Email Marketing

Email is a useful marketing tool when it is created effectively and when it is seen as valuable by the recipient. Creating effective email marketing has its challenges but has the potential to be a valueable part of an organizations’ online promotion technique.

There are countless articles on the web that tell us how to create email that will be opened and read by the individuals that they are sent to. Emailaddressmanager.com is a great website that lists a number of articles that every email marketer should at least look at. Examples of some of the articles include: “Best practices for effective email marketing” which gives information on how to increase the success rate of email marketing campagins. It includes the suggestion to be careful not to include too much multimedia contact in emails to avoid having people not be able to read the email as “65% of decision makers are viewing your marketing email on their text-only mobile devices” (DS Development, 2008). Another useful article is “Increase Sales and Customer Loyalty with Email Newsletters” which explains how emails in the form of newsletters can “generate leads, drive customers to your business or website, and to enhance your image in the market” (Varney, 2008).

 

The most important thing to think about when using emails as a promotion tool is to remember to importance on the subject line. For the email to even be opened, the subject line must entice the consumer to click on it and open that received email. To avoid having you email considered to be spam, Websitedesigner.com states four techniques to get an organization’s email opened and read.

1. Include Your Brand in the From Line: “Your brand in the From line assures the recipient that the e-mail is coming from a reliable and trusted source” (websitedesigner.com, 2008). Emails will seem more professional when they are from a company compared to an individuals name.

2. Include your brand in the subject line: “This practice reinforces the from line, ensuring recipients that it’s coming from a trusted source” (McDonald, 2004). Lorne McDonald also suggests having someone else read and edit your chosen subject line (2004). What may entice the creator of the subject line to open the email, may not be what other people think is effective.

3. Test the day of the week and the time of the day: “Your e-mail may have a greater chance of being seen from 8:00 A.M. to 10:00 A.M. or 4:00 P.M. to 6:00 P.M” (websitedesigner.com, 2008). These times may be when individuals arrive to their office, or when they are leaving for the day. Despite the trend to have emails be sent for monday morning, this may be a time when recipients do not open any received emails because they are overwhelmed with the amount in their inbox.

4. Customer Interests: Make sure your company has researched your target market in order to understand what would be of interest to your potential customers. Emails should be sent to potential customers that have an interest in the products or services that an organization is selling.

 

 Image Sourced from: http://blog.apogee.gr/files/spam_cartoon.jpg

McDonald, L (2004) 15 Tips for Improved Subject Lines. Email Labs. [Internet] Available from: http://www.emaillabs.com/email_marketing_articles/article_15tipstoimprovesubject.html Accessed: November 19, 2008.

DS Development (2008) Email Marketing – Best Practices. [Internet] Available from: http://www.emailaddressmanager.com/email-marketing/best-marketing-practices.html Accessed: November 19, 2008.

Varney, S (2008) Increase sales and Customer Loyalty with Email Newspetters. [Internet] Available from: http://smallbusinessreview.com/marketing_and_sales/Increase_Sales_with_Email_Newsletters/ Accessed: November 19, 2008.

POP-UPs vs. Banner Advertisements

Marketing 430: Posting One Two Three Four Five Six Seven Eight Nine

Pop-ups are an intrusive form of advertising on the Internet which is past the point of popularity. Users of the Internet have voices their annoyance with this form of advertising and have defended themselves against it. Pop-up or ad-blocking software is used by people because the new browsers that are suddenly appearing, are ruining their Internet experience. Companies such as STOPzilla and Spyware Detector were created to help solve the frustrations with this form of advertising.

“When [Internet] users were asked how various aspects of online ads affected their Web experience, they rated the following attributes most negatively” (Nielson, 2004). These statistics are based on 605 Internet respondents in 2004.

 

Design Element	Users Answering “Very Negatively” or “Negatively”
Pops-up in front of your window	95%
Loads slowly	94%
Tries to trick you into clicking on it	94%
Does not have a “Close” button	93%
Covers what you are trying to see	93%
Doesn’t say what it is for	92%
Moves content around	92%
Occupies most of the page	90%
Blinks on and off	87%
Floats across the screen	79%
Automatically plays sound	79%

Although pop-ups grab attention of Internet users, it’s done in the wrong way and are now considered invasive. Marketers will need to think beyond pop-up advertisements and decide on forms of website advertising that will be effective.

