Read part two here

It’s no secret that email is a great way to draw large numbers of leads down your sales funnel. Not only is it easier and cheaper than other lead-nurturing methods, it’s incredibly effective. According to the Direct Marketing Association, email returns $48.56 for every $1 you invest.

But great ROI is not automatic. To fully realize the potential of email as a sales tool, you need two things: (1) knowledge of email best practices and (2) a well-reasoned strategy for success. These are the things we’ll cover in this two-part email series.

First let’s make sure we’re on the same page: We’re assuming you already have a targeted list of leads that you’ve collected yourself (as opposed to a list you purchased). If you’re not at this point, don’t worry: Robin’s post on building your opt-in list is a great place to start. Read it, start implementing it, then come back here. (We’ll wait…)  OK, let’s go.

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Register here for Kutenda’s free three-part webinar series on how small and midsized businesses can SLEEP (Search, Leverage, Evaluate, Estimate and Perform) their way to the top of the search results.

As we mentioned in a previous post, if you want to meet new prospects and close more sales in today’s internet focused world, you need to be visible in the major search engines (Google, Yahoo and Bing) for the search terms/keywords that are relevant to your business, a goal achieved through search engine optimization (SEO).

Problem is, SEO can be confusing for small and midsize businesses that don’t have the time or resources to dedicate to optimizing their company presence online. We’ve got the solution: Kutenda’s free three-part webinar series on how small and midsized businesses can actually SLEEP their way to the top of search results. Register today.

James Omdahl, our director of online marketing, will walk you through Kutenda’s SLEEP (Search, Leverage, Evaluate, Estimate and Perform) technique and provide the best practices, tips and tricks you need to start driving qualified traffic to your web site today.

Throughout the three sessions, James will demystify the optimization process so that you can grow your business online no matter the size of your marketing team/budget. All attendees will receive a free checklist designed to help you get started immediately.

Who should attend
Internet marketing beginners, small business marketers, and anyone else who wants to improve SEO.

Details/Registration

As discussed in my last post, finding the right keywords for your search marketing campaigns is essential for getting the right traffic to your web site at the right price. But many small and midsized businesses should also consider adding geographic keyword modifiers to their search campaigns to really target their search marketing campaigns. In this post, we’ll define geographic modifiers and discuss why they are important to localized search marketers.

What is a geographic modifier?
A geographic keyword modifier is the use of a geographic term in the beginning, end, or in the middle of a keyword term. For example, if my core keyword was “health insurance,” you could geographically modify the keyword by adding the term “Denver” to it, making it “Denver health insurance” or “health insurance Denver.”  Pretty straight forward, eh?

Why would I use a geographic modifier?
Even if a business wants to appeal to searchers on a national basis, it’s not a bad idea to start out by targeting a local market, because they will be able to see better results more quickly. Why? Because competition can be fierce on the national level, and the timeline for success can be considerably longer.

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The first of two posts covering how MSPs can capitalize on the features of Kutenda to enhance their use of the ConnectWise PSA.

Last week at the ConnectWise Summit in Orlando, I had many opportunities to talk to MSPs about how they use ConnectWise to close sales. As this was the first time many MSPs had ever talked to us about how Kutenda helps grow their businesses, it brought up a good question that many of you asked: How do you use Kutenda to uncover sales opportunities if you also use ConnectWise Tracks to do the same thing?

Kutenda is a great tool to help you manage the front end of the sales process, because it helps you to automate that long sales cycle familiar to most managed services providers. Let me explain what I mean.

When a prospect for one of your services expresses interest, one of three things might happen:

1. You call/meet, write a proposal and they sign up (best-case scenario)
2. You call/meet, spend time with the back-and-forth negotiation, the deal dies for any number of reasons
3. You call/meet, realize that the customer doesn’t have a need or doesn’t have the budget

How do you manage the people in scenario two or three? Continuing to call or meet with them might very well be a waste of time for right now, because they may not be ready to buy. Or, maybe they expressed interest in data recovery services, but won’t actually buy data recovery (they might be a better candidate for Help Desk services, for example). If you’re scheduling activities in Tracks for these two prospects, your salespeople are spending time on prospects who aren’t ready to buy.

Kutenda helps you to move those prospects into a ready-to-buy position by giving you a way to automate your follow-up. Here’s what that process looks like:

1. Educate your prospects: Your prospects and customers aren’t spending hours reading your web site to learn about all the other wonderful services you offer. So, you need to let them know—regularly. First thing to do is send them monthly e-newsletters that position you as the expert in managed services, so they know to think of you when they have a business problem you can solve. Kutenda writes a regular e-newsletter for managed service providers—all you have to do is send it.

2. Tell them how you can help them: If a prospect expressed interest in one service, he or she may not know what else you do (I hear this all the time from MSPs—they sell a customer on manageConnectWise services, and the customer buys a VoIP system from someone else, because the customer doesn’t know they offer VoIP). You need to tell them AND make attractive offers to generate interest in those other services. How? By sending them regular offers through email so they understand the other ways you can solve their business problems. Kutenda helps you do this too: We’ve got ready-to-launch campaigns for BDR, Help Desk, Network Management and more, updated monthly, which you can set up to  go out automatically.

Once someone has expressed interest in starting a conversation, that’s when you move them into ConnectWise and psuh them through the last parts of the sales process. Using Tracks to help your sales team manage follow-up tasks toward the end of the sales cycle (the last 20 percent) and Kutenda to automate the lead-up (the first 80 percent) makes the entire sales cycle—from initial prospect to closed sale—easier to manage and more efficient for your sales team.

In part two: How Kutenda helps you generate more leads to put into your sales pipeline.