Create your digital toolbox
When I first started in the digital industry 10 years ago, if you had a website your were using the internet as a marketing tool to it’s maximum and were miles in front of your competitors who didn’t have a website at all.
Now a website of some sort is mandatory for all companies and it’s how it is used in conjunction with an overall digital strategy that is the key factor in your online marketing.
Here are some digital tools that all businesses should have in their toolbox.
What is the best thing you can do for your website
So you've got a website, what next. What can you do now to get it working for you and working for your business?
- Email Marketing – a simple, regular, valuable email message to your database can have incredible increase on your enquiries and sales.
- Google Adwords / Facebook Advertising – Target Google or Facebook ads can get in front of new prospects immediately and provide instant traffic and enquiries. It's under your control, scalable and measurable.
- SEO – Survey your best clients and find out what words they would use if they were looking for your products & services. Optimise your website in search engines for these words.
- Social Networking – Interact with communities such as Twitter, Stumble Upon, Facebook, and LinkedIn to form relationships with your target market and drive them to your site.
- Design – what is the perception that your website is creating. Does it match the brand that you have or that you are trying to convey? How people perceive your business is their reality.
- Outsource – if you don't have the skills or the time to do it yourself, let a professional help you. It will be well worth the investment and you can spend your time doing what you do best.
- People – brand individuals by using blogs, twitter and articles. People like to do business with people more than companies.
- Quality – people seek consistency and quality. Make sure your website is error free, easy to navigate around, generally helpful and everything the user expects. Test, Test then Test again.
Conversion Rates for Online Business
Most online businesses have several conversion rates. On most occasions there are several steps from getting a visitor to click from a email, search engine result, PPC ad, Banner Ad or link to ultimately making the decision to buy your products or services, subscribe to your site, or whatever your end goal is.
In fact every step that brings a prospect one step closer to being a customer is a micro-conversion and looking at each of these micro-conversions is more important than your overall conversion rate. The reason for this is it gives insight into what part of your process is working and where the process stalls.
So what are some of these micro-conversions?
If you look at using an eDM (email campaign) you have the following conversion rates
Opens
The percentage of emails that were open as a percentage of the emails sent.
This is typically 25% – 40% for most campaigns and is effected by the frequency at which your emails are sent, the quality of your database and the subject of the email.
If you send emails at to high a frequency people won’t keep opening them, if you send them at to low a frequency people will forget you are.
If you have a large but poor quality database, many of the people won’t be in your target market and won’t be interested in your message.
If you don’t have a captivating subject relevant to your market, people won’t be interested in what you have to say.
% Action
The percentage of emails where the call to action was clicked on as a percentage of the emails opened.
This can be any percentage and is affected by the message in the email. The more target, captivating and benefits driven this content is, the more people will follow your call to action.
Landing Page Conversion
Once someone clicks through on your call to action they will arrive at a page on your website. More often than not this should be a landing page with specific content following on from the email, not the home page of your website. From this landing page people should have only a couple of options.
Option 1 – take the desired step, be that adding a product to a shopping cart, subscribing to a service, making an enquiry to a sales person, making a phone call.
Option 2 – opting in for further information. If we can’t get them to buy we don’t want to loose them altogether. This could be a newsletter signup, free e-book, obligation free quote or anything that engages the prospect.
Checkout Conversion
In the case of product based eCommerce websites, it’s also important to monitor the how many of the people who have added a product to a shopping cart, actually make it through to checkout. This can give valuable insight into possible problems in the check-out process, that the freight was a lot more than people were expecting or that there was not enough information on delivery times or stock on hand.
Conclusion
Try to identify all of the different micro-conversion in your online sales process, work out how to measure them and then work out what insight the give you.
How to keep email marketing personal
E-mail marketing can be one of the most effective marketing strategies for you to communicate with customers, yet as we recieve more and more marketing emails each day, you face the never ending challenge of ensuring that your e-mail campaigns stand out from the crowd and continue to cut through the noise. One of the ways to achieve this is to incorporate personalisation practices to get the attention of your customers.
Every marketing message is competing for our time and email is no different. We receive more emails each day now than ever before and it can be hard to sort through the email mess let alone try to figure out which emails are worth taking the time to read. Taking the time to personalise emails via the subject line, salutation and content is the only way to ensure that your email gets read. Personalising email campaigns lets customers know that you understand their interests and want to offer content that speaks to them. Personalisation also shows customers and prospects that they aren't just another email address added to your mass mailing scheme.
It's important that you use your customer data when personalizing your email campaigns. This data should include geographic, behavioral, demographic and transactional information. If you don't have this data or it is not up to date try asking your customers to fill out a survey or questionnaire. This information is very valuable to the your success. It can be used to better segment your lists in order to more narrowly target customers – offering them relevant content that specifically speaks to their interests.
