Internet Direct Marketing Tip of the Day

Social Media or Web 2.0 is all about engaging the end user in some sort of dialogue or participation. It might be an invitation to submit a video, picture, comment, or what have you.

Social Media is all about inviting your audience to take some sort of action, even if it does not lead directly to a sale. Many marketers don’t want to dedicate resources to handling the responses solicited. But, it doesn’t have to be so labor-intensive.

For a slightly twisted but effective example of a large brand inviting participation, look at Burger King’s recent “Whopper Sacrifice” campaign on Facebook. It gave a coupon for a Whopper sandwich to anyone who defriended 10 Facebook friends. The company gave out 23,000 coupons before ending the promotion. LC

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Internet Marketing always has a shiny new object to swoon over. It could be the hot new mobile app, a new Social Media outlet, or a new platform not yet devised. But, don’t forget about email marketing.

Many Internet Marketing cognoscenti “pooh-pooh” old-fashioned email marketing. It’s not hip enough. It isn’t hip anymore. But, do you want to be hip, or do you want to sell products or services? Email marketing does a lot of heavy lifting, because it’s pretty reliable and inexpensive to produce and execute.

Whether you’re comparing B2B or B2C rate cards and response rates, you’re going to have a tough time beating the ROI email marketing offers. Of course, building your own email house list legitimately is a no-brainer, no matter how unhip it might seem. Remember, the smarty-pants people who thumb their noses at email marketing are probably not your target audience . LC

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Everyone who looks at response rates is acutely interested in how many clicks a given offer yields.

But, behind those clicks are people with their hands on the mouse. Some of those people are at the top of the sales funnel. Some are ready to buy, and some are your competitors.

You could easily say, “Not all clicks are created equal.” It’s helpful to create “personas” for each segment you can identify. Each segment comes with different agendas.

Naturally, the most sophisticated way to track clicks is all the way to the back end, where they convert to a buyer, sign up for a newsletter, or what-have-you.

Yes, it gets wonky and time-consuming. In a B2B situation, it can take up to 18 months from click to purchase. But, it’s the only real way you’re going to know if your budget is spent properly. LC

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You can easily find out which sites are linking to your competitors and not linking to you. It’s a good practice to find out why they’re pointing to those sites. Is it good content or a partnership? Or, is it a paid ad? If so, how much?

If you have worthy content on your site, it isn’t so far-fetched to ask the sites that point to your competitor to point to you, too. The worst they can say is “No.” The best that can happen is you improve your link neighborhood, which should impress the search engine crawlers the next time they come around to index you. LC

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Funny thing about many marketers: For some reason, they disregard what sales people tell them. This is arrogant and short-sighted.

Sales people are where the rubber meets the pavement. It’s where your organization often makes the conversion to sale or loses it. Sales people can sense emotional shifts in a phone call or face-to-face encounter with a prospect. They see how target audiences respond to marketing campaigns.

So, why do so many marketers not listen to their sales departments? Beats me. I get some of my best ideas from talking to sales people on trade-show floors, the phone and in stores. Try it.

Talk to a sales person today. Better yet, take one out to lunch. You’ll learn something you can use in your marketing efforts. LC

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By all means, optimize your site for people because that is what search engines want. Google CEO Eric Schmidt talks about “user happiness” as the prime objective for Google.

So long as people get great search results that please them, they’ll not switch search engines. So the crawlers want well targeted content that is relevant and fresh, like vegetables . In other words, your good content, be it video, text, podcasts, make search

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You can see how the search engines pick up title tags, meta tags and link tags. Look at the fragments of copy and tags that make up the snippet block of text which displays next to the link to yourself on the SERP (Search Engine Results Page).

Make sure you’re getting found for the keywords your target audience uses, not the ones you use, unless you are just like your target audience. LC

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Users click on hyperlinks in unpredictable ways. For example, they might not click on a link within a solo email message or an ad within a newsletter for many months after the time of transmission.

This means you should look at the response rates long after transmission. No need to obsessively watch them daily or weekly if the message went out months prior. But, do check in to see the increased number.

People will save an appealing offer. Or, they might bookmark the landing page for when they have more time. If you held a real-time Webinar, put a link to that event’s archive on your landing page for latecomers. LC

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Google CEO Eric Schmidt talks about how “user happiness” is central to how his firm thinks of their experience. This makes sense. The happier users are with the Google experience, the more they’ll come back and use it again.

It is this user happiness that drives Google’s search results pages. That goes for the organic, or natural, results, as well as paid listings. Part of that user happiness equation is how satisified the user is with the landing page he/she jumps to from those search results. The more users like your landing pages, the more Google should like you, and you, hopefully, move up higher in rankings.

Instead of always thinking about Search Engine Optimization, it would serve you also to think about “User Happiness Optimization,” or UHO. LC

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Repeating yourself in long form copy or even reiterating a copy point made in the headline once again in the body copy often helps to reinforce a selling proposition in the reader’s mind. Online, it is extremely important to reinforce copy from a statement made in email again on the landing page. This helps the reader confirm that he or she has clicked to the right place.

Many copywriters think this technique insults the reader’s intelligence. When done wrong, or overdone, it can. But more often is the case the reader feels reassured or reminded of a key point you’re trying to establish. LC

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