Feb/090
Gearing Up for SES Expo - Toronto 2009
As a search engine marketing enthusiast, I like to ensure I’m on the cutting edge of online marketing strategies. For this reason, I’m excited for this year’s ‘Search Engine Strategies Expo’ in Toronto.
This is a top choice event for Canadian marketers, corporate decision makers, webmasters and search engine marketing (SEM) specialists. The event focuses on many aspects of search engine marketing, including pay per click (PPC) advertisers and search engine optimization (SEO) consultants.
This year being its 6th year, the SES Toronto conference is designed to appeal to new, intermediate and seasoned marketers looking to advance their SEM and SEO skills. From universal and blended search to the latest tactics in search friendly design, SES Toronto affords delegates a comprehensive learning and networking opportunity.
Feb/090
Email Marketing - Keeping in Touch
The World’s best salesman (as verified by the Guinness book of records) Joe Girard was a true master of keeping in touch with his customers. As a car salesman, he mailed out a card every month to his customers, including Birthday cards, Easter cards and Christmas cards when appropriate. He was successful because he knew the value of keeping himself at the front of his customers minds when it came to buying their next car.
If you don’t keep in touch with your customers, it is very likely your competitors will be talking to them up to and during the time they are considering buying the service or product you offer.
Keeping in touch grows your business.
It is 5 times harder to find new customers than it is to retain existing customers (source: Peppers and Rogers). Chasing new customers is expensive, so concentrating on increasing the referrals and sales from your existing customers proves extremly valuable. The way to retain and profit from existing customers is to keep in touch.
There are many ways to achieve this - however the most cost effective is to use email marketing. Delivering monthly newsletters and/promotions to your past customers, has proven to be up to ten times more effective than using direct mail (IMT STrategies).
Email Marketing doesn’t have to be complicated or tedious. Using a managed email marketing service such as the one here at Primary Target, can have all of your campaign needs handled for you.
From the design of your newsletters, to the scheduling and deployment, a managed email marketing service offers poweful results with virtually no effort on your part.
Feb/090
Web Design - Building for your Visitors
Have you ever came across a website where you had absolutely no idea what to do next? Chances are, you hit your ‘back’ button, and continued on to another website.
Seems like no big deal right? However, from a business stand-point this website owner lost another potential customer… All because his website is lacking the most important thing of all… Usability.
At Primary Target, we often speak with clients who have existing websites that simply aren’t converting. Upon looking at these websites, we can quickly see why. Confusing navigation, inproper site hierarchy and cluttered content all contribute to lost visitors.
Developing your website with your visitors in mind, will help increase vistitor time spent on your website, as well as increase your website’s page views.
Clean navigation and breadcrumb trails (small sub-navigation links that show visitors the path to their current location on the website) will help your them find the information they’re looking for quickly and easily.
How does your website rank in ‘usuability’? Try this… integrate Google Analytics into your existing website, to get a true snapshot of it’s performance and usability. Google analytics provides robust, statistical data that will help immensely.
One of the best stats offered is your website’s ‘bounce rate’. This shows the percentage of people who left your website after visiting only one page. That means they exited your website on the same page they entered.
If your bounce rate is high, you have a few things to look at.
- Is my website’s design at all confusing?
- Is my navigation functional and relevant?
- Is the content on my website relevant?
- Is my website cluttered?
Decreasing your bounce rate will certainly help your website’s conversion. Whether it’s selling products online, or simply having visitors contact you for more information, relevant and structured content will help your website perform the way it should.
Feb/090
SEO 10 Step Run Down - Step 5 - Link Building
In step five of the series, we’re going to talk about link building and it’s importance in the search engine optimization process. Link building is the important practice of getting other websites to link to yours. Having quality websites backlink to yours is amongst many important aspects considered by search engines, while determining the rankings of a site.
When it comes to using this Search Engine Optimization technique for a website, links pointing to a particular website is one of the most dominant off-page factors. Building quality links is vital, however also a very lengthy and extensive task to perform. This is where most webmasters and marketers fall short. They look for an easy, shortcut solution, instead of carrying out a genuine link building campaign.
There are many ways in which link building can be performed. Some are genuine while some are incorrect methods. The quantity of the backlinks can also be increased by using dishonest techniques like cloaking, redirecting and adding hidden content in to the web pages. This is the reason why the search engines do not give much weightage to the quantity or the number of links pointing to a website, but, to the quality of the links, while measuring the Link Popularity of a site.
Search engines mainly give credits to quality links and it is with the help of these links that they determine whether or not, a website is relevant for a particular search. Quality backlinks also help Search Engine in determining the rankings for your site. Google especially gives a lot of preference to good and relevant backlinks, while ranking a site.
The quality of the backlinks depend on genuineness and richness of the content of a particular website which is linking to your website, or which we are linking to. The most significant factor in determining the quality of the links is the relevancy . When we say that a particular link is relevant to our site, we mean that that particular link belongs to a site which is content rich and genuine, and, belongs to the same theme of websites as ours. In simple words, we can say that it is related to our website, so the link coming from their site would be relevant to us. And it is this relevancy of links, which is given weightage to, by the search engines.
Relevant links carry more significance even than high PR (Google Page Rank) irrelevant links. That is why high PR does not guarantee high Search engine rankings. There are chances of a low PR relevant link carrying more weightage than a high PR irrelevant link. There are numerous ways to obtain high PR, like using dishonest black hat techniques, but if you are looking for quality and relevant links, there is no way out except to work hard and build them up slowly.
Feb/090
Email Marketing - Do it Yourself vs. Managed Services
Here at Primary Target, we talk to people every day who currently use a ‘do-it-yourself’ email marketing tool to create and deliver their email campaigns.
Some are satisfied with the service, but most have similar complaints.
- It becomes tedious and frustrating working with cookie-cutter templates.
- They’re view/click rates are less than desirable.
- They don’t know what they can do to improve it’s effectiveness.
Like I said above, some are content with the ‘do-it-yourself’ approach, however many people are looking for a more seamless, professional solution that will help increase their ROI from email marketing.
A managed email marketing service does just that. Professional email marketers, such as the ones here at Primary Target, know what it takes to develop and deploy effective email communications. Not only will it save you the tedious work of creating them yourself, they will return stronger view/click rates and make your campaigns more profitable.
Why is that? Email marketing professionals know what it takes to reach inboxes rather than junk folders. They know how to properly use the content of your campaigns to capture the readers, creating more interest and increasing readership.
A managed email marketing service also usually offers more in-depth analytics, to truly track how your campaigns are performing. Being able to properly use the analytics, a managed email marketing provider can make necessary tweaks to future campaigns to ensure the interest of readers is kept.
In a nutshell, the more people who read your campaigns, the more profitable they will become. Professional email marketers can ensure higher read rates, by using tried, tested and proven methods.
At Primary Target, our average client who switched from a ‘do-it-youself’ tool to our managed email marketing service, receives 3x higher view and click rates… Not to mention the time and frustration saved by having us handle everything for them.