Email Marketing Methods:

Companies can use different methods for email marketing campaigns. The target groups may be new and existing customers, business entrepreneurs who look for partnerships or research minded people who search for information about various products and services. The various email marketing strategies are given below.

1. Direct Mail: This is the simplest form of email marketing. It involves sending information on new and existing products, discounts, promotions, bonuses offered and generally it may contain links to get more information. For sending mass emails, often they are sent to the peoples through various web mail service providers who have a list of email addresses with them. There are many specialized email marketing service providers who work exclusively for sending large numbers of emails.

2. Retention Emails or Newsletters: This may be in the form of newsletters and reports at specified intervals. The idea behind a newsletter is to maintain constant relationship with the customers both existing and new. Any new announcements, promotions and support questions and answers may be included in the newsletter.

3. Advertisement in Other’s Emails: Many email service providers have option to sell advertising space to others. Thus all emails sent to the owners through the client may contain product or service advertisements put by others which are clicked while reading emails by the user.

Tips to Make Email Marketing Effective:

Writing impressive and target oriented email is an art. It should be able to make the prospective customers as buyers. At the same time almost all people hate spam mails that arrive in their inbox at frequent intervals. The email should have sufficient reason for being sent. It should never be a short story but be specific, short and the message should be straight forward explained in few sentences.

Related posts:

1. Tips and benchmarks for the best email marketing
2. Basic Guide to Email Marketing
3. Facebook launches email/messaging

Facebook

Facebook reaches 37% of the Australian population, with people spending an average of 20 minutes on the site per day. Unlike other websites, Facebook users are there socially, interacting and sharing more information than on any other medium. Advertising with Facebook is easy to set up, and it takes no time at all to create an ad. The choices basically are three fold. You can either advertise your Fan page, a post within your fan page, or you can advertise your external website. The benefits of advertising something already on Facebook, is that consumers have the choice to like the post or page you are promoting, which has the added benefit of then being able to market to them at a later date through your fan page.

By far the largest demographics on Facebook are under 25s and over 35 women.

Facebook’s edge over other advertising media is that you can see the exact demographic, as well as the likes and location of your fans and potential customers. As opposed to Google Adwords which uses mostly keywords and search intent, Facebook also takes into account a user’s interests. The bidding system on Facebook is similar to Adwords, the only difference being there is no “quality score”. The only penalty exists if your ads are not getting clicked on, then you have to bid higher, or your ad will not reach anyone.

Facebook’s advertising platform is a lot like Google’s in that you can set your daily limit, the limit of your bid, set your ad creative, set multiple ad creatives etc.

The Good:

The mix of social and promotional advertising means that you can increase the volume of the dialogue you have with your clients. You can promote just to existing fans, or to new ones. Great stories that originate on your fan page can be amplified with post advertising. Facebook also have “Insights” which gives you analysis of your page and your advertising performance. This means you can use data to see which demographics your main fan groups are, who is the most active/engaged groups of people and which geographical area is your most lucrative. Generally, also, the CPC on Facebook are also lower than those on Google Adwords.

There have been some VERY successful Facebook advertising/social marketing campaigns that have worked really well for sometimes obscure brands. Rita’s Ice is a good one, where a small ice creamery gained 100,000 fans by promoting new lines of ice cream flavour. Target gained millions of fans by giving all the users interacting on their page a $20 voucher. The main benefit of fans, to the marketer at least, being that you can continually promote to these people once they have liked your page.

The Bad

Facebook has no way of automating better performing ads, other than on a per click basis. You can’t run lower cost ads, or ads that convert better, other than manually. This means that, even though you can set your daily limit, your ad campaigns may just run away with the poorest converting, highest CPC advertising.

Adding a social side to advertising is a good idea in theory, and probably works with around 10% of the population. However, in truth, most people will respond to an ad, but not want to see your brand come up every time there is a post. This means you may pay for 1000 new users to your Facebook page, but only about 10 of those will remain active and interested.

The Insights/Ad reports are also relatively good for demographics and location, but they are not very good for seeing the connection between Facebook and your website. At the moment, there is no complete solution for seeing who is clicking on your posts and ads, and then spending money on your website.

Google Adwords

Google Adwords reaches some 90% of the online population. With Adsense space on most web properties, including YouTube and SMH.com.au, at some point in the day you will see an adwords ad. The ads come in a few different flavours, with standard text ads, display image ads and video advertising possible. There are a few different bid models available too, with a cost-per-click, cost-per-action or cost-per-thousand-impressions being the most popular.

Google’s advertising is mainly based around the user and their keyword choices, as well as some interest intent through the Google advertising network. This means you can promote to people who are searching for “cheap flights fiji” or for people who are reading a news.com.au article about Fiji. Google, famously, has an auction model that takes into account how much you are willing to pay for an ad placement, as well as the quality of your website and advertising.

