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.

Here are just 20 questions that are worth an answer.

Lead Generation Questions

Email Marketing

Both

I picked this up from a MarketingSherpa email update just in over the weekend. In it they talk through how Sony Ericsson puts together its global email programs – it’s quite a good read and worth a look over.

Part of the story is how Sony Ericsson has invested in their own heat map technology and use it for testing each campaign before they send it out. I have seen heat maps referenced for web pages but never email – here’s the example email heat map they show.

Another feature added to the blog – chat is in testing and should be on the top right hand side of the blog – do drop by and share the occasional word or two.

All the best

Chris

Just for those who would like an email containing the latest post – just head down to the bottom right hand side of the blog and type away.

Have fun

Ok so we all now know that email is great for one to many direct coms – its quite simple to set up – has a good chance of being read and delivered well will make the personal connection you want.

But how about the time when the value you are trying to unlock is going to come from an ongoing conversation across time – not just a one message event?

When tried with email this ends up as an ongoing iteration of notes in each person’s Inbox with no one place where all the communication effort is stored. Online forums go someway to make this happen but they are not the easiest of things to edit at the best of times. Now wikis are starting to make an impact. A wiki is a web site that you can set up to allow whoever you want to have the power to edit the content shown.

Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia that uses this type of technology and method for building content

I am trialing the use of a few wikis for customers that want a central space to capture the workings of a nationally dispersed worker team. I think that a wiki well implemented could take team collaboration to a whole new level. I’ll let you know if my thoughts are well founded.

For all those in RSS land here’s a link to the latest newsletter from Permission. Have fun.

At last there is some way to stop Xtra subscribers that want to CC their address book with their next newsletter and in the process reveal to all who they are sending it to.

Your nice new web site is bright, shiny and ready to welcome to receive visitors. But will they come? This brief article overviews how Google is well worth considering when wanting to attract more traffic to your site and provides some suggestions on how your site can be made Google friendly.

But how important is Google?

Well let’s start off with the statement that Google is largest search engine on the planet. In its index are over 8 billion web pages, 900 million images and 850 million usenet messages. Using this resource there are over 18 million unque visitors performing over 200 million searches per day.

That’s a lot of people searching for web sites just like yours.

So how do you make sure your web site is picked up and placed in this gargantuan index?

First off it’s important to know that a web page with no links coming to it will not be placed in the index. You need at least one link to your web site, and ideally the more the better that people can follow from another site to yours. Once you have this set up then Google will take notice when it comes prowling by.

Google uses automated programs called robots or spider to trawl the Internet looking for web sites that fit these basic criteria to add to its index. These programs try to read each and every page of your website started typically with your homepage and then following each link from there on.

Once you are in the Google index your ranking for the terms people search for depends on the level of relevance your site has with the search words used and the Google “credibility level” of what your web site has to say.

Determining credibility on the web is a function of who else “backs up” what you say through the links they have to your web site pointing to the content you are offering. A growing list of links from people in similar content areas to your content helps increase your online credibility. Therefore increasing your virtual “credibility” is something that you cannot alter by changing the content on your web site, whereas relevance is.

The relevance of your web site to the search terms used is dependant on how these terms are used as text (Google is blind to images) on your site. Web pages that contain lots of content that frequently but appropriately reference the searchers words have a good chance of being found.

There will be, however, a limit to the amount of search words that your web site can be found under. (Padding out your content with lots of possible searched terms makes it look a mess for your prospects and is frowned upon by Google anyway).

Your specialist content area will start to hone in on the terms that your web pages can be found under. The trick though is to use terms that prospects use when searching for the services you provide rather than the product names or technical terms that your business usually describes itself under.

This is a quick article on a very broad and intensive area of online marketing. There is a lot more to cover but the main points are: -

• Google accounts for a massive amount of search traffic on the Internet, estimates have it up to 35% of world wide traffic and around 85% of the New Zealand search traffic.
• Therefore making your web site Google friendly is a wise area to focus on.
• Credibility and relevance are two broad areas to focus on when working in this area
• Start thinking about the terms prospects use when searching rather those you use when selling

Of all the tools available in your e-mail marketing kit bag the viral campaign is in my mind is the hardest to master. If a newsletter has the complexity of a hammer, (it doesn’t but please with me with this analogy), the viral solution is a half blunt weighty chainsaw with attitude.

