Top 10 Frequently Asked Questions

Q. What does your product do?
A1. It is an automated lead generation and market awareness solution. We begin by purchasing a targeted email database that fits your market. Then our solution uniquely creates 1000 customized marketing messages for you and delivers email campaigns daily throughout the year, totally on its own. It is designed specifically for small and midsize businesses. Our value proposition is automated daily email campaigns without the need for a marketing resource. We documented a 5% lead response over the last couple years.
  
A2. (Alternative) First, we identify a database list for your target market from our national database that we manage, and load it into the product. Then, we draft a marketing questionnaire for you about your business. This creates a comprehensive marketing content library of about a thousand customized sales messages describing your business and benefits. Each day database records are assigned to begin email marketing campaigns that pull messages from the marketing library and deliver them automatically at preset intervals throughout the year. That process will drive your market to call you, reply, and to click-thru a link in the email to visit your Web site. Our solution identifies specifically who those click-thru visitors are for sales followup, as well as who opens your emails. That will increase sales opportunities with less effort.

Q. Isn’t this spamming?
A. Spamming is a generic term that means something different to everyone, but is usually considered to be unsolicited emailing. What one person considers spam is a valued offer to another. Our solution complies with the federal law that controls emailing, called the Can Spam Act of 2003. That law is often misunderstood and requires only an automated opt-out in each email, along with a few other guidelines.

Q. How much does it cost?
A. Our solution is $595 per month for 12 months, including all we do through implementation, training, and support, and a targeted database of about 5000 names in your market.

Q. What results will I get?
A. Results vary by customer. Our average customer in 2006 received an email open percentage of 15%. The industry average was barely that and based primarily on communications with people who know you. Our solution is mainly designed for new business prospecting. Also, our average customer received 100-200 leads with an annual marketing response of 5% last year. In 2006, although percentage results are slightly diminished, quantity results are similar due to more frequent email deliveries.

Q. Is there a guarantee or a trial?
A. We do offer a six month trial license. We have many hundreds of customers and provide a lengthy list of references to contact. All our costs, include list purchase, are up front. You can't try marketing once or twice. It is a form of advertising and the results accumulate and measure over a year. The six month license is the minimum available to ensure a proper evaluation and effective results.

Q. Can’t I get a similar solution from a competitor?
A. Not to our knowledge. Other solutions require a resource to create and manage campaigns. Also, other products are designed to create flashy HTML content, like newsletters, for communications with people who already know you. But that is not a good way to conduct new business prospecting because email filters will screen out too many of the messages due to the amount of HTML content. Our solution automatically creates and manages campaigns without a resource. Instead of providing robust HTML graphics, pictures and colors, it produces a quality marketing message describing why someone may need your products or services.

Q. How long will it take to get going?
A. From receipt of payment we can launch your campaigns in about a month.
 
Q. Where do you get the names/leads from?
A. We have a Strategic Database Partner who has developed a large national opt-in database. We select a database list for your market based on your specific firmographic criteria, the list is custom built for you and verified, then loaded into our product.

Q. How many database names do I need to make it work?
A The more the better. 5,000 to 10,000 names is ideal and will typically produce good results. 2500 is the minimum amount to get reasonable results. The more database names, the more leads and sales generated.

Other Questions

Q. Do the emails go out of my server?
A. No.  The emails go out of a dedicated server of ours so it doesn’t require any technical setups on your end, or software, or resources. We plan to provide the option to go out of your servers in the near future.

Q. What if I don’t have an email database to use?
A. We can identify one in our national B2B database that fits your firmographic criteria.

Q. What if my current Web site needs more work to be effective?
A. We are available to help you evolve your Web site to more sophistication.  In fact, most of the leads produced from our solution are web site visitors.  But when they click on your web site landing page link, they are already interested based on your marketing message.  So even if your web site needs some more work, they were already interested.  You can quickly followup and professionally turn their web site experience into a positive one and explain that you are in the process of enhancing your site.

Q. How much time will I need to spend using it each day?
A. Typically an Admin, marketing, or sales resource accesses the solution daily for about 5 minutes to view a key statistics report, and to find your web site and open leads.

Q. Do I own the database?
A. Yes.

Q. What if I don’t renew, do I get the database?
A. Yes.

Q. What kinds of businesses do you specialize in?
A. Our solution works for any business that provides a competitive product or service offering and needs to continually find more prospects and acquire more new customers. Our customer base is very diverse, with dozens of industries and SICs.  The top broad categories of customers are in: manufacturing, distribution, technology, and business services.  If you have a very limited market of less than a few hundred companies, percentage results will be diminished.  However, the need to constantly touch those companies frequently may be even more important.

