eMail Marketing

eMail Marketing

eMail marketing has become a popular way for businesses to engage in regular communication with their prospects and customers because it is easy to use and very cost effective. As the popularity of eMail marketing has increased so has the amount of spam received. To combat the increase of spam, eMail programs have developed filters. The issue now is that legitimate emails get caught by spam filters and are never seen by the consumer.

Getting Past Spam Blockers

Due to the popularity of spam, junk filters are getting more and more careful blocking suspicious messages. What this means is that spammers are constantly being seen and added to the blacklist of unacceptable marketing behavior. Before sending out emails a useful tip is to give the message a quick review of the words that may  be caught and classify the email as spam. Words or phrases that should  be avoided are FREE, amazing, buy now, congratulations, dear friend, great offer, investment, special promotion, and winner.

Getting Emails Opened

The more people that open emails means more potential people are going to take the desired action. There have been studies that explain factors such as the subject line, the from line expectations/brand relevance, and content value all influence email open rates. Subject lines must provide a compelling reason to open the email and this can be done through personalizing subject lines based on the targets interests or purchase history. The from line is important because if it is recognizable then it is more likely tobe opened. Expectations or brand relevance are important because if the product isn’t relevant to the person’s current interest then there will be no need for the person to open the email. The content of the email needs to have original  and compelling information so that recepients create the idea that they are missing out if they don’t open the email.

The Effectiveness of Online Advertising

Advertising is not an exact science so measuring success of an advertising campaign can be done in multiple ways. It’s impossible to determine if your sales are up due to certain advertisements but it can certainly give an idea of whether or not the ads are in the right direction. To asses the effectiveness of an advertising campaign you can keep track of sales, new customers, requests for information and website traffic or click through rates all to guage the impact the advertisments are having.

An option to track effectiveness is to put a referral box in the site’s shopping cart. This will allow you to ask the customer how they found your site before they finish their order. This method is useful because it is a good way to find out which websites are providing the best impression to click ratios and also the best click to buy ratio.

Another way to evaluate the impact of online advertising is to use cookie-based technology that can help establish whether the consumers have been exposed to the advertising as well as how many exposures. Cookie technology was a huge step forward for measuring advertising effectiveness because it allowed us to see if the advertising effected a transaction as well as you could connect transaction data back to advertisements that referred the transaction.

A different but effective approach to measuring advertising effectiveness is by running ads with different themes. You could place one that focuses on price and then one that focuses on company reputation. Feature different web addresses that will take the users to a common portal like a standard company website, and by doing this you can track where the hits come from and measure with ad is producing more hits and therefore which one is more effective.

Click Through Advertising

Pay per click payment is based on click-throughs, while cost per click indicates measurement of cost on a per click basis for contracts not based on click-throughs. Click-through is the process of clicking through an online advertisement to the advertiser’s destination and it is usually the most immediate response to an advertisement. Accurate counting of click-throughs involves excluding “robot clicks” and duplicate clicks and this becomes especially important when click-throughs are used as the measurement on which payment is based.

Click fraud exists in many forms including automated bots, competitors, and even lard click farms are rumored to exist in third world countries. All of these things has a common result of click traffic that advertisers have to pay for. Some motives behind click fraud include competitive fraud, affiliate or contextual fraud, and impression fraud. Competitive fraud is when a competing advertiser seeks to remove a competitor by endlessly clicking on the competitors search terms. Affiliate fraud is when a website owner might arrange for a lot of clicks on site ads in order to increase revenue from the content listings because they are paid per click. And impression fraud is when searches are done repeatedly on a term but no clicks are registered. This in turn drives down the click through rate for the paid search listing and can lead to disabling the search term due to low click through rates.

When making click-through ads choosing the right keywords can be crucial to getting your ad seen while keeping in mind that it is extremely easy to blow a budget on poorly targeted words. When making a click through ad the target market is a key component to keep in mind because international visibility of the web differs dramatically from country to country and therefore click through rates differ dramatically between regions.