One of the first things on CEOs and Managing Directors minds is to reduce spending; this often includes their marketing campaigns. But this is exactly when marketing plays an important role to ensure a company is well known and easily found for economic growth.

Online Marketing is a great way of providing Local, National, even Global coverage to promote businesses. As the name already suggests – Online Marketing is any type of marketing via the Internet; email marketing, search engine marketing or search engine optimisation campaigns, social media marketing, blog marketing social networking or any other form of promoting your business via Internet.

Four factors put online marketing ahead of any other marketing techniques during an economic downturn:

1 – Measurement

Traditional marketing campaigns often lack measurement. With online marketing and a good web analytics package, you are able to track, measure, document the effect, adjust and justify your marketing investments.

2 – Immediate Effect

It is almost impossible to know how effective a TV commercial or other type offline advertisement is. Online marketing methods have a direct value on sales; especially search engine marketing.

3 – Good ROI

The success of a marketing campaign is measured by its ROI (return over investment); the higher the better; and there are few things beating online marketing. For every dollar spent on online marketing, marketers are making more than a dollar through sales or other conversions on their sites.

4 – Small Budgets

Online marketing can start with a small budget and gradually increase it as it succeeds, then reduce to maintain success. Many multi-million dollar companies are basing their economic strategies around this simple principle nowadays.

The DMA estimates that expenditures with online marketing will maintain a significant growth in the coming year with more than 50% of U.S marketing dollars directed to Interactive marketing.

We would like to hear your opinion; with the computer screen rapidly becoming the shop window of the future, should companies prioritise their marketing budgets on online marketing? Add your view in our comments section below.

“How can email marketing help my business?” – This is one most common question we are asked.

At first glance this may seem pretty obvious (it’s advertising, with all the benefits to your business that this implies), but there is a serious point behind it.

In most cases what people are really asking is something like: “Direct email advertising is often ignored, so what’s the point?”

This is a much more complex question, and by no means easy to answer. There are, however, certain advantages to using email (when compared to more traditional direct mail techniques) which can significantly improve the chance that your message will at least be read.

Before we get started, let me first clear up a common misconception. There is absolutely nothing we can do to force the recipient to open the email. Even if there were, we would not do so – such tactics are not the methods of a reputable company.

So, how can we maximise the number of emails that are read (as opposed to being deleted or simply ignored)?

This is two-fold: initial email design and statistical analysis.

Email Design: The first problem is to get your message into your customers’ (or potential customers’) inbox. This is by no means as easy as it sounds since most email servers these days have filtering software installed that shunts obvious direct advertising into junk mail folders, where it is extremely unlikely to be read.

For obvious reasons, the authors of this software do not advertise the criteria they use to decide what is, or is not, direct advertising. However, with a little experience, it is possible to learn what usually works as opposed to what usually does not.

The second problem is encouraging the recipients to read the email. After all, most people have a dozen or more emails to deal with every morning before they can even think about starting their days’ work.

In order to avoid your email simply being deleted as “just somebody trying to sell me something” it must be attractive, interesting and relevant to the recipients concerns. And that is the big problem – some email filtering can be disconcertingly good at picking out “attractive” emails and shunting them into the junk mail.

Clearly there is a fine line between an attractive (and therefore hopefully successful) email and one that will never be read.

At TH UK we have been sending bulk email campaigns for a long time, and consequently we have a lot of experience in this area. We employ this from the outset to design an email that will pass through the filter systems into the recipients’ inbox.

Statistical Analysis: So, how do we assess the effectiveness of an email?

Quite simply, we collect statistics on every campaign we run.

This is perhaps one of the biggest advantages email marketing can offer over more traditional (postal based) direct marketing campaigns.

Email servers routinely return several status flags to the sender on every email that sent. These status flags can reveal if email reached it’s intended target (possible but difficult with traditional mail), if it was opened (impossible with traditional mail), if the recipient click any of the links in the message, and much more.

We record all this information and then analysis it to get a much clearer idea of just how effective a campaign has been. The results of this are used to both refine the initial design and better target the email list so that future campaigns are even more effective.

Online marketing does not simply entail building and launching a great looking search engine friendly website, nor does it mean placing a banner-ad on another website. Effective Online Marketing requires a comprehensive strategy that spans over time, constantly improving the website function and appearance to ensure the website is presented exceptionally well and easily navigated to deliver what the user wants, the search engine spiders can interpret and also focusing on the websites target market.

eMail Databases are considered a quick route to successful online marketing. There is no work involved in building the list. It can be bought in and setup in next to no time. So why not go out and buy a ready made list?

Experience

Here at TH UK we have been working with eMail Marketing for ten years now. In a relatively new market, that’s a lot of dog years! A common service requested of our eMail Marketing department is to buy in a list on behalf of our clients and build a campaign around it. However, things are not that simple and we advise our clients to think very carefully about their objectives and what they can expect from a ‘bought in list’.

Types of eMail data lists

There are different sorts of lists which you can buy and some of them are not worth the effort of setting up and sending, let alone the cost of buying the eMail database.

The best eMail lists are without doubt the ones that you develop and nurture in house. These are lists grown from people that have requested to be communicated with. However, it is commonplace at TH UK to be asked for a list that a client can send to, perhaps because they do not have the time to build their own database, or the inclination to.

Costs

eMail lists vary considerably in cost. We have known eMail lists exchange hands for £1,000 per thousand names. Whilst this is rare, it tends to be because the list is very niche, reactive and well looked after.

