Introduction

One of the many benefits of Vuture Connect is that it allows firms to leverage the deep, personal relationships that partners or other attorneys may have with their clients.  By sending a personalised invitation to an event, or a personal recommendation along with a newsletter, the likelihood of the contact reading and responding to the email is vastly increased.

 

Thinking about real world examples, we have considered how best to use Vuture Connect to increase the takeup for events and newsletters, while not over-burdening partners and other senior users with “marketing mailings”.  We have outlined a few scenarios and suggested some best practice ideas below.

 

• Scenario 1  - Limited spaces are available for a VIP event - ask partners to invite their VIPs first
• Scenario 2 - Asking partners and other senior users to chase their VIP contacts who ignore your initial marketing mailing.
• Scenario 3 - Partners are reluctant to put their contacts in the CRM, but want to send personalised mailings.
• Scenario 4 - Partners do not engage with Vuture or with the Marketing process.  They prefer to forward invites and newsletters via Outlook
• Scenario 5 - Partners would like to add a comment to an alert to which they have contributed, or to a piece of thought leadership they have authored. 

 

Scenario 1 - Limited spaces are available for a VIP event

You want to fill up your VIP event by offering the partners the chance to invite their VIP contacts first.  If there are any spaces left after that, you then want to send a mass mailing to non-VIPs, to fill up the spaces.  Here are the suggested actions:

1. Build a standard marketing invite and turn it into a VC-ready invite using personal message tags, a Deadline date, Email Options and Custom Fields.  
2. Email your partners, including a link to the VC URL and ask them to access VC; sending the invite to their VIP contacts.  Explain that their VIP contacts are getting the invite first. Give them a deadline by which this must be completed, after which the event will be opened up to other contacts.
3. At the deadline date, check the View Stats for RSVPs.  If the event is full, no further comms to the partners are required, just the usual Reminders to Attend sent to the contacts.
4. If the event is not full, send the mass mailing to the non-VIP contacts.  You have two options here.  
   1. If you want to include in this mailing some VIPs who did not respond the first time you will need a new page ID (Vuture will not allow you to send the same email to the same person twice).  To get a new page ID, copy the original mailing to a new page, with a new page ID, remove the personal message tags and edit the Page Options and Custom Fields so it is no longer a VC mailing and send it out as a normal marketing mailing.
   2. If you want to send the invite to contacts who did not receive the Connect mailing you can either edit the Connect mailing to turn it back into a marketing mailing (this will not go to people who have already received it), or copy it and create a new page for the mailing.  Link this page using site linking to prevent it going to contacts who have already received the Connect mailing.
5. Once you have your list of RSVPs you can take over the normal process of reminding to attend, before the date and on the date; sending out the follow up emails and post-event surveys.  Don’t forget that if you have the Events App module as part of your Vuture package you can use it to send “on the day” messages to partners - “Your client xxx has arrived and is downstairs.  Please come down to greet them”.

Scenario 2 - Use the Partners and other senior End Users to chase their VIP contacts who ignore your initial marketing mailing.

In this scenario, you arrange an event and send out a mass mailing from Marketing in the usual way.  However, you notice that some prime VIPs have not responded; maybe nobody has replied from a critically important client company, for example.  You want the senior End Users to send out “Have you seen this invite?  It is perfect for you”  emails to their VIP clients, reminding them to register.

 

You will need to know on whose Connect list the missing VIP clients appear.  If you are using the integration with InterAction you can check this by looking at the client contact record in InterAction and checking the Marketing Lists they appear on.  You should have named your Vuture Connect lists carefully; for example: Vuture Connect Contacts for PartnerXYZ 2022.  You will be able to see, from IA, on which Connect lists the contacts appear.

1. Create your marketing invite as normal and send it to your mailing list.  Monitor responses to ensure that you get a good spread of replies from strategically-important clients.  If you do not get enough, consider moving to step 2.
2. Copy your marketing invite and turn it into a Vuture Connect page by adding personal message tags, Email Options and Custom Fields.
3. Send the Connect URL to your partners.  You could name the individuals for each partner (depending on numbers involved) or you could include a spreadsheet with Client Name, Partner Name and List Name as columns.
4. Because you copied the invite and therefore created a new page ID at step 2 above, the partners can send the invite to contacts who have already received the first version, with a subject line such as “This is an event you shouldn’t miss” or as appropriate.
5. To make full use of the Mailing History screen in Connect, consider rewording the subject line of the invitation when the partner sends it - changing from “Invitation to XYZ Event” to “A Personal Invitation to XYZ Event'' for example.  It will make it clearer in reporting to see that the contact received the invite in both versions.

