Intangible Marketing in a Virtual Environment

For company owners and managers, one of the most difficult tasks is to discover a means to interact with their target consumers on a regular basis at a low cost.

Even if you hire enough personnel to stay in touch with your current customers on a regular basis, it’s practically impossible to stay successful.

The idea of employing outside sales representatives, trainers, and speakers to connect on a monthly, weekly, or even daily basis with the whole organization’s clientele is laughable, especially for organizations with large budgets.

Human-to-human interaction is prohibitively expensive, so it’s impossible to maintain constant touch with everyone.

It’s common for companies to focus on their “ideal customer” and ignore the others. It turns into a game of money.

E-courses and webinars are preferable alternatives to face-to-face courses and seminars when it comes to keeping in frequent contact with your customers and prospects while still providing a meaningful service.

You may attend an eSeminar as you would attend a real seminar or course at a local university or meeting venue.

You must finish the course within a certain amount of time, and you must choose a specific topic to discuss.

Assume you’re a car dealer who wants to stay in touch with his or her customers on a regular basis.

Alternatively, you might provide a monthly e-seminar that focuses on a different aspect of vehicle maintenance or educates students about current changes in the sector that may impact them.

The goal of the e-course is not just to keep your customers informed, but also to ensure that they remember you when they are ready to purchase again or recommend your business to others in the future.

Your chances of being forgotten decrease the more often you communicate with them. If you don’t keep in touch, they’re more likely to forget about you.

If you keep in touch with your students often, you might mention additional items or services that you provide in the context of the electronic course.

Hard selling or hucksterism will cause most students to leave or add your email address to their spam filters if your course falls into one of these traps.

Keeping the conversation focused on issues that your course participants will find useful helps keep them engaged for the duration of the course.

Most, if not all, of the expenses involved with frequent communication with customers may be eliminated via these virtual lectures.

You no longer have to limit yourself to a certain group of ideal customers.

These communications will be accessible 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and there will be no requirement for any personnel to keep in touch with them.

Do not misunderstand, though. As far as I know, there is no way that the Internet can entirely replace humans, particularly in sectors where a lot of personal interaction is required. I’d rather have a genuine handshake than a virtual one.

However, the Internet’s power allows it to reduce the expense of connecting with huge groups of people on a regular basis.

The more often you engage with your target market, the more likely it is that they will remember you and return to purchase from you in the future.

Keep in touch with your customers even if they don’t purchase straight away.

You can avoid losing customers to your competition if even one individual falls through the holes in your screening process.

To simplify things, your electronic course or electronic seminar should be sent by email. It is possible to use MS Outlook or other email software, but I do not suggest this option.

Using a conventional email client to run an e-course with hundreds or thousands of students would be a huge undertaking. Sending messages, subscribing members, unsubscribing members, avoiding sending duplicate messages, and so on might quickly turn into a full-time job.

There are a slew of stand-alone programs geared towards online education. All of them, however, are now unrecommendable.

The reason for this is that an autoresponder may do the same thing as a specialized software application without costing hundreds of dollars.

Once you’ve set up an autoresponder, you don’t have to worry about maintaining it on a daily basis. ever.

Every day, you have to launch the program you use on your computer, import and export subscriber contact information, handle signup requests, process cancellation requests, and do other routine duties. Yuck!

It’s a pain that doesn’t need to be there.

Keep in mind that you may program your autoresponder to send out a certain number of messages on a daily, weekly, monthly, or quarterly basis, and then sit back and watch your messages go out to your target audience.

Everything that would otherwise take time and effort is now taken care of by your autoresponder.

The beauty of this is that the daily burden of connecting with the course participants is the same whether you are dealing with one person or one million.

Zero.

You may also include multimedia formats like MP3 files, flash animation, and even live video to enhance your eCourses and eSeminars.

You don’t have to worry about remembering to check your email for the next lesson since the autoresponder will do it for you.

Your course participants will get instructions on a daily, weekly, monthly, or quarterly basis, and you will communicate with them on a frequent basis. Everything is done automatically.

It’s up to you and your computer’s technological capabilities to determine whether or not you want to utilize email, flash, streaming music, or video.

Keeping things simple is the best advice I can provide. Use just email autoresponders. Instead of typing your course materials, you may use an audio recorder like All Sound Recorder to capture the content.

You’ll be able to convey the same message with fewer words this way. If you just use email, your monthly bandwidth consumption will be significantly more than if you use all multimedia files.

So, if you’re concerned about your monthly bandwidth, avoid anything multimedia-related. even if your internet service provider charges a fee.

In order to be in constant contact with your market and to offer them useful information, you should stick to basic email e-courses.

Check out http://willmaster.com for free autoresponders that you can operate from your own hosted domain.

Autoresponders are available in both free and paid varieties from him. Autoresponders offered by companies like http://besent.com and http://sendfree.com are a good alternative if you don’t have access to a web host that allows you to write your own CGI scripts.

Each of these options enables you to contact all of your customers, not just the most perfect ones, as often as you want and with the least amount of administrative hassle.

In addition, even if your clientele is in the hundreds of thousands, you won’t have to recruit a full-time crew to do this.