E-mail Marketing

It is proven evident that it is essential for your marketing content to be relevant to the audience that you are targeting, specifically when using e-mail marketing to reach your desired customer base. E-mail marketing gives your organization the chance to put the information you wish right in front of customers. For this reason it is important that you have correctly chosen and segmented your target market. With proper targeting you can show your consumers what you have to offer, and through an e-mail campaign that is visually appealing with appropriate content you can draw consumers directly to your site to make a purchase. E-mail marketing is driven on a permission base where the consumer has consented to receive these marketing materials, therefore it generates a perfect opportunity for you to communicate with them what you have to offer, and further enhance the relationship that your organization has built with its current customer base.

A major issue with e-mail marketing is spam. Consumers’ in-boxes work to avoid the entrance of spam, so it is your job to ensure that your organization’s marketing materials are visually appealing and non-offensive to avoid being labeled as junk mail. Not only do spam filters respond more favourably to material that is well designed, but consumers do as well. Appealing e-mail graphics and relevant content are what motivate your consumers to click through to your site, thus increasing your click through rate and site traffic.  Having a good balance between graphics and content creates a marketing material that is easier for the target audience to review when received, and is a more enticing call to action.

One of the huge benefits of e-mail marketing is the ability to calculate your return on investments through sales generated per dollar spent, leads generated per dollar spent, and branding and awareness. According to Joe Soltis there are four necessary actions your organization should take in achieving the best possible results with your e-mail marketing campaign. The first of these being a quality opt in database where you can capture those who already visit your website by having them subscribe to your e-mails; furthermore creating an incentive for them to subscribe (example: giving them access to additional information).  Secondly, sending your customers a timely message is essential in ensuring that your e-mail is relevant to the consumers needs and thirdly segmenting your database to understand what each individual customer is looking for. Through segmentation you can further ensure that you are sending your customer base materials that align with their past purchase behaviours. Finally you need to use advanced technology and good ISP relations to be aware of the percent of the market that your materials are reaching. This includes whether you are going into an inbox or junk box, as well as the percentage of consumers who are responding or blocking materials.

Banner Ads

Banner advertisements have proven to be one of the most common and effective ways to advertise your product or service on the web, and has many different ways of measuring its success. While one can measure the success of their banner ad by CPC or CTR, the only factor that makes your advertisement a success is its relevancy to its target market. We can’t separate the basic concepts of the marketing mix from traditional forms of marketing and today’s ever evolving web advertising. For successful targeting we need to make these concepts applicable to developing an online marketing strategy. Place being an essential factor to consider in developing a banner advertisement for your organization, where an ad that is incorrectly positioned will not only fail, but could potentially be of great annoyance to your site visitors. It is essential to monitor the content of the ads that are displayed on your site, as well as correctly position the ads that your organization may post on affiliated sites. A well structured internet ad campaign can not only generate revenue for your organization, but also promote your social responsibility.

While online bloger Seth Godin will go on the record stating that he thinks that the majority of banner advertisements are a waste of money, in one of his blogs he posts some interesting observations on the relation between banner ads and the success of an organizations contextual ad campaigns. It has been observed that there is a 249% increase in the number of clicks on an organization’s contextual ads after site viewers have come in contact with a banner advertisement from that organization. This demonstrating that while click throughs may not be the most effective way of monitoring your ad success, with appropriate positioning a site visitor of an affiliated site can go from just that to your future consumer.

Banner Ads are intended to increase product awareness and create a positive brand image for your organization. Banner ads can be both textual and animated, but it is essentially their visual appeal that makes them memorable in the minds of consumers. If able to directly position your advertisement and develop one that produces positive reinforcement for your product or service with consumers, your organization can see an increase in its sales and/or effectiveness with other forms of advertising as demonstrated above.

Pay Per Click Advertising

Pay Per Click Advertising has developed a way for marketers to only pay for the displaying of their ad on a host page when it has been physically clicked on by site visitors. When the Pay Per Click rate is based on bids, the company that places the highest bid receives the highest ranking in location on the search engine. However, there can also be the use of a flat rate, where the same rate is charged for all click throughs, and the company’s ranking is based on their effectiveness in matching keywords with those being searched by users. By tweaking your Ad Text to align with user searches your organization can optimize its search engine ranking based on relevancy. Some of the major benefits of a PPC campaign are that it can draw in a highly targeted audience, and it is strictly performance based where you can capitalize on the use of a variety of keywords that are relevant to your product or service offerings.

