Successful Email Marketing Campaigns

We haven’t focused on email marketing in this newsletter for some time, but it remains a powerful online marketing tool, if used correctly. Whether you want to find new customers, or communicate with existing clients, email can be used in a number of ways, as long as some key principles are followed.

A successful email marketing campaign needs to be carefully planned and implemented, so these are our top ten tips:

1) Have a clear objective ‘ be clear what you want to achieve with an email marketing campaign and how your objectives can be achieved. Will it be a one-off promotional campaign, or an ongoing communication channel? What will be the measures to ensure the campaign is effective?

2) Use a good list ‘ this can be one of the main barriers to running a campaign, as the recipient list needs to be targeted, relevant and legal (especially in Australia where the spam mailing regulations are very strict). There are suppliers of good email lists but, depending on your market you may need to hunt them out, or it can be better to ‘piggy-back’ on an established mailing to your ideal target list. If you are developing your own email list, make sure recipients have opted-in to receive your mailings.

3) Avoid the junk filter ‘ this is increasingly becoming another barrier to getting your message out, since trigger words in your message or the formatting of links to a website can mean your email will be automatically blocked, or the recipient alerted to a potential spam message.

4) Get the email opened ‘ the recipient will scan the email subject and sender and within seconds decide whether to junk it, or open it. You therefore want your recipients to recognise who the message is coming from and to give them a reason to take the next step.

5) Get the email read ‘ the content needs to be relevant and interesting to the reader so that they continue reading and do whatever the email aims to achieve. You’ll need to grab and hold the reader’s attention, make it interesting and appealing and avoid any reason for them to stop reading before completing the desired action.

6) Have a strong call to action ‘ depending on the objectives of the mailing, lead the reader through to the final action and make it easy for them to take an action, whether it’s to complete a sale, sign-up for something, complete a survey or make an enquiry.

7) Track the email ‘ it’s essential to monitor what happens once the email is despatched, from open and bounce rates, to clickthroughs and eventual sales. Many email marketing services provide tracking data on each mailing and you can link the email into an analytics package to trace actions through to a website.

8) Test and improve ‘ based on the results from a mailing, or a series of mailings, the tracking data can provide invaluable information to help you test and improve the performance of your mailings. If you’re sending a mailing to a large list, run a test mailing first and spot any potential problems from the responses.

9) Schedule the mailings ‘ decide when to send the mailing, or test different days over a period of time. Research has shown that the highest email open rates occur on a Monday with the lowest on a Friday, but this could vary depending on your market and email subject.

10) Include an opt-out ‘ On all your mailings you need to include an Unsubscribe option for recipients to decline future mailings. Make it easy for them to do so to avoid any negative feelings towards your company or brand.

As shown here, there’s lots to think about and put into action for any email marketing campaign, but effective planning and tracking can dramatically improve the quality of responses.

If you’d like to find out more or discuss your email marketing plans, please contact us now for a discussion.

The Internet Advertising Bureau have just released the latest half yearly figures on Internet advertising expenditure in the UK for 2007. Once again, online advertising spend shows amazing growth, up over 41% on the first half year results for 2006, to a value of £1,334.3m.

These new figures published by the IAB are from the biannual online advertising spend study carried out in partnership with PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC). They show that internet advertising has continued to grow faster than any other main advertising medium, with record spend and increased market share for the period January to June 2007. Online advertising now accounts for 14.7% of overall market share, up from 10.5% for the same period in 2006.

With growth in the overall UK advertising market slowing to 3.1%, online advertising in the UK shows an amazing 41.3% growth, valued at £417.1m. It is clear that advertisers are continuing to recognise and use the online medium as a central tenet of their overall marketing strategies.

Breaking down the Internet spend by media format over the first half of 2007,

• Search advertising – paid-for, or sponsored, listings that advertisers pay for when a consumer clicks through to their site, took a 57.1% share worth some £762.3m,
• Online display advertising (including banners, skyscrapers and online sponsorships) accounted for 21.5% or £287m,
• Online classified advertising was also up to a market share of 20.8%, at some £ 277.7m,
• Solus email – a new category that looks at direct email marketing/ advertising showed a 0.6% market share, worth £7.4m.

