Well we did it, finally got Front Office Box launched. Over the weekend we sent out 250+ invitations to businesses in the Scottish Highlands. Why the Highlands? Good question. Partly it’s where half of the business is based so we can at least demonstrate a local relevance. Partly its because we could get hold of lists of businesses, for free. Partly because it’s a good testing ground. Local companies aren’t renowned (most of them that is) for being Open for Business. There aren’t too many early adopters around here so for us there’s not a lot of low hanging fruit. If we screw up the damage won’t hole us below the water line. We can test our ideas here, find something that works and then put the pedal to the metal in the USA and UK markets.
The first test was using our own technology – how easy would it be to use? how successful would it be in getting our message to the targets? and how acceptable would it be to the targets. The second test was our proposition – how would it stand up when presented to people who had never heard of us. The third test was how would we handle a variety of responses.
We populated our own address book with likely candidates taken from local directories, limiting the input to company name, web site and contact email. We created pages in Knowledgebase for our Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy and we sent out invitations to try Front Office Box using Webrequest. For people requesting a registration form we created another Webrequest which pointed them to links in the Knowledgebase – About us, T’s and C’s and Privacy – and asked them to let us have company and people names and addresses.
The results? Rather pleasing really! We sent invitations to 267 email addresses out of directories – no introductory or follow up calls. This was minimum cost and effort. It’s Tuesday evening now and we’ve had nine companies ask for a registration form, four of which have completed it and now have their own Front Office Box. We expect a couple more to submit the form and hope that others will have put the invite aside and come back to us when they’ve had chance to look at the marketing site. If we get six new users by the end of the week, we’ll be ecstatic. In terms of response to direct mail this is already a success, and best of all, at a cost of nothing.
Best of all, we’ve found some people who are really engaged by the concept of collaboration and sharing. Even better than that, we’ve again proved the value of our own software!
Next comes the results of our press releases and a description of our viral marketing strategy.
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