Hi Everyone just wanted to make you aware that we have our own discussion area now on the new social networking site PromoNexus.Com. You’ll find our discussion area at http://www.promonexus.com/group/promoleads Feel free join the group and use this area to discuss PromoLeads, ask questions, and share your experiences with other users. Of course if you have any questions along the way we’re here to help.
Thanks
Today we are proud to announce the official release of PromoLeads to the promotional products industry. The official press release may be found here.
Over 13 months of software development and testing have made today possible and we wish to thank everyone involved in our Beta test for helping us refine the system. Some Highlights of the release include
We will continue to develop the PromoLeads platform and encourage all our users to submit feedback (located at the top of every page when logged in). We value your input!
Get Ready! PromoLeads is coming out of beta very soon. A few things to note:
We will continue to offer our basic service free of charge to the industry. In the future we will be offering additional services in a premium membership, but the core service will remain free
Suppliers – Invite your favorite distributors to sign up and send them leads. Very soon you’ll find a feature under your “distributors” tab which will allow you to send an invite and assign leads to any distributor you choose.
Distributors – invite a supplier to join PromoLeads. If there is a supplier that you’d like to get referrals from, send them an invite and tell them about PromoLeads. We’d especially encourage you to invite suppliers who already have contact forms on their sites – by changing that to a PromoLeads form, everyone will be more comfortable knowing that every inquiry is going to a distributor.
Watch this blog for additional announcements as we count down to the launch….
Search Marketing Now is offering a free webcast today (Dec 13th at 1:00pm EST) on the basics of search marketing.
SEO, SEM, PPC, keywords, AdWords, analytics — what does it all mean for you as a marketer when you’re just starting out with search? You know you need to incorporate search into your marketing mix, but where do you begin?
We’ll help you get started, in this introductory webcast about search engine marketing. Industry veteran Detlev Johnson will talk about the basics, from the bottom up, so you can understand the landscape of search and how it fits into your current marketing efforts. We’ll do this with a powerpoint presentation, streaming audio, and a Q+A session where any question is a good one.
I’ve attended a few of their other webcasts and they always do a professional job and offer great information. This promises to be a great way to get a quick intro to search marketing. Sign up here.
This week in our newsletter – we announced a drawing for a free website and highlighted new features in the latest release.
Details of the Free Website Drawing are posted Here. Entering is easy – you just need to be an active beta participant and have your form active
Also this week the PromoLeads interface was updated with three new features
Thank you for your continued support of the Beta test. Just 6 weeks left until our formal launch!!
As PromoLeads moves closer to our official launch you will be seeing some changes when you log in. The first thing you’ll notice is the new coat of paint we’ve added. We think it’s a step up, let us know what you think!
There’s a lot more than just a new look, though. When you log in your homepage will now be organized with tabs. We’ve added a dashboard with information about your account and a new Reminders feature. You can add a reminder to keep track of followups or yearly events.
Your Leads (the next tab over from Dashboard) is organized differently now, too. The complicated “filters” method of viewing your leads is replaced by simple listing of your leads in order of “latest action.” Whenever something happens with a lead (a new note is added, a status change, etc), it will pop up to the top of your list so that you won’t overlook it. Hopefully this makes it a lot easier to stay on top of your leads.
Behind the scenes our programmer is working to speed things up so PromoLeads will be faster and more responsive. There’s lots of improvements still in development, and we hope to get them out to you as soon as possible.
Your feedback really makes a difference! Please let us know what you like, what you don’t like, and what you’d like to see added to PromoLeads.
Thanks for using PromoLeads!
As part of the PromoLeads Beta test, PinLine has just reported their sales results for the first 3 months of the test. Accoding to Dave Wehr, PinLine generated incremental sales of $34,000 through PromoLeads during the period. Apart from the obvious benefits of growing sales – there were some other great take-aways from PinLine’s test results.
“The real mind-blowing part of this test is that for the first time in our history (which spans over 40 years) we can truly measure the effectiveness of our advertising” says Mr Wehr. “In fact as you can see from these numbers, we know exactly what the cost of each lead was and the sales that resulted from those leads.”
Mr. Wehr went on to say “In addition to this $34,000 in sales already realized – we’re actively working on over 100 leads with Artcraft and we’re certain a good percentage of those will convert – not to mention the repeat business that’s sure to come from these new customers down the road”
When asked about the experience of working with Artcraft on these leads, Mr. Wehr indicated that he’d developed a much closer relationship with Artcraft and in particular Joanne Watson than he had had in the past. “Now that I think about it, we had never worked with Joanne before she joined the PromoLeads program – but I can think of at least 3 orders she’s sent to us recently that were not from PromoLeads – that should tell you something.” He went on to comment about the feedback mechanisms saying “I really like the note feature – we use it to update eachother throughout the sales cycle. It provides great feedback and keeps us in touch with the distributor.”
