Getting the Most from Your E-marketing Efforts
Do you need to improve your e-marketing results but don’t want to add to the torrential downpour of marketing messages that hit your customers every day?
Then focus on improving your existing efforts rather than increasing the frequency of your messages.
Electronic marketing (which generally refers to both Web and e-mail-based marketing messages) is all about creating an efficient process to move your customers toward the action you want them to take—whether that’s to purchase a product, register for an event, or refer a friend.
The key is to make your process compelling and easy. These five steps can help.
1. Match your marketing to the message. One way to improve response rates is to make sure that what you’re marketing is relevant to the topics your target clients are already primed for. Here are two means to do this.
- Use electronic newsletters that target a segment of your customer base. If an issue of your newsletter covers topic X, market items that relate to X. But keep in mind that doing this effectively takes planning. Try to get a broad cross-section of your staff involved in the editorial planning process for your e-newsletters for the express purpose of matching marketing messages to themes in the editorial calendar.
This is not to say that your newsletter should be made up of advertorials. Your content should stand on its own without an overt commercial message. You simply need to bundle your relevant marketing messages around the valuable content without letting the marketing get in the content’s way.
- Tie your messages to the topics of appropriate Web pages. This is exactly what the Google AdWords service does—post marketing messages on searches and pages that relate to the advertisers’ desired subject. AdWords has been an explosive source of revenue for Google, which tells you how popular the service is with advertisers. They would not use this method if it didn’t work.
You don’t need a complex system to create custom advertising in your Web and e-newsletter content. Simply start with your high-traffic pages and most popular e-newsletters. What topics do they cover? Do you have related products, services, or campaigns? If so, highlight them prominently in those vehicles to capture traffic from visitors and readers who’ve already indicated an interest in that issue by visiting that page or subscribing to that newsletter.
Programming is not required for simple process like this. All you need to do is edit the content of the page or newsletter to include the related promotional message.
2. Identify the next action. Your relevant message should go beyond promotion; it should also direct recipients to take your desired next action. Do you want them to read more information on another page? Contact their congressman via your grass-roots Web site? Request a booth brochure? Be specific about what you’re asking them to do (such as “Click here”) to ensure that they do it. Being subtle may simply leave them guessing, which will cost you a significant chunk of traffic from people unwilling to invest the time to decipher what they should do next.
3. Create custom landing pages. One way to guide your customers’ actions is by developing a landing page tailored to the context in which your marketing message is embedded. This will allow you to maximize your conversion rate by providing an experience created just for your prospects rather than for your generic total audience.
The landing page should provide information specific to that audience and answer common questions they may have. And again, this page should also prominently feature the next specific action you want them to take, such as making a purchasing decision or requesting further information.
4. Make it easy. It should be ridiculously simple for members of your target audience to do what you intend for them to do. Eliminate unnecessary fields in your forms, remove extraneous content, and be clear about next steps. Anything that requires thinking can lose conversions—not because your prospects cannot think but because their time is precious and you need to be quick to convince them to take the actions you desire.
5. Measure and experiment. To be effective at e-marketing, you have to measure performance and make adjustments based on those results. So track click-throughs. Figure out which phrases drive more traffic and which don’t. Try moving buttons and links around on your landing pages to see which position performs best. All you need are very basic traffic reports to identify the patterns of usage on your site. Think about what you’re trying to achieve and plan on how you’ll measure your results in advance.
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