Luke Wroblewski has a thoughtful article on why Sign Up Forms Must Die.

His examples of "gradual engagement" are pragmatic, applied customer experiences that reflect concepts outlined by Rogers and Peppers and many others.

We all deal with Salesforce Web-to-Lead forms on a daily basis, but it's not often that we think of breaking a Lead form down into several smaller forms and seek to gradually learn more about prospects over time.

Granted, most of the examples in Luke's article are in a B2C context, but B2B sites with more than one case study or several pieces of collateral can apply the same concept.

Which Super Bowl ads made an honest attempt at initiating a two-way dialogue? Here's my scorecard.

The Scorecard

Compelling Call To Action: Did the ad provide a memorable URL and call to action?
Continuity: When I go the URL, is the message in the context of the TV ad?
Fulfillment: Does the website answer my questions or deliver on any promises made?

	Time	Company / Product	URL	Compelling Call to Action	Continuity	Fulfillment	Notes and Comments
	4:33:00	Audi	http://www.truthinengineering.com	B+	A+	C	Talk about pressure. The first super bowl ad after kick-off, and this one delivered really well with a take-off on the Godfather. The web site picks up where the commercial leaves of and highlights what is, in my opinion, one slick looking car. Can't actually configure a new Audi online or order one, so not the highest marks on fulfillment.
	4:45:00	SalesGenie.com	http://www.salesgenie.com/tv	B-	B+	A	The first of a couple peculiar animated commercials from SalesGenie.com that appear to have a theme of "If ethnically diverse business owners in America can get free sales leads, so can you." How many people will ever type in "slash TV" after the domain name? I did, which is why they get above average continuity points for keeping the landing page message relevant to the SuperBowl ad. Very fulfilling. I was able to immediately start taking advantage of my 100 free leads and walked through a target demographic wizard that produced 26K prospects (I chose mid-market manufacturers of electronic equipment for the fun of it)
	4:48:00	Under Armour	http://www.underarmour.com/	C	B	C	The TV ad took too long to get the point, but was visually very stunning and entertaining. The Flash web site is actually very nice and loads extremely fast, but really just plays several ads in a loop.
	4:03:00	GoDaddy	http://www.godaddy.com/	C-	B+	B-	No real surprise here. GoDaddy goes straight for the 18-35 Male demographic and this year uses IndyCar racer Danica Patrick as the "bait". Nothing too revealing here. "Exposed" is more of an ironic description of what actually occurs in the video (the Super Bowl is, afterall, a form of family entertainment). GoDaddy uses a cleverly designed image map of Danica such that if you click on certain hot spots, it takes you to a web conversion form instead of directly to the video.
	5:07:00	Tide	http://www.mytalkingstain.com	A	A	A-	I probably spent more time on this site after the SuperBowl than any other. Humorous ad with a memorable domain name / call to action. You can hover over various shirt stains on the web site to hear them "talk". What is that? It's like a mix of Arabic, French, Italian, and.... well.... if you think you can create a better talking stain, Tide provides the platform ala YouTube to "Be the Stain" and upload a picture of yourself and create a voiceover. Crazy.... but if this takes off, it could be entertaining in an amateurish sort of way. For those inclined, Tide even invites you to film your own stain video and upload/share it.
	5:23:00	Sobe Life Water	http://www.thrillicious.com/	C	B	C-	Probably the most over thought TV ad and Flash based website of the whole lot. I seriously thought it was a Geico commercial for the first 26 seconds until the Sobe brand appeared. The domain name is not very memorable, especially for those that are grammatically challenged (I know it took me a couple attempts to enter the domain name). Once I hit the web site I'm faced with a strange "hide and seek" Flash navigation where I need to move the mouse around and "discover" the navigation links. I'm prompted to "disable my popup blocker" (no, are you kidding?) Sadly, the best material is buried in the site under an "Episodes" section that tells the back story behind the dancing lizards as they prepare their Super Bowl ad video shoot. Very clever elements. There clearly is some genius behind this campaign, but it became a horse designed by committee. No fulfillment here. What is life water? Can I read the label? Does it have any sugar (I don't like water drinks with fructose added)? Where can I try or buy it?..... nada.... no answers on the site.
	6:18:00	Chrysler	http://www.chryslerlistens.com	C	C-	C-	The www.chryslerlistens.com  domain looked like it had potential. A community site perhaps? A viral video site about cars? Unfortunately Chrysler is not actually listening. The domain simply redirects to http://www.chryslerllc.com/  which has links for "Community" and "Blog", but they're actually artificial links to contrived pages that give the illusion of an interactive Web 2.0 site, though the blog does appear to have an open comments section. Overall, disappointing.
	7:03:00	Jack In The Box	http://www.makeajacksandwich.com/	A-	A+	A	This microsite was obviously created specifically for the SuperBowl ad, which employed a tongue-in-cheek double entendre about making a Jack sandwich in a hot tub (of course Jack has his mind on literally making a sandwich). If you get tired of manipulating your uploaded picture with an array of Mr Potato Head accessories, you can click on the Location link to find a location near you. Yeah..... how simple is that? That's the way it's done.
	7:05:00	Sunsilk	http://www.lifecantwait.com/	B	A-	C	A nice attempt at associating a unique domain name with a brand. Both the TV and web ads put Marilyn, Madonna, and Shakira in a new light, but as I am not in the ads target demographic of Females 25-55 (it's a broad reaching ad??), I was compelled to follow up just out of curiosity since they setup a unique URL. I was a little puzzled by the "Feature Coming Soon" on the home page. Guess they didn't have the interactive components in place before the SuperBowl.

