Nick Ezzo

Don't send me this.

With the holidays coming up, don’t miss an opportunity to get in front of your customers and prospects by sending a holiday gift or card.

Here’s a tip: go out on a limb and do something memorable and/or fun.  Don’t send the same bland holiday card my insurance agent sends out (sorry, Shawn).  Send something like a picture of your employees or a bottle of sparkling pomegranate juice.   Just don’t blend into the background of holiday music.

Use your creativity and think of what you’d like to receive, and send that.

Finally, resist the temptation to digitize your signature or to use a signature stamp.  Sign each one personally — your customers can tell.

Just a thought!

Nick

This week, I fired up Adobe® After Effects® CS3 and cranked out a couple of videos.

The first one is a 30-second commercial for Volunteer-o-matic™, an Apple iPhone App created by Bjorn Austraat and selling for 99¢ on the App Store.

Then, while I had the application (and my skills) warmed up, I put together a 2-minute mock interview in which I respond to two specific questions about marketing.  It’s pretty wacky, but it was fun to do.

Update: Several people have asked about the songs in the videos, so here they are.

• The Volunteer-o-matic commercial features “You, Me, and the Bourgeoisie” (also known as the App Store song) by The Submarines.
• The mock interview features “Black Star” by Radiohead and “Standing In The Shower… Thinking” by Jane’s Addiction.

Enjoy!

Extreme Web Personalization (a How-To)

While I was at TuVox, I created quite a few one-of a kind marketing programs.

One really cool idea was personalizing www.tuvox.com based on the domain name the web visitor is coming from.  That is, the website “morphs” depending on whether the visitor is a (1) prospect, (2) partner, or  (3) competitor.

NOTE: If you are seeing a little box to the upper right that says “Nick Ezzo welcomes visitors from XYZ”, then you are experiencing basic personalization.  If you see your company logo, you are experiencing targeted personalization.

At TuVox I took it even further, since I had a library of 350+ demo audio recordings created for our prospects.  In addition to the logo, these visitors get a little audio player that demonstrates what their system would sound like with TuVox.  That is what I refer to as extreme personalization.

All of this is done without the visitor giving up any information or filling out a form.

The reaction I get from most people is “how the heck did you do that?”

How it’s done

This level of personalization is accomplished using a database that resolves a visitor’s IP address to their domain name, which is typically their company name.  The database I use actually has the company name, like this:

192.168.10.10 –> xyzcompany.com –> XYZ Enterprises, Inc.

Then the company name is used to pull information out of a home-grown MySQL database.

The fields in the table control things like which type of page to show (prospect.html, partner.html, competitor.html) and whether a company logo or audio file should be used.

The results

When web personalization is done well, most people have a positive reaction.  It makes the website more memorable, and enables work to get done faster.  The responses I received were overwhelmingly positive.

To be fair, I was contacted by two companies that asked me to take their logo off my site.  I don’t think they grasped that only visitors from their domain would see that page.  Two out of 350 isn’t bad, right?

So let’s hear it for Big Brother.

By the way, if you are reading this article, I have already received an email telling me that you are on my site.

- Nick

In the book “Getting to VITO (The Very Important Top Officer)“, Anthony Parinello describes the 10 steps to get the attention of key decision makers.

Awhile back, I created a demand generation campaign to get the attention of 50 decision makers at 50 insurance companies.

Here is what I did  [view here]:

1. I called the 50 top property and casualty insurance companies in the US and recorded what the caller experience sounded like.  As you can imagine, many of these were pretty bad.
2. I posted all 50 recordings on a landing page, and sent the link to 50 VITOs at 50 companies.
3. I watched the fireworks as these CEOs and VPs clicked — first on their own recordings, then on their competitors recordings.
4. Once I knew who their top competitors were, the inside sales team sent  emails and made phone follow-ups:  “you want to sound better than X and Y, don’t you?”

The results:

Once we qualified out some of the smaller accounts, we booked more than a dozen meetings with insurance companies in North America.

Let’s hear it for VITO!

[view here]

Techniques That Cost Less Than $100 Total

Having spent exactly three weeks looking for my next opportunity, I’d like to share some tips & tricks on how to get your next job.   It’s not magic; you just have to understand how to take the Web 2.0 pieces and assemble them into a job hunting machine.

The secret is this: approach your job search like a marketing campaign.

Guess what you’re marketing: yourself.

By the way, since I am a marketing dweeb professional I can get away with antics like sending Nerf™ pistols to people.

Here’s what I did: Read the remainder of this entry »

Although there is a link at the top of the page that clearly says “Articles“, I might as well throw in a gratuitous plug for my articles.

From my work with TuVox and VisiStat, here are a few of the articles I have written, contributed to, or been quoted in.

The long-haired guy in the plaid shirt is me.

CLICK HERE for some of the recommendations that colleagues have written about my work.

Note: If you’ve worked with me in the past, you can write a recommendation by visiting my Linkedin profile.   Each positive recommendation can earn you one bottle of good wine.

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