Holistic Technology Enabled Internet Marketing Solutions

This is an entry in our daily Internet Marketing Advent Calendar series. Each day your favorite marketing elves will focus on a new topic to get your internet marketing in order before the start of the new year.

Wow yesterday was quite a day! Made it around the world, visited billions of people with NORAD tracking me the whole time!

As everyone plays with their gifts, dons their new sweaters and start to travel home – I wanted to say ‘Thank You’. Thanks for sharing the spirit. I also want to say… now it is time to get down to business! Year end is here and we all have lots of planning to do!

This is time to get organized and make our goals for 2011. While reading along with the Internet Marketing Advent Calendar, some of my favorite internet marketing elves taught me a thing or two that I wanted to share:

• Alayna gave us all so much information on how to come up with content, important information about how to keep our CMS website’s up to snuff and she threw in some serious holiday planning tips too!
• Alex knows a lot about PPC marketing! A lot of people use PPC to target people that are looking for their products, services or answers but I think if more people took Alex’s advice we could save some money and target people better.
• Amanda had a lot of good ideas about coming up with new content this year. It is hard to know how much content to put out and how to get it to the people that need it. I loved her ideas about email marketing. That could be a good idea for me… think how many children I could write to!
• Chris, I have never seen him blog before but he sure does know a lot about ecommerce sites. I know a lot of people that could use his advice!
• Jenika is funny. I also think she likes the movie A Christmas Story. She had a lot of references to the Parker family. I loved her tips on using Foursquare. Think of how many badges I could have gotten if I checked in at all the places I visited last night!
• Kyle made me laugh. I got more tips from him on how to keep my tree alive than I have on the dozens of other sites I have visited. He also knows a lot about design and getting new useful content on our websites.
• Mike is the smart, silent type but I really appreciated his tips on shopping online. I really hope people are more controlled when using their credit cards online.

All of these internet marketing elves were on the ‘Nice’ list and I think we can all learn a lot from them to meet our website goals in 2011!

Read the rest of the Internet Marketing Advent Calendar

• Dec. 24 – Santa is Everywhere (Even Online)!
• Dec. 23 – Is Your Web Content a Pink Nightmare?
• Dec. 22 – We Are Santa’s Elves
• Dec. 21 – Holiday CMS Shopping
• Dec. 20 – Top Searches in 2010 – Plus Facebook Statuses and Twitter Trends
• Dec. 19 – Get Your Website Prepared for Holiday Events Early
• Dec. 18 – Use Foursquare to Get Discounts on Holiday Gifts
• Dec. 17 – Manage Your Website Like a Holiday Party
• Dec. 16 – Tips For A Happy Holiday And A Successful PPC Year
• Dec. 15 – Track Santa’s elves with Google Analytics E-Commerce tracking
• Dec. 14 – Keep Your Christmas Tree and Website Alive!
• Dec. 13 – Be Sure to Meet Your Website Visitors’ Expectations
• Dec. 12 – Segmenting your email – I mean – holiday card lists
• Dec. 11 – One Link Goes Out, They All Go Out
• Dec. 10 – Addressing Pain Points Means More Than Broad Smarty Pants Slogans
• Dec. 9 – Sneaking a Peek at Qwiki
• Dec. 8 – Fix Up Your “Charlie Brown” Website
• Dec. 7 – Don’t be a Scrooge with Your Content
• Dec. 6 – ‘Tis The Season for Generosity
• Dec. 5 – Have you been naughty or nice? Now we have online proof.
• Dec. 4 – Online Holiday Shopping
• Dec. 3 – Make a List and Check it Twice
• Dec. 2 – Unclutter Your Website for the Holidays
• Dec. 1 – Walking in a Winter Wonderland of Unique Content

This is an entry in our daily Internet Marketing Advent Calendar series. Each day your favorite marketing elves will focus on a new topic to get your internet marketing in order before the start of the new year.

Image source: David Blackwell

Holiday cards! One of the few excuses we have for sending and receiving mail from our friends and family. I look forward to pulling out my address book and making out cards to those that are closest to me.

I usually buy multiple boxes – some funny, some expressing thanks, some cute and some standard. As I go through my list, I decide who gets which types of card.

This year that got me thinking about email marketing. I take such care in my personal cards I send out. That isn’t even considering those that I send out for people in my business network and those really personalized ones for gifts and family that I attach to presents. Each type of card has an intended recipient.

So why with all this care, and I don’t think I am alone here, don’t we give even a hint of this type of consideration for our email marketing campaigns? Most business I receive emails from are still sending out blanket mass-produced messages to one list. I am getting the same email as someone’s grandmother, someone who has already bought this company’s products and any other demographic that may be on the email list.

