Many small to medium-sized businesses rely heavily on marketing tips and advice that they can get for free from the Internet; at least in the early years of their business.  While this is fine and dandy, your business’s marketing efforts need to be specific and catered to what matters most to your target market and to your current customers. So, I have a few quick tips for you which I think will help you get a better response rate from all your marketing efforts.  To increase the success of your mailing campaigns, advertising, email marketing and the number of leads you get from your website or events, when marketing to clients:

“Use the least amount of words as you can to get your message across! Less is More!”

Here are 2 reasons why, with marketing, LESS is MORE:

#1: When you use as few words as possible, you will be removing all of the extra “stuff and fluff” and keep only the key points of your marketing message highlighted.  This will, in turn, make your message clear, more focused and easier for the reader to understand what you want them to know or do in a timely manner.

#2: Just like you and your business, the people coming in contact with your marketing are BUSY!  When someone reads a piece of marketing collateral or sees an advertisement, they do a quick scan of it.  If it looks too long right off the bat, many people will decide not to even invest the time required to read through it.

A GREAT acronym to remember when creating marketing is K.I.S.S.!

K - Keep 

I – It

S - Simple &

S – Straightforward

How does ExchangeDefender “K.I.S.S.”?

At ExchangeDefender, we keep our marketing simple and straightforward in a variety of ways. First, we have identified our niche and our target market. Second, our product line is very specific, easy to understand, and we market the features that our partners are most interested in. Third, we don’t hide anything; all of our services come packaged all-inclusive to create more profitable offerings for our partners. Lastly, we tell partners what they need to know to have a better more successful partnership with us.

When marketing becomes clear, more focused AND more people actually read the whole message that you are trying to relay – you significantly increase the potential of your efforts!  “K.I.S.S.” is a great way to leverage your marketing to be sure that your client base is receiving the information that you want them to get in an easy fashion for all parties. Also, it is also great to incorporate a call to action with your marketing message so that the customer will know what to do with the information that they are reading, thus also creating a quicker result from your marketing.

Stephanie Hasenour
VP Marketing, ExchangeDefender
stephanie@ownwebnow.com
(877) 546-0316 x735

From all of us at ExchangeDefender, we wish you a very Happy Thanksgiving!

Sincerely,

The ExchangeDefender Team

In the coming weeks I’m going to be taking a, “Did you know?” approach to my blog as I keep running across items that are offered in our feature set that folks find surprising that we offer that would have saved them time had they known. These items are part of ExchangeDefender that folks don’t come across often but they are there. The first topic we’ll touch are White listing and trusting senders.

One of the more common inquiries that arise out of the Trusted Sender is why does it seem to not work consistently. Here’s the logic behind the Trust Sender function in ExchangeDefender. Trust Sender will in essence white list that specific sender address to that specific recipient address. The times when folks over look these details and it turns into a problem are as follows:

Domain administrators often “Trust Sender” from SPAM Czar under the assumption that the sender is being trusted for the domain, the feature set has not changed it will still white list that sender to that specific recipient.

Senders that use disposable email addresses like carlos+is+cool+3425223@exchangedefender.com work around the mechanism, since the from address is always different, so this type of sender is better suited for a domain level whitelist.

That takes us to the options for whitelist formatting. ExchangeDefender will access the following types of entries:

user@domain.com Basic per user whitelist
domain.com Domain level whitelist
a.domain.com Third level domain whitelist
123.123.123.123 IP address whitelist
123.123.123 /24 whitelist

All this information can actually be found in our Knowledge Base inside of our support portal.

Carlos Lascano
VP Support Services, ExchangeDefender
carlos@ownwebnow.com
(877) 546-0316 x737

Whether you are a current partner of ExchangeDefender or just interested in working with us, ExchangeDefender University is a great resource for you to use in order to have a successful partnership with ExchangeDefender.

During the rebranding and rebuilding of the new ExchangeDefender site, we have added all kinds of new information to ExchangeDefender University. We have a Training section where we have all of our training videos and deployment guides available to assist you with the set-up and implementation of our services. There is a section titled Start-up Guides which includes deployment guides and corresponding instructional videos for some of our most popular services. There is also a Partner Resource section that includes everything that you will need to be profitable with ExchangeDefender Included in Partner resources are links to the following:

· Marketing Collateral

· Current Promotions and Special Offers

· Profitability Best Practices

· Frequently Asked Questions

· Upcoming Events & Webinars

· Partner Testimonies

There are also links to all of our other websites, like the Support Portal, our Corporate ExchangeDefender Blog, the Network Operations (NOC) Blog, and our Knowledge Base.