Once again, UK online advertising growth is being driven by a number of factors, including:

• high-speed broadband take-up: some 52% of UK adults have broadband at home and 90% of these have a high speed connection
• the internet is the second most consumed media (amongst Internet users), after TV,
• increasing daily web use: average daily use is estimated to have risen by 158% over the last four years,
• social networking and user-generated content lead to increased consumer interest and confidence,
• increasingly available and sophisticated analytics tools that mean online advertising campaigns can be easily managed and measured.

Advertisers are clearly continuing to switch more of their budgets online to build their brands, interact with their customers and take advantage of new social trends and the web technologies that enable them.

At Web Search Workshop UK we are experts at creating and running PPC and online marketing campaigns. Read more about our PPC management service, or contact us for more information.

E-mail marketing has rapidly developed as a key online marketing technique over the past decade, being seen as a highly cost-effective form of direct marketing. This can still be the case, with careful planning and management, but the rise of e-mail spam now makes the task much harder and, together with email regulations, means that implementing a campaign can be fraught with difficulties.

The two main issues that need to be considered with any e-mail marketing campaign are firstly, how to get through any spam filters to reach the recipient, and secondly to provide relevant content and offers in a timely manner so as not to damage the business brand through negative responses from the market.

Marketing e-mails can now be easily perceived in the same manner as the ‘junk mail’ tag attached to direct mailings, by antagonising recipients if they perceive no relevance to them, but also the sheer volumes of ‘spam’ and the ability of recipients to instantly delete e-mails, either through a filter or from their inbox, makes it all the more difficult to achieve good response rates, despite the lower set-up and mailing costs.

Recent statistics indicate a steady decline in the ‘open rates’ of e-mails, dropping from 36.8% in 2004 to 29.4% during the same period in 2005. Yet apparently over 65% of UK companies are planning to increase their activity in e-mail marketing this year, which will make it even harder for messages to get noticed.

A survey published by Revolution this month indicated that 40% of UK companies who are using e-mail were not pre-testing any core elements before sending out bulk e-mail campaigns. The perception remains that e-mail is a low-cost marketing technique and therefore the testing and segmentation principles of direct mail, for example, are not being used to the same level. But what damage could poorly targeted e-mails be doing to the brand, particularly if they are perceived as ‘spam’?

E-mail management and tracking software is essential when managing any e-mail marketing campaign, as this can show ‘open rates’ and clicks on links within the e-mail, as well as ‘bounce’ rates and unsubscribes – all of which are key measures to help understand how good the mailing lists are, or the creative effectiveness of the e-mail at generating a responses, not just immediately but over a longer period of time.

Find out more with our list of tips for developing an e-mail marketing campaign, or contact us if you’d like to discuss e-mail marketing in more detail, or to set-up a new campaign.

This is the first of an occasional feature in which we look at some of the search tools that used to be major players in the market but have now largely disappeared from view. To begin with, we consider LookSmart this month, which used to be a significant directory and search site alongside Yahoo and the Open Directory.

First established in October 1996, LookSmart became a significant web directory where human editors would review and list sites. As the Internet boom arrived after 1998, the site became an important source of search traffic for sites that were listed – either through its own domain or through its listings partnerships with other search engines, including AltaVista and MSN, so that eventually free listings were charged for and the backlog of submissions grew.

There was a UK office and website established as the global coverage of this directory was expanded and additional revenue also began to be gained from the growth in pay-per-click advertising as Overture listings were included within the results. However, this all came to a sudden end at the end of 2003 when MSN, its main distribution partner, withdrew the arrangement and an estimated 70-80% of the company’s revenue was lost.

Since then LookSmart has faded into obscurity. The UK site no longer exists and the original US site has become a shadow of its former self with only a tiny percentage of the search market, which was not helped by a confusing series of changes to its pricing policies. It still earns some revenue from its own pay-per-click activity, although the company recently reported a large loss which included the costs of trying to combat click fraud on the site.

LookSmart still retains its directory listings and also displays search engine results from WiseNut, which it bought in 2002 when this new search engine index was being hailed as the new Google. This tool has now dropped behind in terms of current technology and the financial forecasts for the LookSmart business are poor.

