E-mail Marketing

Marketing a product or service via e-mail is rather new but has become very effective, however it is one of the hardest marketing techniques to implement.  The most difficult but most important part of this marketing technique is to differentiate your e-mail message from those that are spam.  When I see messages that are from organizations or companies that I don’t usually deal with I delete them right away without opening them because of the threat of viruses.  Any e-mail can contain viruses no matter who they are from.  Another thing that the creators of these e-mails have to be aware of is most e-mail programs are programed with a certain detail of a spam filter which catches anything that it considers spam.

The second implication of this e-mail marketing technique is the whole subject of obtaining the e-mail addresses of the people you are sending it to.  There is a Privacy Legislation that protects consumer’s privacy rights and prevents organizations from obtaining consumers e-mails.  There is a way, however, to legally get e-mail addresses from customers.  All it is, is a sort of opt-in process where the customer signs up for the e-mail newsletter on the companies website or store.  It however can be a daunting task, but is the most important step in creating an e-mail marketing campaign. 

Overall, setting up an e-mail marketing campaign is a great way to market your product or service.  If the  e-mail is created properly and the contact list incorporates the right people the marketing campaign can result in a high return on investment for your organization.  Effective e-mail campaigns can also lead to other marketing tacticts.  One of the other tactics that it could lead to is viral marketing or invitations to visit the companies website.  As I said earlier e-mail marketing is still rather new, but if done efficiently and effectively can lead to a great response rate.

Pay Per Click Advertising

Pay per click advertising or PPC is a form of advertising where a company is charged by how many people click on their advertisement. For example, if a company places their advertisement on Google and that advertisement is clicked by 100 people in a day, they would pay Google more than if the advertisement was only clicked by 50 people. Pay per click advertising is a cost effective form of advertising, you are only paying when your advertisement is being used. Using this form also gives you a good understanding of how well your advertisement is doing, and whether or not you need to reconstruct your advertisement to attract more attention.

The key to effective pay per click advertising is having the correct key words within your advertisement. Whenever someone types a key word into a search engine, it comes up with all the sites on the web that are relative to that key word. By incorporating the correct key words into your advertisement you will have the greatest chance of appearing on the results page of searches which are relevant to your product or service. For example, if you managed a grocery store and you created a pay per click advertisement you would want to incorporate key words into your advertisement and web page that people would use to search for it. Such words could be produce, vegetables, fruit, or even check out.

By utilizing pay per click advertising and creating effective advertisements companies will be able to get the best “bang for their buck”. Using an advertising medium like this though can be risky for organizations. Companies can spend a lot of money tailoring their advertisement so that it will appear on search engine results page.  If their landing page is not effective then the customer will just click the back button and see if your competitors ad is any better at informing you about and eventually purchasing the product.  If for instance your landing page takes the customer to an inactive site they will just press the back button, you lose sales and get stuck with the cost of them clicking on the ad.