In addition to all of that, there is a step-by-step walk through process of how to successfully work with ExchangeDefender. It runs through a Portal Tour, Account Management, Placing an Order, Managing Services, and how to go about Getting Help. Just click on the big blue arrow to get started. When you are finished there is a link in the last step that will bring you back to the ExchangeDefender University homepage.

Visit http://www.exchangedefender.com/XDUniversity.php!

ExchangeDefender University is a great tool to utilize – and a great site to bookmark and refer to! Please take advantage of it – it is there to help you every step of the way! And of course, if you have questions…don’t hesitate to Contact Us!

Stephanie Hasenour
VP Marketing, ExchangeDefender
stephanie@ownwebnow.com
(877) 546-0316 x735

Don’t get me wrong, by win, I mean limit the bleeding to as minimal as possible. Let’s face it, nobody wins during an outage, everybody gets yelled at by someone else for the entire duration and thereafter. Knowledge of technology goes out the window and gives way to frustration and anger at other folks. I’m going to keep my opinions out of the post and just recap the some of the “best” solutions we saw come from partners. And I’ll additional preface this by saying, this isn’t meant to imply what could have been done, because it’s not my place to say that, period. But these were some things that I saw executed that worked for partners and their clients and I figured I would share.

This list isn’t in any sort of order…

Plan A – LiveArchive – Contact Export Combo

This was pretty impressive to me, out of the gate. I had a partner that rolled their clients to LiveArchive and they actually had links on their desktop to do this, like we recommend. The first person to pull this off, had it the easiest for sure. Most smartphones support Contact exports from ActiveSync to the phone SD Card. So he was able to have them have their email via LiveArchive and still not have their contacts disappears once we went to the Dial tone migration route.

Once we enabled that, we had another partner that had the same idea but a day too late, so he had to go fetch the contacts from the old OST to put them into the Temp Mailbox to facilitate the process above. Then he had to move the contacts under a different contacts folder to avoid duplication once we merged the data back.

Plan B – Migrate to Rockerduck, like yesterday!

We had a few of those that basically saw a pattern of hardware issues and limitations on the Exchange 2007 software and decided they’d had enough and they moved to Rockerduck on day 1. Yes, they took a hit on the man hours required to export then upload PSTs, but this group of folks were done with the outage as soon as those PSTs finished uploading.

Plan C – Find an ExchangeDefender employee and hire some people to beat them with bats on sight.

I was hoping they would find Vlad, but that didn’t happen. Obviously, there are great variables that prohibit or make it more difficult for folks to try do items A & B, and I understand there is a cost in labor that was assumed at the time of deployment and it is hard to take that hit again. We understand and we have a plan in place to migrate all users that do not opt out to 2010 via online moves. This is going to take some voodoo work to make it seamless but our Exchange team has a plan designed to make it happen. Unfortunately, some of the prep work caused some extra authentication windows to pop up for already irritated end users, but this is one of those “one step backwards to go to two steps forward” scenarios.

Carlos Lascano
VP Support Services, ExchangeDefender
carlos@ownwebnow.com
(877) 546-0316 x737

Companies invest a lot of time, money, and resources into the creation of their products and services. Yet, these valuable resources usually dive deeply into how their product works or what its function is – while often ignoring or rather wrongly focusing on how to attract clients to what they are selling. This is where marketing plays its role.

Any outreach that comes into contact with a prospective client in any way, shape, or form is performing a marketing function. The question is, do companies know how to perform marketing functions in a way that accurately represents their organization while effectively reaching their target market?

My hope with this post is to paint a vivid picture of the difference between a client’s needs and wants and also layout some common problems or challenges that businesses face while trying to figure out the best strategy that they should use when marketing to their client base.

Let’s start with the idea behind the title of this post…

“Find a need and fill it – Is this really the key to successful marketing?”

In the past, businesses were built on satisfying customer’s needs.  While this is still the case, however, now, it’s more about customer’s wants.  The real question is if people actually understand what they need vs. what they want?

Need – Loosely defined as something that is necessary for survival.

Want – Loosely defined as a wish, craving, demand, or desire for something.

Many needs can be translated into wants when the right message is sent to consumers. People may not need to get the latest brand new thing, but they want to feel that sense of security, excitement and success that goes along with having something shiny and new to show off.

