SellingPoint Overview: Marketing

The marketing department can make use of the following features:

Customer relationship management

• Allows marketing to gain control over the timely dissemination of resources to dealers and sales teams.
• Connected CRM technology allows marketing to get a view of all activity out in the field at any time. See what activities sales people are working on and who is being contacted. This data can be useful in forecasting scenarios to gauge product or promotional popularity.
• Customer support activities and interaction history is viewable at anytime to gauge customer satisfaction.
• Assists marketing to ensure that sales teams are meeting sales goals.

Electronic newsletters

• Contacting leads and opportunities through newsletters is an excellent way of informing possible customers of a company’s product offers and promotional activities. This is an inexpensive way to offer a constant invitation for potential customers to visit the company’s online store for additional information.
• Existing customers will appreciate regular newsletters delivered to their inbox informing them of new products and specials. When done correctly, this is a reliable and inexpensive way of increasing customer satisfaction. It also keeps the invitation to visit the company’s web site continually before them.
• Newsletters are sent as email messages from SellingPoint and can be targeted to specific lists of addresses. A built in account management system allows customers to opt in or out at their choosing without needing to contact the company for assistance.
• Addresses can be added or updated to lists manually, but they can also be manipulated in bulk. Drop in purchased mailing lists with ease from an Excel file, CSV file, or other popular format.
• Newsletters can be sent out to any number of recipients and can be scheduled to for mailing at a time that is best targeted to promote readership.
• Tracking technologies are used to tell you exactly who received the newsletter, when they read it, and what they clicked on in the message. This information is very useful in gauging the success of strategies in near real-time.
• Send out rich looking newsletters will full color and graphics. If the recipient is not using an email client that can view messages at such fidelity, then the system will automatically send a text only version to ensure everyone gets the most readable format of the newsletter.
• Attachments can also be added to newsletters, making it a powerful way of keeping in touch with groups of customers or partners that would benefit from drawing files or PDF files such as architects or draftsmen.

Exchange Portal

• Manufacturers can make liberal use of this portal to advertise their product offerings and manufacturing capabilities.
• Manufacturers can also post available resources that they may want to resell to other manufacturers such as machine time, assembly lines, or other departments.
• Such data is automatically sent from SellingPoint Management Studio to the portal, making it easy to manage interactions which this online community that is used by vendors, architects, draftsmen, contractors and consumers.
• The level of visibility can be set to ensure that the manufacturer is only see by the type of audience they wish.
• The use of this portal is made available without charge to manufacturers using SellingPoint.

Marketing resources for online strategies

• Often times marketing personnel at a manufacturer will need some initial guidance on how to make effective use of the new SellingPoint online store in their marketing strategy. Resources will be provided that give direction on topics such as creating an effective design for the online store, informing customers of the store, keeping the store in front of customers, effectively positioning the web site and store for search engine optimization, and more.
• Templates and samples will also be posted over time that can be used as the basis for designing their online presence for maximum appeal.

Web site statistics and analysis

• Marketing must know if their online strategy or campaigns are working. A major part in providing that data is to have detailed web site statistics and analysis reports. SellingPoint includes tools that provide this and much more.
• Some of the data collection points that SellingPoint reports on include:
  • Unique visitors, number of visits, pages served, hits, and bandwidth on a monthly, weekly, daily, or hourly view.
  • Breakdown of visitors by countries, host, last visit, IP address, and robots/spiders.
  • Percentage of specific pages viewed.
  • Breakdown of where visitors came from, such as a newsletter or a search engine.
  • If coming from a search engine such as Google, see what the visitor typed in to find you.
  • See what operating systems and browsers your visitors are using, which is useful for targeting the design of your web site.
  • Are visitors encountering any problems with your site or store such as missing pages or bad links? All such issues will also be broken down into easy to understand results.

Design services

• The SellingPoint online store can be fully customized to look any way the manufacturer would like. The manufacturer may like to create a fresh design or just match the SellingPoint store to the design of their existing web site. In cases where a designer is not available, Vesigo can provide design services that will guarantee that the graphic design and layout work be done correctly and in a timely manner.
• These services will be offered on a case by case manner with two methods of pricing: template designs and custom designs.

Online advertising management

• Capitalize on site traffic by offering advertising space to partners and vendors.
• Offer banner ads as images or interactive movies.
• Flexibility to place different ads in different areas of the web site to target correct audience.
• Set rotation based on time, dates, or number of impressions.
• Set rotation to occur on certain months, days, weekdays, or hours.

Online content rotation management

• Capitalize on site traffic by featuring related products and services.
• Flexibility to place different ads in different areas of the web site to target correct audience.
• Set rotation based on time, dates, or number of impressions.
• Set rotation to occur on certain months, days, weekdays, or hours.

Online store electronic payment processing

• The SellingPoint online store may be configured to process electronic payments such as credit cards just like a traditional online store. Turning on this feature is simply a matter of checking a checkbox and entering the merchant account information.
• PayPal business accounts and Authorize.NET are currently supported gateways for processing electronic payments.

Continue to Part 5: Information Technology Personnel