Luckily automation also can help your personalisation efforts. Although automation doesn't sound like its personal, when used correctly automation processes can allow you to easily follow-up with customers based on consumer behavior – delivering messages at the right time. This keeps your business top-of-mind and helps to keep an on-going dialogue with your customers – further building your relationship. Customers are more likely to do repeat business with companies they trust.
If you take the time and effort to personalise your emails, you will see a great improvement in your email marketing results.
How to build email lists
A regular, valuable email to your database is usually a core element to any eMarketing strategy. But how do your build your database and how to do you grow it? Following are a couple of ideas that might get you started.
Networking Meetings
From your local chamber of commerce, to specialized industry groups, the meetings of many organizations are great opportunities to make contact with new people. You are exchanging business cards with people, so make sure that keep in touch with these people. Send them a personal email the day after the meeting, recapping your conversation with them, and letting them know that you will be adding them to your monthly email list.
Trade Shows
Whether you have a booth, are one of the presenters, or are simply attending a trade show, you have an excellent potential opportunity similar to networking events, but at a much greater scale. Organizing the follow-ups to people you actually spoke to yourself, and then adding the person to your database is a given.
Seminars
Organizing informational seminars is a great way to build a healthy relationship with prospects and potential referrers. One effective technique is to have advance registration, and to ask permission to send regular emails at that time. (You can use www.stickytickets.com.au/a183 for this). You can also offer to send the material to people who can’t make it, so that even if the person is not able to attend the seminar, you still have an opportunity to stay in touch with them.
Retail Locations
Storefront and retail locations provide many great ways to build your email lists. Adding fishbowls or point of purchase displays are easy ways to take advantage of real-world traffic. (BTW – I always leave my business card in bowls at restaurants and places like that. Partly because I like to be kept informed on special nights they are having, but also because I have a special business card that is a mini advertisement of how my business can help them. Occasionally, as they are adding my card into their database, it catches their eye and they give me a call).
Events
Concerts, parties, art openings, or any other occasion that gathers people together can provides an opportunity to build your email address lists. Having a registration or check in location, or associates with clipboards working the room are just two ways to make contact. In the case of events, it is a good idea to offer some kind of incentive to boost signups. However, make sure that the person can only receive the incentive via email. This way, you will improve the quality and accuracy of the lists you are collecting.
Post Cards/Direct Mail
When a company has an existing database of postal addresses, direct mail may be the best way to get the email addresses for your existing customers and prospects. Again, offering an incentive always helps stimulate a greater response, and is particularly effective when there is a pre-existing relationship. Publish a specific, but simple, web site address on your mailing to direct people to a landing page with the list signup on your site (www.yoursite.com/special), so you can repeat the offer from the direct mail piece. This can help increase the number of people who actually signup.
Phone Calls
Using the telephone to get email addresses can be a time-consuming process, but isn't it time you gave your customers and prospects a call anyhow. In this case the call will both continue to kindle the relationship, as well as helping you establish an email based communication point.
Run and online competition or promotion
If you offer an incentive, people have a reason to give you their email address. A popular way to do this is to run an online competition where a person can enter by submitting their name and email address and possibly their interests. You can multiply the competition response by giving them the opportunity to have additional entries in the draw by sharing the competition with other people. Please note that you may have to register your competition with various state regulatory bodies. (If you need help with this, Redback Solutions, has a competition website that you can use and can also help with legal side of things)
Why you should send Christmas cards to clients
It's a time of year when we start thinking about Christmas and sending gifts and cards to clients. I thought the article had some nice ideas on Christmas Cards, however on the other hand how many cards do you get each Christmas and how many do you read. Much of the purchasing decisions are made by me, yet I don't see the Christmas cards that come in, they get opened by my admin team and put on display in our office.
Why not send an electronic Christmas card by email. This will go straight to the intended person and can be a bit more personalised as well as reflecting the personality of your business. If you are interested in this most interactive agencies or web companies (like www.rb.com.au) can help you with this.
As an alternative or additional idea, send your clients a New Years card in mid January. They will be back from holidays then, will be thinking about the year ahead and will have already forgotten about Christmas and the cards they got last year.
By Karen Morath
This month I plan to correct one of the biggest mistakes I have made since flying solo and send Christmas cards to clients. In the past I didn’t do this, but instead donated the money I would have spent on cards and postage to a charity.
Religiosity aside, Christmas falls at year’s end – a wonderful time of year to thank people. We need to acknowledge the contribution that the people who support our businesses make to our livelihood and, even if we do it throughout the year informally, there is nothing like sending a Christmas card to formally acknowledge your appreciation and to wish them well for the festive season.