Banner advertisements is a form of website advertising that has been around for years but is effective because Internet users know what is expected of them. Once they click on a particular advertisement they will be taken to the advertiser’s website. Banner ads come in a variety of sizes based on their pixel dimensions (Harris, 2008).  Buttons and skyscrapers are also considered a form of banner advertisements. The standard skyscraper is 120×600 and the wide skyscraper is 160×600, which are sizes set by the Internet Advertising Bureau (Crucial Marketing, 2008). ”Advertisers generally hope a banner ad will do one of two things: visit a  specific site or create branding” (Harris, 2008) Branding is making a product or service become top-of-mind in the eyes of the consumer. For example, a person surfing on the Internet may see a banner advertisement for Dove shampoo but doesn’t click on the link or run to the store to make a purchase right away. Instead, the next time they are shopping for shampoo they will choose Dove because they will remember Dove’s advertising.

“Advertising is less and less about interruption and tying to grab attention, but more and more about engaging a willing audience” (Thomas, 2008). This is a great quote taken from this week’s power point notes which explain the trend away from pop-up advertisements. Web site advertisements need to be seen postively by consumers and not annoying and invasive.

     (Full Banner)

  (Skyscraper 160 x 600)

 

Crucial Marketing (2008) Skyscraper Ad. Marketingterms.com. [Internet] Available from: http://www.marketingterms.com/dictionary/skyscraper_ad/ Accessed: November 9, 2008.

 

Harris, T. (2008) How Banner Ads Work. Howstuffworks.com. [Internet] Available from: http://computer.howstuffworks.com/banner-ad.htm/printable Accessed: November 9, 2008.

 

Nielson, J. (2004) The Most Hated Advertising Techniques. 6, December. Useit.com. [Internet] Available from: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20041206.html Accessed: November 9, 2008.  

 

 

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Click Fraud Explained

Marketing 430: Posting One Two Three Four Five Six Seven Eight

As explained from this image, Click Fraud is a form of Internet crime involving pay-per-click advertisements. Individuals are responsible for driving up the costs of a firm’s advertising from illegitimately clicking on these advertisements, pretending to be an interested and potential customer. Individuals are also setting up computer programs to generate multiple and illegitimate clicks of the results listed through search engines. Some marketers believe that this is such a problem that ”20 percent of fees in certain advertising categories continue to be based on nonexistent consumers in today’s search industry” (Olsen, 2004).

Click fraud is not only happening between rival companies, but some publishers or developers of websites are clicking on the advertisements listed on their website to generate more commissions. The following video shows how this takes place.

Detecting Click Fraud: A sudden increase in the total number of all keywords clicked on from search engines (without a promotional campaign in progress) could indicate click fraud (Mordkovich, 2005). It is important to “study data such as click and conversion patterns by keywords, as well as the IP addressees of clicks” (Seda, 2007). If the same IP addresses are responsible for many clicks on specific ads it is the most obvious way to detect click fraud.

Action against Click Fraud: A small business that only has an advertising budget of $100 per month would probably not find it worth while to fight back against this Internet crime (Seda, 2007). Larger companies however, may find that click fraud is resulting in thousands of dollars of wasted advertising. The most extreme action a company could take would be to turn to litigation but it is often hard to prove who is responsible. A lawsuit filed against Google in 2006 resulted in a settlement of $90 million to reimburse advertisers for losses as a result of click fraud. These advertisers claimed that Google wasn’t doing “enough to combat the problem and that its clients are suffering financially as a result” (Kopytoff, 2006). Since this lawsuit Google claims to have addressed this issue. Companies may want to enlist in the services provided by companies that were created to eliminate click fraud. Examples of such companies are: ClickDetective and WhosClickingWho. These services will track conversion rates and list IP addresses that visit a site.  

 

 

 

Kopytoff, V (2006) Google to Settle Click-Fraud Lawsuit; Advertisers claim overchargers by search engines. 9, March. [Internet] Available from: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/03/09/BUGRMHKQTR1.DTL Accessed: November 2, 2008.