The Winners

Based on the scores, Tide and Jack in the Box come out on top. As far as most functional campaign, SalesGenie.com is the most likely to get visitors to self-identify and enable an ongoing dialogue.

Interesting that in such a consumer driven B2C Internet world that a B2B site would have such strong positioning in the Super Bowl.

i-Dialogue customer iGrafx recently localized their interactive online resource center with German content.

Salesforce.com CRM is easily configured to capture customers language preference. Just add a custom field to Lead and Contact named something like "Preferred Language" and map the field to i-Dialogue's "Language" field.

Whenever a customer clicks on the language bar at the top of an i-Dialogue page, or submits a localized web form, the customer's language selection is automatically updated in Salesforce.

iGrafx has also localized their email auto-responders to German for a truly relevant and localized dialogue. Future plans are in the works for Italian and Spanish sites too.

Who is this iPod person and why do so many Marketers continue to embark on a campaign to free him/her? OK, but seriously. How qualified is a Lead that responds to a "Free iPod" campaign anyway? From my personal experience, the answer is "zero". Aside from the person who actually wins the iPod, "no" leads are actually compelled to learn more about your product or service when giving away consumer goods in a B2B campaign (and good luck converting the winner... they'll kick the tires and take a test drive out of respect, but they won't be a real decision maker). The lesson learned? If you're going to give anything away, at least make sure it has your brand/logo on it so you can justify the giveaway as an advertising expense. But ideally, make the collateral relevant and related to cultivating the dialogue with a customer.

Lately, I've been re-exploring the possibilities with component-based workflow in the development of online marketing and customer portal sites. The concept is simple. You drag components onto web pages that allow interactive web developers to define actions and behaviors in response to web page events.

This is in contrast to the current convention in i-Dialogue, which currently implements workflows through the explorer interface.

As an example, a basic lead nurturing campaign requires the triggering of a long running email auto-response campaign when a web lead form is submitted. Using the i-Dialogue explorer I would have to define a dialogue rule that associates the form with an auto response campaign. But I can also add a smart component, called a "Form Submit Handler", to the landing page that intercepts form submit events and triggers the autoresponder on its own.



Granted, not a significant decrease in developmnt time, but it's much more apparent when looking at the landing page that "Oh... when the web form is submitted these events will be triggered and I have the ability to configure them".

