How VARs Can Use The Internet To Improve Customer Retention And Add New Sales

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Length: 11 min, 33 sec

Excerpts from an exclusive interview with Brad Holaway, president of reseller Copperstate Restaurant Technologies, and Jim Roddy, president of Business Solutions

BSM: You’ve been in the channel for 23 years, so you remember when the Internet wasn’t an option for drumming up business and wasn’t a competitor. But now you have an e-mail newsletter and do other things web-related that are helping you grow your business. Can you talk about how those initiatives came about and maybe some of those real-world learnings that you had as you built this?

Holaway: The thing that I’m most excited about right now is the e-mail newsletter that we recently set up. We’ve been doing this for about six months now and I’ve been very, very pleased with that particular initiative. We’ve used a company that another reseller at the RSPA meetings told me about – Constant Contact. What Constant Contact does is they provide the back-end to do all the work of an e-newsletter.

In our history, there’s a lot of dealers I’ve talked to over the years, and everybody wants to set up a newsletter. You start out, you do your first one, and put all the effort in and you say, “Wow. This is great. We’re just going to do this.” By the time you get the first one done, you’re exhausted – because you have to figure out how to print it, how to format it, is the content good?, on and on and on. I have found it not to be workable. We’ve sent out two (e-newsletters) now, and the results have been surprising to me how effective it’s been. Some of the things I had not expected.

BSM: What are some of those things? What are some of those results you’re talking about?

Holaway: The next day, you already have information about who’s read it and how many. Our first one out was a 40% opening rate. You never know when you send out a paper newsletter how many people are going to open this thing. But I actually saw not only what percentage, but I could go in and see who opened it. One of the really surprising things was one person that had opened it 12 times to look at our newsletter. I’m not even that interested in it! I told the salesperson who was working that customer, “Did you realize they opened the newsletter 12 times?”

This is only a portion of this exclusive interview. For the complete podcast, go to above media player.