The hidden opportunity in your PDF downloads

If your company is like most these days, you have numerous PDFs on your Web site available for download. With this cost effective and user friendly tactic, many companies are missing the opportunity to let the PDF help close the sale.

PDF Newsletter (Toyota Material Handling)

Too often, the downloadable PDF is not professionally designed because you’re not investing in offset printing. Such treatment can lead to missed opportunities. When uploading documents in PDF format to your Web site, ask yourself, “What does my audience do with those documents, and are my PDFs doing their job?”

From investor relations to sales collateral, your PDF downloads provide a convenient means for potential buyers and investors to collect the information they seek.  But do those documents rise to the level of your corporate identity? Do they enhance your brand? Do they build your image? Do they sell?

When researching a vendor, product or service, buyers commonly collect downloaded PDFs and spit them out of the office printer for later analysis. Product information, whitepapers, spec sheets, company fact sheets, annual reports – they’re all being downloaded and printed as we speak. While offset printing volumes are being reduced, the office printer is alive and well.

So treat the office printer like another media channel. When your company’s material comes out looking superior to the others in the prospect’s collection, you’ve just jumped to the top of the stack.

Email marketing has grown up as the novelty has worn off

Email is an excellent medium for the agent or dealer audience. They are willing 'brand participants.'

The blogger’s opinion in the shared post below is consistent with our own observations concerning the role of email marketing in today’s media mix. It is true that email has increasingly become an effective retention tool, while it has declined as an acquisition tool.

There are ways, however, to leverage email as a medium in your customer acquisition efforts. In particular, sponsored ads within existing email newsletters can bring relevant content to an audience already loyal to the sender, thereby providing reach to new potential  subscribers. Publishers who sell ad space in their email newsletters are on to this, and that can be a good alternative.

clipped from www.e-consultancy.com The use of email marketing to drive customer acquisition is in significant, and terminal, decline. email is not a customer acquisition tool. In fact it never has been, but in the early years of the media, the novelty of receiving email meant that acquisition and lead generation emails were opened and clicked on. Any email marketer who thinks that consumers expect and deserve regular, mass email marketing will find their reputation and results flowing rapidly down the toilet. Email marketing is a retention tool, and used cleverly it is the ‘killer app’. Cold emailing as a core business proposition just doesn’t work because the need to flog as much data as possible is totally contrary to email marketing’s core requirements – targeting, relevance and quality.