Email marketing - getting the metrics right

So, you've got a brand new website, you've done your SEO and you're ready to do some email marketing campaigns to drive more business online....that's a great start, but have you thought about what you want from your campaigns , ROI and how you're going to measure results?
It's all well and good to want to generate some leads, but your efforts will be wasted if you don't know how effective your marketing is, and while it may sound really boring to some people, reporting is vital.

Here are some of the metrics you should analyse when doing email marketing, whether it is for in-house created campaigns or sponsored campaigns:

• Campaign name
• Date sent
• Distribution / total emails sent
• Bounce back rate:
  bounce backs/total emails sent (BB/Sent)*100
  If you want to go more granular (my favourite buzz word at the moment :) ) you can break down bounce backs by soft and hard bounces -
  soft bounce=out of office message, inbox full
  hard bounce=spam, email address does not exist, contact has moved
  
• Receipt rate:
  Total emails received/Total sent (received/sent)*100
• Open rate:
  Opened emails/Total sent (opened/sent)*100
  One point to remember here is that this number may include people who have the automatic preview pane activated in their email client, so this should not be used as a 100% accurate number but more as a trend.
• Unsubscribe rate:
  Unsubscribe requests/Total sent (unsubscribe/sent)*100
• Click through rate (CTR):
  Number of click within the email/Total emails received (clicks/received)*100
  You can apply a CTR to all clicks within an email or to each individual link if you have the ability to track them as this will help refine the content in future campaigns
• Conversion rate:
  Conversions/Total emails received (conversions/received)*100
  Once again you can do this as an overall number for the email or go link specific. Conversions can be any goal you've set for your website, whether it is a newsletter subscription, a sale or a request for information/quote
• Cost per acquisition (CPA):
  Conversions/Cost of the campaign (conversions/cost)*100
  This shouldallow you to target your campaigns more effectively going forward and make sure you get the best ROI for your activities
  

Some of these metrics will only be available to you if you've set up some web analytics tool, but most email marketing software will give you essential information straight out of the box.
This should help you get started with your campaigns but as ever if you need help or would like to see some templates, contact me.
Have a great weekend.

Getting started in PPC - Make the most of your paid campaigns

Ok, atfer a few weeks talking only about social media, I thought it was time for a change...so today we're going back to one of best online marketing channels in terms of ROI: Paid search.
There's very often a debate as to whether companies should focus on organic or paid search...and the answer is that to make the most of your marketing efforts, you should use both.
Paid and organic channels complement each other and in the long term can bring you a regular amount of leads and business.

So how do you get started if you've never been into the paid search world before? here are some simple tips that should put you on the right track:

1. Before attempting to launch paid campaigns, make sure you have clear and measurable objectives for you site: sign ups, sales, document requests....
   Remember that paid campaigns are all about return on investment, so measuring /reporting is crucial.
   
2. Optimise the conversion channel/ sales funnel on your site: the 3 clicks rule applies here - visitors should be able to get to the content they want in 3 clicks, so make sure that your site is clear and directs visitors in the right direction
3. Look at what your competitors are doing and benchmark your business against theirs. If their ideas work, why not take inspiration from them (I did not say copy, ok!?)
4. Do some keyword research to identify core keywords and long tail keywords for your target market
5. Choose which paid programme you want to go for. I guess at this point everybody's thinking Google Adwords, and there's a reason for that. The google tool is the most comprehensive out there a will give you the widest coverage. However, it is also worth looking at Yahoo Search marketing and MSN/Bing.
6. Allocate a budget to your campaigns and stick to it.
   
7. Build your campaigns within Google making sure to have a wide range of keywords, creatives and landing pages. There is no magic formula to get it right so getting your hands dirty and testing is vital. Always give some time for your campaigns to run before making changes.
8. Optimise your landing pages - build ppc specific landing pages on your site using the same keywords as your creatives and clear calls to action. Google uses a quality score for landing pages so consistency in messaging and optimisation matters.
9. Track, measure and report on your campaigns. Review results on a regular basis and updates campaigns accordingly. Bidding high on keywords is not always the best strategy, so you need to aim for high click through rates (CTR) and low cost per acquisition (CPA)
10. Make sure you website is organically optimised too and is ranked for your core keywords, as a presence in both paid and organic results will boost customers confidence.

Paid search can take a lot of resources from a business so make sure that you plan accordingly, and if you have a sufficient budget, going with a reputable search marketing agency to manage your campaigns is always a good option.