In an article in BtoB Magazine by Karen J. Bannan, she says businesses should target potential customers by possible places they are in the sales cycle

“By targeting your e-mail messages based on where the recipient in the sales cycle, you should see bigger lifts, more satisfied customers and more retention and repurchase over the long haul.”

As we build our email list, lets try to segment the list according to different factors; like current customers, sales leads, small businesses, medium to large size businesses, conference attendees etc. Once you have even just a few list segmentations in place you can slightly tailor your message to make it more relevant to the person who will be receiving your email.

Read the rest of the Internet Marketing Advent Calendar

• Dec. 11 – One Link Goes Out, They All Go Out
• Dec. 10 – Addressing Pain Points Means More Than Broad Smarty Pants Slogans
• Dec. 9 – Sneaking a Peek at Qwiki
• Dec. 8 – Fix Up Your “Charlie Brown” Website
• Dec. 7 – Don’t be a Scrooge with Your Content
• Dec. 6 – ‘Tis The Season for Generosity
• Dec. 5 – Have you been naughty or nice? Now we have online proof.
• Dec. 4 – Online Holiday Shopping
• Dec. 3 – Make a List and Check it Twice
• Dec. 2 – Unclutter Your Website for the Holidays
• Dec. 1 – Walking in a Winter Wonderland of Unique Content

In my last post on Campaign Tagging, I walked you through the basics of setting up tagged links that work in conjunction with Google Analytics and Email Marketing. While campaign tagging is not a new feature within Google Analytics, it’s still a powerful tool to keep in your Inbound Marketing tool belt.

So let’s jump right into it! You’ve created a newsletter; used the URL Builder to generate your tagged links and have successfully delivered your newsletter. In order to see the results of your newsletters performance, you’ll need to log into Google Analytics: view Reports → Traffic Sources and then Campaigns. Once you’re in the Campaign dashboard, look for the specific campaign that you referenced when you were generating the links, i.e. Dec-2009-Week-Two

Once you click on your campaign name, you’ll have the ability to review different reports like landing pages, regions, new vs. returning visitors and more. We’ll be focusing on Ad Content today.

Ad Content or Campaign Content is one of the optional values that you can set when generating your tagged links (fig. 1).You will use this option to differentiate between ads within your newsletter. In other words, if you have three separate links that have the same landing page, this is where you would distinguish which link sent the most visitors to your site.

fig. 1

I used the example “Button” above to show that this link will be associated with a graphical button that will be used in a newsletter. If there was a text link as well, you would then change Campaign Content to “Link” and regenerate the URL. See example below.

fig. 2

The benefit of using Ad / Campaign Content is that when reviewing analytics, you’ll be able to view this report and see whether or not your graphical button had more impact than the textual link. With this data, you can gauge what kind of user conversion works best with your target audience. As you can see in the example above, the graphical button had far more success than the textual link for this particular campaign.

Although reporting and link performance is available in most Email Service Provider platforms, connecting your campaigns with Google Analytics gives you far more power. You can track and analyze your visitors behaviors AFTER arriving to your site via your email campaign and not just what link they click on within their Inbox.

Photo Credit: Wendy Copley

This is an entry in our daily Internet Marketing Advent Calendar series. Each day your favorite marketing elves Kasi and Amanda will focus on a new topic to get your internet marketing in order before the start of the new year.

Email Marketing is still so important

2009 has been the year Social Media just seemed to take over. We all love new toys and seeing how they work. Please don’t think that makes your old favorite toys any less useful (Velveteen Rabbit anyone?).

Every social networking site is tied to an email address. For many of those sites, a new update or subscriber on a site generates an email alert reminding you to go back and see the most recent activity. Our businesses are run with emails. Sales leads are usually forms filled out on your site, which generate an email. Everything we do online is held together with email.

Our friend Greg Cangialosi, CEO of Blue Sky Factory calls email the “Digital Glue.” Email is the driver of all things we tend to do in business. It is the staple of all online marketing. When you are building a gingerbread house you essentially have some cookie planks and cool colored candy. The frosting is what holds the whole thing together! Don’t overlook how important email is because it is the one piece that hold all of your online marketing together.

Want some more from Greg?
Check out this video too on merging your email marketing with social media:

Read the rest of the Internet Marketing Advent Calendar

• Dec. 4 – Is Google Caffeine on Your Holiday Wish List?
• Dec. 3 – Don’t Forget to Make Your Title Tags and Check ‘Em Twice
  
• Dec. 2 – Your Mobile Website
• Dec. 1 – Your Holiday Card List (Your Network)

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