Not so fast. Email marketing may indeed have become more challenging, but the ROI continues to be great – the best, say most reports. And even those who say it’s dead will admit on closer questioning that they’ve clicked through to see the new Threadless T-shirt or Amazon special offer.

The truth is, e-mail marketing isn’t dead, but you do have to be savvier about it.

• Your e-mail marketing has to be opt-in. Sending your marketing message to people you don’t know is spamming. Send your messages to your subscribers, your customers, clients, and friends. Put a subscription button prominently on your website and offer that service to people in your physical shop. And make sure that it’s easy for the recipients of your messages to cancel their subscriptions. This way, you’re only sending your messages to people who really want them.
• Your e-mail marketing has to be valuable. Not just to you, but to the reader. If you’re sending people interesting information, a heads-up about new products they’re going to love, or announcements of bargains they’ll want to know about, then they’re going to be interested. Not every day, probably, but at reasonable intervals. Try to get some of that value into your subject line, too. If your customer gets the word that you’ve got new products, but isn’t ready to order and deletes without opening, he’ll still have gotten the message that you have new products. Next time, he’ll be more likely to take advantage of the offer. A few seconds to delete doesn’t feel intrusive to most of us, but you’ve gotten your message out there and reminded your customer of your existence.
• Your e-mail marketing has to be interesting. This is different from the previous point: you may have lots of useful information to share, but if it’s boring, your reader won’t wade through your dull introduction to find the nuggets of good stuff. So it has to be well-written, and visually attractive is good (especially if it’s attractive on mobile devices as well). But there’s another component of “interesting” for most readers.  Most of your readers, at any given moment, are going to be thinking of themselves, not of you. So your email should be about them – their benefits from your special offer, their needs which you can fulfill, their special qualities which your product will highlight – and not about you.

Test your email thoroughly, segment your list and send the right people the right stuff, and you can benefit from email marketing as so many others do.

From: Internet Marketing

Imagine opening a phone book to find the number and address of a local business, and being greeted with an ever-changing page of information about that company: reviews, comments, pictures people took with their phones…

No need to imagine, of course. That’s Yelp, Citysearch, Judy’s Book, Merchant Circle, Four Square and dozens of other local online information portals. Yelp, the largest, has about 26 million readers a month and, according to Inc. magazine, a quantity of information that is probably second only to Wikipedia.

It also has a lot of power. More and more consumers rely on the reviews at these sites during their purchasing decision making process.

What should your company do about these directories?

• Be there. As consumers rely more heavily on review sites and local directories, not being present can cause you to be overlooked. List your business with the national  ones –the ones we’ve mentioned, plus HotFrog, Brown Book, and Local.com, among others – and then track down the ones specifically for your local community. If you’re not primarily a local business (for example, you do e-commerce), you can still benefit from local listings. It’s a link to your website, after all.
• Register or claim your business. In many cases, only those businesses that register or claim their listings can respond to reviews, add a link to their website, and in other ways have some control over the listing. Brown Book lets you upload videos and other content. Yelp lets you communicate with those who leave reviews. Merchant Circle hosts a blog for you. Explore the options.
• Encourage happy customers to review your business. Trying to game the system by posting fake reviews will backfire, but asking customers to support you is smart.  Train staff to respond to compliments with, “I’m so glad you liked it! Would you write that at Yelp?”
• Respond to unhappy reviews. You can’t please everyone, but a kind and helpful response can turn a bad review into a good opportunity to show your excellent customer service.  Calm down, if you need to, before you make your response.
• Quote the good reviews. People who’ve made public comments about your company have already shown that they’re willing to share their opinions. Use the things they’ve said as testimonials online and in your marketing materials.
• Watch your analytics. Keep track, with whatever kind of web analytics you use, of the kind of traffic that comes to your site from directories. That information can help you make decisions about advertising and future linkbuilding.

From: Internet Marketing

There’s more to the story…  Now, Adwords lets you in on some things that have been undisclosed up until now. Let’s imagine that you sell sporting goods online, and take a peek at a couple of your customers.

Search Funnels

There’s your future customer, searching for that excellent new racket you sell. He sees your ad, but doesn’t click. He’s looking at the organic results first. He goes off to grab a snack and then comes back and searches again. This time he clicks on your ad. Then he goes back to Google. He searches for another racket, one that’s a little less pricey. He sees your ad this time, too, and looks at a couple of your competitors’ sites. He changes his search query again, sees your ad, clicks through… but doesn’t buy. The next weekend, having talked with his friends about their experiences, he searches again for the racket. Once again, he sees your ad, clicks through – and this time, he takes the plunge and buys the racket.

Wouldn’t you like to know all that? After all, if you knew it could take a customer a week to make up his mind, you might keep a campaign going longer than if you thought your customers decided within one day. If you knew they had to see your ads five times before buying, you might budget differently. If you knew that seeing the less pricey alternative helped them make up their minds to buy the top of the line racket, you’d see the value of that ad differently.

