What We Learn from Them: Sales & Social Media Tricks from Our Partners

First, we talked about What We Learn from YOU. Now it’s time to talk about what we’ve learned from our partners in crime.

Seriously the best part of working for a startup is learning and doing new things every day. That is especially the case when I work with our integration partners and other SaaSy friends, like in our ongoing series of free webinars. Just last week, I’ve learned so much from a few of our partners that I thought I’d share with you now their innovative ways to connect with clients on and offline.

So let’s dive in and reveal (or steal?) some of their secrets!

How to Email Like a Human by AffinityLive

We use the inexpensive CRM Intercom to manage our many customers. One problem we’ve come across lately, including in this week’s newsletter advertising our webinars, is that we’re getting increasingly spammed. Not just newsletters, but support-to-client emails.

Last week, in our “Smarter Sales: How to be more Personal Through Automation” webinar, AffinityLive gave us a solution. At the start of this year, Gmail went ahead and introduced Tabs, which relegates your emails to Inbox, Promotions and Spam. This means we increasingly are getting spammed. So AffinityLive gave us some rockin’ tricks for how to work around that clever Gmail canned meat hunter:

• Make it Ugly! Actually, the less formatting, the more likely it’ll pass through spam and be read. After all, you don’t have headers and sections in your personal emails, do you? More personal, simpler emails have double the click-through rates.
• Don’t Unsubscribe! Even though depending on your emailing system, this might not be an option, whenever possible you should change the wording on your Unsubscribe button or link. Emails without the word Unsubscribe are less likely to be spammed and are a third likely to be opened.
• Make it about their Company, not Them! Again, if your email management system allows and captures company name, by adding your clients’ company name into the subject of the email, it is TWICE as likely to be opened.

 

How to Tweet to BackLinks & other Content Tricks by Service Crowd!

This one blew my mind. While Matt Cutts and his SEO Googlers are sometimes really direct about how to best use Google and Google services like GooglePLUS, it’s often guesswork with out Twitter and Facebook work in the midst of Google things. So here’s what I learned from Daniel Duckworth of top Australian Business Directory ServiceCrowd taught us during our webinar on “How to Create Content that Converts”:

• Each Tweet = a Backlink! We already knew that B2B companies that use Twitter tend to double their leads, but it was news to me that each individual tweet counts as a nice backlink to your website or blog. Now, remember that Google’s metrics are constantly changing and this could change by the time I hit Publish, and this Google SEO isn’t always an exact science, but it’s definitely one more reason to encourage tweeting!
•  Write about something people need offline: Ask yourself: What does someone in an office need? What kind of material are they willing to download? How does my content fit into their research cycle?
• Write about DIY (no matter the field!):  Write about something your intended audience is looking to learn how to do. What aspects of your product/service are people trying to do themselves?

How to Opt-in to Win by OnePage CRM!

Both ServiceCrowd and another awesome integration partner OnePage CRM have said time and again how the only way you create content that converts is truly by creating good content that answers questions and solves problems for your prospects and clients. OnePage CRM has seen huge success with its exclusive and detailed content that allows small business to learn from the Three Common Mistakes SMBs Make When Choosing a CRM.

As you see, this downloadable content can be found by an Internet search for “Choosing the Right CRM.” OnePage CRM also gives it as a bonus to people who have attended any of their webinars, as a “thank you.” The email starts by talking in brief about the benefits of the ebook and then reminds people that they can become a OnePage CRM “master” by attending another free webinar later in the week.

This isn’t meager content — they actually sell it on Amazon too. “People think that to publish a book you need a whole lot of different things: publishing house, printing house etc.,” OnePage CRM’s Greg explains talking about the invisible hurdles small businesses see to following suit. “No – now you need a computer.” Nowadays, it’s just about developing content that counts

And it clearly zeros in on the target — anyone looking to learn the mistakes SMBs make when deciding on a CRM will clearly be in somewhere in the buying cycle, on the verge of at least trialling different customer relationship management systems.

And in order to get that content, folks need to either give their email or Twitter or LinkedIn. This enables other points of contact to continue to move it down the sales funnel. Plus, creating these opt-in content forms are easy with solutions like Wufoo and Unbounce.

So what are you waiting for?

What do you want to know about?

At the Quote Roller HQ, we are always looking for new ways to teach you (the bonus is that we learn too!) That’s why we have an ongoing series of Thought Leadership Webinars, as well as our blog and other resources. Obviously, this all helps our SEO and in developing our Google credibility, but it’s about more than that. So tell use what YOU want to learn about! And tell use which partners or potential partners you want to see us working with! Who knows, your wish just might come true!