If you're new to Internet and e-Mail Marketing technology, or if you're simply curious about Run-time's integrated approach, you may find the following frequently asked questions both informative and thought-provoking.

• What Is SalesExpander?
• What Is "Internet/e-Mail Marketing?"
• Why Should I Use Internet/e-Mail Marketing?
• What Is "Interruption Marketing?"
• What Does "Permission Marketing" Mean?
• What Does " Relationship Marketing" Mean?
• What Is "Word-of-Mouth Marketing?"
• What Is "Viral Marketing?"
• What Does "On Demand" Mean?
• What Does "State of the Art" Mean?
• What Are "Web Forms?"
• What Are "Autoresponders?"
• What Are "Web Analytics?"
• What Is a "Marketing Dashboard?"
• What Is Lifetime Value?
• What Is "Search Engine Optimization" (SEO)?

What Is SalesExpander?

SalesExpander is a state-of-the-art, on-demand, Internet/e-mail marketing application that lets you leverage Permission & Relationship Marketing principles for dramatic increases in your lead capturing, lead conversion, and customer retention capabilities.

With SalesExpander, you turn your Web site into a tireless 24/7 sales force. You maximize lead generation and conversion using the Internet and SalesExpander's advanced, automated e-Mail Marketing technology.

SalesExpander has been designed with the needs of your sales force in mind. Its easy-to-use, Web-based interface lets them respond quickly, and with the right information, to customers and prospects. Using SalesExpander's monitoring capabilities, they can determine whether prospects open their e-mail messages, and whether they click on the links within those messages.

SalesExpander is an excellent tactical tool for achieving strategic Business, Sales, and Marketing objectives. Use it to develop new geographical sales territories, announce and promote new products, promote and follow up on trade shows, and countless other Sales & Marketing activities.

What Is "Internet / e-Mail Marketing?"

It took a while, but after the introduction of the Internet and the popularization of e-mail as a form of business communication, progressive Sales & Marketing professionals began to realize that this new medium was entirely different from what had come before. The old rules no longer applied. They had to come to terms with the facts:

• The Internet is not a passive medium like radio, television, or print media.
• Interruption Marketing -- such as traditional advertising -- is not effective on the Internet, because people are actively searching for information instead of waiting to be entertained.
• Site linking and e-Mail give the Internet a " viral " quality unlike any other medium -- meaning that the right Marketing techniques can produce exponential results at a fraction of the cost of traditional Interruption Marketing.

Why Should I Use Internet / e-Mail Marketing?

People -- and businesses -- use the Internet first and foremost as an information medium. Because more and more people research their purchases on the Internet, it has also become a prime medium for selling. However, Sales & Marketing professionals, after much painful trial and error, eventually came to understand that traditional Interruption Marketing is simply not effective on the Web.

On the Internet, you simply cannot buy attention. Instead you have to make fair exchange with your prospects and customers. If you give them the information they need to make informed decisions on an ongoing basis, they will give you their attention -- and very likely their business.

Fortunately, it turns out that Internet Marketing is in fact much more cost-effective than traditional Interruption Marketing. Why? Because:

• The medium of e-Mail is virtually free.
• The Internet and e-Mail have global reach.
• You can measure results and analyze feedback in real time, so you will know what works and what doesn't.
• You can direct your Marketing effort where your results and analysis show there is the greatest potential.
• The Internet is a powerful medium for Word-of-Mouth and Viral Marketing

What Is "Interruption Marketing"?

Most television, radio, and print advertising can be classified as Interruption Marketing, because it attempts -- quite literally -- to interrupt what its audience is doing in order to present its message. Such advertising relies on creativity and repetition to attract and retain an audience's attention.

While Interruption Marketing may still be the method of choice for many large consumer goods manufacturers, it is increasingly being supported or replaced in small- to medium-sized businesses (particularly for B2B and specialized B2C) by Internet Marketing, because:

• Broadcast time and print space are expensive.
• The reach of broadcast and print ads is limited by the size of the audience tuned in at any given moment.
• Measurement of the affects of an advertising campaign are usually delayed and often only representational (i.e., only a sample of reaction to the campaign is analyzed, and only well after the fact).
• Radio, TV, and print are one-way media -- they do not allow their audience to respond directly, and they do not allow the advertiser to gather information about the audience.

All of these factors make ROI of traditional Interruption Marketing difficult to judge.

What Does "Permission Marketing" Mean?

In Permission Marketing, you obtain permission to market to individuals and businesses in exchange for a specified benefit (such as information, or product discounts, or any other benefit, whether tangible or intangible). The aim of Permission Marketing is to turn prospects into customers and customers into repeat customers.

Run-time's On-Demand applications, including SalesExpander, allow you to stay 'front of mind' with your prospects throughout their sales cycles, so that your company is the natural choice when the time comes to commit to a purchase.

What Does "Relationship Marketing" Mean?