Mordkovich, Boris & Eguene (2005) Click Fraud and How to Counteract It in Ad Campaigns; Detecting Click Fraud. July. [Internet] Available from: http://www.searchenginepromotionhelp.com/m/articles/pay-per-click/anti-click-fraud-tactics-3.php Accessed: November 2, 2008.

Seda, Catherine (2007) Blogging for Business. In: How to Win Sales & Influence Spiders. Boosting Your Business & Buzz on the Web. USA, New Riders; Pearson Education, pp.143.

Image Source: Olsen, S. (2004) Exposing Click Fraud. 19, July. Cnet News [Internet] Available from: http://news.cnet.com/Exposing-click-fraud/2100-1024_3-5273078.html Accessed: November 2, 2008.

Title Tags are Important

Marketing 430: Posting One Two Three Four Five Six Seven

There is nothing more frustrating than when you decide to bookmark a website and you have to erase the automatic text and create a new name to save into your list of favorites. The text, is too often unrelated or useless in order to remember what the page was about when you look back at your favorites list. This automatic text is known as a title tag. Websites that aren’t creating a relevant title tag are at a definite disadvantage.

That disadvantage is to do with Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

SEO is the process of optimizing specific elements of a web page in order to achieve high rankings of results from a search engine. Many marketers believe that title tags are the most important factor of achieving a high ranking from search engines.

Where title tags appear:

• Title tags create the automatic text when a web page is added to favorites.
• Title tags are the highlighted text on all search engine results.
• Title tags create the text used for on tabbed browsing

Here are some tips to create a useful and relevant Title Tag:

1. Include company name. In order for your brand name to be remembered, it should always be included within the title tag, and usually at the beginning. (Highrankings, 2007) It’s not a good idea to use only the company name however, as pages would not be distinguished from each other on your website.
2. Different Pages should have different Title Tags. Make sure the title tags are specific to the page. The Canucks Home page (“Vancouver Canucks – The Official Website”) is different than the schedule page (“Vancouver Canucks – Schedule”).
3. Include specific phrases. In order for your website to show up high in the ranking of search engine results, make sure you include keywords and phrases that your customers would be looking for. For example, if you are selling signed Canucks Jerseys, a good title tag would include this information.
4. Research Keywords. Understand what specific keywords your customers are using. There are many online resources that help with this including Google AdWords and Wordtracker.
5. Watch the length. Make sure the title tags that you are creating are not too long and contain spam. Make sure all information included in the title tags are relevant and will fit into the limits set by search engines. Google, for example has a limit of 63 characters of less. (Heard, 2006) Some SEO specialists state that title tags should be no longer than 4-5 keywords (Scocco, 2006).

Creating title tags that follow these steps are not only going to help to attract new visitors to your website, but it will increase user convenience.

 

 

Heard, J. (2006) The 7 Essential Title Tag Strategies of High Ranking WebPages in 2006. 27, March. [Internet] Available from: http://www.marketposition.com/blog/archives/2006/03/the_7_essential.html Accessed: October 27, 2008.

Highrankings (2007) All About Title Tags. 1, February [Internet] Available from: http://www.highrankings.com/allabouttitles Accessed: October 27, 2008.

Scocco, D. (2006) Keep yout title tags short and pertinent. 15, November. [Internet] Available from: http://www.dailyblogtips.com/keep-your-title-tags-short-and-pertinent/ Accessed: October 27, 2008.

Why blogs are a good idea for business

Marketing 430: Posting One Two Three Four Five Six

A blog is an online diary of pages that reflect thoughts and opinions of their creators. They are posted on the web to allow comments from readers who either share or oppose these opinions. They are increasing in popularity and it was estimated that in 2005, a new weblog was created every 2.2 seconds (Sifry, D, 2005).

Businesses can use blogs as a new way to promote their products and services that is different from their standardized marketing messages. According to Catherine Seda (2007), businesses blogging is a way to stop persuading customers, and to start engaging with them. Allowing comments on a blog will be a way for customers to provide their direct thoughts.

Businesses may want to write about issues relating to the products that they sell, compared to telling the customers to BUY NOW. The products are services are marketed but in a subtle way.