A component-based approach does have it's associated challenges:

1) Atomicity Yields Complexity. Smaller, more granular components yield more flexible solutions and reduce need for programmatic customization. But if 3 different workflow components on a web page are required to process a lead form, trigger an auto-responder, and intelligently redirect the page, then the complexity of the page design is increased. Pre-built page templates are the best way to address this problem.

2) Process Visualization: The i-Dialogue Explorer allows me to see across multiple campaigns, landing pages, and auto-response rules at once. I can see exactly which landing pages have auto-response rules and which ones don't. But if workflow is embedded into pages in the form of active components, I need to drill down to the individual page to learn which workflows are active. The answer is in a new generation of campaign reporting tools (if there were only 26 hours in a day, I would add this and a dozen other features ).

3) Creative-Business Collaboration: Interactive Web Development requires a unique set of skills. Part graphic/web designer and part marketing/business user. It's rare to find these skills in one person, so you often find different individuals taking responsibility for various components. For example, one person provides the HTML, layout, and graphics. Another provides copy writing, workflow and auto-response rules.

The bottom line? We'll need to support both approaches and give campaign designers the freedom to choose which approach works best for them.

A few days ago I commented on how i-Dialogue form validation may help to prevent Web-to-Lead Spam. Well, that exercise led to experimenting with other validation rules that may be of interest to eMarketing power users.

Note: i-Dialogue forms use an age old syntax for validating form fields called Regular Expressions. It's alright if the following validation rules look cryptic or bizarre (they look that way to me too ). But these expressions pack a lot of punch and can be very powerful.

To use these expressions, simply enter Edit mode on any Text or TextArea type question and paste the expression into the Validation Expression textbox.

Basic Email Validation:
[\w\.-]+(\+[\w-]*)?@([\w-]+\.)+[\w-]+
Ensures email address conforms to basic name@domain.com format.

Consumer Email Exclusion:
[\w\.-]+(\+[\w-]*)?@(?!gmail|yahoo|msn|hotmail|googlemail|freenet|rediffmail|aol)([\w-]+\.)+[\w-]+
Ensures email addresses are not from any consumer (free) email ISPs. Great for B2B marketing campaigns.

Positive Decimal:
^[0-9][0-9]*(\.[0-9]*)?$
Ensures entered value is a positive decimal.

URL:
(?\w+):\/\/(?<Domain>[\w.]+\/?)\S*
Ensures web address is the proper format.

Date (DD/MM/YYYY):
((0[1-9]|[12][0-9]|3[01]))[/|-](0[1-9]|1[0-2])[/|-]((?:\d{4}|\d{2}))
Ensures date is in DD/MM/YYYY format.

If you've ever used a personalized B2C portal page, such as My Yahoo! or Google's Start Page, then you know that the terms "portal" and "customization" often go hand in hand.

But is this necessarily a convenient feature in B2B portals? Our experience has been "No". And even though i-Dialogue portals support customizable "My Pages", here's is why they are often not a good idea.

1) Yahoo and Google have disclosed that only 5% of their total customer base are even remotely familiar with the customizable page option. These people are called "Power Users".

2) 80% of site visitors that use customizable pages simply accept the default configuration assuming the page designer knows best.

3) The types of support call conversations that take place when customizable pages are enabled in B2B portals can be chaotic. For example:
Representative: OK. Login to the portal and click on your My Account page.
Customer: OK. I'm there.
Representative: Now on the left hand side of the screen you should see a list of "My Products".
Customer: I don't see "My Products" on my account page.
Representative: What do you see?
Customer: I have the NCAA Basketball scores widget installed and "My Cases" directly below that.
Representative: (Flustered) Alright. Click on the "Add Widgets" link and let's re-add your Products list to the page...

A consistent look-and-feel in customer portals gives CSRs the ability to quickly familiarize customers with the interface and resolve their issues.


When should you use customizable pages?

There are information design circumstances when a customizable page makes sense.
1) Rule of 3. The portal widget library must provide at least 3 widgets (aka portlets, web parts, components) that are of high informational or interactive value to the end user.