As always, if you need help planning your online marketing activities, let me know!
Have a great weekend

Social Media Optimisation- what to include in your strategy

As mentioned in the past few weeks, I've recently been working on a social media strategy and I'd like to share what I think are some essential elements to include for any business wanting to enter this vastly complex and ever changing area of online marketing. I don't intend this to be a definitive list, the be all end all of social media, but I think it represents a good mix of activities:

1 - Push strategy:

• Publish articles / content syndication: distribute your keyword rich content as widely as possible across the web through online article submission websites such as amazines, e-articles....
• Social bookmarking: encourage people to bookmark your content in websites such as digg, reddit, delicious, twitter....you can achieve this by publishing link worthy content on your site and add social bookmark buttons (explanations here)
  Create your own social bookmark accounts and tag your own articles to increase distribution
• RSS feeds: Create an RSS feed for your site and update it as regularly as possible. Distribute your feed and encourage signups with buttons on site.
  It is also advisable to link your feed to social media sites such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook
• Content distribution automation: try and automate as much of the processes as possible by developing website apps that will automatically sync your website with your social media tools (rss, twitter, social bookmakrs, blogs...)
• Social networking: it seems obvious, but you need to create individual accounts on each of the social media main sites (Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace) The sites you regsiter on will depend on your tagret audience and its demographics
• Microblogging: Tweet as often as possible!
• Blogs: Build relationships with influential bloggers in your industry and try and publish your content on the blogs whenever possible as this will giv eyou some authority in the market
  
• Rich media: Use rich media such as videos to widen your appeal and distribute video content such as tutorials, guides on sites such as youtube

2 - Pull strategy:

• Link baiting: create link worthy contenton your site to attract visitors and increase your link popularity and make it as easy to syndicate as possible (buttons, feed...)
• Widgets: If you have the budget, create a downloadable widget for your site but be creative!
• Blogs: a blog is the perfect way to demonstrate what you do in a less formal environment that a corporate website. It can also become the hub of all your social media activities (and also help you search engine rankings)
• Forums: Engage and respond on a regular basis. If people talk about you in a forum ,whether it is negative or positive, make sure that you're there to respond.
  Use the forums to advise people and don't be too pushy, remember that customers like to talk, so listen!
• Viral campaigns / buzz marketing: viral marketing is a very tricky art to master, but if you get it right it could be worthwhile.

As you can see there are a lot of things to take into account when doing SMO (and I'm sure i've missed some too) but one thing to remember is that a good social media strategy will only work as a aprt of an overall integrated online marketing strategy. And as usual, tracking and reporting is key as you need to put your resources towards the most effective channel, so measure, measure and measure results to make sure you do the right thing.

Social media optimisation - helpful tools

Since I've been working on a social media strategy recently (I'll post more details soon), I thought I'd share some tools which I think could be useful to anybody managing their own SMO.

The first one is a social boomarking tool called Social Marker (http://www.socialmarker.com/). While some people may not think of social bookmarks sites as part of a social media strategy, they are a great way to syndicate your content using your own tags, especially when combined with buttons on your site.
The best feature of Social Marker is that it allows you to bookmark your content on all of the main social bookmarks sites at the click of a button (including delicious, reddit, digg, stumble upon...). Initial set up may take a while as you need to register individually on each of the sites, but once this is done, everything will be very straightforward.
When used with free social buttons (www.addthis.com), your social bookmarking efforts will never be the same again!

The next tool is a video upload service that allows you to upload your rich media on a wide range of video sites at the click of a button. The principle is the same as social marker with a slightly long initial setup (need to register on sites such as youtube, dailymotion...) and simplicity afterwards. Tube Mogul (http://www.tubemogul.com/) also gives you in depth analysis for each of your videos, allowing you to understand users behaviour across the sites.

Because social media can be extremely time consuming, it is becoming essential for any internet marketeer to automate a lot of the tasks. This can be a simple link between a blog/rss feed and twitter (http://twitterfeed.com/) but it can also mean developing apps that will automatically distribute new content from a website to sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Blogs, Twitter....I'm sure a few tools are readily available online, but bespoke solutions can be ideal if you have the web development resources.

Ok, so now you have the right tools to start implementing your strategy, but how do you measure it? While it is hard to find any free integrated social media effectiveness reporting tools, a few tips can help you measure basics fairly easily.
If you use google analytics, you can create a new segment to compare social media results with other marketing channels (paid, organic..) Instructions here. Being a bit of a Google Analytics fan myself, I can only highly recommend Brian Clifton's blog, Measuring Success.

Ploked.com also gives some really good info on which metrics you should use when measuring social media activities.

While I'm sure most of you enjoy spending time using social media, I think it is very important for any business to make the most out of this wonderful internet marketing channel by planning its growth and carefully measuring results.
Enjoy your weekend!