In an article written by Kenneth Fjell he conducts an analysis of the use of PPC versus PPV rates for advertising from the publishers perspectives. He illustrates how for sites whose click through rate is generally not high it can be much more effective to charge for advertising space based on a pay per view scale opposed to a pay per click. However, when optimization is correctly constructed by that advertiser there could be an increase in the rate of click throughs where a pay per click rate would become more appropriate. His general consensus from his research is that site advertising on banner space is one that can be priced through a trial and error process and can be evolved by the advertisers ability to produce materials that is relevant to its users.

Google is a major player in the pay per click advertising world, where with the development of Google AdWords they allow users to have ads above the search engine results and on the Google Network, which advertisers only pay for when clicked on by users.  Of course the amount of times your advertisement is displayed is based on the relevancy of your keywords to those being searched by users.  Google has developed a bidding structure to allow for more price effective ways of using Google AdWords, where the positioning of a textual ad opposed to a search results ad used to be the same cost per click for advertisers. It has been proven through the use of pay per click advertising that the content that the site content that your ad appears near can have a significant effect on the appeal it has to users based on site relevancy. Thus the advantage of having your ad placed on a search results list because the user is actively shopping for the information that your ad is providing.

Search Engine Optimize

Search Engine Optimization is an online tool that is supposed to put your business at the top of the results page on a search engine such as Google or Yahoo, but first, you must know how to correctly position yourself. Consumers who are visiting search engine websites already know which product or service they are looking for, and search engine optimization is supposed to be able to give you the opportunity to show these consumers that you can provide them with exactly what they are searching for. While your company can pay to position yourself on a site such as Google, you can also be placed in the Organic listings. By strategically designing your website, bidding on keywords, and getting indexed and listed by major search engines, you could end up being placed at the top of the page, and without paying to do so. However, poor web page design could put you several pages back on a Google listing, not exactly what we would consider a prime advertising location.

 

While getting your firm to the top may be a challenge, once you reach it your business will begin to see the benefits of correctly positioning yourself, where it is estimated that 84% of online users in the United States use search engines.  This brings one to realize that your company “could spend a million bucks on a website, [but] if it’s not visible, it’s worth nothing.” (qtd. by grant in cooper, 2004 p.1). Being visible online doesn’t mean getting your business to appear on the second page of Google’s posted results to a potential consumer’s online search, but rather in the top half of the first page. We all know from experience that we rarely flip to the second page to see the results that the search engine has brought up for us, never mind moving on to the third or fourth.

 

Seth Godin discusses in his blog titled ‘How to make money with SEO’ the unlikely chance that your business will be the one to end up in the top listings of a search engine such as Google or Yahoo and how to better optimize your chance of being at the top. Seth suggests that if you have a product or service that is remarkable and pair it with a unique term or trademark, your firm can be one that people want to talk about. As a result of creating this buzz worthy product or service, your company can simply say, “just type ___ into Google” and you’ll find us.  While the concept of your organization being directly “Googled” sounds fantastic for your business, owning a search worthy keyword is a process that can be quite difficult to execute, where you need to create your business around the trademark and make it one that consumers can’t stop talking about.

 

Microblogging

With the Internet’s rapid expansion in available functions and tools for expressing ourselves, we have seen how an individual can use many different forms of social media to express his or her thoughts and ideas. This ability to express ones self has also opened an opportunity for businesses to effectively market their organization.  With the growing use of Microblogs, “a form of blogging that allows users to write belief text updates (usually less than 140 characters) and publish them, either to be viewed by anyone or by a restricted group which can be chosen by the user” an organization or individual can develop an online following by releasing statements or posting links to information through text-messaging, e-mailing, and many other forms of communication (socialtraining.wetpaint.com). Microblogging has allowed for users to tune into the finer details of their ‘friends’ lives, and realize commonalities that perhaps may not have been discussed before.