2) Productivity Gain. Saleforce users often spend several minutes and hours in the Salesforce user interface, therefore productivity gains can be achieved by customizing the UI per Profile or user. But customers are not using your web site as a productivity tool. It is purely informational. In fact, most B2B portal customers want to spend the least amount of time possible in your web site to resolve their issue and locate the information they need.

"Customization" is not the same as "Personalization"

Finally, "customization and personalization are not the same". Customization is the ability to add/remove/change content on a page. Personalization is delivering highly relevant content to end users, such as Amazon.com's "Others who have purchased X have also purchased Y" feature.

Interactive Marketing should emphasize personalization at all times and CRM driven portals are a great platform for delivering one-to-one relevant content.

Microsoft's Internet Explorer 7 web browser was officially launched this week prompting web developers and eMarketers everywhere to download and install it for compatibility testing.

I've been using IE7 Beta for several weeks and noticed the new RSS auto-detect button would only occasionally find a feed on a web page. "Hmmmmm", I thought  "Maybe this is just a Beta thing. I'll wait until the final release to worry about it".


Now, RSS adoption by everyday consumers is probably barely over 1%. However, I've been a firm believer that RSS auto-discovery in browsers will be the key to promoting more adoption (besides calling it anything other than "RSS", like just plain old "News Feed").

All of our web hosting solutions include an RSS feed that aggregates activity across all web applications so that customers and partners can subscribe to a single feed to track discussion forum activity, blog entries, KB article updates, and general news.

So, when I installed the final release and noticed our feeds were still not being auto-discovered, I turned to RSS expert Charlie Wood who pointed me in the right direction to quickly resolve the issue (thanks Charlie!).

The impact of RSS on B2B marketing may take awhile, but features like auto-discover in IE7 will definitely help remove the major barriers to adoption.

New in i-Dialogue v 6.4.7 is a feature called "Actionable Events".

Actionable Events (AEs) are web interactions that automatically trigger follow-up tasks in Salesforce. For example, a web lead may subscribe to a newsletter and passively monitor emails for several months. Then one day the Lead responds to a newsletter by clicking on a link to a white paper and does some serious research on the web site.

The next day a Sales rep calls the Lead and asks them if they can answer any questions regarding a particular product. The customer will think the sales reps timing is perfect and relevant.

This scenario is accomplished by editing an i-Dialogue portal object in Salesforce and selecting the "All Download Events Are Actionable" checkbox and defining the trigger count and default Task fields.

i-Dialogue will auto-create and dynamically assign tasks for each Lead or Contacts based on OwnerId.

2 new i-Dialogue worksheets are available to help Marketers define their online marketing campaigns.

The Drip Campaign Worksheet helps to define a series of email auto-responders over a finite campaign duration, such as a 30 day download trial period.

For example, "Day 0" is defined as the day when a Lead first registers to download a white paper. On Day 3, you might automatically send a follow-up email with a personalized introduction. On Day 10 you might send a purchase offer or coupon, and so on.

The Tiered Collateral Worksheet is useful for defining what you're willing to give in exchange for self-identification information.

For example, you may provide access to a white paper in exchange for a verifiable email address, but require a first name and phone number for an online test drive or product demo.

These worksheets compliment each other in that auto-responder email messages may contain a personalized call-to-action that offers increasingly more marketing collateral in exchange for more personal self-identification, such as in a Rogers and Peppers 1-to-1 style of marketing campaign.

Could your customer support portal use some flowcharts and diagrams to help customers trouble shoot problems? If you're in the Hi-Tech or manufacturing sectors, the answer is probably yes.

Visio has been my tool of choice for several years, but today I stumbled on a web-based flow chart designer called Gliffy that really impressed me.

I evaluated Gliffy by recreating the channel lead registration workflow I published a few days ago, and as you can see from the image below, the result isn't too shabby for 10 minutes of effort.



Gliffy can host the JPEG images for you. I can easily envision using Gliffy in customer portal knowledge base articles to help with trouble shooting.

