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Newsletter - April 2007

5 Steps to Building a Killer Email Strategy

Done the right way, email marketing can be one of the most effective ways to spread your company’s message and expand your customer base. But far too many small businesses throw money away by starting their email campaigns without an effective strategy. Read on to discover five steps to creating a successful email campaign.

Boost Email Success with these Vital Tips

1. Identify your objectives
Before you start any email campaign (as with any marketing initiative), first define your objectives . Are you trying to increase name recognition, establish your company’s experience or trustworthiness, boost newsletter signups, drive traffic to your Website, attract new customers, or are you aiming for a combination of the above?

If your campaign has more than one objective, prioritize before you start. While most companies would love to achieve all of the above, trying to hit too many notes in one email will dilute your message.

2. Define the target audience
You use different language to explain things to different people in your everyday life; similarly, you should do the same in your email communications. Before you create an email campaign, think about who your target audience is going to be. Is it another business or a consumer? What is your target audience’s age range, gender, and education level? What are their interests and hobbies?

3. Develop a content strategy
Once you know who will be reading your emails, you can design your content to strike the right chords with your emails’ recipients. To be sure you have the right tone and information, create a profile of an average member of your target audience. Then hone your content to appeal to that person’s tastes and needs.

4. Set the frequency and send schedule
Sending your email at the right time can have a huge impact on your open rates. For example, B2B recipients are often busiest on Monday mornings, and are therefore most likely to throw away an email without reading it.

Frequency is also very important. If you send your mails too far apart, your readers may stop looking forward to them, and you will no longer keep your Website fresh in their minds. But if you send too often, you run the risk of annoying them and losing them from your email list.

5. Evaluate results and tweak the strategy accordingly
The perfect email campaign is always a work in progress. Use the broadcast activity report (such as open rates and click-through activity) to help keep a close track of the success of each email campaign in achieving your goals – and how well those goals improve the profits of your company. Then, constantly look for ways to improve.

If you would like to evaluate the effectiveness of your email marketing activities, or wish to create your own email marketing strategy, please call 01242 570330 for a no-obligation consultation.

"World Wide Web" Marketing on a Local Scale

One of the many advantages of online marketing is that you can reach a global audience with very little expense and effort. But if you are running a local business, global reach isn’t really a strong draw for you.

Is it worth using the power of the Internet to advertise when you are only looking to attract local business? The answer is an unequivocal yes – and here are some tips on how to do it!

How to Apply Internet Marketing to Local SMEs

1. Local Search Engine Marketing - Search engines have streamlined and improved their functionality to appeal to local businesses. For example, you can specify that you want to target a specific city, region, or even people who are searching for businesses within a certain distance from an address. Pay-per-click advertising systems do this using a combination of keyword analysis and location indicated by IP addresses.

2. Local Business Advertising - Google also offers local advertisers the opportunity to show up when searchers view the area with Google Maps. For example, people can search for car dealers in a specific area and have a number of local businesses show up, along with a link to your Website and your address.

3. Targeted Search Engine Optimization - One of the best ways to help people find you through search engines is to target a very specific niche. A particular region or city is a wonderful niche to use in your optimization. Most searchers quickly realize that using a term like "restaurant" alone won’t help them find eateries in their area. They will quickly learn to include the region in their search – and if you’ve optimized your pages for that region, then people in your area who are actively looking for their local restaurant will find you quickly and easily.

The same principle applies to just about every other type of company. People frequently search for stores, restaurants, car dealers, and other businesses in their particular region.

4. Region-Specific Email Lists and Advertisements - Many companies are skilled at collecting targeting information from visitors to their sites. This information can include important metrics such as regional data. You can use this information to rent highly targeted email lists that include not only the customers in your area, but also to advertise on Websites people in your city visit regularly.

Online marketing is a huge help for local and national or international businesses. If you would like to review how these and other local search techniques can work for your local business, please call 01242 570330 for a no-obligation consultation.

Using KPIs to Measure Your Website Success

Is your Website a success? If so, how successful is it? Is it improving or deteriorating over time? Surprisingly few businesses can truly answer these questions, because they don’t have an accurate means of determining what their business goals are or how to measure how well they have performed.

In this article we’ll show you how to identify your Website’s Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) – and how to use them to determine your future course of action.

How to Identify Goals and Constantly Improve Your Website

Step One – Determine Which Actions are Profitable
At first glance, it might seem pretty easy to determine the steps customers take to increase profit. In fact, it might seem like there is only one – make a sale. However, a large number of factors usually impact profitability, both before and after your customers hand over their credit card numbers. These include:

Hearing about your company.
Being persuaded to visit your Website.
Becoming curious about your offer, and engaging in the Website.
Signing up for a newsletter.
Returning to the Website.
Getting through the payment process successfully.
Buying – the easy one!
Satisfaction with the product.
Referring friends or acquaintances to your service.
Becoming a repeat customer.

You can also use a Website to reduce costs for leads, customer service, face-to-face meetings, and sales-force time. Be sure to ask every department in your company for input into the goals that need to be defined. Pick the goals crucial to your company’s success so you can focus your best efforts on them.

Step Two – Quantify KPIs
Next, you have to find a way to measure your goals. For each of the steps above, there are corresponding Website metrics that can let you know how well your online business is doing. These include:

Advertising results, such as open rates in emails.
Site traffic.
Page views.
Number of people on your in-house email list.
Repeat visitors.
Shopping cart abandon rate.
Conversion rate.
Testimonials.
Referrals.
Repeat purchases.