As with everything in life, there are always multiple opinions on theories or ideas and marketing is no exception. Just because some marketing advice is repeated often, doesn’t necessarily make it true or applicable in all situations especially in business. I both agree and disagree with this statement and will explain why.

“Find a Need, Fill a Need”

If you follow the “find a need and fill it” marketing strategy you will be inviting commodity pricing. Think about this… People need a computer network set up … but they want someone who understands their business, and that will suggest things to make it run smoother before an outage occurs.

People price shop for what they need. Most things that people need have multiple alternatives and competition in the marketplace. Therefore, people tend to buy things that they need based on cost by going for the most cost-effective option. Alternatively, people will pay premium prices for things that they want without even thinking about it. Take Apple for example, Apple understands that people will buy what they want regardless of the price that they have to pay to get it. There is a certain allure and sense of satisfaction when purchasing something that one wants. The “Find a need and fill it,” approach is great for getting in the door with a client, particularly if you’re the first to knock and their need is urgent…nonetheless, that approach may not always win you the client or retain the long term business that you are inevitably going for. After that point is when you market to clients based on their wants.

People will pay for the intangible things – are you proving these?

“Find a Want, Fill a Want”

On the flipside, if you follow the opposite “Find a want, fill a want” strategy it could lead a new marketing revolution for your company. Of course there is always a process in finding both needs and wants, it is essential that both be filled. To fill a need is not just about filling the gaps but to really provide a solution – and a lasting one at that – thus creating a long-term revenue stream. To satisfy your customers you must both fill the need and keep your customers happy by giving them want they want. But the trick to this is…When finding what they want; you can turn that want into a need by offering the solution to their problem. Think about Technology.  Everybody NEEDS it, but if a company also provides stellar support and excellent customer service, you fill the need and also provide a premium service making it a want and therefore more attractive to a prospective client.

How do you find your customers’ needs?

It is not always easy to find one’s needs. Watch for trigger phrases from your clients – People will rarely say that they need your product or service. What they will do, however, is lament the lack of something, or talk about a specific problem or even state an aspiration for something. For example, Instead of a customer saying “I need some new accounting software” they will say something like “I can’t ever get a handle on my receivables.” This then will open the door for you to offer a solution to their problem thus making your offering both a want and a need for them. Also, this will make your company stickier to your clients because you will be providing them with more than just a commodity that the “next guy” could offer them. They will find value in your offering thus making client retention much easier.

ExchangeDefender’s Approach

At ExchangeDefender, we go to market with both strategies in mind – filling needs AND wants. For example, ExchangeDefender’s LiveArchive product is an enterprise-grade business continuity platform that lets you resume work right where you left off if the Internet connection was interrupted or other technical glitches got in the way of getting things done. The best part of all is that LiveArchive is always on, constantly archiving your sent and received mail, so there is no maintenance or management to worry about in case of an outage. So, when doing marketing for LiveArchive we market it as a feature that you want to have to make your offering more attractive to your prospective clients and it will most definitely be something that you need in the event of an outage. We look to fill the essential needs of our clients while also providing them with intangible things that they want like, great customer service and technical support, and also the intangible satisfaction of knowing that if an outage were to happen that they will already have business continuity built-in and in place that they can rely on when they need it.

Final Thoughts

Marketing is very “cloudy” because there is not a right or wrong strategy. The bottom line with marketing is that people buy and will continue to invest in products and services that solve their problems. People don’t necessarily buy something just because they need it or want it. Naturally, price, or ‘value’ will always be an issue with most people but if you have the best solution to solve their problems, then price will be much less of a concern. The goal should always be to create win-win situations for both you and your clients – so find your niche and protect it!

How can I help?

Please let me know if there is anything that I can do in terms of helping you about with marketing.  We have a ton of resources to offer our partners including marketing collateral so please take advantage of that and don’t hesitate to contact me!

Stephanie Hasenour
VP, Marketing, ExchangeDefender
stephanie@ownwebnow.com
(877) 546-0316 x735

This week has been dedicated to improving the core mechanics behind our Exchange Defender Compliance Archive software and increasing the functionality it offers. This product was originally designed over two years ago, with limited functionality. This product has definitely been one of the more challenging software platforms to design and implement on a large scale. However, it’s been a very enjoyable program to design and launch. This week has been very productive and we have got a lot of new features and new tools to talk about!

· Misc. rending issues have been resolved.