Google Adwords integrates into Google Analytics, so there is a seamless integration between your website and the advertising you display. This means you can track a use from the ad to your landing page, and through to a conversion.

The Good

Google Adwords allows you to optimise by clicks or conversions, meaning that the ads that actually generate sales can be served in preference for ads that don’t. The bidding, rotation and experiments can be rotated, so if you want to run 50% to one URL and 50% with different creative to a new URL, you can do that. Within a month, you can run a range of marketing experiments to find out which creative or landing page works.

As you can advertise based on search keyword, you can actually promote your business to users at the moment they want your product the most. This means you know exactly what your customers want when they are clicking on your ads, and you know they are looking to purchase your product. As opposed to Facebook, which will allow you to connect to people who have an “interest” in your product, Adwords allows you to target those that are researching and then purchasing your product.

The Bad

Quality score is a blessing and a curse. Advertising accounts that have a low quality score overall will be affected no matter how good their ads are later on. As Google looks at the URL of the ad, and the account, this means that some web properties can permanently have a 30%+ higher advertising cost because of lazy Adwords management.

The cost of advertising on Google has become prohibitively high for a lot of advertisers. The most competitive markets have a cost per click of $10 and go up to $50. This means that for an average conversion rate of 1%, you would need to spend $1000 – $5000 for one conversion. This cost is often driven up by new entrants who will bid high for a short period of time before their budget runs out.

Although Google claims there is a social element with their +1 program, the level of integration is no where near that of Facebook’s. As few people are using Google+ or +1′s, the difference is marginal and hardly noticed.

Which one then?

The bottom line is this, Google Adwords is ideal and highly recommended for eCommerce businesses. Over time Adwords can optimise to reach your clients when they are ready to buy, and can be optimised to only serve ads that convert. Facebook is ideal for companies looking to build a brand. If your company has a personality you want to project online, then the options on Facebook are great.

No related posts.

The Features of Google Plus:

The service is more aimed at peoples who like to share things among close groups and groups with similar interests. Since Google has many other sharing services already, its seamless operation in Google plus makes everything easy for the users. The privacy settings on Google plus are more user-friendly which means that you have complete control over what you share with a particular person or group. The circle feature in Google plus is the most important opportunity to get new peoples and new contacts. New circles can be created exclusively for family, friends or co-workers. In Google plus the posts and links can be shared only with the designated circles if desired or public links can be added to share with all. One drawback in Google plus is its freedom to re-share the posts among others by the recipients.Even though there is a button for disabling this feature, not many users can locate it easily. The good feature is that the posts can be edited and comments allowed in all posts. The video chat feature in Google plus provide live interaction among users.

How to Use Google Plus for Best Results?

There are many ways to effectively use Google plus for getting good traffic to the websites. The profile page is an excellent tool to add information, pictures, videos, and links about your product or service. By placing important keywords in the information provided, the search rankings will be much higher than using any other SEO method.The circle feature in Google plus helps to provide information to the targeted people unlike in Facebook and Twitter where whatever information is fed will be read by all. The Google plus hang out feature helps to invite friends and contacts for a video conference.

Related posts:

1. Google Bookmarks and Marketing
2. Google+; Why leave Facebook?
3. Google+ to hit 20 million users – Should Facebook be worried?

Bounce Rate is the number of visitors that land on a page/site and leave before navigating any further. Exit Rate is the number of visitors that leave your site from a given page based on the number of visits to that page.

Why are they important?

Bounce rate will tell you if your content is interesting enough that people have visited your site and stayed. For eCommerce sites it will tell you if your offers are good enough, your site trustworthy enough, or your products enticing. For other sites it will also give you signals of trust. There is also some evidence that it is used as a quality signal by Google. This may or may not be true, but we do know that if a user searches for something, visits a site, and then bounces right back to Google, they get the option to block all results from that domain from their search. This data is also being used in Google’s algorithm to detect quality.Exit rates will tell you if people are leaving a particular page and not going any further. They matter because they will tell you if a particular page is turning people off, or if you have an eCommerce site, where people are leaving that site. If you have high exit rates on your shopping cart, it means people don’t trust you, your shipping costs are too high or they changed their mind.

High exit rates on some pages is not a bad thin, after all some people have to leave your site at some point. High exit rates on sign up or conversion pages might be a bad thing, if you are trying to get people to do something.

Related posts:

1. Understanding and Reducing Google Analytics Bounce Rate Pt2
2. Understanding and Reducing Google Analytics Bounce Rate Pt1
3. SEO Analytics – 4 Ways To Improve ROI on SEO

The Key Elements of Responsive Web Designing:

The first and most important step in responsive web designing is to create a flexible lay out by allowing the fluid grids to resize the content according the screen resolution. The flexible lay out is dependent on the screen resolution where texts and contents get filled automatically without the user adjustments.