I also use Visio when chatting with customers on the phone to help remind me of a customers business process requirements or campaign workflows. With Gliffy, I can simply email customers a link to these flow chart sketches to get some quick feedback.

The site says it's in Beta, but you would have to have some pretty high expectations to even notice. The workspace behaves and reacts just like a desktop application. Even the CTRL-Z undo key combination works! Although, I did find it more useful to rely on frequent saves and versioning as a wiser recovery option.

Gliffy definitely follows the Pareto Principle of determining which 20% of desktop features provide 80% of the value.

Very cool.... I give Gliffy a big thumbs up.

It's been a few years since releasing our last channel management solution (which was for Epicor CRM), so it was an obvious choice to integrate i-Dialogue with Salesforce.com to develop a Partner Portal solution.

Salesforce seeded the AppExchange with some spectacular PRM Channel Management solutions earlier this year that quickly got my creative juices flowing. So now, in addition to Lead and Opportunity management, there is also support for online requests for Marketing Development Funds, Refunds, Special Pricing, and Demo Units.

Also, some there's some clever email escalation, lead forwarding, and reassignment features built-in. It looks like a formal release and announcement will be the week of June 19th. Pricing is already available.

If you have an interest in web usability then you should check out Jacob Nielson's AlertBox newsletter.

This weeks topic on Business-to-Business usability is particularly relevant to i-Dialogue Customer Portal (there's also a 282 page PDF report you can purchase). Jacob's approach is more quantifiable and scientific than most other web usability specialists, but I tend to agree with many of his principles and conclusions.

In fact, Jacob's Top 10 Web Design Mistakes of 2005 challenged us to revisit i-Dialogue's design and add a few new features (namely dynamic fonts, "Best Bet" search results, and auto-focus on form fields).

There's an interesting phenomenon going on in Marketing these days. The accessibility of the Internet and the creativity of consumers have created an environment where customers are in control of several brands, and the smart marketers are just "rolling with it".

General Motors, Sony, MasterCard, and Home Depot have all empowered consumers to create their own commercials for re-broadcasting. Sometimes with unflattering results.

But GMs willingness to host these commercials and not delete them (at least the ones in good taste) actually is a net gain in terms of creating a dialogue with consumers. Afterall, these consumers were already venting their frustrations outside the realm of GMs control. At least GM is given a chance to show they acknowledge consumer concerns, even if they aren't addressing them.

I think it does disarm an activist consumers position considerably if their opinion can be freely expressed as a comment in a companies blog or discussion forum. Again, it's better to be the first to know instead of hearing through the grapevine on a consumers blog that they had a bad customer service experience and would not recommend the service to anyone else.

Dan Weiden touched on this topic briefly during a keynote he delivered recently here in Oregon. As the Architect behind the Nike brand, he's had an interesting evolutionary perspective on this topic. His reaction was more facially expressed than articulated.... but I could tell it was creating quite a creative challenge in the larger B2C space.

The principles behind i-Dialogue ("Internet Dialogues") embrace this trend, but it's interesting to see the relatively slower adoption of online customer empowerment in the B2B market. True, the customers tend to be a bit more professional, but still.... wouldn't you rather provide 4-6 dialogue options through your own web site and resolve customer issues one-on-one instead of waiting for consumers to communicate with you via their own public blogs and other discussion forums?

It's worth noting at least once in this blog the difference between a "360 view of the customer" and the "i-Dialogue 360" methodology.

I'll use both terms occasionally and they do share a common term.

A "360 view of the customer" refers to a holistic view of a singular customer, while "i-Dialogue 360" refers to a holistic view of all your customers within the context of your customer lifecyle.

A "360 view of the customer" typically implies integrating front and back office systems, whereas "i-Dialogue 360" is usually a front-office process for managing customer relationships.

The i-Dialogue 360° solution is premised on helping businesses manage the entire customer lifecycle. The 'cycle' term simply refers to a businesses objective to create repeat customers.

