Posts Tagged ‘internet marketing’
Monday, July 6th, 2009
Marketing is not easy, especially in this economy, so if you’re an eCommerce site that has specialized in carrying higher-priced luxury goods, what can you do to not lose your existing customers and attract new customers, since everyone is cutting back? Try, introducing lower-priced goods, as the airlines do with their customer seating in coach. If you’ve haven’t flown in the past 2 years, check out any of the airlines’ sites and see how they are offering more seating prices of different levels in coach, so that they can keep their margins and acquire new customers that they normally wouldn’t have attracted without diminishing their brand efforts.
By offering more goods options that have different price points, you’ll be able to keep your high-priced luxury item lines and introduce lower priced items without hurting the brand.
Tags: brand marketing, customers cutting back, ecommerce marketing, internet marketing, keeping customers, luxury goods, luxury priced ecommerce, offering new product lines, online marketing, online marketing tactics
Posted in online marketing | 4 Comments »
Monday, May 4th, 2009
There’s been a lot of noise about Twitter today, but what good is it for online marketers? For B2C marketers, Twitter can be a powerful lead generation marketing tool, which can send out real-time information to Twitter ‘followers’. For example, an eCommerce site can send out last minute sale information via ‘tweets’ to move inventory quickly on limited items. By sending out a ‘tweet’ to followers on a 24-hour sale, can increase traffic to a site tenfold.
Tags: b2c marketing, ecommerce marketing, for online marketers, internet marketing, lead generation, online marketing, online marketing techniques, online marketing tip, send out tweets for marketing, social media marketing, Twitter marketing
Posted in internet marketing, online marketing | No Comments »
Thursday, April 2nd, 2009
You’re getting tons of customers to your site, but you’re losing them just as fast as you are getting them, so what do you do? Don’t expect that just because you built it, they should stay. Building a good customer retention program is as important as creating a good customer acquisition program. Email marketing is a good and simple way to keep your customers informed with new items at your site, community happenings, announcements and making sure that your user base returns to the site. Here are some tips on what you can do to build a good email campaign:
1. Segment the Database – Do not send a mass email to all of the database. This will surely have a lot of opt-outs or low click through rate back to the site. Separate the database mailings by how you want to market to the user base, such as creating emails tarrgeted to either region, gender, age, or work title. Learn and understand what your customers want and mail to them accordingly.
2. Test Email Campaigns – Test different headlines, subject lines, graphics and body text to see what performs better. Test, test, test!
3. Email Blasts & Newsletters – Try sending weekly email blasts with specific product or service offerings to your segmented database. Send monthly newsletters that contain content that is more general and can appeal to a larger audience than the segmented email blasts. Monthly newsletters can contain content, such as news, third-party offerings, community happenings, and Refer-a-Friend programs. Make sure to be consistent about the newsletters delivery schedule to keep consistency. This will help build brand-equity of the company site.
4. Do Not Send Too Many Emails In A Short Period – This is a big no-no. The more emails that are sent in a short period will surely tire the customer base and ensure that your campaigns will be opt-out with more frequency. Think about how many emails do you get…what are the ones that you opt-out of?
For more information or help on your email marketing campaigns, please contact Ashley Hart on the ‘Contact Us’ tab of the homepage of www.AshleyHartMarketing.com
Tags: Ashley Hart, ashley hart marketing, customer retention, email, email blasts, email campaigns, email marketing, internet marketing, keeping customers, newsletters, online marketing, online newsletters, online traffic, returning customers to site, segment database
Posted in Ashley Hart, internet marketing, online marketing | No Comments »
Tuesday, March 10th, 2009
It’s tough times out there, including for the online industry, so how do we make sure that we are getting the most for our advertising buck? Take a look at your current online marketing strategy and see which channels are the most inefficient. Get rid of them! Yes, I know what you must be thinking, if it’s bringing me even one client, it’s worth it…but it’s not. Now is the time to really pay attention to your customer acquisition metrics and conversions and see where you can cut the fat, so you can move over money to the most efficient channels.
Also, pay more attention to your customer retention programs. This is where many marketers don’t take advantage of the database they already have. Make email and viral marketing your best friend. Offer promotions to drive the traffic back to your site. I will guarantee you, by creating unique retention programs, you will increase the LTV (Lifetime Value) of your customer and increase your ROI. This will also help you to decrease your marketing expenses, since its much cheaper to market to current clients than it is to acquire new ones.
Tags: advertising in a bad economy, customer acquisition, customer retention programs, efficient advertising, email marketing, internet advertising, internet marketing, lifetime value, LTV, online advertising, online industry, online marketing, return on investment, ROI, viral marketing
Posted in online marketing | No Comments »
Tuesday, December 2nd, 2008
Is there a difference between Business-to-Business (B2B) and Business-to-Consumer (B2C) online marketing? Absolutely. Don’t let an inexperienced marketer tell you otherwise. B2B marketing tends to focus on providing targeted content, such as white papers, case studies and webinars to their target market, in exchange for the target markets’ contact information. Also, B2B marketers tend to focus more on customer acquisition, rather than customer retention, since attrition is much lower in the business market than in the consumer market. Online marketing channels tend to concentrate on SEM, SEO and related business information websites.
B2C marketing tends to focus equally on customer acquisition and retention marketing programs. Consumers are more price & service sensitive than businesses. Consumers visit more alternative online services, if they believe there is a better value for them testing out varied sites. Many good B2C online marketers will focus on creating customer retention programs that keep consumers coming back to their sites to extend their Life Time Value (LTV) of their online members…i.e. if the average of an online user is 2 months at a casual gaming site, then the marketer seeks to extend the LTV to 3-4 months. By extending the LTV of an online member, potentially increases online usage at the site and will increase overall ROI for revenues.
