It’s nice to be noticed. Alan Belniak of SubjectivelySpeaking fame received one of our self-promotional campaigns, when to his personalized website and summed up his experience in a recent (fairly recent) blog post. It is excerpted below to remove all the negative stuff (jk), but you can read the full post here.
I got a medium-sized envelope in the mail yesterday. It was addressed to me, at my work address. I noted that the return address was in Texas, but didn’t immediately notice the three letters above the address (come to find out it was a company name). I have to admit that I was curious. Really curious. I Googled the name before I opened it and didn’t get much info from the top few results.
We are a B2B company, to be clear. If you read the comments on Alan’s blog post you’ll know what I mean. Hand-addressed envelopes fair well at the workplace. Non-traditional inserts fair well anywhere.
To set up this next excerpt let me say that we aren’t tracking ever move Alan makes. In fact, we don’t use cookies (very often), so our tracking capabilities are limited to the microsite we build for you, or you, and you. We know you’re busy. We’re busy too. We want to sell you something, but you may not be buying.
Our microsite frames the conversation. You know what we do at a high level. If you’re intrigued let’s set a meeting at some point in the future to chat further. Let’s get you off the phone and back to work. It’s quick, clean and simple.
Here’s the kicker: about three minutes later, my phone rang. I looked on the caller ID display, and it wasn’t a number I recognized. I Googled “area code 214” and sure enough – it was Texas. What’s great about this exchange is that this company knew I was reading their site because I just clicked through. They were making a bet I was in the office (versus on the road or somewhere else, maybe mobile) and that they’d reach me. I was torn away from the desk momentarily, so I couldn’t take the call. But they left a message, and I called back, because I thought it was so clever. They engaged me in a way that wasn’t obtrusive and actually intrigued me.
When we finally got a chance to talk to Alan we found that he speaks our language, or we speak his. He’s on Twitter and he’s blogging. Would we have learned so much about Alan had we mailed a postcard with a picture of red decoder glasses and a link to our corporate website? Yeah, uh, no.
Great feedback, Alan.
(For the record, we’ve beat the SEO drum to death, but the Venture Law Group and Valley National Gasses–publicly traded–get all the Google and Yahoo love.)