Other important metrics could include downloaded white papers, references to online manuals and FAQs, page abandonment, and so forth. Identifying these methods will give you a concrete way to determine your Website’s effectiveness.

Step Three: Track Success and Tweak Performance
The final step in putting KPIs to work for you is to display the results in a way that is easy to track, and pinpoint areas that could be improved. Collect each of your targeted site metrics in a graph that shows improvement or deterioration. Target areas that need to be addressed, and make tweaks to see if you can boost performance. Then test those changes to determine whether the results are positive or negative.

It is impossible to improve your Website’s overall performance without a firm handle on the actions that drive profits, and an overview of your current situation. By defining and tracking your KPIs you can vastly improve the profitability of your online business.

If you would like a no-obligation consultation to help identify and develop a plan to improve your website's KPI, please call 01242 570330.

The Art of Online Headlines

Writing strong headlines is an art form that has been perfected over the centuries, especially in our modern age when newspapers have become part of our everyday lives. Perfecting this art is critical, since a headline can make or break even the best-written articles.

However, writing for an online audience has different implications than writing for print, and this causes even the most skilled headline writers to make serious mistakes. Here are some factors critical to creating an effective and attractive online headline.

Creating Effective and Persuasive Headlines for Online Readers

Where are Headlines Used Online? - Before you can write a persuasive online headline, you have to think about where that headline is going to show up. Some of the most common places headlines are used in online marketing include:

Title pages for Websites
Web-page headings and subheadings
Search engine results pages (SERPs)
Email subject lines
Article headlines
Lists of articles, Web pages, etc.

Thinking about these uses underscores the importance of headlines to your online marketing goals. A good headline can entice a reader to open an email, click through a link, or pick your page out of a list of competitors in a SERP or article directory.

You can also see that headlines often have to stand alone, without the support of text and pictures that surround newsprint headlines. This means it is very important for the headline to reflect the meat of the article. While newsprint titles often use puns and other plays on words to spike interest, these tactics can backfire without surrounding context.

Design your headlines to have a strong impact on people who are scanning down a list for specific items of interest. It’s a good idea to do some keyword research to establish the phrases your potential readers are using to find what they want to read. Insert those keywords at the beginning of your title to ensure that you are alphabetized properly in lists. Don’t weaken your text with frivolous words; and use articles such as "the" and "an" only when absolutely necessary.

The more targeted your headlines are, the more attractive they will be to your target readers. Aim for tight, precise text that lets your reader know what he or she has in store for them once the email has been opened or the link has been clicked. Many writers think that being obscure will draw a broader audience, but most online readers don’t have the time or patience for surprises. They will be drawn much more strongly toward titles that are sure to interest them.

Finally, be sure your headline reads well. Attempting to shoehorn more keywords in by leaving good grammar behind is a sure way to drive away your audience.

Google Testing New Ad Type

Google AdWords customers already have a choice of paying by click (on the Google network) or by impression (on the Content Network). Now, Google is shaking up the advertising industry by testing AdWords ads that use yet another popular payment method: PPA (Pay Per Action).

Adwords Change to Eliminate Click Fraud, Boost Profit Potential
The idea is that advertisers will define certain actions that add value to their site. The action might be a purchase, a newsletter signup, a white paper download, or a request for more information. Whenever a visitor that lands on the site through an AdWords ad performs that action, the advertiser pays a specific fee.

AdWords Change Reduces Risk to Advertisers
Any kind of advertisement carries a certain amount of risk, which is split between the advertiser and the publisher. The advertiser doesn’t want to pay for ads that don’t perform, and the publisher doesn’t want to not get paid for his/her ad space.

For example, click fraud is a major concern among small to medium enterprises that advertise through AdWords. False clicks on a high-value keyword can turn a profitable campaign into a disaster.

PPA ads reduce the advertiser’s risk, since money is paid only when the site visitor performs an action that has profit potential. Visitors who never make it to the site, or who click away immediately, do not cost anything. Click fraud becomes difficult or impossible.

With PPA ads, the publisher bears most of the burden of risk. However, in Google’s case, this risk is greatly reduced because the ad ranking is influenced by profitability. Advertisers who offer a very low price per action, whose sites cannot convert, or who do not report their results honestly, will not be able to compete with more successful ads, and will simply not be displayed.

Impact on the Internet Marketing World
Google is such a big player in the advertising field that a major change such as this is sure to have consequences. Google is set to gain more advertisers and to swallow up an ever larger piece of the Internet marketing pie.

The obvious losers in this situation are affiliate sites, such as Commission Junction and LinkShare, which have built their business model around PPA ads. Unlike Google, these companies charge a hefty fee to advertisers who participate in their program. Given a strong PPA alternative in AdWords, advertisers could soon be fleeing affiliate sites in droves.

Yahoo could also be hurting from this move. Their recent upgrade to their pay-per-click advertisements, called Panama, had the industry speculating about whether they had a chance to catch up to Google. The new development could leave them in the dust yet again.

How to Sign Up For PPA AdWords
So far, the PPC advertising method is still in beta phase. However, Google has invited companies to send in requests to test the system. To be eligible, your company must be based in the US and must be capable of using Google’s tools to track conversions.

If successful, the new service will be made available to all, watch this space!