Effective relationship marketing views customers as progressing through various stages in a lifecycle. Below is the cycle we use in i-Dialogue 360°.

Prospective customers enter the cycle as they become aware of an organizations products or services. They may then subscribe to a newsletter, drip-campaign, or do some other research to educate themselves about your solution.

Many customers prefer to take a test drive and evaluate a product before purchase. Service oriented businesses might offer a free consultation visit.

A prospect becomes a customer once their business is acquired, and from there the customer immediately enters a service and support relationship.

Persuading customers to upgrade or try new products is common in growth or expansion campaigns, where you're simply trying to make customers aware of a new solution, educate them, and encourage the cycle to repeat.

I stumbled upon this great product configurator (PC) at http://vtx.honda.com, which helps prospective motorcycle buyers visualize the various models and configurations of the Honda VTX motorcycle.

This is a great example because it provides a self-service interface that helps consumers experiment with various configurations and immediately answers key questions, such as "How much will this cost if I add this feature?", "What does it look like in Blue?" and "Where can I get it?".

I'm still hoping for the day when these product configurators are tightly integrated with ERP Bill of Materials (BOM) systems so that Marketers and Engineers can collaborate and quickly make product configuration and part changes (price, source, look) and then immediately publish the changes live to their web site.

But the low-hanging fruit for most relationship marketers is simply to get some basic customization capabilities and images available on their web site.

I recall reading a case study where the conversion rate of customers who actually used the online PC and requested a quote was phenomenally high (> 30%). It may cost anywhere from $10K-$200K for a really good configurator (depending on product complexity) but with 30%+ conversion rates that can be easily be measured in closed-loop reporting environment, who can afford not to consider that investment?

Of course, an organization must be MTO capable (Made-To-Order) to truly recognize the benefits of a PC.

I mostly focus on B2B marketing, but the recent Origami campaign by Microsoft caught my eye as it was technology related.

There was a lot of hype and viral marketing leading up to the announcement, and even I got caught up in visiting the origami project web site in the weeks leading up to the products formal announcement.

My only bit of constructive criticism here is that these teaser microsites could really benefit from engaging the customer in more dialogue. How many consumers would have subscribed to a simple email alert like "Contact me when new Origami updates are available [email address here]". I know I would have.

Regardless of whether the final Origami announcement does or does not meet consumer expectations, at least Microsoft would (and should) have the opportunity to engage in follow-up dialogues with curious subscribers. It may take 5-7 intelligent follow-up 'drips' for the marketing message to really resonate.

Update: Dustin Hubbard, Group Manager for the Mobile PC team at Microsoft, gives some genuine follow-up and history on the Origami campaign.

I made the 3 hour trek up to Seattle yesterday to attend a Salesforce.com live event (check for events coming to a town near you. I highly recommend attending) and made some great connections with prospects, customers, partners, and SFDC employees.

My key interest was the "Developing for AppExchange" session, since we're within about 45 days of launching our Relationship Marketing solution for AppExchange. It was great to hear first hand from other CEOs the genuine concerns and accolades on how the AppExchange is working out for them.

From a marketers perspective, I'm getting pretty excited about the potential of this solution. True closed-loop marketing campaigns have historically always been an afterthought, requiring data warehouses that aggregate historical marketing data from weeks and months ago.

But with Salesforce.com and the AppExchange, we're building marketing campaigns that have closed-loop, real-time integration built into the DNA. Employee-Customer dialogues are real-time and Marketers can be more agile, launching campaigns faster and adjusting on a daily basis to optimize their ROI instead of taking a waterfall, batch-and-blast approach to marketing.

Side note:
On the train ride back to Portland, while I was refining our AppExchange solution description, I realized that i-Dialogue may be the most hyphenated solution on the AppExchange (or should that be most-hyphenated?); with keywords such as closed-loop, real-time, business-to-business, employee-customer interaction, and mid-market.  I wonder what a college English teacher would say about this? 

