In business it is essential to have a good mix of tools in your marketing toolbox, and email marketing is definitely a useful tool to have. A good email marketing campaign gives you the ability to reach new customers as well as enhancing relationships with your current customers. It can even help you win back old customers and encourage current customers to remain loyal to you and keep buying!
So where do you start? Let’s say you run an online ecommerce website selling luxury goods. You already have a vetted customer database full of clients who you’ve already asked whether or not they are willing to receive promotional information. The first thing to do is look after the customers you already have before you start looking elsewhere. You can do this in a variety of ways; offer them some special deals that are only available to them as they’ve already bought from you, or let them into your online sale a day early. By doing this you are helping your customers see how great you are, and if you’re lucky, they’ll be telling their friends all about you!
Next you should target new clients with different promotions, and keep in touch with all new and prospective clients by producing a newsletter to let them know about some upcoming product releases or news. This keeps your name in their minds so that when they are ready to buy what you are selling, it is your company name they think of first, not your competitors’. Finally it is important that you have a method of measuring the effectiveness of each email marketing campaign so that you can see which promotions are working best.
SEO Articles business promotion, email marketing, email marketing for business
It is always important for the success of your business that you understand where your potential customers are coming from – what is driving them towards your business, and what is convincing them to convert? However, when it comes to your website this is of critical importance if you want your site to make you money, as you need to know who your customers are before you can target them.
Google Analytics is one way of gathering and analysing that data to determine which search engine or referral site is sending potential customers your way as well as which pages they are spending the longest time viewing on your site and, depending on the set up of your site, which page they are on when they convert.
By understanding which pages interest your customers most and what they are searching from when they find you, you can ensure that the content of your website is written with them in mind. If they prefer one page over all the others, you need to ask yourself why. Does it have more or less content? More or less graphics? Is the tone or style any different to the rest of your site? With this kind of information at your fingertips you can really tailor your site to your customers’ tastes.
SEO Articles conversion tracking, conversions, Google Analytics, website
The key to good quality search engine optimisation is in the preparation and planning stages. Before you even begin you should evaluate your business and your website. What are your goals? Who are your customers? Who do you want to be your customers? Put yourself in their shoes and look at your website critically. Is it visually appealing to your customer demographic? Is it written in their kind of language?
Next go to a search engine and imagine what they might type in if they were looking for your product. Don’t just check out where your website is placed, check out the competition. Visit the websites of the major competitors you knew you had, as well as the ones who you’ve just found ranking higher in the search engine results pages than you! Compare their websites to yours, concentrating on the usability as well as the content, and thinking about what might be boosting them further up the rankings.
The next question to answer is: what do you want to achieve with SEO? You would need to focus on different techniques depending on whether you want to increase brand awareness, increase sales, or just tell customers about a special offer you’re running. It’s important to be clear on this one – increasing visitors to your website doesn’t automatically increase sales if they are being directed to an information page instead of a product page, and the answer to this question will shape your whole optimisation strategy.
Even when your search engine optimisation campaign is up and running, you can’t become complacent. You have to keep checking your position on the search engines (hopefully you’re upwardly mobile!), your competitors’ positions (are they doing some SEO of their own to counterbalance your efforts), ensuring your visitors are being directed to the right landing pages to encourage conversions and ensuring that your content is still vibrant, accurate and relevant.
SEO Articles search engine optimisation, SEO
Ordnance Survey are one of the largest map-makers in the world. They have been providing detailed geographic information for over 200 years and are still at the forefront of the mapping industry. In that time, the methods they use for collecting the data has changed dramatically – the advent of computers transformed the process completely. From their headquarters in Southampton, Ordinance Survey now supply maps for both business and leisure users, in paper form as well as digitally.
With their pink covers, the most well known of the Ordinance Survey’s paper maps is probably the OS Landranger Map series. They are full of information to help you plan a day trip or a weekend away, with a 1:50 000 scale and include an abundance of attractions to visit. For the walking enthusiast, Ordinance Survey produces the Explorer series, with an orange cover. These maps are a little more detailed with a 1: 25 000 scale and show features such as public footpaths and bridleways. The OS Travel Maps are aimed at the motorist, with eight regional maps, and one national map. The regional maps with green covers encompass the whole of Great Britain’s road network for those who are travelling in their own area, while the blue covered national map is essential for anyone planning to travel long distances.
As one of the Ordinance Survey’s Licensed Partners, Global Mapping can offer the complete range of OS Data as well as their range of paper maps. Click here to purchase OS Data and maps.
Best of the Web national mapping agency, national mapping agency for Great Britain, Ordinance Survey, Ordinance Survey's, Ordnance Survey
There are many aspects of choosing a Search Engine Consultant that are the same as deciding on anyone you are going to be working with long term. You want somebody you can trust, who you can see yourself working well with, and who will work hard for your business. But there are some things you want to look out for specifically when choosing a search engine consultant.
A good consultant will take the time to understand your business before they begin work. From that solid foundation they will be able to improve your placement in the search engines. This is crucial when choosing the categories to which your site is submitted as they need to be chosen with care and should be categories aimed at the market you are targeting. The consultant should then monitor the submission until it is accepted. It is this attention to detail that you want to look out for, as it needs to be applied to many aspects of search engine optimisation. When optimising content, a miss-spelled keyword can damage your chances of a first page listing.
The type of SEO consultant to avoid is one who uses certain ‘black hat’ methods, such as keyword stuffing. These methods may get your site to the top of the listings in the short term, but in the long term the search engines will ‘sand box’ you, and your website will not appear in the listings at all. It can be very hard to recover from that. Many of these unethical methods are also very off-putting to visitors, meaning that they are less likely to convert to sales. Taking the time to choose an ethical search engine consultant will give higher return on investment.
SEO Articles ethical search engine consultant, higher return on investment, How to pick a Search Engine Consultant, search engine consultant, Search Engine Consultant to Work with your business, SEO consultant