It all started as a calculated approach to use email marketing to register sales and marketing folks for a live webinar.

The concept for the webinar is straightforward enough: a live interview on April 13 of leading sales and marketing executives on their innovative approaches to outbound sales and marketing.

The live webinar is entitled:  The Outbound Renaissance – How Faster and Smarter Prospecting is Dramatically Improving B2B Demand Generation.

I made the fateful decision to choose an image from the Renaissance period to which I take full responsibility.

We are overwhelmed by the puzzling reception to our email.

Without disrupting our testing, I can confirm the following:

• Swirling rumors of the uncanny resemblance of the image to Umberto Milletti, CEO & Founder of InsideView.
• Excessive clicking on one of the registration links caused disruption to our server farm.
• Extraordinary landing page visits that can be construed as outright gawking.

To preserve the integrity of our test and in the name of marketing science, I would ask that you please do not sensationalize our webinar but rather, recommend to your colleagues the webinar based on the educational content alone.

Ask your colleagues to responsibly click on one of the registration buttons and register for our webinar in an unemotional and unbiased manner.

The results of our test will be presented at the webinar.

I hope that this blog post will help to rectify this situation and preserve the integrity of our test.