· Elevated domain level access.

· Message download (.msg format).

· Import Tool ( Still being developed )

One of the biggest challenges when creating front-end GUI browser software is getting things to look and respond the same way across several browser platforms. It seems (chrome, Mozilla, opera, IE) all have their own recipe when it comes to rendering different component. One of the first issues we addressed this week was minor rending issues, increased performance and logic loops for displaying messages in the browser. None of these were huge issues, but an eye sore none the less.

We’ve had this request for a while and we finally implemented (Elevated Domain-Level Searching). This new feature allows domain admins to examine messages inside any user’s mailbox that is within the selected domain. Using this feature, you have full control inside of that mailbox just as if you were signed into that compliance mailbox. However, there is currently no way to wildcard search all mailboxes within the same domain at the same time. The processing load that would generate would be tremendous and would not be a pleasant searching experience.

One of the more elaborate features, (at least behind the scenes) is message downloading. In the past you could download messages in .eml format, which left a lot to be desired. Well, we’ve changed that this week. Now when you request a message download, it will generate the file in .msg format! Looking at this from a developer’s perspective and for anyone who has ever worked with Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook controls will understand the heartache in this area of development. The control exposes a lot of information, if you just want to look at elements and examine a message contents. However, the second you want to use the component to perform any useful operations that’s when it becomes a challenge.

The last and most important area of concern was importing mailboxes into the compliance system. This is something we’ve been working on and it should be ready in a few weeks. We’ve made a tremendous amount of progress with this tool and are very excited for its launch. When designing this tool, we’ve put message integrity at the top of the list. Some of the concerns we had about this software was handling duplicate messages and keeping them from being inserted into the archive mailbox. We also added the ability to handle program/internet crashes while messages are being imported and the ability to resume the import process.

Hank Newman
VP Development, ExchangeDefender
hank@ownwebnow.com

Dear Own Web Now Partners & Clients,

At approximately noon yesterday the data center hosting the hub of our US operations suffered a major power failure that momentarily interrupted all network services. More redundant services resumed operations immediately (ExchangeDefender) while others started recovering through emergency systems around 5 PM EST. We are incredibly sorry for the impact this has made on your operations and promise not just to compensate you through service credits but also enhance service redundancy so that this never happens again.

On behalf of the whole ExchangeDefender team, I am sorry we put you into this situation. Much like you we’ve spent a part of yesterday in the dark with no clear ETA on when the services would be restored or how this failure could have happened in the first place.

The facility that our main US operations are in boasts N+2 redundancy, over 30 days of generator fuel and is one of the largest and most reliable in the world. As a matter of fact, we consolidated our central operations here due to the issues we had in California and Florida. The facility has had an incredible service record and has allowed us to provide the same level of service to you. Yesterday the facility experienced a failure in Automatic Transfer Switch (ATS) equipment designed to switch the power feed from live utility power to the power generators in the event of power loss. This was the piece of equipment that was designed to keep power available and while it is also redundant with A/B feeds, the data center distribution routers were not connected to both power banks. While our equipment remained powered on, the network connectivity remained down. This was the technical root of the issue.

Thankfully spare ATS was available and the utility, data center and supporting vendors were all available on site within the hour and completed the replacement within 5 hours of the service interruption. We did our best to keep everyone informed of everything we knew every step of the way through our Facebook page (http://www.facebook.com/ExchangeDefender) and our Twitter @xdnoc and @ExchangDefender.

Our operating procedures also call for use of emergency failover systems should the primary systems be down for more than 4 hours. At roughly 3:30 we began restoring services to our web sites, redundant Exchange clusters and continued restoring services well into the night as the data center facility restored full operations.

ExchangeDefender inbound service was not affected by this incident as it’s massively redundant through multiple data centers. However, a disruption to the major central control in Dallas effectively flooded the failover sites and some of our partners reported email delays from minutes to even two hours. Worse, our Exchange hosting clients were impacted for 4-6 hours and with the lack of ExchangeDefender LiveArchive to back them up, it completely failed them. Again, we are sorry for this issue and will address it immediately.

At approximately 10PM EST I held a webinar for all our partners to explain in detail what happened, how we responded, what we learned and what we intend to do to fix it going forward. You can watch the webinar here (requires GoToMeeting codec)

Going Forward

First of all, we will be providing service credits to everyone that was affected which includes our entire USA client base.

