eMedia Marketer

Most people view email signatures as a way to sign off emails and offload a load of legal bunf to prevent you being sued when that thing you said about your boss makes it half way around the world..

However… your email signature can be a really useful and free way of engaging with clients and promoting you online presence.

Here are 5 essential tricks to fully utilise your email signature:

1) Use an html format signature to enhance design and functionality – make sure you present your logo smartly and in the correct format – and host it on your web server so you are not attaching it to the email all the time!!
2) Include your essential contact details including sales and support details – and of course your web address – very important!
3) Add direct links to your website for customer testimonials and news pages ( or the blog if you have one!)
4) Include any awards or recent recommendations.
5) Include the ability for people to follow you on Facebook and Twitter beneath your web URL

Remember you send out loads of email every day – now each mail can be a promotional opportunity for your business. Even if you send on those humorous viral emails, you are now marketing you business – in an inoffensive and informal way..

One of the best ways of improving rankings and traffic is to have fresh, original content on your websites. Of course writing original content can be time consuming, unless you have a regular stream of relevant topics to write about. Wouldn’t it be great to have a service that delivered relevant content to your RSS reader everyday so you could pick the best articles to write on! well with a bit of tweaking Google news can provide just that service….

Step 1: Go to news.google.com enter the keyword of the topic you are wanting to receive news on. Press ‘Search News’ The Results are displayed underneath.

Step 2: At the bottom of the page is a link to an RSS version of the results: ‘RSS’ Click on this link and you should be presented with the same results displayed in the RSS reader of your browser (or whatever your default RSS reader has been set to)

Step 3: bookmark this RSS feed to your RSS reader for future use!

Depending on the topic you may want to search for an exact phrase instead of a single word. To search for an exact phrase, include quotation marks around the phrase, for example “My search phrase”

You may also want to include multiple terms. Google allows you to search for multiple items and delivers results into the same custom RSS feed.

To search for multiple items, add the word “OR” between the items, for example: ”Term A” OR “Term B” this delivers any relevant news articles or blog posts that either contain the phrase “Term A” or “Term B”

You can also search for multiple terms in the same result by replacing “AND” instead of “OR”.

These results can be used as a custom RSS feed by clicking on the RSS link as before.

Once your RSS feed is in your reader, you should be able to get customised results every day!

What are the aspects of my site that are affecting my conversion?

There are a number of key issues to converting customers on your ecommerce site:

• Traffic – the RIGHT CUSTOMERS in enough volume.
• PRICE ( including shipping costs)
• STOCK availability – if drop-shipping or outsourcing you should show stock in the warehouse or don’t show stock levels at all…
• Store design and usability/customer confidence

If the price is right, stock is available, and the site has a professional design then it is all about traffic:

Just as a reminder – the Main sources of traffic for your site:

• Organic search – all about rankings getting the right positions on the right keywords
• Pay per click – prioritise what you spend, filter your keywords by performance indicators like conversion rate or clickthrough rate
• Email campaigns
• Offline activity

If you go through the above on your site and carefully address the site issues and pricing, and then start to generate traffic from the 3 sources above you should start to see better conversions…

One of the questions I often get asked from clients running online stores or membership websites is; what is a realistic conversion rate?

Why is the conversion rate important? : The conversion rate is a measure of your websites ability to persuade site visitors to take a particular action you would like them to take. It is therefore a measure of your websites effectiveness.

How to calculate the conversion rate: the conversion rate is the number of visitors who took the particular action you wanted on your site ( i.e. purchased an item or subscribed to a mail list) divided by the total number of visitors to the site over the same period. I generally use a 1 month period as this gives more even results.

Getting statistics about other sites copnversion rates is no mean feat – people generally don’t like to give these figures out – but I have some figures provided by clickz from Fireclick’s actual web retail customers from Dec 2003 - March 2004 ( I little old but should still be relevant)

These figures should at least give you some comparison for your own site…

Online Marketing Inside Out has recently been published by Sitepoint. It is authored by Brandon Eley and Shayne Tilley, both seasoned ( if that is possible with the ever-changing web!) online marketers. This book is a great resource for those looking to get a handle on e-media marketing, it takes you through all aspects of a well rounded online marketing strategy, from SEO and PPC to social media and blogging. It was an easy read – it took just over a week for me – and I am not a speed reader! but it is one of those books that every marketer should have on hand to dip into to get some perspective on a particular area of online marketing. If you are savvy with all things web related then there isn’t anything in there that will be too enlightening, but it does allow you to check yourself in making sure you have covered all the basics in your emarketing mix. I also found there was some  tips and links to useful sites which were worth knowing…

The various online activities and strategies were solid and well advised – there were now ‘techniques’ that might get you delisted tomorrow and they have clearly stayed away from some of those riskier marketing activities, which I think is definitely a good call as it will keep the shelf life of the product for a good few years to come