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Challenge: Lead generation.
Solution: Create educational webcasts about the specialized medical equipment for physicians who may use the aesthetic lasers to beautify their patients.
Results: Increased sales leads, rising site traffic, captive prospect audiences 24 times a year and 1 percent to 1.5 percent conversion rates from e-mail blasts to webcast audiences.
Cynosure’s name combines what it is with what it does. Taken from an ancient mariner’s term about a guiding star, cynosures are now focal points of alluring beauty and starlike light.
Perhaps it’s only fitting that the Westford, Mass.-based manufacturer of aesthetic lasers made a visual choice for an aspect of its direct marketing efforts. Starting in August 2008, Cynosure turned its eyes and its direct marketing efforts toward webcasts.
Facilitated by technology from Norwood, Mass.-based digital marketing firm Cramer, Cynosure is creating 24 webcasts a year that the company hopes will prove alluring to the 29,000 physicians who have opted in to participate in digital communications with Cynosure.
“That’s your time right in front of that physician,” says Cynosure Web Manager Laurie Barron. “It’s almost like a sales call, one-on-one with a physician speaking to another physician about our product. So that’s great face time, even though it is electronically.”
Christine Zajac, Cynosure’s marketing communications director, says the point of the visual communication is to aid its lead generation program, titled “We Have a Plan: Let’s Talk.” Let’s Talk pulls e-mail addresses from various areas of Cynosure’s marketing mix—from direct sales visits made to doctors’ offices to lead-capturing e-mail blasts Cynosure arranges through third parties, such as key publications. Then Cynosure adds addresses it gathers through trade shows and its workshops and Web site.
The physicians who learn about the webcasts through Cynosure’s e-mails can then register online.
Zajac says Cynosure prefers to segment the physicians and target them according to specialty, when appropriate, in order to optimize clickthrough, registration and webcast attendance. While some more general webcasts, such as “7 ‘Must-Dos’ to Market Yourself Online in a Tough Economy,” can be promoted to the general list, specific webcasts need to be marketed directly to the plastic surgeon or dermatologist who may be interested in watching.
Using this registration information as guidance, Cynosure can star names for specialized webcasts and send out about 7,000 e-mails. When an average of 200 physicians register, they instantly receive e-mail confirmation with the webcast date, URL and system test URL. On the webcast date, Zajac says, typically half of the registrants attend.
“We usually start about three to four weeks out, and we usually do about three e-mail blasts, one definitely either the day before or the day of the webcast,” Barron says of the efforts to register physicians for the webcasts.
Cynosure ensures the webcast content is educational and promotes its products—especially, considering many of the webcast viewers may have just purchased Cynosure products and would like to see how other physicians use them, what kind of results they get and how the doctors market those results to prospective patients.
“When we do one webcast, the other archived webcasts also get additional hits,” Zajac adds.
Far from ending when the webcast is finished, this lead generation effort serves as a way for Cynosure to continue the dialog with physicians. E-mail and direct mail communications are added to sales representative follow-ups. The representatives say that the webcast-generated leads are quality.
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