Online marketing channels for B2C online services tend to concentrate on SEM, SEO, direct marketing, email campaigns, blogs, viral and affiliate marketing.
Tags: affiliate marketing, b2b, b2c, business to business, business to consumer, case studies, customer acquisition, customer retention programs, direct advertising, direct marketing, email marketing, internet marketing, LTV, online market, online marketers, online marketing, SEM, SEO, viral marketing, webinar marketing, white papers
Posted in internet marketing, Media Buying, online marketing, Search, SEO | 1 Comment »
Friday, August 1st, 2008
One of the more important tasks that you must incorporate into your online business plan is monitoring your competitor. It’s easy to do and there are many online tools that let you review your competitors keywords through online services.
Check out KeywordSpy.com and SpyFu.com. Both of these services will help you review your competitors organic and paid keywords by simply typing in your competitor’s domain. If that doesn’t work, try typing in search keywords that you think your target market finds your services online. The keywords that you type in should bring up a string of related keywords that you can use to help drive more traffic to your site and to see who else is using similar keywords.
Also, try Alexa.com to see how your competitor ranks against you in traffic.
Keep in mind, that if you can see how your competitor’s traffic is being monitored, they most likely are monitoring you as well.
Tags: alexa.com, internet marketing, keyword search, keyword spy, keywordspy.com, monitoring competitors online, online marketing, online search, online tools, organic keywords, paid keywords, Search, SEO, spyfu.com
Posted in internet marketing, Media Buying, online marketing, Search, SEO | No Comments »
Tuesday, July 15th, 2008
If you are a B2B marketer, you know the rising costs on Google Search is making it tougher on your bottom-line ROI numbers. To reduce your costs and to stay within your marketing budget, check out Google Base. Google Base is currently in beta, but it’s a great product to test out, since it’s free to list your products and services and you can link it to a store easily for processing purchases. Google Base makes it easier for consumers to find products and services from B2B marketers that are more relevant to their searches.
Also, check out HowStuffWorks.com, if you are a marketer with products that need demonstrations. HowStuffWorks.com can create customized pages for marketers that want to brand their products and services in a non-traditional way to their target markets. The How Stuff team will maintain the page for you with their own editorial content, which is relevant to the products and services that you are marketing.
Tags: b-2-b marketers, b-to-b marketing, B2B marketing, b2b marketing secrets, Google Base, Google Search, How Stuff Works, HowStuffWorks.com, internet marketing, listing products and services, Media Buying, online marketing
Posted in Ashley Hart, brand marketing, entrepreneurs, internet marketing, Media Buying, New marketers, online marketing, Search | No Comments »
Tuesday, July 1st, 2008
Online marketing has been a cheap and effective solution comparatively to traditional media for advertisers with small budgets. The baseline for online marketing choices for advertisers have been search marketing through Google and Yahoo, display advertising through Advertising.com, and affiliate marketing through LinkShare and Commission Junction. Now, these cheap solutions are being affected by the economy, due to advertisers of all sizes looking for economical ways to maximize their ROIs because of softer sales, which causes high biddng wars in Search and increases in CPM and CPA costs for prime display advertising space.
As the U.S. economy worsens, big budget advertisers that have used multi-channels for their marketing strategies will be forced to cut their budgets and limit their marketing channels, which makes online marketing a more attractive solution to traditional outlets. So, what can you do as a Marketer with a limited budget competing with the Big Boys? Try alternative advertising services to the baselines. For example, advertising networks, such as AdOnNetwork represent some of the Top ComScore sites and offer cheap remnant ad spaces for a 1/3 of the price.
Tags: AdOnNetwork, advertisers, advertising, Advertising.com, affects of the economy on online marketing, affiliate marketing, cheap marketing, Commission Junction, display advertising, economy, google, internet marketing, LinkShare, online advertising, online marketing, ROI, Search, yahoo
Posted in Ashley Hart, brand marketing, entrepreneurs, internet marketing, Media Buying, New marketers, online marketing, Search | No Comments »
Monday, June 9th, 2008
Email marketing is considered the #1 way to market on the Internet, but what does that mean to you, if you don’t have a database of users yet? How do you build an email list to market your services? Should you buy a list from one of those online services? Don’t even think about it. I know it’s tempting to buy a list and it is the easy way out, especially, if you are just launching a site and don’t have any customers, but don’t build your email list this way. This is a common mistake of Entrepreneurs and less experienced Online Marketers to buy lists and to send bulk email to the list, hoping that users will click on your email or newsletter. This is definitely the way to get ‘black-listed’ on the top mail servers. Think about how much you hate getting email from companies or people that you don’t know. So, how do you build your email list?
The best way to build your email list is to run targeted marketing promotions that require people to offer their emails to you. Also, try running online Search marketing, Cost per Lead, Cost Per Acquisition campaigns or try offline Event Marketing programs. It will take time to build the list, but once you do, you will have a database of users that want to hear from you and will be more receptive to your marketing offers.
The last thing you ever want to do is to market to people who never requested your information, so don’t do it. Take the time, build your list and you will have an effective email marketing campaign.
Tags: bulk email, cost per lead, CPL, email, email lists, email marketing, event marketing, internet entrepreneurs, internet marketing, marketing, newsletters, online marketers, online marketing, online media buying, search marketing
Posted in brand marketing, internet marketing, Media Buying, online marketing, Search | 1 Comment »
Monday, May 12th, 2008
No site should be a link island. It’s important to know how well your website performs in relation to your online competitors. Websitegrader.com is a great free tool that helps you see how well your site stacks up in keywords, blogs, and tags.
Tags: blogs, branding, internet marketing, keywords, online marketing, online performance, tags, website user experience, websitegader.com, websites
Posted in brand marketing, internet marketing, online marketing | No Comments »