Second, we will begin deployment of redundant control systems for ExchangeDefender: placing additional admin servers across our failover sites, adding more capacity to the existing ones and most importantly providing geographic redundancy to ExchangeDefender LiveArchive.

Finally, we will be adding redundancy to our Exchange 2010 networks in USA.

Expect to see major changes this quarter. While this issue never occurred before and we don’t expect it to occur again, we have learned the hard way that we need to greatly improve certain areas of the product in particular LiveArchive.

Personally, I put my name and reputation on the product and on the service we deliver. I believe we are the best and the solutions that we offer in LiveArchive and ExchangeDefender feature-wise are without comparison. We will make sure that all of the features, not just the inbound mail processing, live up to the 100% uptime expectation you should have and we have maintained on our inbound service for the past decade.

My staff has worked tirelessly throughout the day and night to keep you informed and restore service as fast as possible. I want to personally thank you for your professionalism and the way you treated us during this difficult time. While it’s easy to lose composure and patience when services are down and there is limited visibility/ETA on resolution, almost universally the comments included “Well that sucks but I’m glad it’s you dealing with this and not me.” While I appreciate it, I do feel we failed you.

Our operations will remain in Dallas at the existing data center facility because simply put – they are the best. Even with the power incident which was the first one that we’ve experienced in nearly a decade of working with them, this is the kind of an issue Microsoft, Google and Amazon experience on a weekly basis. Cloud services are about providing an affordable IT solution through massively scalable equipment which is incredibly complex – it is not foolproof nor easy to fix when it goes down but the benefits are that you and your clients are not on the hook for a repair bill, equipment or the amount of manpower required to manage it all. Best of all, problems such as those experienced yesterday can be minimized and we will begin to work on that today.

Again, I apologize for the inconvenience this has caused you and your clients. I know we are fortunate to earn your business and the trust you put in us and our features that are designed to keep you up and running when your systems are affected. I’m attaching some resources that you can pass on to your staff or your clients as you see fit. I look forward to talking to everyone that was affected by this and while I work my way through the messages, emails and callback requests I hope the videos and resources we provided so far offer some clarity as to what happened and what we intend to do next.

Thank you for your business.

Sincerely,

Vlad Mazek, MCSE

CEO Own Web Now Corp

Resources:

ExchangeDefender NOC: http://www.ownwebnow.com/noc

XD Twitter Feed: http://www.twitter.com/xdnoc

ExchangeDefender Twitter Feed: http://www.twitter.com/exchangdefender

Partner Webinar about the incident: http://www.ownwebnow.com/media/Cloudpocalypse.wmv

In a few moments we will begin the upgrade of our network to ExchangeDefender 7. The process will be seamless to our users and we don’t expect any issues. We are prepared for the unexpected issues and here are some suggestions:

1. Sign up for the Network Operations Blog updates (http://www.ownwebnow.com/noc)

2. If you don’t like web / RSS feeds, check out our Twitter feed (http://www.twitter.com/XDNOC)

3. Make sure you have distributed the User Guides to your end users so they can navigate the new User Interface. Link to end user collateral is here.

During The Upgrade

Check the NOC first (web / @xdnoc). We will be posting updates there and to the Twitter feed as soon as we identify and document a bug.

If you see an issue that has not been addressed, open a support request at https://support.ownwebnow.com

Call us at +1 (407) 209-3276 if the issue is urgent. Note: This number will be discontinued after the launch on June 1, 2011.

Earlier today we sent a newsletter announcing the launch of ExchangeDefender 7, the integration between Shockey Monkey and Kaseya as well as the educational content that we’re creating for everyone looking to get to the cloud.

Unfortunately, one line caught the eye of many of you:

“Over the past month and a half we have been working with so many of our partners on ExchangeDefender 7 that I’m really sad this will be the final newsletter as Own Web Now Corp.”

Apparently, some of you stopped reading at that point

Allow me to explain: Over the past 2 years we spent significant resources into promoting and marketing ExchangeDefender. It is the backbone of our communications infrastructure, business continuity as well as our biggest and most popular product. Everyone we talk to knows about ExchangeDefender, nobody knows about Own Web Now Corp.

So we’re rebranding and retiring Own Web Now Corp and going forward will consolidate our brands and sites under ExchangeDefender. This has been announced at a number of blog posts and previous newsletters so I feel silly having to state it here again but for the record, we’re not going out of business.

Sincerely,
Vlad Mazek, MCSE
CEO, Own Web Now Corp