The new Search Funnels feature tells you just about all of this (not the conversations with friends, of course, but most of the rest of it). Using this feature, you can learn more about your customers’ behavior. How quickly do your customers convert? How many times do they see your ad before they click?  How long do they wait between the first time they see your ad and when they finally convert?

To get this information, you simply sign in to your Adwords account and choose Reporting, and then Search Funnels. Search Funnels sorts all the times your customer looks at your ads into three groups:

• Assist impressions: these are the times when your ad is presented to your customer, and the eventual customer doesn’t click on it.
• Assist click: these are the times the customer clicks on the ad, but doesn’t convert.
• Last click before conversion: these are the times the customer clicks on the ad and does convert.

Now you can see how many impressions and clicks your ads require before they lead to conversions, and how long a time lag there is between one of these events and the next. You can compare campaigns and keywords, too.

Remarketing

There’s another customer.  She has visited your site before, window shopping through your sporting goods, and has bought a couple of small items, but she has never taken the plunge and made a major purchase. Still, you think she may be interested in the new top-of-the-line racket, so you use the Google Content Network to present some ads about that racquet to her as she visits other sites around the web. She’s not actively searching for a racket right now, so she hasn’t seen your keyword-driven ads, but when she sees your ad, she recognizes your store as one she’s shopped at before, she clicks through, and this time she decides to treat herself to a new racket.

This scenario sounds like you’d really have to know a lot of personal information about your customer, but actually Google has a clever plan for this.

You tag pages with a remarketing tag, such as “rackets.”  When someone visits that page, they’re added to your Rackets list. Later, as they visit sites using the Google content network, they’ll be recognized and shown your ads about racquets. They recognize you, since they’ve visited before, and you get the chance to keep in touch with them without having to capture more information.

From: Internet Marketing

We all love finding bargains so as an etailer it would only make sense to post coupons to the most popular esavings sites on the Internet. To that end, we’ve compiled a list of coupon sites for consumers and etailers. It’s a list of sites we’ve used with great success and has helped grab those deal-a-looking shoppers you may not have gotten otherwise.

1. 100bigcoupons.com
2. alexscoupons.com
3. baby cheapskate
4. bargainbum.com
5. bargainlist.com
6. bensbargains.com
7. boodle.com
8. bradsdeals.com
9. cellfire.com
10. cheaptweet.com
11. clevermoms.com
12. clickmycoupon.com
13. couponalbum.com
14. couponbug.com
15. couponcabin.com
16. couponchief.com
17. couponcode.com
18. couponcowgirl.com
19. couponcrib.com
20. couponmom.com
21. couponmountain
22. couponmountain.com
23. coupons.com
24. couponshouse.com
25. coupontrunk.com
26. currentcodes.com
27. dealcatcher.com
28. dealio.com
29. deallocker.com
30. deals.yahoo.com/coupons/
31. dealseekingmom.com
32. ebates.com
33. ecoupons
34. f fatwallet.com
35. fabuloussavings.com
36. flamingoworld.com
37. freeshipping.org
38. gogoshopper.com
39. keepcash.com
40. momsview.com
41. mycoupons.com
42. mysavings.com
43. pocketdeal.com
44. redplum.com
45. retailmenot.com
46. retailsavingsonline.com
47. savings.com
48. savingsmania.com
49. shopping-bargains.com
50. slickdeals.com
51. smartsource.com
52. sundaysaver.com
53. swapbabygoods.com
54. thecouponclippers.com

From: Internet Marketing

Facebook as an E-commerce Platform

There was an early expectation, but it never panned out. There were a few dozen e-commerce applications for Facebook in years past, and most are now extinct except for a select few. There are several large retailers with Facebook Stores (selling virtual gifts as well as real ones), but it’s never really caught hold with the consumer. Facebook just hasn’t become a hub for buying and selling goods.

One of the problems is that people at Facebook are hanging out, not actually shopping. I don’t need to tell you that you visit an ecommerce website to buy stuff not to “kabitz”. You’ve probably searched for an item, arrived at the website somehow and are ready to buy or just getting some pre-purchase background information.

Facebook Online Advertising

As you may know, Facebook offers Pay Per Click ads. As with any PPC medium, success here depends on how well you target your location, demographic and fine-tune your ads / landing pages. Since the ads served up to Facebook visitors are triggered by user?s location and demographic, Facebook ads have the advantage of being super, laser-targeted. I know a few affiliate marketers who make $100s of thousands each month with carefully sculpted Facebook campaigns. They?ve even stopped advertising in Adwords because Facebook is a much more efficient advertising vehicle for their products and services.

On the other hand, you’re still facing the leisurely attitude that goes with Facebook, so conversions may be lower than in other places online, but your impression stats should be incredible and your CPC amazing. Testing and fine-tuning will ensure that you?re getting the ROI you require. We typically shoot for an efficiency ratio of 3 to 1.