Recently Joanne Watson and Greg Law of Artcraft Promotional Concepts shared some of their experiences with PromoLeads during the last quarter. (June – August) This period was the very beginning of our beta test – yet the results were tremendous. As discussed earlier – this phase of the test was designed to be very small and participation was limited in order to be able to control and monitor results closely. Below are some highlights from their letter.
The PromoLeads site is off to a great start. I realize you are only in your ‘Beta Test’ phase but the leads generated have surpassed our expectations in both volume and quality. Despite our initial skepticism, PromoLeads represents a great potential for both suppliers and distributors. Here is brief summary of the results to date and our feedback.
Leads – Over the past 3 months Artcraft has received over 300 leads from the site for Pinline and PrimeLine suppliers. Based on our initial estimates, about 40-50% of these leads are qualified. To date we’ve closed 58 orders, with a total of $89,093 in sales.
Customers – Customers range from individuals running golf tournaments, medium companies looking for new product ideas, to large Fortune 500 companies looking for custom products. Prospects are placing multiple website inquires and it still remains a competitive marketplace.
Sell-In – This isn’t an order taking site for stock products. Custom products, creative artwork development, and customer service are a key part of the inquiries. Based on the results to date, the quicker the follow up to inquiry, the higher the close rate.
Suppliers – As an added bonus the system promotes a closer relationship with suppliers! Through distributor updates and notes on the lead, and contact through the sales process, a strong partnership has developed! Our goals are the same, attract new customers and increase sales volume.
The PromoLeads site allows suppliers and distributors to work together in generating new leads from the internet, without distributor concerns of suppliers selling direct. Many factories already have contact pages on their websites, and auto-directing these inquiries through PromoLeads to distributors, provides a faster, most efficient way to close the sale.We are very excited about these initial results and look forward to working with more suppliers in the rest of the test phase. PromoLeads brings both sides immediate business and we feel a strong partnership with the suppliers we work with. We’d be happy to discuss our experiences with new suppliers.
If you haven’t put your lead collection form up on your site yet – what are you waiting for? Activating your form is the first, critical step in generating sales for you and your distributors! If your form is active but you’d like to improve your results, we’re here to help. Simply email support@promoleads.com or call us at 800-460-4996. In addition, both Joanne and Greg have graciously offered to discuss their experiences with any prospective PromoLeads suppliers.
One of the challenges of demonstrating the importance of search marketing to promotional products suppliers is getting a feel for the traffic on supplier web sites. The traditional thinking is that supplier sites are for distributor use and while distributors may “bring” an end user to a supplier site – end users are not the focus. Who can blame suppliers for thinking this way when their entire internet history to date has been focused solely on the distributor. Web sites have been built to be distributor friendly and for the most part are static brochures. So why should a supplier care about end user traffic? Because in many cases – it’s a big number!
Unless you’ve specifically blocked search engines from indexing your site (or your site design is not search engine friendly) every word of your site is stored in google and other seach engines. Evey word is searchable and when people search for terms that appear on your site – you probably show up.
TIP – There is Gold in your item numbers. Try this – do a google search on one of your most popular item numbers (SKU’s) or brands. Chances are your site will come up in the search results. If it doesn’t then you need to ask why not and see who is showing up. One of your competitors may be optimizing their site or bidding for ads based on your item numbers / brands.
So -would you like to know how many visitors your site gets, how they get there, how long they stay, which pages they visit, and what they do before leaving your site? You can get all this information and more using Googles free product – google analytics.
While this is not meant to be a comprehensive discussion of the capabilities of google analytics I do want to share with you some examples of its capabilities. At it’s most basic level GA will help you determine how many visitors you are getting, where they’re coming from and what they do when they arrive on your site. Once you have a feel for what your site visitors are doing when they arrive, you can begin to tweak your site to make it perform better.
Figure 1. – overall traffic statistics showing unique visitors for a 1 month period
Figure 2 – Sources of traffic and top keywords
As you can see from these screen shots – Google Anayltics provides a wealth of data. You can see how many unique visitors are coming to your site, how they’re getting there and what they did while visiting. The next obvious question is what do you want your visitors to do on your site and how can you get more of them to take that action? As a PromoLeads subscriber – you want your visitors to fill in a lead form and create an opportunity for you and your distributors – that’s what we call conversion. Getting higher conversion rates will be the topic of many blog posts to come.
Further Resources
Some of our new suppliers have been (understandably) worried that putting a PromoLeads form on their site would lead to misunderstandings with their distributor. Along with suggesting a more open dialog between suppliers and distributors, we’ve added a feature to the form creation process that allows suppliers to add the PromoLeads Pledge to their forms.
When creating a new form, just check off the box that says “Show the PromoPledge on my form” and your new code will include the pledge. If you’d like to add the pledge to existing forms, log in and click the name of the form (on your home page, under “Your Forms”), then click the “edit this form” link. Follow the directions above and save your form. You’ll have to replace the HTML code on your website after you save the form.
Hopefully this helps some of our suppliers avoid any misunderstandings with distributors! If you have any questions or comments, please let us know. Thanks for trying PromoLeads!