AdamAtchison's Weblog

E-mail Marketing

adamatchison — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 23:32:37 +0000

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

adamatchison — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 23:52:17 +0000

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.

Search Engine Optimization

adamatchison — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 20:46:56 +0000

If your website appears first on a search engine results page your company holds a significant advantage over your competitors. There is serveral ways to ensure that your website will be at the top of the search results. One of the ways is to have correct key words within your website. When a person is searching the web, they type in key words into a search engine and the search engine searches the web for the sites that are most closely related to that particular key word. If the key word that was typed in buy the searcher is contained within your website it will show up in the search results. Almost all of internet users use search engines whenever possible. With this being said it is important to have a website that is designed with search engine optimization in mind.

There are several resources online available that will be able to help create a web page that optimizes search engine results. One resource is called Google’s Keyword Generator which is offered by Google. It allows you to type in any word that you think will be a valuable key word for your website and it tells you how often that word is used and how often the site is visited that has that key word. This site will reveal other words similar to that key word that you typed in, this will give you better ideas of a key word that can be used to better optimize search engine results. By using this resource, you will be able to create a web page that people will visit more often than your competitors websites.

As I have thought about it, the best way to attract people to your website is to optimize search engine results. If and when you get to the top of the results page by using the best key words for your site the people that have searched see that your page is at the top and subconsciously think that your site is a better site for them than your competitors. This is the case even though your site might not be the best. If you don’t have the time or patience to use the key word generator you have the option of paying the search engine to place you website at the top of the results. This is true as long as the key word typed in is located somewhere within you site. When the key word is typed into the search engine the company who pays money to the search engine will automatically placed at the top.

Social Networking and Blogging

adamatchison — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 23:18:57 +0000

Great mediums for marketers to use when promoting new products are the newly produced Social Networking sites. Using these social sites the word of the product hits a large number of people at the same time, also with reletively low costs to them. By doing this marketers can get comsumers talking and blogging about the product which can be considered Word-of-Mouth advertising. In my opinion the number one reason that marketing professionals use this is the popularity of these social sites like Facebook and MySpace.

A form of social networking is called blogging. This is when people can voice there opinions on the topic or oproduct and post them for everyone in the world to read. Blogging is relatively new and over the past 10 or so years has become popular as the internet has become more popular. On some company’s website you will find product forums which customers can comment and question the products which is a form of blogging. When first intoduced to blogging I was thinking that a blog was just on important things like politics and the like. After forming a profile on WordPress i have noticed that the blogs are on just about anything that can be thought of.

If companies incorporate social networking sites into its marketing campaign, they will be able to reach the greatest amount of people especially the ones that are in their target market. This will not only hit their target market but it might also target other potential secondary markets that have not been thought of before. If your company or organization’s product gets people to blog or voice their opinion about it, then you should take it as a compliment because that means that they like your product so much that they are telling others about it and also how they fell about it.

Viral Marketing

adamatchison — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 23:26:25 +0000

Viral Marketing has become more and more popular as the main way of marketing a product. It is a marketing phenomenon that encouragespeople to pass along a maketing message in such a way that is speads like a virus. Hence the name viral. Something that is viral could be compulsive reading, listening, or viewing or it could be something that is so amazing that people have the urge to share with others. With Social networking sites like Facebook and Myspace becoming more popular viral marketing is becoming the most cheapest and effective way to market a product. Viral Marketing will include any strategy thatencourages people to pass on your message to others. The most trusted form of communication is Word-of-Mouth.

Although this marketing stategy sounds easy to execute it is actually a distance away from it. Think about how many videos there are on Youtube and how many of those you have actually watched. There is thousands of millions on the site and it is almost impossible for one person to view them all. Of the videos that you have actually watched how many have you told friends or family about or sent to them via e-mail or Facebook. The Viral Marketing campaigns are relying on the viewer or consumer to tell others about it and to spead the word. In order to viral the advertisement has to be catchy so that you will want to watch it again and agian. Also the advertisement has to leave enough information out so that you have to do some research to find out more about the product or service.

There are several successful viral maketing campaigns that have been introduced. One is the Dove Evolution campaign.

