Web Design And Marketing

Email marketing with a newsletter to your clients is a great way to market to your customers. Why? It costs far less to keep a client / customer than to acquire a new one, plus keeping your company on their top of mind is important. Providing your current clients with an email newsletter that provides value, is an easy way to keep them coming back. However, your email-marketing newsletter must be done correctly . Don’t just throw anything out the door.

This week’s great tip on Internet marketing is stay focused on your email newsletter’s “call to action”.

Providing valuable content for your clients through an email marketing newsletter is a wonderful service. However don’t lose site of your goal. Don’t just write an article and email it out. Make sure that each and every email newsletter contains a “call to action”, and make sure that the email focuses on it.

When sending an email marketing newsletter to clients it is very easy to lose focus. There are so many decisions to be made, such as what items/service to promote, what kind of creative the piece to should have, etc. The “call to action” can easily get lost among all of the decisions that need to be made. Below are the top 3 mistakes often made in client email newsletters.

Mistake #1 - Choosing the email’s creative first

Sometimes not only are there too many decisions to make, but they are made out of order. One of the most common mistakes is deciding on the creative (or the look and feel) first. A common example of this is when a website’s creative is used as a basis for an email campaign.

Always decide on your call to action’s placement first. Is the call to action to promote / sell an item, is it to get them to recommend your services to a friend? What ever the desired action is, make sure you design your email’s creative around the call to action. The best way to do this is to create a simple wireframe first. Just grab a pencil and paper and draw boxes where you want things to appear. The first box (or boxes) to draw is the area where your call to action will be placed. Put it above the fold and in a prominent place. Then place boxes for company information, content, etc. Now take your creative, and incorporate the creative into your wireframe. Your email newsletter does not have to look exactly like your website, you can always rearrange the various creative elements to keep the look and feel similar to the website. Just make sure that the creative doesn’t distract your client from the call to action (i.e. don’t lose focus).

Now, make sure that all the copy used in your call to action area is clear and concise. Be sure to keep the area “clutter free”, in other words make sure that there is plenty of white space around your call to action, and that the call to action “pops out” at your reader. For instance, many email newsletters contain dense copy and is difficult to read on a computer screen. It is common knowledge that customers skim information presented on computer screens. Make sure that your call to action, is easily skimmed and understood.

Mistake #2 – The landing page as an afterthought

Now that you have designed your email, you need to design your landing page (or wherever you want your clients to go). It is always best to customize the landing page according to each email newsletter’s call to action. Make sure that the benefits and any necessary details are easily found. Don’t just link to any page on your web site, if you can’t customize a web page for each newsletter to your clients, at least make sure that the page is unique (see mistake #3) and appropriate (that it flows with your call to action).

What if you aren’t selling a tangible item? What if your call to action is to get them to forward your newsletter to a friend? In this case, your landing page is the capture page where your client provides their friends information. Make sure that the look and feel portrays a comfortable and credible presence. This includes only asking for appropriate information, and prominent placement of what you will and won’t do with the information you collect (your privacy policy).

Mistake #3 – Not setting up appropriate metrics for your email newsletter

Every email marketing newsletter you send out to your clients needs to uniquely measure its call to action . You should be able to measure the web page back to one, and only one source. In this case it is our email marketing campaign to our clients. For example, do not use your home page. It will be difficult to tell what visits you received because of your email marketing campaigns, or if your visits are from search engines. Sure you can sort by website referrers, but since we are talking about email newsletters, it will be next to impossible to sort be referrer.

The easiest way to set up a uniquely measured page is to design customize page for each campaign, or just copy one of your website’s current pages to a new unique file name. Once you do this, be sure to add the appropriate command to your robots.txt file so that the search engines do not index the page (this would surely throw off your metrics).

Use an email newsletter service that will track the amount of unique opens, click thru’s and unsubscribes. Then use the analytics from your unique landing page to determine actual conversions. Also, be sure to note if there is any significant traffic on a particular day or timeframe. This could be useful information for future email marketing and search engine campaigns.

Keeping your focus on the call to action is imperative to a successful email marketing newsletter to clients. Providing your clients with valuable information, and a prominent call to action can help ensure that your clients are satisfied, and that your business keeps growing.

Filed by admin at 5:33 pm under Marketing & Promotion
No Comments

Over the past 10 years, Web site promotion has grown from a small niche segment, to an explosive marketing channel that packs a severe ROI punch. There are many Internet marketing and Website promotion techniques, ranging from search engine marketing to viral marketing. A web site looking to establish effective promotions has a lot of techniques to consider. This article provides a brief overview of what I consider to be the 3 Internet marketing fundamentals that every web site promotion should include.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO has been around as long as the search engines. SEO has grown from a couple of programming tricks (which are now a huge No-No) into a legitimate industry that focuses on increasing a web site’s visibility.

SEO focuses on generating “organic” or natural results in a search engine. Visitors form organic search results do not eat into your web site promotion budget. Therefore a well thought out SEO campaign can reap large. According to MarketingSherpa (Search Marketing Benchmark Survey August 2005) SEO campaigns provide an average conversion rate of 4.2% versus 3.6% for Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns Depending on a web site owner’s skill set, SEO can be done in house or outsourced. Any upfront SEO cost are usually made back fairly quickly. A SEO strategy is a must for anyone running a Web site.

Pay Per Click (PPC)

PPC consists of running a text ad targeted to specific keywords. Advertiser’s only pay when some clicks on the ad. This is a very different model than a typical cost per impression model where costs can run high without any measurable results.

PPC is a great avenue for web site promotion when a web site first launches or adds a major new category /product. This is because PPC offers instant visibility (versus SEO which can take months). PPC campaigns can start as low as 2-5 cents a click, or it can go as high as $25 per click (or even higher ) depending on the keyword. Depending on the cost per click, PPC can be very affordable.

However be sure to do your homework, as a simple PPC campaign can get out of hand very quickly and end up running quite a tab in just 1 day.

PPC is expected to generate more than $14 billion dollars in 2006 according to a January 3, 2006 Piper Jaffray “industry Note” by Safa Rashtchy . That is an increase of 41%! Estimates for revenue in 2010 is for more than $33 billion. Why is Pay Per Click exploding this way? The answer is simple, it works and the results are easily measured (which is not always the case in advertising/marketing)

Article Publishing / Syndication

This is the least expensive Internet Marketing technique, and is very effective. Article syndication doesn’t cost you any money, however it does take some of your time. The concept is simple:

1. Write an article about a topic that is relevant to your Web site and your customers.
   Create a tag line that describes your Web site and that links to it.
2. Place it on any free article syndication Web site (for example EzineArticles) . Once there, other web site owners will copy and paste it into their web site.
3. This is a great way to reach your target audience through other web site’s that share similar audiences. It is also a great way to generate traffic to your web site.

No matter which way your Web promotion strategy takes you, including these 3 fundamentals will ensure that you have the basics covered.

Filed by admin at 4:37 pm under Marketing & Promotion
No Comments