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One Christmas holiday we had a phone call from a Marketing and Sales Exec VP: "I need more leads!" Thus started our long-term relationship with Intraware, based in Orinda, California.
Intraware, Inc. (NASDAQ: ITRA) provides digital services that enable enterprise technology publishers to tie together licensing and software processes into a clean, simple customer experience. The Intraware SubscribeNet service is a Web-based delivery and support platform that enables technology companies to deliver, track and manage the software, licenses and other digital content they distribute to their customers. Intraware’s customers include Adobe, Business Objects, EMC, Hyperion Solutions, IBM, McKesson, and RSA Security.
To meet an aggressive business objective, Intraware needed to ramp up lead generation quickly. Hale! Marketing was engaged to become the satellite marketing team responsible for monthly lead generation and launching new products.
We quickly prepared a lead generation plan that defined how the target audience would experience Intraware campaigns. To create opportunities for "launch-style" messaging, and to make it easier for prospects to understand the SubscribeNet service, we recommended specific new product bundles. We developed positioning and messaging to effect quicker understanding of Intraware's value proposition.
The campaigns were focused around a series of webinars. We used webinars because they were a self-identifying tactic – the respondents identified themselves as being somewhat qualified as legitimate prospects by the simple fact that they took the trouble to sign up to view a 30 minute webinar presentation. Because the tactic used the webinar as both an attraction and a qualification hurdle, we expected a numerically low response rate but relatively high quality respondents. This was proven in practice, and significant sales conversations were started following on from the webinars.
To prepare the environment for effective lead generation, Hale! Marketing provided a refreshed Intraware logo and look and feel that appropriately presented Intraware. This included literature redesign and a new sales presentation with updated messaging, put in place before the lead generation activity began.
The greatest hidden barrier in lead generation is awareness. Intraware had an awareness problem. Our first few campaigns were aimed at quickly ramping up awareness. While running those campaigns, we researched the names of decision makers, and touched them in various ways with targeted messaging and calls-to-action that were easy steps for starting a sales conversation. We used various direct mail pieces, email, and guided voicemail to generate a response.
We continued to refine our lists as the lead generation campaigns continued, and varied the order of touches and the medium used. All aspects of each campaign were measured for response. As we continued month-to-month lead-generation, the results kept improving as awareness increased. Webinars about "licensing" generated between 100 to 200 webinar registrations, two to four times greater than Intraware had expected. And typical response to the email campaigns: out of 7,631 emails delivered, the open rate was 23% and clickthrough was 6.8% (10 times better than the industry average of 0.7% clickthrough rate reported by Harte-Hanks' analytics service for that time period).
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