Results-Focused Online Marketing Strategies

Are you concerned about Marketing ROI in these tough times? Read on for a variety of things you can implement virtually without cost if you have the available resources.

Co-Registration & Co-Marketing
Are there companies in your industry that have related but non-competitive offerings? What better time to work with them and figure out some strategic co-marketing. These efforts might include:

• Ad swaps. Get them to run a small ad on their site or in their newsletter in exchange for running one on theirs.
• Co-registration. Get them to offer an opt-in “check box” for your newsletter in their newsletter sign up process and do the same for them.
• Shared editorial. Write a relevant newsletter article or blog post for them and get them to do the same. Be sure to get a link back to your site to maximize SEO.
• Contests. Launch a contest to encourage purchases or sign ups and get a partner to give you the prizes. Be sure to give them enough exposure so that it’s well worth their while to do so.

Social Media
Have you figured out how to leverage Social Media for your business yet? If not, it’s a great time to start some experiments in this “free” medium. Bear in mind the word “social” in social media and make sure you only launch relevant initiatives or you’ll risk alienating your audience.

One great strategy is to develop some valuable content and offer it for free. You can then promote the content through social media (which, unlike promoting your business directly, is okay). As an example, if your business offers Executive Coaching you might want to write a great guide on “Effective Leadership in Tough Times” then find opportunities to get the word out to relevant sites, networks and forums.

Just remember, you do NOT want to be spamming sites and forums with commercial stuff. Just stick to getting word out about the helpful guide (or whatever content you develop) and ensure that the guide itself and the pages it’s presented on are well branded and have an appropriate call to action. If you take the high road and do a great job executing on this you can achieve dramatic success with such an approach.

Email List Optimization
Regardless of the size of your organization you can improve your results dramatically by cleaning and optimizing your list. The lowest hanging fruit in these regards is simply to determine who has been in your list for the last 6 months or more and has not opened an email. Break this group into a separate list, send them a test mailing to determine they are indeed “dead” and then cut them from the list.

Your deliverability % will go up, your complaint rate will go down and your costs will be reduced if you use an external vendor. This is a tactic we love to bring in when we’re doing email consulting with larger companies as it’s usually possible to save the company more money in deployment costs than what the engagement costs them (we’re 3 for 3 in these regards in the last year or so with companies who have lists over 500,000 in size).

This post originally ran in our Online Marketing Insights Newsletter. Watch for the next issue as we look at Article Marketing, Blogging and Effective Site Optimization.

Note: this was originally posted earlier this year. In the interim the laws in the U.S. have changed so that it’s actually illegal to put your unsubscribe functionality behind a log-in requiring a password! Any companies still doing this (I can think of a couple) would be best advised to get on track with this as soon as possible.

Ever tried to unsubscribe from a newsletter, only to find out you need to enter an account password in order to access the unsubscribe function? Ouch.

Message to marketers - don’t ever, ever, ever require this. First off, if the unsubscribe function is being accessed from a newsletter, the technology required to automatically pre-populate your readers’ email in your unsubscribe form is so simple that even I could do it!

Secondly, chances are that a majority of the readers who want to unsubscribe probably don’t remember what password they originally used for your service or publication. By requiring they log in to unsubscribe, you’re pretty much guaranteeing that these folks will flag you as spam instead of trying to figure out their password. So, if you’re wondering why your emails are going to the spam folder on Gmail or AOL, this might just be the reason.

I read a good article on email reputation the other day by Ralph Wilson at Web Marketing Today. He supplies 11 great tips on improving your delivery rate. In these tips, he rightly advocates removing bounced recipients and finding ways to engage and woo back subscribers, but leaves out one critical tip: clean out the dead!

Particularly if you’ve been sending email for a long time, it’s likely that you have an extremely large percentage of your database that is not interested in receiving your emails. Don’t take this personally, it’s a natural consequence of time and shifting interests.

“Email is cheap,” you might say, “why would I cut people out of my list?” Well, a pattern that I’m starting to see is that if you’ve been sending emails for a couple years or more, if you’re using responsible email practices, and if your open rate is less than 20%, it’s likely that 50% or more of your database is effectively dead.

Let me give you a couple examples. I did one project this year where we experienced problems migrating a large list from one email vendor to another. Deliverability was an issue after migrating the database and we needed to act fast. In this case, I filtered the list down so that it included only people who had opened an email in the previous year, had purchased a product in the last 18 months, or had joined the list in the last 3 months.

The result was that we reduced a list of 2.9 million subscribers to a list of only 1.2 million. Sounds scary, doesn’t it? When I saw the size of the new list I thought I was in big trouble. That said, a funny thing happened when we deployed the next newsletter.

Although we had cut the list by almost 60%, we still got 90% of the typical response in terms of opens and clicks. While it would have been nice to have kept that last 10%, the huge cost savings of reducing the deployments by 60% and the improvements to deliverability meant that our roi went through the roof and the cost savings more than made it worthwhile (as well as justifying my fees for quite some time).

More recently, I worked on a database about half this size with similar results. The only difference in this case was that without the deliverability crisis we had more time to tinker with the final segmentation rules for who we kept and who we removed from the database.

In this case, we were able to get to a point where we balanced the “age” of the subscriber against their activities in the past 2 years and were able to cut the list size in half while maintaining virtually 100% of the open and click activities as compared to past mailings.

Again, the cost savings and the improvements to deliverability made this a tremendous win and in one fell swoop we virtually doubled the roi on what we were paying to deploy emails.

Bottom line: if you have a large list and have been sending email for over a year then you could achieve some significant cost savings by cleaning up your database.