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 Issue #24 - June 16th, 2003 Internet Marketing Newsletter for Small Businesses
Brought to you by idesignbusiness.com http://www.idesignbusiness.com Issue #24 Monday, June 16th, 2003 In this Issue: ARTICLES: ONLINE POLL: FREE RESOURCE: Welcome to the 24th Issue of the idesignbusiness Internet Marketing Newsletter. This issue marks the 1 year anniversary of the newsletter. To view all the past issues please visit the newsletter archive. For this issue, I want to talk about the importance of tracking and evaluating your marketing campaigns. We have discussed many different ways to market your business online and this issue will help you determine what works for you and what doesn't. As always, I want to hear from you! Please direct all newsletter correspondence to newsletters@idesignbusiness.com You can view all past issues of the Internet Marketing Newsletter for Small Businesses at the newsletter archive. Click below to visit the archive: Newsletter Archive Neal St. Clair idesignbusiness Advertisement ARE THESE GUYS NUTS? A company called M.T.I. is doing something most internet surfers are saying is crazy. These nut-balls have set up a system that allows anyone on the internet to take a large portion of their company right out from under them. It works like this: You buy one software product from them and you then have instant rights to sell the software to as many people as you can. Their software company just became your software company. So you are getting life-time royalty rights to their software which means you own it. Plus they are even nutty enough to give you a website that cost them over sixteen hundred dollars to have built. What person in their right mind gives you their website? Well....Maybe these guys aren't as crazy as we all think they are. Although it seems like they're making a big mistake by giving you far too much, they actually have a solid plan that benefits you. Full details at the link below http://www.DesktopSnooper.com Online Poll Are you tracking your marketing campaigns? ARTICLE Evaluating the Success of Your Marketing Campaigns by Neal St. Clair Over the past year we have covered several different Internet Marketing methods in this newsletter to increase traffic to your website. Past articles have focused on Affiliate Programs, Email Marketing, Banner Ads, Search Engine Marketing and more. For this issue I want to stress the importance of tracking and evaluating these different campaigns so you can allocate your marketing budget to the most effective mix of marketing tools. One of the greatest benefits of the Internet is the ability to track where visitors to your website are coming from. Everytime you send out an email with links to your website, place a banner ad on someone else's website, or advertise in an electronic newsletter you can determine how many people are clicking on your link. The small amount of work it takes to setup a tracking system is well worth the benefit you will receive from knowing what marketing campaigns are working and what are not. Each Marketing campaign you employ takes valuable resources to implement. More often than not money is required to market your business and if money is not required your time definitely is. By tracking click-throughs and conversion rates for each campaign you can make an "Apple to Apple" comparison of all your campaigns. For example, wouldn't it be valuable to your business to know that on average your spend $.50 per click for email campaigns and $.75 per click for Newsletter Ads. In addition you would know your conversion rate for click-throughs to sales for each specific marketing campaign. With this knowledge you can easily optimize your marketing efforts by increasing spending on tools that work and decreasing spending on less-effective methods. Setting Up Tracking Mechanisms for your Website I have outlined three different methods you can use to begin tracking your marketing campaigns below. These methods are in order of ease to set up.
Let's say you are using several different marketing tools to increase subscribers to your Online Newsletter. You are using Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising, banner ads, and email to bring people to your newsletter sign up page on your site. The easiest way to evaluate each tool is to create unique URLs for each campaign. For example, for the PPC campaign direct users to www.yoursite.com/newsletter_ppc.htm, for your banner ads send people to www.yoursite.com/newsletter_banner.htm, and for your email campaigns send people to www.yoursite.com/newsletter_email.htm. Each one of these pages should contain identical content so you can make a fair comparison of each campaign. If you use forms on your website to collect user information you should always add a hidden field within the form to record the source of the sign up. In the example above about unique URLs, assume that the landing page contains a form so people can subscribe to the newsletter. In each form you should include one line of code within the form that matches the campaign source. For example, for the banner ad page I would add the following code: <input type="hidden" name="source" value="banner">. I must stress that this method of tracking is for people that are comfortable with HTML and database programming. When using ASP or Perl programming you can add a ? to a URL to assign a value. For example, if we were tracking the success of our banner ads in the example above we could use one URL to track all campaign sources. The URL for the banner ad would look like - www.yoursite.com/newsletter.asp?source=banner, the URL for the email campaign would look like - www.yoursite.com/newsletter.asp?source=email, and the URL for the PPC campaign would look like - www.yoursite.com/newsletter.asp?source=ppc. Once you have added the ? to the URLs, you can then use the Request.QueryString function in ASP and Perl to isolate the source of the visitor. Advertisement Professional Websites for as little as $1.15 per day! idesignbusiness has created monthly website packages designed for small business owners and small business budgets. For as little as $1.15 per day, you can have your own professional website including all the great features below:
Learn more about Monthly Website Packages FREE RESOURCE: Each issue of the Internet Marketing Newsletter for Small Businesses will include helpful free online resources to promote your website. The idesignbusiness Small Business Forum is a place where you can get free, objective advice about issues related to the Internet. Post a question or search the Forum for a specific topic. I encourage you to use the forum as a place to share ideas, find answers, and learn new marketing techniques that from other small business owners and webmasters. Visit the Forum ABOUT idesignbusiness idesignbusiness provides complete Internet Marketing services for small businesses. Increase Website traffic, build your customer base, and drive revenue using our cost-effective and result driven tools and services Please visit http://www.idesignbusiness.com for more information. SUBSCRIPTION NOTICE This newsletter is only sent to opt-in subscribers. If at anytime you would like to be removed from this list, please send an e-mail to newsletters@idesignbusiness.com with REMOVE in the subject line or click on the remove link below. Spread the word - Please forward to friends and colleagues. Copyright 2002 - 2003 idesignbusiness http://www.idesignbusiness.com |
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