The next rung of the eMail list ladder, is the proven and responsive list generated by buying habits. These lists can be purchased around the £500 per thousand mark. Although these lists have proven buying trends, be wary of the fact that unless what you are selling is related to their area of interest, the recipients are still unlikely to interact in volume with your message.

On the cheap end of the scale, £100-£250 per thousand addresses, you will find the bargain bucket eMail lists. These could be generated by surveys, or offers, but in our experience, you are unlikely to achieve a return on your investment with them. These recipients are likely to have exchanged their email address for a personal gain, like a freebie, or document, even a competition entry.

In summary, be cautious about paying out for eMail lists, and consider whether or not it may be worth investing in developing your own list – wouldn’t that be a more valuable asset to your business?

TH UK are eMail Marketing Experts that can help you generate in house lists and maximise the potential of the list, Contact Us Now to find out how we can add benefit to your specific business.

However, it appears that the algorithm is serious a factor to consider when estimating the value of your website or blog. A good example is Website Value Calculator http://www.websitevaluecalculator.com. To estimate that value, the script  uses data from the most popular and recognized statistic systems available on the Internet – Alexa Traffic Ranking and Google Page Rank and the amount of links to the blog/website. For example, Google.com…

• Alexa Traffic Ranking: 2,
• Google Page Rank: 10,
• Average of 57,950,000 backlinks from major search engines.

The script calculates indicators of potential profits, all sites have a potential of earning money, Google.com can earn approximately $5,825.895 per link per month from selling text link advertisements and approximately $9,135,000/Month through creative product placements, by placing relevant affiliate links on the site, could earn approximately $32,366.07 per month. Based on the fact Google.com is worth $1,561,822,935… Nice…

How much is your website worth? To improve that value, please feel free to contact our SEO team.

It’s very common for us to be asked for eMail databases. On the whole (and there is always an exception) we avoid buying in third party databases for our clients. Of course we could send and charge much more if we did, but quite simply, it doesn’t work.

Common requests are “We are in the widget industry and wondered if you could provide us with an email list of businesses with a turnover of 10 million plus in the London area?”

Sure we can get them, but do you really think these people will want to buy from you? After you have sent them an email, when they did not request it, from a company they have never heard of, asking them to buy something?

Another common question is “Can we broadcast a marketing message to our contacts that we have built up over the last five years of trading?”

The answer is yes, you can legally send them a message. How you go about it is important though. For email marketing to work effectively, you need to gain trust and credibilty. If you are sending to an in house list of contacts, tell them why you are emailing them, what you intend to email them ad how often. You need to be as relevant as possible to your contacts, tell them where you got their details from and personalise the message.

If after sending them an email they have not opted into your subscription, don’t send to them again. Focus on those that want to hear from you and build on the relevancy in the content you send to them.

Your objective should not be to sell to them, instead to gain their permission to communicate with them by email.

The best way to obtain an email database is to build one yourself, TH UK offer services to help you build an in house email database.

I get annoyed when the eMail Marketing Industry is tarred with the same brush as spammers. As an ethical Online Marketing Agency, we monitor closely what we are sending for our clients and educate them on the best and most ethical practices.
Back to today. As I said, my inbox contained spam and I filtered through those who had got through the net. I arrived at an email from a global cereal brand. I looked at it, as it carried this global brand and thought that I must have opted in somewhere along the line. That was until I realised that this message had been sent to a domain that I had only registered a month ago and was dormant. I set all emails sent to this new domain to be forwarded to my inbox, as I always do when I registered the domain. This message had been sent to kelly@mydomain.com. Kelly? I have never heard of Kelly. So the email was Spam, of the worst kind, as this address had never been used.

So how did this household brand end up with this email address? I am still waiting to see, they have still not responded to my email outlining my annoyance with them. To be honest, my annoyance is not that they have sent the eMail to me, its who else they sent the message to as part of their eMail Marketing camapaign. How many other people will now get so annoyed with eMail Marketing that they would never touch it with a barge pole?

When I get a response, I will update this post.

If you still want an ethical eMail Marketing campaign, enquire here.

view the eMail Marketing document

Some of the subjects covered include:

The Subject Header

The “From” Address

Personalise Your Message

Safe Sending

It’s ideal to keep as a checklist for when you run your next email marketing camapaign. Written in laymans terms, its also a great starter for those new to the industry.

One such organisation is the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who now have well over 500 organisations supporting their petition to prevent the charges. You can add your organisation or individual name to the petition here.

The stakes seem to be higher in the USA, the matter got several column inches in the New York Times. The column itself has caused controversy, ZDNet blog on this matter very well here “DearAOL.com coalition tangles with Esther Dyson over Goodmail’s CertifiedEmail approach to spam eradication“.

Their email marketing message, was sent to their subscribers advertsising children’s shows in London’s West End, with two young boys faces and the headline….

“Doing it for the kids. Like Gary Glitter in a sweet shop, you too can have your pick of kiddy treats in London’s theatre world”.

Perhaps this was lastminute.com’s new group marketing directors way of gaining publicity? Niall McKinney, previously of ‘Lad Mags’ Loaded and Nuts, joined the firm earlier this year.

The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) stated: “We considered the reference to a registered sex offender in conjunction with images of children in an ad for children’s theatre was likely to cause serious or widespread offence.”

Lastminute said it had withdrawn the ad with immediate effect and had no plans to use the promotion again. How gracious of them.