Ready for a short and sweet blog post with a helpful tip?
Good.
Here we go…
Good Persuasive Content
For the sake of this post, let’s pretend you have some damn good content that your sales team uses to follow-up with prospects. In the past you might’ve just attached the content to an email.
Attachments are tough as you can only attach files up to 25MB. That makes it tough to share video, or large PDFs. Thankfully we have the internet, and a huge number of sites specifically designed for sharing.
You could be sharing a YouTube video, a presentation on Slideshare, an infographic on Scribd, etc. You could also share from Box.net, Dropbox.com or Google Drive. In any of those cases you are going to be dropping a link into an email and sending it off to the prospect.
Be Smart
The default links from any of those services are not trackable. So…add tracking.
We use Hootsuite to shorten the links to our sales resources. Then, we create a custom report for that specific URL in Hootsuite.
As we send out links to PDFs, videos, blog posts or whatever, we’re able to see the number of people that click on it.
- Is it perfect? No.
- Is it better than email marketing data? No.
- Is it better than sending out sales resources any other way that we’ve discovered. Emphatically yes.
We did a sales push where we sent 55 warm, targeted emails to a group of people that we’d met socially. In each of these emails we included a series of links, all shortened and tracked in Hootsuite. We were able to see that we got 19 clicks. We also know that those 19 clicks resulted in 4 meetings, which resulted in 3 clients.
As we went through the sales push, Hootsuite Analytics sent us a daily email to keep us up to date about the number of clicks our emails had generated. The reports can be set up to go out Daily, twice per week, weekly and monthly.
How will you use this?
It’s simple really. Make untrackable links trackable, and get a report on it. How will you use this feature?
If you aren’t using Hootsuite yet, I suggest you do. Get a free account.