Relationship Marketing is a form of Permission Marketing that uses the relationships you have with existing customers. The aim of Relationship Marketing is to turn valuable customers into regular and loyal customers, maximizing their lifetime value (LTV) to you.

Run-time's On-Demand applications, including SalesExpander , allow you to stay 'front of mind' with your customers throughout their sales cycles, so that your company remains the natural choice when the time comes to commit to another purchase.

What Is "Word-of-Mouth" Marketing?

When a customer uses your products or services and then comments on their value to other potential customers, you are benefiting from word of mouth. If you use techniques that make it easier and more desirable for your customers to pass on the good news, then you are engaged in Word-of-Mouth Marketing. See " What Is 'Viral Marketing'? "

What Is "Viral Marketing"?

Viral Marketing is Word-of-Mouth Marketing that leverages the Internet and e-Mail for exponential results. In order to create a true "idea virus," you must have something truly unique, or of incomparable value, to sell -- or give away. See Seth Godin's Unleashing the Idea Virus for a vivid account of how Viral Marketing works. See " What Is 'Word-of-Mouth Marketing'? "

What Does 'On-Demand' Mean?

"On Demand" describes a service-based approach to application architecture. What this means is that you do not make a major up-front investment in hardware, or in software licensing, before you begin enjoying the benefits of the application. Instead, On-Demand applications tend to be hosted solutions (i.e., the user logs into the vendor's application server and network to use the software, rather than installing the software on a local computer) with "pay-as-you-play" pricing. Such On-Demand applications are gaining in popularity because computer technology is becoming more commoditized, and because many small- to medium-sized businesses are at least as conscious of Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) as they are of Return on Investment (ROI).

The On-Demand approach makes your life simple. We host and manage the system on highly secure, MySQL DB servers running on UNIX systems in multiple, backed-up locations. We take care of all e-mail traffic and bounce backs.

What Does 'State of the Art' Mean?

Simply put, 'state of the art' means that nobody does it better. SalesExpander combines long Sales & Marketing experience with deep Internet Technology expertise. SalesExpander allows you to leverage Run-time's experience and expertise to build and retain your customer base.

What Are "Web Forms?"

In Internet Marketing , you give in order to get. Specifically, you provide something of value -- such as information -- to your prospects and customers in exchange for permission to contact them, usually on an ongoing basis with e-mail.

Web forms allow you to automate the process of gathering contact information and permission to market, as well as the process of responding to requests for information and other items of value. If you use SalesExpander , a prospect submitting information using a Web form automatically receives acknowledgement and access to the requested item of value, while your Marketing database receives the prospect's contact information.

What Are "Autoresponders?"

An autoresponder is an automated means of responding to a request submitted via e-mail or a Web form . SalesExpander's autoresponders turn your Web site and e-mail Marketing into a 24/7 Sales channel, responding to requests in a timely manner.

What Are "Web Analytics?"

Most Web servers gather data about Web site activities and store it in a log file, and most Internet Service Providers give Web site owners access to these logs. However, data is not information. In order to organize data into information, you must ask the appropriate questions of the data.

Web analytics applications start by imposing a framework to provide an interpretation of the logged data, and this is where most inexpensive or freeware Web analytics applications end as well. Needless to say, most freeware Web Analytics products are worth every penny you pay for them.

Good Web analytics applications apply additional logarithms to your Web site traffic to capture information that your Web server was never designed to capture. These applications tell you not only how many visitors came to your site, but also what they did, where they went, how far they drilled down into your content, where they abandoned their search for information, and much, much more.

Web analytics applications can be tied to marketing dashboards to give you a snapshot of all of your Web site's key performance indicators.

What Is a "Marketing Dashboard?"

A marketing dashboard provides a graphical representation of your Internet Marketing key performance indicators, as captured by a Web analytics application. Marketing dashboards are usually displayed as Web pages and can be customized to display the information most essential to your Marketing initiatives.

What Is "Lifetime Value" (LTV)?

It is often said that it costs many times as much to sell to a new customer as it does to sell to an existing customer. Lifetime value (LTV) is the value of repeat sales to a customer over the period of time that customer remains a customer.

Realizing and increasing LTV is the objective of customer loyalty programs. Run-time's LoyaltyExpander product automates your loyalty program, allowing your customers to choose their own rewards and manage their own accounts.

What is "Search Engine Optimization" (SEO)?

Just as in face-to-face sales, the key to Internet selling is to get in front of the prospective customer. On the Internet, you do this by optimizing your site for the various search engines, so that customers looking for your types of products and services find your Web site, as well as the specific pages within your Web site that most interest them.

Optimizing your individual Web pages so that the major search engines rank them highly is an ongoing process that requires keyword phrase research, content refocusing, and continuous testing and improvement. Because careful and continuous monitoring and analysis are required, SEO is best combined with Web analytics applications and Marketing dashboards.

For more information, download the Run-time SEO white paper.