An example of a business in Nanaimo that is doing this comes from the Mahle House Restaurant. The owner posts a monthly wine columnon the company website explaining about wines that he has tasted all around the world. These blogs are about personal travelling stories but they are related to what the business is selling. Hopefully when the readers of this blog come to the restaurant they will try a bottle of the wine that he brought back from that trip.

Another example that was discussed by Caroline Seda (2007) is when realtors create posting about their personal opinions about what will happen with the real estate market. Considering the uncerntailey of the market today, this may be information that customers are waiting and wanting to hear!

Small companies seem to be blogging more than large corporations for a number of reasons. Owners of these small companies can build brand image, get exposure to their company cheaply, and can interact directly with potential or existing customers. (Newall, 2006) “Blogs humanize a corporation” (Newall, 2006). Blogs help to make the company feel more approachable, and creates a personal voice. (Alexander, 2007).

The most important tip that I have found by doing research on this topic, is to keep the information in the blog useful! (Alexander, 2007) Businesses should include information on the blog that people would want to share with others. The more people that visit and use the information on this blog, the more the company will be marketed.

 

 

Alaxander, P (2007) Should You Start a Business Blog? Why you should consider a small-busines blog– and how you can start one. 28, February. [Internet] Available from: http://www.entrepreneur.com/technology/techtrendscolumnistpeteralexander/article175236.html Accessed: October 23, 2008.

Newell, C. (2006) CEO Blogging: Are the Advantages Worth the Efoort and Potential Risk? Evaluating Business Blogging Exposure for Larger Businesses. 20, September. [Internet] Available from: http://blogsite.com/public/blog/142265 Accessed: October 23, 2008.

Seda, Catherine (2007) Blogging for Business. In: How to Win Sales & Influence Spiders. Boosting Your Business & Buzz on the Web. USA, New Riders; Pearson Education, pp.39-56.

Sifry, D. (2005) State of The Blogosphere, Part 1: Growth of Blogs. [Internet] Available from: http://www.sifry.com/alerts/archives/000298.html Accessed: October 22, 2008.

 

 

A Viral Marketing Example

Marketing 430: Posting One Two Three Four Five

Viral Marketing is defined as “a marketing phenonenon that facilitates and encourages people to pass along a marketing message”. (cruical marketing, 2007) It is known as word-of-mouth marketing because the promotion of a product or information is so intriguing that individuals who see these messages, feel compelled to pass the messages onto friends, family and colleagues. As more and more people see these messages (that can be in the form of videos, text, photos, etc) it is spread rapidly, just like a virus.

The internet has increased the speed in which viral messages are spread. For example, if one person sends a video through email to ten friends, and those ten friends send the video to ten friends of their own, the video will soon been seen by hundreds and thousands of people.

Viral marketing is all about targeting your audience, and many factors need to be considered if a marketer wants their messages to become viral. Thomas Baekdal (2006) lists seven important factors that need to be considered:

1: Make people feel something: “Viral marketing is 100% about emotions” (Barkdal, 2006) If people are not impacted by a message they see, they will not relay this message others. These messages should for example, evoke feelings of fear, humor, sadness, happiness, and/or intrigue.

2: Do something unexpected: Make a marketing message that is different than the competitors in order to attract attention.

3: Do not try to make advertisements: “Focus exclusively [on] creating a good and interesting story” (Barkdal, 2006) and not on trying to see the product directly.

4: Make sequels: For the people who have seen and passed on your marketing messages, they will be egar and will be waiting to see what is done next.

5: Allow Sharing, downloading and embedding: Let individuals see and share your messages and information easily with others.

6: Connect with comments: interact with your audience by encouraging their opinions.

7: Never restrict access:“Viral marketing is never about exclusivity. It is about getting it out there for everyone to see” (Barkdal, 2006).

 

A great example that encompasses all these elements:  ONE RED PAPERCLIP

Kyle MacDonald wanted to see what he could trade his red paperclip for, so he started a blog, advertised on craigslist, and within one year he had traded his way to a house!  Readers of his blog were intrigued enough with this idea, that it was shared with others and soon millions of people have read his blog. The story grew from being featured in local newspapers to national newspaper headlines such as the Wall Street Journal, Manchester Evening News, and Vancouver’s Province.