Within a flexible lay out the images get changed on the fly so they also need to be resized to adjust to different resolutions. This is achieved by cropping or resizing the images when it gets below a specified size.

In traditional web designing, as part of the CSS3 specification, media queries control how the styles are applied. In responsive web designing, it allows the web designers to meet the styles based on device properties like screen width, orientation and other similar aspects.

Responsive web designing is thus different from usual web designing in terms of technical competence on the part of the designer. It is still in its beginning stage and lots of tools and techniques are expected to emerge in the future as the technology progress upwards.

Related posts:

1. Standard Web Page Size

No related posts.

Google Adwords Remarketing is a new(ish) feature that allows you to target people who have visited your site already. Google sells it as a way to “cross-sell, up-sell, and promote other relevant products: surround sound systems or DVD players, for example.” Just a note, you can target people with Remarketing regardless of source. A customer can come through your site organically and still be added to a list.

In order to set up Remarketing, all you have to do is;

1. Go to Shared Library
2. Audiences
3. Add a remarketing list
4. Add the code to the page, or action, on your site that you are targeting

Related posts:

1. Tips to improve your Google Adwords Performance
2. 78 Great Reasons to Use Google Adwords
3. What Are Google Adwords

Related posts:

1. Attention Interest Desire Action in Keyword Choices
2. The power of keyword domains – Still almost nothing, sometimes
3. Descriptions for SEO – 10 quick keyword ideas

How It Affects SEO?

Facebook has now become a trusted social networking website with its rich and varied content and style. For companies and marketing organizations, the most important benefit is the opportunity to place links to the company website in Facebook pages. The next is the placing of targeted keywords in the content on various strategic sections like ‘about’,’Info’and ‘Q & A’ sections. There should be a balance for the keywords because excessive key words often give negative results. The Q & A sections and chat features provide interactive conversations and give a live experience for the visitors.Facebook’s like button and share feature give a network of like mined people who will spread the business in a large scale.

The Facebook pages allow not only content but images and videos as well. This helps to educate the customers by providing enough information they seek. Getting quality inbound links from associated websites and blogs help a lot in driving traffic to the website. Using the static FBML application, a specific page can be created to the visitors to land on.

The more numbers of fans a website get, greater is the linking that website get. Therefore keeping more fans will help to dominate in SERP. Facebook has now grown to a large social networking application where people can interact, chat and express their feelings in a great way. For many small businesses a Facebook page is a second home page that describes the business goals, products or services and about its history, future plans and quality policies. Today Facebook can be accessed from mobile phones, tablets, ipods, blackberry and other similar devices.

Related posts:

1. Is Facebook Losing User Attention?
2. 9/10 People Like Brands on Facebook
3. Facebook Advertising – Find Managers

Global SEO

What is it worth?

Optimising your website for global customers is a specific task that is worth isolating from general SEO activities. This activity is of specific benefit to exporters, but it is also of benefit to businesses that are targeting customers all over the globe. You can clearly increase your customer base by adding pages on your site that specifically target the US, Europe or Asia.

What can you do?

If your site has a generic top-level domain, such as .com or .org, and targets users in a particular geographic location, you can provide Google with information using the Google Webmaster tools. This will also improve your website in Google’s search results for geographic queries. Setting a geographic target won’t impact your appearance in search results unless a user limits the scope of the search to a certain country.

If an international domain (.com, .org, .eu, etc) has been used, Google relies on several other signals, including IP address, location information on the page, links to the page, and any relevant information from Google Places.

Matt Cutts has also said that server location is taken into account for local search results, although the level this is the case is debatable. Google does try to find context from server IP and top level domain location. However, if your site has a geographic TLD/ccTLD (like .co.nz) then Google states they will not use the location of the server as well. Obviously there could be a clash between server IP and your TLD, (for instance hosting your site in the US and having a .co.nz domain). Doing that would be a bit confusing, and Google can’t really “average” between New Zealand and the USA.  So, the ccTLD is generally a much stronger signal than the server’s location could ever be.

The optimisation also counts on the keywords that a user chooses. Not only is search location, search preferences and search history taken into account, but also if they are using words that are geotargeted. This means there is a language factor that needs to be taken into account. There are specific foreign language search engines, Baidu for Chinese or Yandex for Russian. These search engines take into account the language of the site, and the page that is produced.

So what specific SEO steps can you take?

1. Build GEO specific pages with local content and location information
2. Build GEO specific pages that attract local links
3. Purchase the GEO specific domain and point either at your website or at the pages or build a second mirror site (this will depend on the competitiveness of your market).

Related posts:

1. The Importance of Keyword Targeted Domains in SEO; Almost Zero