview or great post we’d like to share with you if you choose to sign up. I’ve seen people solve the problem that way. If the platform you’re using won’t allow that to occur, a next best step is to use the tactic, but when you send the followup email, we want to thank you for attending, or sorry that you missed the webinar, but we have great content like this on a regular basis. Here’s another example that you can get if you choose to sign up to hear more from us.

SM: Other than changing systems right now, it’s going to be next to impossible. We have a huge list of email subscribers, and with the follow-up messages, people are at different stages. You can imagine how complicated this system transition is. If we decide to make that investment to change systems, we have to find a system that addresses these problems. I’m not yet sure which system does that. I think the case study we just went through is one of the problems that exists in social media marketing.

FD: It does. The next question is, you have an active Facebook channel and an active Twitter channel. How many of those people are members rather than people who [hang around] and you would like to activate?

SM: Probably lots. Again, there’s a tracking problem. I have no way of connecting my LinkedIn, people who are [hanging around] or following me on [Twitter] or our Facebook friends or Likes. I have no way of connecting these databases. When you get to large numbers, without technology, there’s no way to reconcile these things.

FD: That’s exactly right. That’s going to be the challenge that most businesses run into. Who do you use for CRM?

SM: We have Google for CRM and aWeber is our email marketing system.

FD: OK. Those just may be the limitations of the tools you’re with. I know there are offerings from companies like Salesforce or even ExactTarget that could help. ExactTarget would be strong on the email part of the equation as well as the activation of some of your Facebook fans – trying to help you derive more value from that channel. You’re going to need the CRM integration if you want to track that well. That seems to be the problem. That’s also why you’re starting to see some consolidation in that space now.

SM: I that you’re exactly right. These multichannel touch points, and the databases that need to be reconciled. I need better tracking capability, unless I go to the more expensive solutions, which typically, very small businesses can’t go to. Our audience is full of tiny businesses that are just starting out. They can’t afford to go to the more expensive solutions.

One solution … [comes from] a company called Act-On. I don’t know if you’ve seen them.

FD: I have, yes.

SM: And there’s another company called Marketo, which is a Silicon Valley company. These are email marketing, CRM systems – not in the Salesforce context – but they are email marketing/lead nurturing systems. They have more sophisticated capabilities, better integration … but they’re also much more expensive.

FD: Yes, you’re exactly right.

This segment is part 7 in the series : Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Frank Dale, CEO of Compendium
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