While many individuals use microblogging sites such as twitter as a means of social networking with their friends, there are also ways that an organization can leverage this social tool to be a functional resource. Companies such as H&R Block have used Twitter to talk taxes with its clients, CNN posts its headlines on its twitter page for followers to link to headlining news articles, and Oprah has used it to encourage viewers to tune into her show.  While a small text file can have a great influence on your communication with your clients, it can also cause problems where a post can be read in an incorrect context. On the contrary, one could argue that “tweeting” encourages both consumers and marketers to get straight to the point with their opinions and the message that they are trying to convey their followers.

Microblogging is a concept that is proving to be very effective for both business and personal use; however, concerns are still arising regarding the issue of regulation on the content that can be posted on sites such as twitter. With sites like twitter having such a rapid rate of growth, it is in their best interest to develop a policy for the content that can be displayed and distributed via microblogging. Associations with information that is not seen to be socially respectable would damage the future use of microblogging sites by businesses that were using it as an effective marketing tool.

Viral Marketing

With the rapidly growing use of social networking many opportunities have risen for us to go to our consumers and market our products or services. Viral marketing is one of these opportunities, and is also one that happens to be quite cost effective. We have all heard of word-of-mouth marketing and are aware of its effectiveness. Consumers hold great trust in the opinions of their family and friends and will often purchase a product based on their trusted opinions. Viral marketing works on the same principles, but is conducted online, and the referring of the site to your friends and family is encouraged by the organization. Viral marketing needs to start with an idea that is viral worthy where your consumer understands and likes the concept, tells five friends, who tell another five friends, and this wave continues to evolve to the point where the idea becomes like a virus and is spread throughout the web. The evolving number of people who continue to come in contact with your site is what separates viral marketing and word-of-mouth.

 

We have to then ask ourselves, how are we going to make our product or service worthy of viral marketing. The idea has to strike a level of importance into our consumers where they feel that they are influenced enough by this idea to pass it along to their friends and family. By offering a “click to tell your friends” button, we can encourage our site visitors to pass along the idea directly from our site. Each user who starts a tree of forwarding the site to its social network is uniquely interested, thus creating the opportunity for many different branches in spreading the “buzz”. By making it simple for our consumers to forward the idea to their network, we are more likely to see it spread at a rapid growth rate.

 

Viral marketing is allowing us to use our online consumers to do a large amount of our work for us.  Sites such as YouTube can post video clips where celebrities like Miley Cyrus can promote themselves via social marketing and achieve millions of views within less than one week. Viral Friday posts the top five videos of the week in achieving the highest numbers of views through social marketing, where we can see that for some companies marketing through social networking sites has proven to be very successful; however, risks do follow. Bias opinions of products or services also circulate the web, where viral marketing can then have a negative impact on the success of your company. Sony had a failed attempt at using social networking to promote its products for the Christmas season which lead to its consumers feeling frustrated with their attempted viral campaign. When using social networking to promote your organization you first need to consider the method that you will use, and the risks that could potentially follow.

Information Architecture

Information architecture is defined by Kevin Shoesmith as, “the art & science of trying to make information more findable on websites & intranets; furthermore, the art of digital librarianship, cataloging, organizing & categorizing information so that users can find what they are looking for.” Shoesmith discusses the use of metadata to give users more ways of finding the information they need, and the many other components that are involved in Information Architecture.

Information Architecture addresses the concern of how a website will function, including the areas of searching systems, labeling, navigation, and design organization. The concept of information architecture is to appeal to the needs of your target consumer so that your website has stickiness, where the user comes to the site, finds it to be feasible, but also appealing, so they stay and spend some time there. Information architecture’s purpose isn’t to attract onetime users, but to develop a strategy that creates user return. We need to think of information architecture as a blueprint of a sequence of information and procedures that facilitate our consumers’ quest for information. If we help users achieve their goal of obtaining information through a sensible series of steps they will become return users.

