 |
 |
|
Top ways to waste your marketing budget
Failing to get the most out of your email marketing
A well-designed message (not necessarily a pretty one) can increase response to your emails by up to 50%! That’s a huge difference in the return on your marketing dollars.
There is no magic formula for a good email message. To make sure your message is well designed, you have to test every element of the message—from the subject line to the placement of the links and the call to action.
Not spending time to track the results from your email marketing campaign, failing to send compelling creative and not knowing email marketing best practices are the main reasons why companies fail to get the most out of their campaigns. So what should companies brush up on? I’d say the top issues are optimizing their messages for the preview pane (those of you with Outlook know what I mean), doing everything possible to keep messages from being caught in spam filters, providing intuitive navigation back to your web site, and using appropriate calls to action.
Losing people on your Web site
All roads lead to your Web site. Any serious prospect will be looking at your Web site multiple times throughout the interaction with your company—before, during, and after the purchase decision.
The first thing you need to make sure is that your Web site content is of interest to your prospects. The second thing is to have calls to action that will get your Web site visitors to engage—view a webinar, download a whitepaper, fill out a survey.
Last, you need to make sure that you can track these interactions. With this information in hand, you can fine-tune your follow up to match your prospects’ interests and avoid wasting valuable marketing and sales resources.
There’s a lot of meat to this point, and yet it just scratches the surface. To have an effective web site, it needs to be relevant, well-designed and usable. By “well-designed,” I don’t mean that it has to be pretty. Your web site needs to communicate your brand and also help people navigate their way through so they find desired information.
The point about tracking interactions is key. Companies need help learning what’s important to track, and how to act on the data. It’s not enough to know that you get 2,000 visits per month from your Google Adwords campaign — you need to know which keywords actually make the sale and what else to do with them, for example.
Another key point is that a web site must support the customer “before, during, and after the purchase decision.” It’s not enough to have great product information — the site needs to be easy to use so people can make the purchase confidently and easily, and then close the feedback loop once the purchase is made.
And... finally
An ecommerce video on Marketing Strategy
WebProNews is a site I discovered a few months ago, and their video coverage of the latest Search Engine Strategies conference is very good. Their newest video is an interview with two smart marketers with two first names, Allan Dick of Vintage Tub and Bath and Brian Mark of ToolBarn.com. Both of these sites started as small online businesses and now are among the top 500 internet retailers, so if you own a small ecommerce site or want to start one, you should take 15 minutes to listen to the interview.
Dick and Mark discuss many search-related ecommerce marketing strategies they use in their day-to-day ecommerce businesses, and they make some great points about the following:
- Using Google Adwords as a research tool to find top converting phrases as input to an SEO campaign
- How both companies handle local search and retailing to local markets
- Retailers’ perspective on social media and working with niche bloggers
- Advice for a budding online retailer — “Be open to trying everything”
We don’t want to give it all away, so why don't you take a minute or two, click the orange button and check out this very interesting and very potent video...
|
 |
About the video... Online retail is not a venture for the faint of heart, to be sure. Finding success in the realm of eCommerce requires patience, diligence, and a willingness to be flexible and constantly experiment with new methods and techniques to improve rankings and conversion rates. Alan Dick and Brian Mark are successful e-tailers who know a thing or two about running an online store. Our own Mike McDonald was lucky enough to catch up with them at Search Engine Strategies in Chicago, and they had some intriguing things to say about SEO and online retail.
Both Alan and Brian have noted that since implementing common SEO strategies into their respective online shops, their businesses have seen almost exponential growth in both traffic and revenue streams. What areas did these intrepid entrepreneurs focus on with their site optimization strategies? One fundamental aspect they both agree upon is the balance between paid and organic search listings. Focusing too much on one or the other is not the most efficient way to achieve optimum search rankings, but a holistic approach that takes focuses on the interdependency of paid and organic listings has proven to be the most effective strategy in the long term.
Also, pay-per-click should be viewed as more of a testing mechanism to chart the conversion rates for certain keywords, rather than a complete marketing tool. Social media is playing an increasingly important role in online retail, so it may be in the best interests of retailers to tap the blogosphere for product reviews, with the caveat of full disclosure if the reviewer is receiving product compensation for his or her time. The goal should be to facilitate discussion about your products, and not to influence the conversation.
What other tips and tricks to Alan and Brian suggest for e-tailers? You’ll have to watch the video to find out!
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
ORIGINAL DESIGNS
|
New Site
|
Redesigned
|
PayPal Site
|
osCommerce
|
Web Gallery
|
PhPBBS
|
Web Forum
|
|