Christmas cards should not be about the sender, so I particularly dislike it when organisations use greeting cards as billboards – with logos printed on them, and worse still, printed signatures! Sending Christmas cards should be a gift to the receiver, a thank you for the year you have spent together.
In the past when I didn't send Christmas cards to clients, I used to include a paragraph in my newsletter to let my readers know that I had donated to a charity rather than to Australia Post and my local stationer
But not all my clients read my newsletter. Those who did might think it’s appropriate, but they missed out on hearing that they – as individuals – have been important to me and that I value them. Those who never heard of my donation to charity may just have felt unacknowledged and this is a terrible outcome for me as a human, as well as being bad for business.
Another reason to send Christmas cards is that it provides an opportunity to keep lapsed business relationships alive on a personal level. In writing our Christmas card list we can include everyone we value, not just those who we have worked with this year or who currently subscribe to our newsletter.
How nice it is to have the opportunity to communicate with the designer who moved us into our office three years ago and who, although we may not have a professional need for ever again, we are eternally grateful to?
We can also thank the people at our IT company’s help desk who we have never met or contact clients who we worked for in the past but who are not currently in our loop.
I now see great value in sending Christmas cards to my clients, so I will spend November handwriting hundreds of cards to the people I value and whose contribution to my business, both past, present or indeed future, is appreciated. Email cards just don’t cut it when you consider they should be about the receiver, not about being expedient and low cost to the sender.
Top 10 Tips for Surveys
Surveys are a great way to keep in touch with your friends and clients and also gain some valuable insights that make a real impact on your business.
Surveys can also go terribly wrong, get a poor result and mislead you into drawing conclusions that a biased by the questions asked.
Online Survey Tool – Zoomerang, has these great tips for running a sucessful online survey.
-
Clearly define the purpose of the survey.
-
Keep the survey short and focused
-
Keep the questions simple
-
Use closed ended questions whenever possible
-
Keep rating scale questions consistent through the survey
-
Logical ordering
-
Pre-test your survey
-
Consider your audience when sending survey invitations
-
Consider sending several reminders
-
Consider offering an incentive
How to write a newsletter
One of the key elements of a successful eMarketing strategy is regular communication with your friends and customers, and one of the easiest ways to do this is through an email newsletter.
Have you ever tried to write an email newsletter? Most people find it extremely time consuming which is why most people plan to send out a monthly newsletter and then manage to send out only a couple over a 12 month period.
To make your newsletter work look at making it short and to the point. It will make it easier to write and more importantly easier for your friends and customers to read. You try and have 80% of the content useful information that your friends and customers can use in their lives and businesses and only 20% about your company and product offers.
Here are some simple ideas to get you going.
1. Tip of the Week/Month
Give your friends and customers a tip from your area of expertise and then explain this tip in a paragraph or two.
eg. Tip – “Choose a domain name that reflects your business name, is easy to spell and easy to remember”.
You only need to think of 12 tips to be able to create a years worth of monthly newsletters.
2. Checklists
Give your friends a checklist that they should follow for a topic that you have expertise in.
eg. “Checklist when buying a car”
3. Case Study
Tell your friends and customers about a project that you have been involved in. You should explain what the project required and how you went about it. Identify any challenges that you encountered and how they were overcome.
4. Q & A
Ask your friends and customers to send in questions or problems that you can help them with. Answer there question in your newsletter.
Make sure that you get their permission to use their question.
5 Tips for eMail Marketing
1. Send out your emails with a consistent frequency. Whether this is weekly, fortnightly or monthly stick to a schedule. You will get much more impact from message and your contacts will come to expect and anticipate your emails. We find that fortnightly is the optimal frequency for most businesses, but this can vary depending on the spending habits of your clients.
2. As well as frequency, timing is key with Business Communication. If you send your message over the weekend or late at night, it will then be just one of a number of emails that the reader has to get through in the morning. If you send them on a Tuesday to Thursday between 9.30am and 4.00pm they will be more like to be read.
3. Write content that provides value to your contacts. Your message should have 80-90% of the content being information that is valuable to your contacts that they can use in their business. Only 10-20% of the content should be about your company or your products. If you follow this rule people will continue to read and look forward to your emails.
4. Only send emails to persons you have met or who have requested to receive them. It is much better to have a small database that has grown organically than to have a large database of people who aren't interested in what you have to say. Make the unsubscribe feature easy to find. You will gain nothing by continually sending emails to people that don't want to receive them.
5. Proof your emails. Check your emails thoroughly before sending them out. Once you've sent something to hundreds or thousands of people you can't get it back. Even better get someone else with a fresh set of eyes to check it.
