With a four-day weekend coming up, it's a perfect time to sit down and learn how to analyse your website and web marketing activity. Grab a hot drink, a comfy chair and your laptop, and take some time this weekend to think about improving your web presence.
This month's newsletter lets you in on the top e-mail marketing mistakes, why you should use web analytics, how to ask for links, and the benefits of placing ads on social networks.
Contents:- Top Ten Sites
- Perfecting Your E-mail Marketing Campaigns
- Analyse your Traffic for Better Conversions
- Link Building: To Ask or Not To Ask
- Targeted Ads on Social Networks
Got a sweet tooth? With Easter on its way this week, we've decided to look at the top 10 most popular websites in our confectionary category. Chocolate, cakes, fudge, oh my! Save the Easter bunny some time and order online this year.
| Rank | Site Name | URL |
| 1. | Cake Bitz | www.cake-bitz.co.nz |
| 2. | Exquisit: Cakes and Edibles | www.exquisit.co.nz |
| 3. | Sweet Sensations | www.sweetsensations.co.nz |
| 4. | Mrs Higgins Cookies | www.mrshiggins.com |
| 5. | Sweetsdirect.co.nz | www.sweetsdirect.co.nz |
| 6. | Robyn's Handmade Chocolates | www.handmadechocolates.co.nz |
| 7. | Home Style Chocolates | www.homestylechocolates.co.nz |
| 8. | Lolly Shop | www.lollyshop.co.nz |
| 9. | Candy Bouquet | www.candybouquet.co.nz |
| 10. | Chocolate Graphics | www.chocolategraphics.co.nz |
The key aim for sending out e-mail marketing campaigns is to grab the recipient's attention, and interest them in the product or service in which you are promoting. You want every e-mail campaign you send out to have high deliverability, basic personalisation and maximum click-through rates.
You definitely do not want your e-mails to be the reason why customers go elsewhere, so there are several things you should keep in mind when composing every campaign.
From Who?
Make sure the 'from' line of the e-mail is clearly the exact name of your company or the newsletter in which the customer signed up to. This will lead people to determine if they know the sender or not. Many default 'from' fields will be filled in with insignificant names such as 'no reply' or 'control', which can lead the recipient to delete an e-mail without opening it.
Getting Stopped as Spam
Getting your campaign stopped by e-mail clients and automatically filtered as spam is a common issue, but is often easily fixed. Take care to avoid flagged keywords in your campaign's subject line such as "Win", "Free" and "Trial".
Customisation
Customers love personal attention. Even though they might be one of thousands receiving the same e-mail, every customer wants to feel like a person, not a number. Make sure the e-mail marketing system you use allows first name customisation, and be sure you have a comprehensive, segmented database of customer names in which to use. You want your users to feel like you know them. Nobody likes to be addressed as 'Dear Sir/Mam'.
Edit Carefully
How many times have you received an e-mail from a company with spelling and grammar errors? It's not a good look, but is astonishingly common. From misspelled words to links that do not work, these slight missteps signal a lack of professionalism to the customer. This can be easily avoiding with careful editing and repetitive checking by both the author and another set of eyes before sending.
Let Them Reply
Some e-mail campaigns come from unique e-mail addresses which are unable to receive incoming mail. While many do this to avoid the need to filter through repetitive responses or spam, replies can provide valuable insight for your company, and you should not inhibit your customers from getting in contact with you. Replies can be in the form of product enquiries or problems with the e-mail itself, and every message can be potentially valuable.
Keep it Simple
Don't include too many graphics, attachments or images that overshadow your message in your e-mail campaigns. Remember the key goals of your e-mails; to get a customer's attention, inform them about your product or service, and solicit their interest to click through to your website to turn interest into purchase. Keep it concise and simple and your campaign will be effective.
E-mail marketing has been shown to increase purchasing likelihood by 50%, so by avoiding common e-mail marketing mistakes you give your company the highest chance of reaping its benefits.
Updating your website regularly to improve your online sales process is essential in utilising your web presence as a revenue-generating tool. Do you know how to find out when and where users are dropping out of completing a sale on your website? Don't update your website for better conversions to sales on hunches, consider using a web traffic analysis program like Google Analytics.
Web analytics tools in a general sense, tell you where your visitors come from and what they do on your site. The data that you can retrieve from an analytics tool like Google Analytics can help you decide how your site should be organised, and help you discover search-term ads that are likely to lead to sales. Some search experts even go as far as to say all of your online marketing efforts should be based from your findings in an analytics system after your website's initial set up.
