ONLINE MARKETING e-Marketing Strategies YOU ARE HERE!

E- MARKETING STRATEGIES THAT WORK

Integrating Versatile E-Marketing Strategies and Techniques Ensures the Maximal Results of Your Integral Marketing Campaign

Implementing effective e-marketing strategies ensures that a websites gains maximum long-term exposure across the Web. The effects of various e-marketing strategies and techniques differ, but combining most of them gives the optimal long term results.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) plays a substantial role in online website marketing. The most important objective of e-marketing is to get your website recognized by the Search Engines. Search Engine Marketing >>

All other e-marketing techniques can contribute significantly to achieving better visibility across the Web.

BANNER ADVERTISING

Banner advertising was one of the first online marketing strategies, both on websites across the Web, and search engines. Whether the banner ad is on well known quality websites or search engines, the principle is the same: clicking on the banner ad takes a visitor to the advertiser's website.

The most suitable technique for search engine directories, with categories and subcategories, is to serve the banner ad whenever a particular category or topic is clicked on by the visitor. The other technique is to serve the ad whenever specific words or phrases, to which ads are linked to, are searched on the search engine or directory.

The advertiser pays a rate based on a cost per impression (CPM) for the display of their ad, depending on the popularity of the topic or search phrase. The rate is commonly per 1,000 impressions.

Charging per impression - every time a banner ad is shown on a page - and not per click, has often shifted the focus on traffic quantity and not traffic quality. Showing irrelevant banner ads to just about all visitors, rather than to the appropriate audiences, generated untargeted traffic and the decline in ROI in the past. In time it lead to the decline in CTR rates as well, and recent statistic show visitors tend to ignore banner ads, especially if irrelevant to the information or product they research. Therefore, much of the decline in performance was due to inappropriate utilization of this e-marketing technique.

Though not as popular as it once was, banner advertising is still very much in use today. Banner ads, if creatively designed and specifically tailored to target audience, and skillfully delivered only to the precisely defined audiences, could be successful. Also their branding effect must not be overlooked.

E-MAIL MARKETING

E-mail marketing is one of the most powerful online marketing tools available, but also the most abused one. While e-mail marketing is extremely cost effective, highly personalized, and precise, its often connected with spam and unsolicited junk e-mail, which is, beside being extremely irritating, not working at all.

E-mail marketing must be used exclusively on an opt-in basis. It's also called permission marketing, as people specifically give you permission to send them e-mail messages. In that case only, when you deliver your message exactly to your target audience, who specifically want to know more about your products/services, you could expect high response rates and generation of highly targeted traffic to your website.

A common form of e-mail marketing is e-mail newsletter or e-zines advertising. E-mail newsletters offer news and information that your website users are interested in, while providing you with a permanent contact from your users and clients. They are valuable for customer retention, but reputable newsletters can also be a valuable marketing tool for marketing other websites. They might be formatted as plain text and/or HTML, usually featuring appropriate links to your website for detailed information. HTML e-maisl resemble web pages, enhancing your website branding as well.

VIRAL & AFFILIATE MARKETING

Viral marketing and it's form affiliate marketing, could be quite successful, if based on ethical methods used. Viral marketing, should spread the marketing message so fast across the online community to resemble the spreading speed of the viruses, but that's where all the similarity cease to exist. Motivating people to pass on marketing messages to friends or colleagues it's quite difficult to achieve, therefore a powerful incentive is needed, but even all kinds of free stuff, including screen savers, games, e-cards, e-books, etc. are often not working adequately. That's why paid incentives are also used to motivate consumers to spread the marketing message, but there is potential problem here, as they might become to eager to get the prize and become spammers.

Online affiliate marketing is similar to offline affiliate marketing. Affiliate websites promote your products and services, and receive a payment for sales generated by their referrals. Affiliate websites must be relevant and with trustworthy business principles, as utilizing unethical marketing techniques and spamming on affiliates could damage the brand instead of helping it

ONLINE PRESS RELEASES

Online press release (PR) strategy should include: e-mail press releases, online newspapers and magazines PRs, especially their editorial areas the targeting of specific-interest sites, PR announcement services and reputable discussion groups. Plus, in many cases, the content should be tailored for each of third-party sites edited by professional media people.

NEWSGROUP & MAIL LIST POSTINGS

Participating in suitable online newsgroups, mail lists or forums, utilized by your target audiences, is also a useful way of building credibility. Including your signature (name & website address) is usually allowed, but you should not try to use them just for marketing issues. Even if you succeed, to motivate people to click through to your website you would need to establish credibility as an expert. Therefore you should post regularly, provide valuable information and opinions, as well as respect the rules.

The effects of the above strategies and techniques differ, but combining most of them gives the optimal long term results. Still, the most important objective of Internet marketing is to get your website recognized by the Search Engines. Search Engine Marketing >>

User Oriented Design & Ethical Website Marketing Strategies by Distinctia, 2006