In a blog titled “have they broken Google search?” Lyle Katnrovich discusses Google’s use of Information Architecture for anticipating the search results that users are looking for. What Lyle points out in this article is that if Google doesn’t know exactly what it is you are searching for, or is unable to find an article that directly relates, they post articles that “partially match” opposed to providing nothing at all. From Google’s perspective we can understand the structure of their information architecture where they are working to support consumers goals and assist them in navigating more easily. By providing a functional structure that may not deliver the exact results that the user needs, Google is in turn displaying options that are likely to aid the user in finding the correct information.

Consumer Profiling

When its comes to correctly appealing to your consumers the ability to profile online consumers is a concept that opens up a window of opportunity from the business perspective; however, the implications of bordering too close to the line of privacy violation puts a cap on the extent that most businesses will go to obtain this information. Data mining is a procedure that greatly aids a business in appropriately segmenting and understanding its target market, where this data can be used to profile our consumers.

 

From a business perspective we can see the importance of walking the line between getting the desired target information such as who is buying a particular product, how they react to promotional changes, what other items they are purchasing, and when and how frequently they are visiting our online store. In an article written by Barret she discusses Google’s plans at the time to purchase banner ad-giant DoubleClick, a purchase that would give Google the right to profile all of the consumers who visited one of the thousands of sites that run DoubleClick’s ads. While we can see the great benefits for Google in being able to predict their visitors needs, one also needs to consider the privacy implications that follow having such a wide range of consumer information at your finger tips.

 

Even with privacy advocates being quick to judge a company’s actions towards consumer profiling, Google isn’t the only major online company that is utilizing its opportunities. In a 2009 newspaper article Bearne discusses Microsoft Advertising’s decision to merge its two ad networks in order to create Microsoft Media Network, one that now has the network abilities to utilize data from each of the networking sites, where the use of MSN passport user data is now used to target any individual consumer based on factors such as sex, age, and other user data. With the access to such a large pool of information we are able to basically predict the future searches of our consumers based on their previous clicking actions.

 

Finally, the use of online consumer profiling is intended to make your company successful, or at least more successful by allowing you to fully understand your consumer. This entails the way your website is laid out, the wording of the content on your site, and how to effectively walk your client through the purchase cycle. With the use of profiling we can find where we are going wrong, and how to make it better. If consumers are coming to our homepage and filling their shopping cart but not physically making the purchase we need to find out why, and then it needs to be changed.

Online Banking Privacy

Almost everyone that I know now uses online banking, yet we are all very concerned with the privacy of our personal banking information. While we are able to clear the history of our Internet use, or reset our cache, we still question what the site that we were active on does with our account information. With such a large concern of the security of our banking information, I also wonder if those who aren’t concerned, only feel that way because they view the advantages such as saving time & money, and the convenience through online bill payments, to out weigh the risk of fraud. We as Internet users are all looking for the assurance that our information is not going to be susceptible to fraud, but while the bank may be doing all they can to keep us secure, the question is, are we?

TD Canada Trust for example, has implemented security software and has a team of security personnel who keep TD up-to-date on the ever-expanding security issues, tools, and methodology. They also use secure firewalls and cookies to keep unauthorized users from having access into their internal systems. The development of both session cookies, and persistent cookies are used to control the storage of different types of information based on the desired level of security. Session cookies store the information only during your online session, where persistent cookies store your information for a length of time, but only with the consent of the consumer. Persistent cookies are used for options such as having your access code stored on your personal computer. While banks implement many security procedures themselves, it is also up to us as the consumers to hold up our end in practicing safe banking. The banks ask that we keep our passwords and access codes secure and properly log out of the online banking session, however, they are available for 24-hour phone service if we have misplaced our information and require assistance.

If a big portion of the reliability of our personal banking information lies in our hands, then I think that we need to take a good look at the personal precautions that we are taking to protect ourselves from being subject to fraud. This evaluation lies particularly in our use of passwords, where many of us are guilty of using a common password for many different sites whether it be online banking, e-mail, or the start-up of our computer. Furthermore we find ourselves using simple one-word passwords or ones that hold a personal meaning to us such as the name of our pet, our family member. An article titled Professional Pointers discusses our bad habits in developing our passwords, and suggests more creative and effective ways to ensure that we are keeping our personal information secure.

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