Q. Won’t everybody delete these messages, or they will get filtered out?
A. Certainly many messages do get ignored, deleted or filtered out.  That is just a function of marketing in general, and filtering technology.  But we touch everyone in the database up to 28 times per year.  That process produced an average 15% email open percentage in 2006.  

Q. How many times do you send the emails out?
A. The emails are staggered out daily to your database, with each name getting touched up to 28 times per year.

Q. What happens when someone wants to be removed?
A. Our solution provides an automated opt-out link in every email that goes out.  Most unsubscribe requests are handled that way.  Sometimes a recipient may elect to reply to the email and ask to be removed.  We train you how to handle that simple procedure online in our system.

Q. Will this integrate with my other databases?
A. Our solution does not currently integrate with your other database or CRM application. But almost all of our customers have another solution they use for managing their contact information for prospects and customers. Our solution easily runs independently from that. We are the marketing activity system. Once we generate a lead, it is forwarded to the sales team. By loading the purchased list into your CRM system, your sales rep does a simple query for the lead, then calls and tracks all activities in your CRM. If it becomes an active prospect, you take them off the campaign in our system and manage them through your other application. Integration has not become a necessity to use our system successfully. We are in the design phase for a web services platform that can link into any application.

Q. How computer literate must I be?
A. You should have basic knowledge of how to use a computer, Microsoft Windows, a mouse or pointing device, and how to use a browser to access the Internet.  No special skills are required.

Q. I already use Constant Contact (or ExactTarget or something else).  Why do I need your solution?
A. Congratulations on your decision to move into email marketing.  I hope that solution is generating good results for you.  They have a nice product.  However, those products are designed to create robust HTML graphics and as such, are really only effective for communications with companies who already know you, like customers and active prospects.  If you used those system to send to a fresh list of people who don’t know you, too many of your emails will get filtered out.  So the difference is, our application is designed for new business prospecting, while the other product is mainly used for customer communications.  We have quite a number of customers who already had/have Constant Contact before they decided to license our product.

Q. What about the security of my database and reliability of the product?
A. You will login with a unique combination of your name, company, and password.  As far as reliability, we have used a co-locator provider partner since 2000 and experienced over 99% reliability.  This company specifically specializes in hosting the infrastructure Internet communications equipment, backup, and other capabilities needed to host thousands of Web sites, web servers, ISDN, DSL, T-1, and other communication methods.  We have a traffic monitoring device that measures workload capacity so we know when to add more servers to the infrastructure hosting mix well in advance of any possible performance issues.  You should expect that the eProspector site will normally be available to you and that your data is secure and backed up regularly.

Q. Can I use eProspector for customer base communications too?
A. Yes.  We designed the current Nurture Strategy for that purpose.  It will help prevent negligence, the number one reason that customers leave for another supplier.  These types of messages are short and personalized.  They are not designed to sell so much as show appreciation.  They have been effective for promoting customer loyalty and discovering questions or issues that had not yet surfaced.

Q. How do the results compare with other products?
A. If the other sales and marketing programs have a method to calculate your Return on Investment, you can easily compare. Our average email open percentage was 15% last year. Our average annual lead response was 5%. For a typical customer with a database of 5000 names, our average customer received 250 leads last year. Calculate the number of sales you feel you could close and the revenue value. Then subtract the total cost of our solution from that amount, and divide the amount left by the total cost. That is your ROI. Let us know how it compares with other solutions. We believe ours will be higher.

Q. What other questions should I be asking?
A. You should be asking how to move forward to license our solution.  It is simple.  We will process an email invoice.  Upon receipt of payment we will obtain and load your target firmographic list from our national database, draft your message questionnaire, review your edits and approve the messages, and launch you.  You may also qualify for our fixed fee and monthly payment program.

Q. How long does it take to get going?
A. On average it may take about a month.   It is somewhat dependent upon you in regard to the editing and approval of messages, and whether or not you have a separate internal database list to load.

Q. What kind of technical resources do I need?
A. You only need access to the Internet using Internet Explorer browser. 

Q. What if I don’t have a Web site?
A. We will assist you with this by helping you develop a Web site.  That is our specialty.

Q. Can I talk with some references?
A. Of course. Visit our web site section under Testimonials and Case Studies and/or request our Customer list after viewing one of our webinars.