Giving the Customer the best experience

adamatchison — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 19:50:38 +0000

A websites success is determined by the customers experience. If it is positive they will return and use the site again, if it is not positive they will most likely not return to your site as often if ever. A positive experience relates to engaging the customer, easiness to use, appeal, and keeping the customer coming back. The websites that receive repeat customers are the sites that the customers enjoy and feel that they have had something offered to them. Word-of-Mouth comes into effect when a customer has a good experience on your website as they will then tell their friends that your site was good and you will receive more visits. The customer’s experience is harder to make positive on the web because you usually only have one shot to make it. The customer comes to your website, either for a reason or by accident, and their first impression will tell if they are going to stay, how long they will stay, or if they will leave right away and go to a different site. The customer is in control of what they do. In the physical stores the salesperson is the one who creates the positive experience and is the one who keeps the customers in the store. Much easier for them then on the web.

In order for your company to be fully successful on-line you will have to understand the target market in order to tailor the site towards them. When creating a website, the company should first keep in mind what the customer will think and if they will have a positive experience on it. This will both create a excellent brand image as customers see it, and will create repeat visits and an increase in the customer base. As I am on the web a lot both for school and leisure I have ran into websites that have given me a positive experience, and some that have given me a negative experience. Some positive experiences were: Google.ca, Amazon.com, and eBay.ca. These sites give positive experiences because they are not too cluttered, they engage the visitor as they have to type in key words to search for what they want, and they are easy to use again as you just type in the key words of what you want and it comes up with many results. The negative experiences were: most any information sites like, ceoexpress.com, and most on-line newspaper sites like theglobeandmail.com. These sites gave me negative experiences as they are too cluttered and busy, and it take time to find what you are looking for, not just typing in a key word

Building a website

adamatchison — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 19:22:25 +0000

When a company decides that they need a web presence for their business there are several steps that they will have to go through in order to make a sucessful one. The first step is to define the project, wereas to gather information, discover who is the audience, determine future goals, set budgets, set up teams, and create schedules. The purpose of this first step is to gather the information that is needed to make the site effective. This information includes the site goals, who will be the main people that visit the site, the tone that the site will be giving, and defining the boundaries of the project. To find the information on the user of the site the producer must do some market research to find out the demographics and psychographics. Next the site developer must create a profile for each visitor, which can be explained as a paragraph that describes what and who a real person does and is. After the visitor profiles have been finished the developer must produce a project plan (scope document) that will be produced to the site owner to let them know what the project entails, how everyone will be communicating, and the budgets and allocation of team members hours. We will now move onto the second step, which is the development of the website. One way of doing this is by developing a wireframe for the site. Wireframes are really just a storyboard for the site which just shows the information and helps with the visual design of the site and templates. Here is a link that defines wireframes and also give examples of real company’s wireframes.

Canadians online

adamatchison — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 20:02:55 +0000

Canada has the highest amount of online activity in the whole world. Here is a clip that has the numbers. According to Statistics Canada during the last two or three years there has been an influx of Canadians that go online for personal activities. It went from over two-thirds of Canadians aged 16 and above in 2005 to three-quarters of the same age groups in 2007, thats almost five percentage points in two years. (Statistics Canada Website: Canadian Internet use Survey) Of Canadian cities the ones with the most internet usage are the urban or larger cities like Calgary, Ottawa, and Toronto. This is because smaller rural towns don’t have high speed internet access or don’t have enough money to purchase the high speed. With social networking sites such as Facebook and Myspace growing in popularity youth kids aged between 16 and 25 are on the iternet a lot more than there older counterparts. Also this age group is using the internet to find out information about schools they might want to attend, getting infomation regarding homework or assignments, and checking e-mail with regards to finding out times they will be meeting their group members if they have a group project. This is primarily why the average amount of Canadians online jumped so much in the last years. Also the gender with the most online activity is male. I think this is because, as a male myself, males are more intersted in sports and use there time online to find out scores from the games last night or to find out stats for the players that they have in there sports pools.

With the advancement of the internet people have started to use it for online purchases, and to control all their banking. With online purchases and online banking about half of all Canadians are concerned about using their credit card online because of the whole idenity thieft scare. To cut down on the threat of Identity thieft Canada introduced a new legislation called the PIPEDA (Personal Information Protection and Electonic Documents Act). As of January 1, 2004 all businesses and organizations that asked for personal information had to comply by these rules. Some requirements include having to identify the actual purpose that the information is being collected for, having the customers knowledge and consent before going through with the transaction, and only using the information collected for the purposes of which it was originally collected.

trial

adamatchison — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 15:14:06 +0000

This post is to see if this program works properly.