It would be unlikely to see someone else have as much success with a blog posting as Kyle had. This viral marketing idea was unexpected and unique, and evoked feelings from the readers that followed the story from reading the blog, to reading his book on the process. “People are attracted to things they’ve never seen before, especially if they’re over-the-top in some obvious way” (itotd.com, 2006).

 

The original blog post: http://oneredpaperclip.blogspot.com/2005/07/one-red-paperclip.html

Offer to make a trade for the house:

http://oneredpaperclip.blogspot.com/2008/06/how-to-make-offer-for-house.html

 

Image: MacDonald, Kyle. (2008) Available from: http://www.flickr.com/photos/kylemacdonald/sets/1424046

Baekdal, Thomas (2006) 7 Tricks to Viral Web Marketing. [Internet] Available from: http://www.baekdal.com/articles/Branding/viral-marketing-tricks/ Accessed: October 15, 2008.

Cruicial Marketing (2007) Marketingterms.com. Viral Marketing: Definition. [Internet] Available from: http://www.marketingterms.com/dictionary/viral_marketing/ Accessed: October 15, 2008.

itotd.com (2006) Viral Marketing: Making a fortune with paperclips and pixels. Available from: http://itotd.com/articles/580/viral-marketing/ Accessed: October 15, 2008.

 

The ‘Community’ Website Design Element

Marketing 430: Posting One Two Three Four

In this week’s lab we were introduced to the 7 Design elements that made up the customer interface. These 7C’s are:  context, content, community, customization, communication, connection and commerce. I want to discuss the COMMUNITY design element for my blog entry.

com·mu·ni·ty: [kuh-myoo-ni-tee] a social, religious, occupational, or other group sharing common characteristics or interests and perceived or perceiving itself as distinct in some respect from the larger society within which it exists (usually prec. by the): the business community; the community of scholars. (Dictionary.com, 2008)

Creating a sense of community can help increase traffic to a website, can increase brand awareness, but most importantly it can fill a need that is not available from any other source. If individuals are able to gain benefits from visiting a website, they will see it as being valuable. There are many reasons why Individuals would be interest in online communities are some of those reasons include: building interests, group coordination and information sharing, project management, learning, and general coversation. (White, Nancy 2002) Online communities allow individuals to do all these things without time and geographical barriers. The more that individuals are actively involved, the more loyalty they will have to a particular website.

A great example of an online community is Oprah.com. If anyone has watched her show you know that she encourages her viewers to visit her website to talk about the show they have just watched. The Oprah magazine also refers to the website for a way for its readers to share their thoughts on specific articles featured in the magazine. There are message boards, personal blogs, and hot topics that visitors to the website can engage in on the website.

“Welcome to Oprah.com’s online community, where members come together for advice, support and friendship.” (Oprah.com, 2008)

Being a part of this online community creates a feeling of being valued as posts to message boards will be looked at and answered by members of Oprah.com staff. Ideas for the television show are often taken from discussion boards as people are discussing important issues and opinions. This is very efficient from a marketer’s perspective, because actual members of the firm’s target audience are creating ideas for the show. An estimated 2.2 million people people visit the Oprah.com website in a month (quantcast, 2008). The firm is able to get free market research of what issues are important to their target market just from monitoring what takes places in their discussion boards. This proves that creating a sense of community is not only beneficial to the website visitors.

An online community must provide some sort of value to the visitor, especially when the website is similar to many others that on the internet. ”The best way of being different is to add value to your site that your competitors are unable to match” (Reed, Martin. 2008) This sence of community needs to be implemented by the other ’7C’s’ – design elements that make up a website.

 

Dictionary.com (2008) Community. [Internet] Available from: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/community Accessed: October 9, 2008.

Oprah.com (2008) Community: Connect with us and each other. [Internet] Available from: http://www.oprah.com/community Accessed: October 9, 2008.

Reed, Martin (2008) What is your online community’s added value? [Internet] Available from: http://www.communityspark.com/what-is-your-online-communitys-added-value/ Accessed: October 9, 2008.

White, Nancy (2002) Defining the purpose of your community. Full Circle Associates. [Internet] Available from: http://www.fullcirc.com/community/communitypurpose.htm Accessed: October 9, 2008.