 I was recently optimizing an email template that contained an "Email a Friend" link that was catching my eye as clutter. After removing the link and improving the layout I was then faced with the thought of "OK.... what have I really sacrificed here? Have I removed any possibility of viral marketing by removing the 'Email a Friend' link?"

The metrics clearly showed me that about 1 hundredth of 1 percent (0.01%) of all email recipients actually click through on "Refer a Friend, "Refer a Buddy", and "Email a Friend" links. But without the "Refer a Friend" link, wouldn't customers simply use the 'Forward' buttons in the email reader anyway? Afterall, that's how 99.99% of all Internet viral marketing happens anyway.

I believe that most marketers today have to assume that customers will hit their "Forward" button long before they'll utilize an inline forward feature. Forwarding email is a sub-conscious activity with reliable results that requires no learning curve for most consumers, whereas the "Refer a Friend" found inline behaves differently from one email marketing engine to another, and privacy conscious consumers will not be comfortable using your email marketing engine for exchanging messages between friends.

Maybe it's time to re-think this feature and propose some new and innovative approaches to viral marketing. In a B2C environment, maybe there would be more success by taking a Hallmark card approach where the sender gets to email a card to a recipient (birthday, anniversary, whatever) and incorporate the marketing message into the email?

In other words, "Refer a Friend" links are competing directly against email forwarding, and must therefore provide more utility and value to win.

Definition of acronyms and terms used on this blog:

B2B = Business to Business
B2C = Business to Consumer
CRM = Customer Relationship Management
iCRM = Internet CRM
RSS = Really Simple Syndication
SEO = Search Engine Optimization
PPC = Pay Per Click
SERP = Search Engine Results Page
CPM = Cost Per Thousand (from Roman numeral "M")
WSS = Web Self-Service

Several companies rely primarily on customers downloading a software product (or white paper), evaluating it, and then making a purchase decision.

Collecting an email address at the time of registration allows customers to recieve monthly newsletters, but what's really needed are precise, automated email follow-ups at specific milestones within the evaluation process.

The following image shows a basic 30 day evaluation process and some potential key milestones.



Notice that the customer does not have to wait until the next monthly or quarterly email newsletter to be exposed to your marketing message.

Product evaluation campaigns can be as simple or as sophisticated as needed. 3 general types of lifecyle campaigns include:

1) Immediate auto responder with timed follow-ups.
In this scenario, a prospect visits your site and completes a download request form (to reduce abandonment rates this should be kept to a minimum, such as email, first name, and last name).

They immediately receive download instructions via email and are free to install and evaluate the product.

Then, at defined intervals, the prospect automatically recieves follow-up emails with more information about the product and "call to action" link to purchase the product (note that these emails do not assume much of dialogue context, such as have already spoken with someone on a phone).

2) "Smart" Email Follow-Ups.
This type of campaign is the same as the above mentioned campaign, except that each email makes a "smart" determination as to what the customer needs based on what is known about the customer.

Examples include a role-based call to action (Economic vs. Technical justification for product) or a custom follow-up to an online KB article search.

3) Product Integration.
The holy grail of product evaluation automation is having the product actually tell i-Dialogue when certain evaluation miletones have been achieved and sending emails in response to these milestones. Emails can be sent to the prospect or inside/outside sales reps.

For example, if 20% of all prospects don't even install the product, the nature of the email messages should continually remind them that online installation and configuration support is available. Conversely, if a prospect *has* installed the product, then the tone of follow-up emails should provide some information that leads towards a purchasing decision.


Evaluation campaigns do not neccessarilly need to be driving towards a purchase milestone. They can be in response to white paper downloads that are cultivating a lead for a phone follow-up, test driving a car, or visiting a casino.

There are myriad options and opportunities here. The key is that these mini-campaigns are not synchronously tied to your larger campaigns. They are initiated and matured based on asynchronous factors and milestones.

The web conveniently enables asynchronous dialogue between a customer and sales/support representative. But does this replace the need for call scripts? Do representatives still need script support when making a sales call?

RSS feeds can be personalized to individual customers preferences, but don't to offer anonymous feeds as a common courtesy.