Some times they work well, sometimes they injure all within its radius.

I don’t want blood on the e-mail marketing market so here is my opinion on how to tame this beast to perform each time for all concerned. For I believe if you choose the right benefits and pack them into a simple message your next viral campaign will do its job well.

What you want it to achieve is the first thing to decide.

Do you want 30,000 people in the draw to win your prize? Or, would you like to build permission to talk to 10,000 people at a later date. I would suggest the later has more appeal.

Please don’t confuse the two. The messages for each are very different. Draw entry forms that have sneaky opt out tick boxes hidden at the end of the form surprise everyone. Especially those that accuse you of spamming them when all the thought they did is put their name in the hat.

No, don’t let those teeth get a grip. Make your intent clear and pack in those benefits for trading your email address and you are way on the producing a high-growth way email.

What you offer to entice people to join your list can have a real affect on the people you attract. For example a company wanting to attract members to a new service email that offered a free VW Beetle would attract a fair share of offer seekers mixed in with their target group. Pick a prize that your ideal prospect would like to receive and you have a better chance to weed competition seekers out.

But how can you make your viral campaign get up and grow as apposed to sit dead still in your prospects inbox?

The key personal motivations working against viral campaigns working are lethargy, interest and compassion. These three make up what I call the sloth index. The first is obvious. There is other stuff to do. Why bother. Interest is again a simple one, does the whole process sound worthwhile, simple and fun to follow.

This leaves compassion, the feeling that would I want to receive this from someone else. Do I really want to be a part of spreading this message to my friends? These are big motivations to try to resist.

But resist it you must – so plan your next campaign to fight each with a vengeance.

It would see the shape of the letter F quite accurately describes how visitors see your web page content.

Check out this link to learn how heat maps can reveal the pattern of how your visitor’s eyes quickly scan what you present.

Last week the latest our latest Telecom Yellow Pages Directory was dropped off. We received a dozen copies all nicely wrapped in cellophane ready for passing around the office.

Seven days on and they are still sitting there – waiting to be released.

My bet is that they will remain in their place for a month, if not longer.

Have we stopped shopping for new stuff while they are there?

Doubt it.

Our fingers are still doing their walking – they have just moved from fanning through 2000 pages of yellow print to searching 8 billion web pages of Google searched content looking for that next new purchase.

My pick is that we are not alone and that there will be a few copies of the Yellow book still in cellophane by year end.

(Few weeks on since this post and the plastic is still doing its job)

The Feb 06 edition of my own email newsletter was sent out yesterday to my list - here’s a link to the web version.

Email subject lines are a key part in announcing your message to your audience. I think it’s worth taking some time to ponder what details should fit the 50 characters of left aligned text you have to play with.

Here’s a succinct article I just picked up from EmailLabs that goes some way to guide you on what is worth testing.

Les Mills has been New Zealand’s leading gym since first being established in 1968. The numbers are impressive; nine clubs, 250 personal trainers and a total of 10,000 gyms in 55 countries using the Les Mills Group Fitness classes.

While they have a nationwide membership that currently stands in the tens of thousands the process they followed of welcoming new members to their local Les Mills gym was still taken very seriously.

“We knew that the experience a new member had within the first 30 days of joining was very important” says Guy Needham, National Marketing Manager Les Mills.

Here’s a link to the PDF of the case study that tells the full story of how Permission helped Guy use email to effectively welcome new members in.

MarketingSherpa are out looking for quotes to fill their book of learnings for 2005 - here’s my stab at one that has helped me this year.

“Just by adding one more piece of the online marketing puzzle allows you see a completely different picture of whats happening.

It could be one more Adwords ad to rotate against the one you initially start or perhaps one more landing page to challenge the “sure winner” you kick off with or even another subject line to use in that email campaign.

You choose the extra piece you apply – but make the effort and you’ll reap the learning rewards that would have been otherwise lost .”