Quantcast.com (2008) Estimated Monthly Traffic: Oprah.com. [Internet] Available from: http://www.quantcast.com/oprah.com Accessed: October 9. 2008.

w i r e f r a m e s …

Marketing 430: Posting One Two Three

Wireframes : Who? What? Where? When? Why? 

• Who uses wireframes? Wireframes are usually created by the project manager in order to form a picture of what they want the site itself to look like. Wireframes are then shared with the graphic designers who will take this ’storyboard’ and create the graphics/photos/logos/etc needed for the website to come to life. It also serves as a way to communicate with stakeholders for the comapny that is building a web presence. It is a great form of communication as it is easier to understand the layout of the site in this form rather than just from a description in words. A written description could also pose a number of problems. Page descriptions may be too long, sentences could be missed, or the entire page layout could be misinterpreted. A wireframe solves these potential problems by creating a very simplistic form. Wireframes require little technical skill so anyone is able to create them.

 

• Whatare wireframes? They represent what a website will look like but without the use of graphics or colors. It can easily be remembered as the skeleton in which a website is build from. It determines the content and navigation of a site, and not the design elements. Wireframes include elements such as navigation of the website, links, and where specific images and logos will be placed. They show every page of a particular website. The picture here is an example of what one would look like.

 

• Where(or how) are wireframes created? Wireframes can be developed in a variety of ways. What’s great about them is that they can be hand drawn, or can be more complex and be developed from a variety of computer programs. This is an example of a wireframe that I’ve made for the website http://www.tshirtbordello.com It include pixels of particular images and has the outline of what the website will look like once it’s created.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

• When and why are wireframes used? The best time to develop wireframes are before the design elements are created. Design before you build! This could be done when a website it being redesigned or when a new website is first being created. As mentioned above, they are a great communication tool between the people envisioning what they want the website to look like, and the people that are creating it.

Programs to build wireframes:

Axure RP Pro  - $589 – Single User License or a free 30 day trial download. The company states “With Axure RP Pro, creating annotated wireframes is fast and effective, allowing you to focus on the design instead of the documentation”.

Screendesigner- $149 – Full License or a free 14 day trial download. “With ScreenDesigner you can create User Interface and Functional Specifications. Communicate your ideas efficiently, endorse collaboration and create great applications!”

Jumpchart – $Various prices depending on use. “Helps keep website content organized”.

Designing wireframes are just a part of a marketer’s job for planning a web presence. The most important point to remember is to keep the customer in mind. If a page looks like it would be too difficult to build a wireframe will help make it easier by breaking down the elements that are needed. All websites should be built by first creating wireframes to show how the pages will fir together. Mitch Speers describes this quite well with the following metaphor:

A wireframe is like a woman’s skeleton–it shows how the parts will fit together, but tells you very little about how pretty she is. We want to check the wireframe carefully to make sure we haven’t given her a gorilla skeleton by mistake, before we get distracted by thinking about what color dress she should wear.

 

Information received from:

http://www.binamica.co.il/english/wireframes_web_application.html

http://www.strangesystems.net/archives/000005.php

  

An email to Harbour Air

Marketing 430: Posting One Two

During our Lab this week, we were asked to give the local company Harbour Air a recommendation into what web analytic software we think they should implement. As they do not currently have software on their site to track visitor data (from what I could tell from the source code) an email should be written to them to explain the advantages of having this type of software.

The email would be as followed:

To: marketing@harbour-air.com
From: my email address
Subject: Web analytics

September 21, 2008

Dear: Harbour Air Marketing Department

 Good afternoon,

I am an Online Marketing student at Vancouver Island University and this week we were looking at how you use your website http://www.harbour-air.com as a key asset of your business. The website is easy to navigate, provides answers to questions that visitors may have abour your business, and even allows for reservations.  

We did wonder however, if you are currently using any type of web analytic software to keep track of your visitors to the website. There are many website activities that would beneficial for you to measure.

I would like to explain two software solutions in particular and include my recommendation for the best solution to choose.

Google Analytics is a free, hosted solution that will track a number of useful performance indicators. It tracks basic information such as the number of visitors by date and by country. It also tracks referrers to your website (search engines, referring sites and direct traffic). This program is a great place to start to view visitor information data. This short video by Google shows their features directly.