If you’d like to know more about LookSmart, or if there is a search tool that you used to use in the past and wonder whatever happened to it, please let us know

A report published recently by Enquiro in Canada adds a more detailed level of analysis to the research conducted by Eyetools that used eye-tracking software to identify
‘hotspots’ on a page of Google search engine results (see April newsletter)

The study, across 300 sessions, identified the way that searchers viewed the page of results once it was displayed, represented as a ‘golden triangle’. In fact, the shape tended to represent an F pattern with the eye travelling from the top left (organic and paid results) to top right (paid results) and then down the results on the left (organic results).

The new study provides more in-depth findings that indicate that searchers tend to react differently to natural listings compared to the sponsored results. It describes the process of
‘semantic mapping’ which implies that many searchers will look for the best match in the results between a search listing and their concept of what the most appropriate result will be.

In such cases, a searcher will respond to those results, regardless of position, that match their concept most effectively. Therefore the
eye-tracking sees users jump around the page looking for direct matches, as well as having peripheral vision to scan all the information on a page.

The study analyses other factors that influence search behaviour, such as emboldened terms, demographic differences, and a user’s confidence in the results between listings they are seeing
for the first time against ones they have seen previously. To read more about this report and to view some sample pages, or to buy the report, please click
here.

If you would like more information about using eye-tracking software or how this survey impacts your search engine listings, please contact us for more information.

The posting of press releases through online sites can be a valuable way to promote your business as well as another way to support your search engine marketing activity. As they grow into significant online resources, many of the main press release websites have started to support their search engine coverage by optimising their sites, resulting in the possibility for your press release to achieve some good exposure on the main search engines!

Press release distribution sites have been on the web for many years and can provide a valuable marketing channel for many companies. However, as well as helping to increase your visibility on the web through the distribution of press releases, it is also possible to use this content to support search engine rankings and to build the number of links to your site.

If you’re thinking of submitting a press release in the near future here are some of the main sites you could consider submitting to:

• Press Box
• PR Web
• Press World
• Free Press Release
• Click Press
• Click 2 New Sites
• PR Leap

Most of these sites enable you to publish each press release for free, although most require registration to be made. However, when using these tools, here are some tips for optimising your release:

• Include some of the main search terms you want to target within the text of your release, and in particular within its title, but remember not to sacrifice the readability of the article. The title of the release is often used as the <title> tag for the page once indexed on the main search engines.
• When allowed, include links through to your website within the release, as this can help increase the number of links that are linking through to your own site.
• Of course, if you have newsworthy stories to publish, these should also be added to your own site to support the content and to help target the same or similar terms as the circulated releases.

If you’d like to know more about using press releases to support your marketing activity and to increase your search engine visibility, please contact us for more details.

Staying on the subject of user research, the Internet monitoring company Hitwise has just released some interesting information about UK service engine usage during February 2005.

Hitwise’s web traffic data confirmed that Google is the top UK search engine and also splits this usage between the .co.uk domain and the .com version. Following Google’s recent introduction of IP redirection which sends UK-based users to the .co.uk version, the latest data shows that this site is now used for 63.7% of all UK web searches, whilst Google.com was used for 7.7% of search traffic – therefore a total share of 71.4%.

This represents a massive domination of the market, with Google’s nearest competitors showing a much lower market share. Yahoo has an 8.4% share of search traffic with 5.5% coming from the UK site and 2.9% from the .com version. Figures for the new MSN Search tool show that the UK version attracted a 7.9% share during this period. This leaves a further 12.3% for all the other search engines, such as Ask Jeeves, Lycos and AltaVista.

The Hitwise data also shows that Google is more dominant as a search tool in the UK than the US, where it has a lower share of search traffic at 56.7% as it faces more competition from Yahoo, which shows a 29.9% market share.

The research also showed that different UK search engines tend to be used for different purposes. For example, MSN and Wanadoo (Overture/Yahoo results) tend to send more searchers to travel sites than other search engines, while Ask Jeeves is stronger for shopping and classified categories.

An interesting study was published recently on how web users view the rankings appearing on a search engine results page. The US based company Eyetools, used ‘eye tracking’ software to monitor the way that 50 users viewed a set of Google search results.

