Marketing
Issue No. 38 - December/January 07/08
Boost your e-Marketing success
by Dr David Corkindale and Dr David Corkindale
Spending on online advertising will be over $1bn in Australia in 2007, the third largest medium after TV and Press. It is forecast that 10% of all advertising will be though some form of online activity by 2009.
Some major, international companies like Nike now only spend about a third of their promotional budget on what might be termed traditional media like TV, press, radio and outdoor.
So, if online is being embraced for marketing purposes by the big boys, how can SMEs get in on the act?
One way that is available without any great IT capability is to use email. Just through the act of interacting with clients and enquirers a small company should be building up its list of email addresses. If not, it is possible to buy lists of reasonably relevant email addresses or you can mount a simple campaign to acquire them; competitions at exhibitions and shows are one method but there are many options that a bit of ingenuity can create.
But how do you make the most of sending an email to someone?
•Do you know what day of the week is best to send your email?
•Is Saturday a no-no day?
•How do you devise the subject line: how many characters can you use and still get a high open rate?
•How important is personalisation to open and click-through rates?
•Can choice of a words in your message double the click-through?
These questions have been answered in a recent Report released by Mailermailer.com1. The data in the report comes from an analysis of 270 million email messages from 3136 clients in 22 industries during January-June 2007.
One notable thing was that the proportion of people who open unsolicited email - email from an unknown source - is declining. To counter this and to make your email campaign effective you need to use it more skilfully.
Guidelines for effective promotional email
Those with experience using direct mail for marketing should have no difficulty adap...