When using a web analytics tool, pay special attention to your bounce rate, which is the percentage of visitors who immediately leave your website upon entry without clicking through to deeper pages. This will tell you that your landing pages aren't working effectively, and need to be looked at.
Use the information you find using an analytics tool as customer feedback. Make small adjustments to copy, layout, prices and so on, then use the analytics program to see what pays off in traffic conversions. Do customers leave your site as soon as you prompt them to log in? Do they click the back button when asked for their credit card details to complete payment? Use web analytics to discover how many people bail out during each stage of completing a conversion into a sale. You can then relook at how each unsuccessful process could be tackled more effectively.
Building links from other websites to your own is an essential aspect of Search Engine Optimisation. However, it's not always easy, especially if you're new to an industry and don't have a lot of contacts. How do you ask for links? Should you actively contact other websites for links, or let them come to you?
Search engines want to provide searchers with the highest quality websites, and see external linking as a natural process of popularity amongst the relevant field. Unfortunately, it's not quite as easy as having a well-designed website with an innovative product or service. Link building for most companies involves active participation in seeking links.
This doesn't mean e-mailing thousands of websites out there asking for them to link to your website (sometimes referred to as "link begging"). You've probably received many requests like this in the past, most of them heading straight to your spam folder.
When asking for links, keep it specific. Search for websites and organisations that are similar to yours, and see which sites link to them. Send an e-mail to the webmasters of these sites requesting that they link to you as well, and give them a specific reason why your site is particularly relevant and useful for their visitors.
Remember that it's the quality of links, not the quantity that counts the most.
Don't simply send dozens of e-mails out asking for link exchanges. This puts you in the position of requiring to link to any website that links to you, and there is a chance that many of those websites are for organisations you don't want to link to. When you link to a website, you're seen as a partner, a friend, a source of recommendation. Endorsing any site which offers you a link could possibly lead you to linking to websites which have risky optimisation methods, or have been banned or blacklisted by search engines. This isn't beneficial for your site's SEO.
Link baiting, or throwing content out into the web world in the hopes that it will get picked up on, is a great thing to have in mind whenever you consider updating your website with any new information or news. Developing a blog is a great way to generate natural links, especially if you create a blog series, a succession of posts on a topic which are compelling and relevant to your industry. Use keyword tags to make sure all of the posts are linked together, and you could see yourself gaining a favourable following of links.
Remember that while there are a million things you could do to try and build links, there is no substitute for creating content that is so unique and interesting that people just simply want to link to it. Make sure you assess whether or not your link building efforts could be better spent on creating enticing content!
Are you keen on trying a new way of online campaigning? Targeted pay-per-click (PPC) and cost-per-impression (CPP) ads on social networks have been available for some time now. Have you wondered if they are right for your business?
If you have a Facebook page, you're probably aware of targeted advertising. Facebook have been using profile information to generate relevant ads on your page since November 2007. It's not a new concept; kids see ads for toys when they watch Bob the Builder, and homemakers see ads for cleaning products while they watch Good Morning.
The technology used by Facebook and other social networks however, tells them much more in-depth information about you. They know your age, sex, marital status, favourite book, products you're a fan of... the list goes on.
If you are interested in launching a new online marketing campaign, consider trying social network targeted advertising. Your business can gain exposure amongst only the market you want it to. This means you have a great chance of attracting attention, as the people seeing your ads are more likely to already have interest in your product or service.
For example, imagine you are a wedding planner in the North Shore. You can target your ads to people listed as 'engaged' within your region. You can then choose the age of those you wish to target, say 29-39. Additionally, you can choose a sex, say female. Upon implementation of your ad, it will only show up on the pages of engaged women in their 30s who live in Auckland. It's marketing at its most targeted.
Unlike text ad marketing, you can use images rather than just words on social network ads. Images are influential in social media consumption, and are powerful conveyors of messages as they closely resemble photos and posted item screenshots from friends.
But do be wary - your product or service has to be absolutely perfect for the target market. Reports have suggested that social network advertisements have the lowest click-though rates in the industry. This isn't necessarily a bad thing; the clicks the ads do get could have high conversion rates to sales. Remember that people are on social networks to virtually connect with their friends. They're not shopping, not searching. Simply promoting a product for a certain target market won't get you clicks if the product isn't 100% perfect for that market. While your click rate may be low, if your product or service is unique and perfect for the targeted customer, those few clicks could be the right clicks.
We're interested in your opinion, if you have anything you'd like to hear about in the newsletter, let us know.
Images from Flickr: Email Icon, Fudge.org Google Analytics, Hold My Hand, Facebook Ad.
