Internet Marketing

I am on the hunt for another team member.

This person will be based in our Auckland, NZ office and will manage a range of email marketing and lead generation campaigns for our growing list of clients.

You will need to be proficient around HTML, have a fondness for detail and like working on a variety of projects.

This role will suit those that have a few years work experience in web development with some client facing involvement and can show an ability and desire to uncover all there is to know about online marketing.

If you are interested in knowing more then it is probably best to go here and use the sales enquiry form to kick things off.

All the best

Chris

….. for a few clients I am working with at the moment that are doing some good work.

Need a good chartered accountant? Check out Clive’s site and let them know I sent you across?

How about a mortgage broker, Adam’s service comes with some good guarantees

Or a new content management system? Solutionists work next door to me and have a mean system to help you manage your web words.

All the best

Unlike employees your web site is best treated as a number.

So forget the nice graphics and the soft comfortable design influence, it’s time take your web site and distil it down to the cold hard facts of a percentage conversion rate. (That is its ability to create prospect leads as a percentage of the total Internet traffic it receives.)

Hard clinical numbers tell you whether all the bright lights and fancy colours of web design are making a difference to convince those itinerant web browsers to start tapping away on their keyboards to become prospects of note.

Here are four points to help you begin to view your web site in this new light.

Firstly the old saying holds true online, you can only manage what you measure, so start to investigate what web tracking tools you have to see if they provide you with the numbers you need. Most will provide visits - hits and top pages. What you really want is a tool that shows you all this plus the ability to track actual visitor actions. If what you have comes up short, don’t worry. There’s no need to invest much to get what you need. Google even provides a tool free of charge in their Google Analytics package that does a basic but solid job of showing you what you need to know.

Second, once you know your stats you need to plan their improvement. You can do this by viewing your web site not as a publisher but as a prospect visitor. (Some tools can help you alter your perspective by showing you in real time the live paths people actually take as they click through your site.)

There will probably be a few different groups of prospects and customers that work through your site. Your task is to map out the characteristics and content demands of each group and then to see how your site performs.

For instance one of your predominant groups could be quite analytical in nature, arriving at your site on a fact finding mission whereas others could be more interested in the “feel” of the business – its owners and customers. Somehow your content will need to appeal to both of these quite different prospect groups.

Thirdly after matching the right content to the correct profile then you need to present it in the correct way. Just like a poorly tied fly can ruin a good day’s trout fishing - web content poorly presented will fail to trigger the registration response you desire.

For example Permission started working with a client’s web site that was converting just 2.5% of its web site traffic into prospect leads. By altering the way the exact same content was presented we managed to increase this to a credible 25%. (The industry conversion rate for offering free content is 10%.)

And finally by taking on the goal of wanting to view your web site as a number you need to know there is no finally. There are always ways to make some incremental improvement on what you have done before.
Even our customer experiencing a solid 25% conversion rate has us working away each month to tweak things further to crack the 30% barrier we have broken with others in different industries.

You need some new curtains.

Rather than trying to locate the printed directory that someone has left around the office/house you fire up the web and land on your search engine of choice.

Once there you stop and think… start to type, and then click the button to see the results.

Your screen refreshes and reveals a mix of web sites that the search engine thinks best fits with what you are looking for plus for good measure it throws in a scattering of paid advertising.

You digest all that’s there and if something appeals then you click on the link and start weaving through what’s on offer.

For those that sell curtains with some online marketing expertise worth its salt then as you arrive on their web pages their site adds one more visitor to its statistics. Plus if they are really onto it you will be persuaded to fill in some form of sorts to become a lead for their sales team to work with.

All this could take a matter of minutes from the time you start looking at the tattered drapes in your office to the submit button on the curtain web site page.

The key point in this short process is the few seconds just before the prospect starts typing. Here they are pondering what search terms best suit what they are looking for. By knowing with a high degree of certainty what words will appear you have a better chance of ensuring your site is listed as part of the refreshed screen.

There are around four popular ways that people use to build a list of search terms that their prospects have a good chance of using:

• They guess
• They pay someone to guess for them
• They copy their competitors
• They conduct some online paid advertising research

The first two are more common than you would like to think. My money is on the last one.

Cold hard facts always seem to cut through the clutter and help you see what people are really searching for.

To make this strategy work you need to employ the services of Google Paid Advertising with their Adwords service and some online marketing expertise.

Placing paid ads with Adwords will not only provide you click-through traffic as people click on the ads as they appear but the reporting tools provided will reveal to you the amount of times your ad was shown and not clicked. From here you can see which terms are the most used.

When setting such a research program up you need to cast your net wide to bring in as many possible search terms as you can think of. (Permission has access to a range of databases that can help you here.)

Once you have your list then it’s a simple case of loading up your campaign with this search term list “behind” your Google ad and letting your campaign run its course.

Within a few weeks of monitoring you should start to see those terms that bring you the best clickers (best being the ones more likely to convert into a prospect) and those that are not registering any action at all.

There will gradually appear a few search term “stars” that continually deliver the goods. These are the ones your web site needs to become friends with. Then all you need to do is to take the time to work through the changes necessary to ensure your web pages are refreshed somewhere in the first page every time your prospects use them in their searches.

It is interesting to investigate how subscribers treat your email marketing over various editions. They may well click on the first edition they receive, but what do they do with subsequent editions?

Do they have one quick click and then fail to return, or do they continue to open and read subsequent e-mail messages? To find out, we must examine the degree of loyalty your subscribers show towards your ongoing e-mail messaging.

To measure subscriber loyalty, you need to look at the total number of subscribers that have clicked on any of your links, and then classify them according to whether or not they have clicked previously. Using this information, you will be able to gauge the percentage of your audience that are first-time clickers.

Now, depending on how much your list of subscribers has grown since your previous campaign, you should hope that around 50% of your audiences are repeat clickers.

Email marketing that is carried out too infrequently or lacks good content will achieve a far smaller percentage. In some cases I have seen repeat clicker percentages as low as 20%. Take some time to see how your figures stack up.

Message activity

Not only is it valuable to know who your loyal subscribers are, but also it is useful to understand how effective your messages have been in getting people to click in the first place.

While an email message may contain 10 or more hyperlinks, the vast majority of those who choose to click do so on just one link.

I put this down to the very limited amount of time your readers are prepared to spend on your message. Subscribers will skim-read your copy, choose the link that best interests them, and then click on it to read more.

They may intend coming back to your newsletter to look over other areas of interest, but chances are your message will slowly sink under a pile of incoming mail, and that one click will be all you will get.

Now that you know about this one click phenomenon, you can ensure that the one click you do get will be on your most important hyperlink by highlighting it in some way so that it stands out.

If you do this successfully you can transform it into what I see as the “Golden Hyperlink” as it carries a disproportionate amount of the click traffic.