Helping hand for reseller marketing

Distributor itX has launched a free bundle of tools for resellers on a new website that lets users customise their sales pitches and track the responses.

itX marketing manager, Paul Sadler, said the new Pipeline marketing portal basically took a lot of work out of the hands of resellers - work that a lot of resellers weren't actually getting around to.

"The majority of our partners don't have marketing internally," Sadler said. "A lot of resellers are just not doing this sort of thing."

Pipeline - at http://www.salesdetails.com/pipeline/home/select.sok -- gave resellers a simple four-step sales and marketing process to follow to generate leads and get results, he said.

Resellers choose an interactive campaign, which can be customised according to their business, and can upload their campaign prospect lists into the secure system.

"Nobody else can see your customer details," Sadler said.

Once a prospect list is chosen, resellers can email out a campaign - previously created for each vendor by itX and the vendor - in a personalised, reseller-specific email to prospective customers who can then can click through to animations and other marketing materials on another page, branded with the reseller's own logo and details.

Sadler said resellers then got a report back which told them which customers clicked on the email, which ones clicked through to view certain information, who they forwarded it to, and so on.

Thirty-four resellers were already using the portal. A recent IBM animated campaign for e-forms had reported that 65 per cent of potential end-users had clicked through for more information, Sadler said, with resellers gleaning a number of sales leads as a result.

"It complies with privacy laws, and spam [laws]," Sadler said. "And as part of our pitch and education for resellers, we are advising them to go in subtly, obviously, and that it isn't something to share."

itX had spent around $55,000 outsourcing the portal development and about $10,000 on each vendor campaign, Sadler said.

"We're looking at installing a direct-mail option, which asks whether you'd like to send an email or a letter that would have a unique URL bringing the customer back to the campaign online. In the next phase, we'd like to integrate our third-party call centre." Sadler said.