All you need to do to start to track this data is to place a particular JavaScript code into your website and all the data is provided to you. You can also find numerous reviews on the internet from businesses/individuals that have actually used this software.  Link 1 / Link 2

Another web analytic solution that is available is Clicktracks. The information that is available is much more detailed than the previous software mentioned, and you will actually own the software. This means you can choose what information you want to collect. This software does require purchase but you can receive a 30 day free trial. You’ll be able to see the keywords used in search engines, view the details of your particular advertising campaign, and view detailed information of visitors from all around the world.

I encourage you to take a look at the software solutions that I have mentioned. After all, a huge advantage of online marketing is that we are able to access customer data without even having to ask these customers. A marketer can find out key words used in search engines, and trends among visitors such as pages of abandonment and bounce rates. A good portion of your market research has already been done for you, and you should be able to access this information. Wouldn’t it be useful to know the pages on your website that result in an immediate exit by users? Clicktracks can provide you with the best customer data, and even has support phone numbers that will help you in setting up the program to find exactly what you need. With a complex and well constructed website such as Harbour Air, I think this web analytic software was made for companies such as yours.

Megan
Online Marketing Student
Vancouver Island University
www.viu.ca

 

Web analytics is hugely important for online marketers and without utilizing the data that is available, businesses would be at an extreme disadvantage. Marketers can use measures obtained from these analytics to know what to improve on, and for market research opportunities. Of course not everyone will be able to fully understand each measure’s importance, but there are many resources, and even books that would useful for business owners to read and understand. Web Analytics: An Hour a Day by Avinash Kaushik seems like a great place to start and to really understand what web analytics are all about.

This quote explains the need for web analytics quite effectively through direct comparison…

• “Imagine if you were to build a house without first laying down a solid foundation. Your house would be unstable, unsupported and susceptible to the shifting of the earth. Similarly, without web analytics and the consumer insights and trends it provides, your company’s business objectives are susceptible to the shifting of your customers’ online preferences, purchasing and web surfing behaviors.”  ~Jim Sterne

http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/10888.asp 

 

 

Did you read that PRIVACY POLICY?

Marketing 430: Posting One

In this week’s class a question was asked: “How many of you read privacy policies?”

Looking around the room, only a couple people had their hands up. I wanted to visit some popular websites to see exactly what I’ve signed up for.

Facebook’s Privacy Policy: http://www.facebook.com/policy.php

• Have photos or postings on your page that contain illegal activities? Facebook can share this formation to lawyers, agents or government agencies.
• Anything posted to facebook should be done at your own risk and becomes publicly available information. This means that if you post an opinion in a facebook group called “I hate cellphones”, the public at large will have that record and can use that comment for any purpose they choose.
• If you put your favorite movie/song/book, etc on your website page, Facebook will personalize the advertisements and promotions that you will see when you sign into your account. “Facebook may use information in your profile without identifying you as an individual to third parties”.
• Facebook will use information about you obtained from other sources such as newspapers, other websites, and instant messenger services to personalize your facebook experience.

 

Amazon’s Privacy Policy: http://www.amazon.ca/gp/help/customer/display.html/702-8504739-6683204?ie=UTF8&nodeId=918814

• Personal Information will be shared to third parties, which is necessary to preform a specific function such as delivery, credit card processing, analyze consumer data, and to provide customer service.
• The companies that place advertisements on Amazon’s website will receive information about you as a user such as geographical area for example, but not information that would identify you as a specific individual.

 

Other Privacy Policies you might want to check out: YouTube  /  MySpace / Google / Wikipedia  / Ebay.ca / craigslist / Other Popular Websites

 

PIPEDA(Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act) regulates the collection and use of personal information across Canada on the federal and provincial levels. It requires all organizations to state the purpose of information being collected, and must inform and obtain consent for the use of that information. The organization cannot use this information for any other reason that what was consented to, and must keep this information secure.

 As users of this information technoloy we need to be aware of what we are giving consent to. Once you click the “I accept” button, you’re on the hook for everythng that was stated in the privacy policy that you probably just glanced over.

P.S Check the footer of your favorite website to find their privacy policy.