The result of this research, shown in this screen shot, found that 100% of users looked at the top 3 listings on the page with only 20% of users looking at the 10th ranked website. It also showed that people tend to view the ‘organic listings’ on the left of the screen more than the pay-per-click listings to the right.

The research highlights the benefits of achieving a much prized top 3 ranking. It also indicated that getting a pay-per-click listing at the top left of the page – which is often allocated to the top two advertisers for popular terms – can allow for significantly more traffic than further down the page. However, whether this increased volume of traffic is as cost-effective is another matter that needs to be measured!

A press release on the findings can be found here.

Although not entirely surprising, this research adds another level of understanding on search engine usage and the balance of traffic between ‘natural’ and PPC traffic, at least on Google. The results would also indicate that on Overture’s partners, where in most cases the top sponsored results are displayed on the left above the main ‘natural’ listings, the clickthrough rates are likely to be higher.

The use of eye tracking software to identify the ‘hot spots’ on a web page are one thing for search results. It could also be used to assess how well your website performs in getting visitors to view the important content on your site and follow links or take action. To view a case study of this type of work, view the PDF document here

To find out more about implementing user research for your website, contact us now for details.

Last month we looked at the Internet Archive website which can help online users go back in time. On a slightly different note this month, we take a look at time around the world.

If you have an international business that works across time zones, there are two websites that provide an excellent resource to check local time around the world.

World Time Server is a simple but effective site that allows you to select countries (and states or regions for some countries) around the world to display their current time. Time Ticker presents the information in a more visual way – you need Flash to display the global map and then drag the time line to the required location. Alternatively you can select a country from the right hand panel whereas the left hand panel lists all the countries that fall within the current time zone.

Web analysis tools provide valuable data on your site traffic and usage, which in turn can help you to improve your site and your online marketing activity. They can answer a wealth of questions, such as:

• Which sites referred users to your website?
• Which search engines are producing the most traffic for your site?
• How many repeat visitors does your website attract?
• What path do users take when navigating through your site?
• Which parts of your site do users exit from frequently?

Most packages use either a website’s log files or they record information with a small piece of code placed on each page of a website.

There is a wide range of packages available, differing greatly in price and functionality. We have summarised some of the most popular options below:

i) The Free Options

Webalizer is a simple log file analysis tool that you can load onto your web server and use to view your website statistics online. It provides yearly, monthly or daily summary information on usage, referrals and search engines and keywords.

AWStats is a more advanced log file analyser which is developed by the ‘open source’ community. It provides complete lists of referrers and keywords and also includes good information about the browsers, screen sizes and operating systems that are being used to view a site. Its main limitations are that it can be quite difficult to install and it does not provide the facility to export data to a spreadsheet format.

ii) Hosted Analysis Packages

Hosted analysis tools display your statistics on a secure website and providers charge a monthly fee for their service, meaning you can get started without a large initial expense. To set a package up, most require a small piece of code to be placed on every page of your site, which tends to be very simple to do.

The majority place ‘cookies’ on your visitor’s computer to measure unique visits and browsing patterns. However caching, dynamically generated pages, frames and firewalls can often disrupt this process, meaning that the statistics they provide may not be totally accurate in terms of volume, but are still useful for measuring trends over time.

These commercial tools provide more detailed information than the free tools and allow you to create reports based on custom date ranges and export reports to spreadsheet files, which can be very useful in many business settings.

Some of the most popular tools for small and medium sized business are LiveStats.net ($49 per month), HitBox Professional ($35) and WebTrends 7 ($35). Click Tracks ($49) is a slightly different package that allows you to view statistics superimposed on different sections of your website, making it easier to visualise behaviour.

iii) Standalone Packages

Most of the main commercial providers also offer a ‘stand alone software’ version of their packages that you can use on your own computer. There is a high up front cost to this type of solution and they tend to use a website’s log-files so can be more complex to set up. However this can be more appropriate if you work with a number of different websites or are certain you want use a tool in the long run as there is only a one-time fee and the software provides faster performance.

Most commercial packages offer a demo version or a free trial that you can test by running through the scenarios you are most likely to face before you buy.

In many cases your hosting company will provide statistics through a favoured package, depending on the fees paid or the depth of data required. If you’re not sure what statistics are available for your site, or how to make the most of your log files to develop your site, please contact us for more details of how we can help.