Facebook for Social Media Marketing

This is probably the easiest option for Facebook marketing newbies. It’s easy and free to set up a Facebook page for your business, and the Fan and Friend system helps you get the word-of-mouth benefits. Drive Facebook visitors to your e-commerce website, and you get the best of both worlds. There are also some ways to leverage Facebook pages for SEO benefits too, but we’ll keep that for another discussion.

Getting started is super easy:

• Set up a Facebook business page.
• Add plenty of keyword-rich content, plus ads and offers to lure visitors to your website.
• Use “Share” buttons to encourage visitors to spread the word.

Step it up by taking advantage of the full functionality of the system:

• Offer something just for Facebook fans – a gift with order at your website is a common and effective choice. Becoming a fan is such a small commitment that many people will opt in for a small, or even a virtual gift. Fans get your feeds, and their friends can see what you have to say, too.
• Create content. There are so many options here that you can easily end up with lots of things for visitors to check out – and the casual hanging around of Facebook encourages people to spend time on your page. Start Discussions, upload photos and videos, create Notes pages with authoritative information or import your blog feed into a Notes page, encourage Reviews, and use the Events section to promote your business with webinars, virtual meet-ups and special offers.
• Use Facebook Insights to track activity at your page. Since this gives you demographics, it can be a good adjunct to your website’s analytics. Use analytics to track the number of visitors you receive at your website from Facebook, and to track their conversion rate.
• Add a Facebook button to your website to get some two-way traffic going.

Don’t forget that Facebook is social media, though.  It’s a great way to engage customers, add a human face to your company, and spread the word about what you have to offer. However, people on Facebook can shut out anything that begins to feel intrusive – and for many Facebooks users, anything that comes across as too commercial crosses that line. Stay interesting, useful, and entertaining for best results.

From: Internet Marketing

When: February 16, 2010

Location:
Kip’s Authentic Irish Pub & Restaurant
9970 Wayzata Boulevard
St. Louis Park, MN 55426
952-367-5070

From: Internet Marketing

Here’s a cheat sheet from seomoz:

Search Engines are the easiest way to get free organic traffic to your website. The only hurdle is that you have to make it to the first page to get any of that traffic.  In order to get Search Engines to determine what your site is about by crawling your page. On site optimization lets you “tell” the search engines exactly what your keywords are and what could be related to your site.

There are seven components that you can tweak for SEO: title tag, headers, titles, body text, anchor text in links, URL, image alt tags, meta description tags, and keyword tags.

• Title Tag
  • 65 character limit
  • Use your keywords (one to two)
  • Main keyword to the left
  • Unique titles for every page
• Headings
  • H1, H2, H3 tags
  • Increased importance so should use the keyword (especially H1)
• Body Text
  • Your keywords should have prominence or be in the beginning  of your text
  • Main keyword should have 3-5% keyword density (should not be “stuffed”)
  • Use relevant keywords
• Anchor Texts
  • Use your keywords to link to the relevant page
• URL
  • If you can, then place the keyword in your specific URL page i.e. www.example.com/keyword
  • Describe your content
  • Keep it short as possible
• Image Alt Tags
  • If you have images use them and label them with your keywords
  • Don’t have them read “img2.jpg”
• Meta Description Tags
  • 160 character limit
  • Unique for  each page of your site
  • What is seen in the search engine results
  • Short description for your readers for a snapshot of what your site(a tiny advertisement)
• Meta Keywords
  • Low in importance

A basic rule of thumb is to keep it simple. If you have a good, concise, and relevant keyword list then it should not be difficult. Although optimization is the goal, over optimization is not. You are not playing only to the search engines, but also to your reader/customer. Always make sure that the site is “readable”.

From: Internet Marketing

From: Internet Marketing

Do you remember where you were when Google’s Big Daddy rolled out in 2005? Well, I certainly do and many websites were reeling from the consequences. In grand style once again, the big ‘G’ announced several months ago the Caffeine Update, slated for release late this January 2010.

At the end of the day, all we really care about are the implications, so here they are wrapped up neatly for simple consumption:

• Improved search result page speed – meaning you’ll get the answers to your queries much faster. Google is overhauling how they index information yielding better over performance.
• Fast and cleanly designed & constructed website will be preferred over slower, poorly coded sites.
• New and updated content will be given preferential treatment over old stale content.

Google is playing catchup with some of the smaller less significant social media and news monitoring upstarts and Caffeine is a direct attach on their ability to display fresher, more time sensitive content.

It’s important to note that this doesn’t mean you should throw out traditional on and off page optimization techniques, to the contrary. You’ll need to use these techniques in conjunction with your news and social media campaigns with an eye towards a comprehensive and CAFFEINATED holistic internet strategy.

From: Internet Marketing