Start spreading the news

• Jonathan Crossfield
• 19 August 2008
• Page 1 of 2 : single page

Photo credit: Josh Mehlman

Frank Sinatra may have been singing about new york but every day businesses are spreading the news to a widening audience through the internet.

The success of a website depends on two things: attracting the right readership to your content and persuading them to take the next step – a sale or an enquiry. But what if you could get the message out beyond your site, sending your content to the people instead of relying on them coming to you?

Online marketing differs from traditional models by embracing interactivity. Traditional marketing is a one-way conversation with a passive audience. People don’t turn on the TV looking for ads. But on the internet, they choose to view your marketing material by clicking on your link. This active audience chooses to read your message and will, if motivated, spread the word through a number of networking channels. This is social media.

Because of this shift to an active audience, websites are changing from a ‘company selling’ model to a ‘customer buying’ one. This means content should identify with the customer's needs rather than merely listing the features of your offer. By understanding the customer's role in this marketing relationship, you can produce web content that encourages participation.

Blog standard

I have a reputation for being opinionated. It's one of the reasons I love to write. So when I started a blog, jonathancrossfield.com, it became an outlet for my ideas, views, observations and professional opinions.

Because I blog, my opinions now appear on websites across the world. While I sleep, websites I’ve never heard of are taking the RSS feed from my blog and placing my questionable wisdom on a whole range of websites, online forums, blogs and emails. Each of these sources feeds traffic and links back to me, further increasing the success of my own site as well as my prominence in search engines such as Google. This in turn allows more people to discover my content and syndicate it to their websites and newsletters, snowballing until eventually my website will require little effort from me to produce hundreds, if not thousands, of hits.

Blogging is one of the most powerful methods of freeing your content from the confines of your website, sending out lines to hook readers and lead them back to you.

If a blog seems too complicated, you can still get your message out to a receptive readership with email marketing.

Permission email marketing, where customers request subscription, now makes up 27% of the average internet user’s inbox. This illustrates a spectacular difference between online and offline behaviour. Many people complain about letterbox junk mail but happily receive electronic marketing.

How easy is it for small businesses to use these methods and what do you need to consider when planning your online marketing strategy?

Checklist

Do you need:

• Beginner: to increase repeat business and maintain long term client relationships?
• Expert:To spread brand awareness and your business message beyond your website to attract more people? 
  

Beginner

Is it for you?

• You have an established customer base
• You want to increase repeat customers
  
• You want to promote new products or services easily
• You want to present your brand as informative and trustworthy

Challenge

Research shows that for most businesses, 80% of their sales come from 20% of their customer base. The business from a small number of established customers usually outweighs that from new customers. Yet most businesses spend 80% of their effort and marketing budget chasing new customers who will most likely only produce 20% of their business income.

Why are companies only spending 20% of their time talking to their best customers?Netregistry’s sales and marketing director Giles Donovan explains how the company dealt with the situation.

“Although we started out simply dealing in domain names and web hosting, we soon expanded to offer many other services as well. But many of our customers would come to our website to buy one thing and not be aware of the other ways we could help them.”

Although many businesses have used email marketing for years, recent surveys reveal newsletters are often produced quickly without a clear focus to engage the customer or the means to track the success.

To evaluate the success or failure of Netregistry’s newsletter campaign, Donovan knew the software would need to provide detailed information on how many people opened the email and whether they clicked on the links it contained.

Solution: email marketing with copywriting service

• Additional traffic to your website 
• Tailored email templates to match branding, look and feel
• Ability to track response and analyse the success of each email and link 
• Mail Room comprehensive email marketing service
• Copywriting for professional articles starts from $150 per article 
  

Netregistry chose an email marketing system with an easy interface and the ability to produce detailed statistics, allowing the response to a monthly email newsletter to be tracked. With an email template designed to replicate the look and feel of the website, the newsletters were consistent with the brand.

“Over the years, we’ve experimented with different formats but we’ve settled on the newsletter strategy which achieves the best results,” says Donovan. This includes identifying the specific time and date when a newsletter is most likely to be received and opened.

“Trial and error showed us Wednesday morning sees a much greater response to our newsletters,” he says. “People are more likely to spend time processing emails on this day, according to our statistics. Therefore, our marketing schedule is set up to allow our newsletter to go out on the first Wednesday of each month. If we miss this date, we see a definite drop in the number of people who open it and click through to our website.”

Many businesses use email marketing only to publicise special offers or promote a new product. Netregistry decided to adopt a softer marketing method.

“People are less likely to open an email that's clearly just a sales pitch,” Donovan explains. “But more people will open it if they feel the email contains information and advice they can use.”

By sending articles and tutorials instead of monthly promotions, the Netregistry newsletter has dramatically increased responses. The informative articles create more interest in the readers who may then follow links to investigate related products. The feedback has been very positive with many customers reporting they now read the newsletters instead of ignoring them.