Scenario 3 - Partners are reluctant to put their contacts in the CRM, but want to send personalised mailings. 

In this scenario, partners hesitate to share their contacts with the firm’s CRM.  They are concerned that their contacts might get over-mailed if they share them. Vuture Connect standalone means that partners do not have to share their contacts with the CRM, or with each other; only with the Contacts Module.  

1. Upload a list of contacts from Excel, as a .csv file, to the Contacts Module.
2. Use Email List Access to make them available to that single Connect user only.  Other Connect users (other partners) cannot see or mail these contacts.

All the usual Vuture email tracking and reporting is then available for the Marketing team to measure the success of the mailing, but the contacts are protected from being mailed by other users.

Scenario 4 - Partners do not engage with Vuture or with the Marketing process.  They prefer to forward invites and newsletters via Outlook:  Sometimes using Forward and sometimes as an attachment to an email.

This is a common occurrence, due to the fact that clients will more readily open an email from a partner when it is sent one-to-one from the partner’s email address.  Clients will respond better to a one-to-one email from a name they know, but this does not mean that Outlook is the only way forward; Vuture Connect can also handle this scenario perfectly.  

One problem with Outlook or other email providers is that there is usually no way for the Marketing team to tell if the partner forwarded the email to the client or not.  Or, if he or she did send the email, did the client receive it?  Did they open it?  There is also no easy way for the client to unsubscribe reliably from these mailings.

Another problem is that carefully-crafted email layouts can get jumbled in the Outlook email process and often lose structure when they arrive, missing elements on the page, altering fonts and generally making a mess of the email.  Vuture Connect allows a personalised mailing to be sent, while offering all the protection and reporting that the Marketing mailings get from Vuture.

1. Build the marketing email in the usual way.  Copy it and adjust the copy for use with Vuture Connect (Email Options, Custom Fields, Deadline Date and Message Tags).
2. Explain to partners that due to invites and newsletters getting mangled via Outlook and other emails, they will not be supplied as forwarding copies.  But, by using Connect, the partner can send out the mailing as a one-to-one communication which will appear in the client’s inbox as genuinely “from them”.  

From the partner’s point of view, their goal has been achieved.  The client’s experience will be dramatically improved by receiving emails from a name they recognise, personalised to them, which do not get corrupted in the Outlook process.  The firm can know that they are compliant with the requirement to allow easy and reliable Unsubscribes, and the Marketing team can track and report on the email as if it were part of a standard Vuture mailing.

Scenario 5 - Partners would like to add a comment to an alert to which they have contributed, or to a piece of thought leadership they have authored.  The Marketing team would also like to send out the alert, but not send it to any VIPs on the VC lists (avoiding duplicate mailings).

A piece of thought leadership or a personal contribution to an alert will always be more meaningful to a client if the author themselves forwards it on to the client.  However, clients do not necessarily want to receive the mailing twice. To make this situation easy and stress-free for both the Marketing team and the partners using VC, here is one suggested approach, using InterAction:

With InterAction

1. Create the Alert in the usual way as a marketing mailing.
2. Copy the Alert to a new email and turn the copy into a Connect mailing (Email Options, Custom Fields, Deadline Date and Message Tags)
3. Share it with the partners in Vuture Connect, giving them a deadline and explaining that the mass mailing will go out on xxx date.  Anyone they choose not to share it with personally, will receive the mass mailing later.
4. On the deadline date, open the mailing list you plan to use, in InterAction.  Search the list for the Activity of Email Sent for this mailing name.  You will be able to identify those contacts to whom the partner(s) have already sent this mailing.  Mark and Remove the contacts from this list.
5. Send the mass mailing to the rest of the contacts remaining on the list.

If you do not object to clients potentially receiving the mailing twice, you could ignore step 4 above and simply send the mass mailing to every contact on the list.