Generate business from your e-marketing plan

The overall objective of any marketing initiative is to help sell your goods or services. Used successfully, e-marketing can enhance customer relationships and increase your business’ profitability.

Your e-marketing plan needs to consider which techniques to adopt in order to attract potential customers to your e-commerce website and keep them coming back.

There are a variety of different approaches that you can take, and your e-marketing plan will usually include a mix of different tactics that are best suited to help you meet your overall objectives.

This guide provides an introduction to the e-marketing techniques most commonly used by small businesses.

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Email marketing

Marketing your products or services by email can be a fast, flexible and cost-effective way of reaching new customers and retaining existing customers. Email marketing allows you to create more targeted and personalised messages – helping you to build more meaningful relationships with your customers while improving response rates to your direct marketing campaigns. However, it is important not to overuse email marketing, since what makes it so effective – timely, personal messages – can irritate people if it is irrelevant or unwanted.

When creating email campaigns technical considerations include cross-platform compatibility – since different platforms and programs will display email differently. You should be careful in your use of images since these will increase download times and may be blocked by email filters. Create plain text versions as well as HTML versions to help improve deliverability and always provide a link in your email to a web version – so that recipients can view it in a web browser rather than an email client. See our guide on email marketing.

It is important to profile your customers and understand what the best format is for them. For example some customers may prefer to receive plain text emails rather than HTML, as they will want to read their emails on a mobile device. While it is best practice to provide a quick and easy registration process for email marketing, consider what information you want to gather in the first instance – with a view of building up your customers profile over time.

Email marketing rules

The Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations cover marketing emails to individuals. You must use an opt-in consent procedure for commercial emails – which means you can only target people who have agreed to be contacted. The exception is the ‘soft opt-in’ which applies when:

• you have obtained an individual’s email address and details during a sale or during negotiations for a sale of a product or service to them
• your messages are only marketing your similar products or services
• you have given the individual opportunities to refuse marketing messages when their details are collected and with every future message, and they do not opt out

See the page overview of email marketing under privacy laws in our guide on email marketing.

Advantages of email marketing

• Flexible – you can send plain text, graphics or attach files – whichever suits your message best.
• Easy for people to forward, building your reputation by word of mouth or viral marketing.
• People can click on links and follow your call to action immediately.
• Easy to attribute value to a campaign by using web analytics software.
• Less intrusive than telephone marketing.
• Inexpensive and eco-friendly compared to postal direct marketing.

Potential problems with email marketing

• Files need to be small enough to download quickly.
• Unsolicited commercial email or ‘spam’ irritates consumers. You need to make sure that your email marketing complies with privacy and data protection rules, and that it is properly targeted at people who want to receive it. The ‘click through rate’ for untargeted or cold emails is likely to be very low.
• Poorly designed emails may not get delivered. Emails that use certain spam keywords in the subject heading or content of the email are likely to be filtered out by email software and internet service providers.

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SMS marketing

Text messages or short messaging service (SMS) messages are the messages that people send from their mobile phones.

Text messaging is growing at an enormous rate. One of the primary reasons behind this growth is that text messaging has become increasingly used as a business tool.

Text messaging enables information to be sent to groups of people quickly and conveniently in much the same way as email, making it an increasing popular e-marketing channel.

Advantages of SMS marketing

• The personal nature of mobile phones make SMS marketing a very powerful tool.
• Most people take their mobile phones everywhere – meaning they can be effective for time sensitive messages.
• People tend to read virtually every text they get – unlike junk mail, spam or adverts which can be ignored.

Potential disadvantages of SMS marketing

• Your message has to be short – you do not have much space to get your message across.
• People respond negatively to unwanted texts. Make sure you have their permission to send them texts and that your SMS marketing complies with privacy and data protection rules.
• People are wary of responding to SMS messages due to an increase in fraudulent messages. Under the E-commerce Regulations, you are required to make it clear who the message is from and commercial communications must be clearly recognisable as such. For more information on the E-commerce Regulations, see our guide on e-commerce and the law.

Costs

You will need to employ a mobile phone agency to send out the texts for you. Companies tend to price their services by packages – so check their delivery rates, try before you buy, and make sure the support services are satisfactory. You can also brand your messages so you send messages from your company name, not just your number, while the development of 3G (third generation) and smartphones, which have larger screens and can play music and video clips, has also made multimedia messaging service (known as MMS) possible.

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Promoting your website

There are three main ways that people arrive at websites – direct navigation, web referrals and search engines.

Direct navigation

A good way of generating web traffic is to make sure you include your web address on all printed material – business cards, letters, flyers, etc.

Choose a simple web address (URL) which avoids hyphens or other punctuation as it will be easier for people to remember. If you operate exclusively in the UK, choose a .co.uk address. If you trade abroad, consider a .com or .eu address as well.

For more information on choosing a domain name, see our guide on website hosting options.

Web referrals

Web referrals are an important means of attracting visitors to your site. There are a number of ways you can generate these.

• Include your web address in all email footers.
• Email marketing – targeted email newsletters and offers to customers can be very effective. If the offer is interesting, it is also easy for people to pass the email on.
• Online advertising – the use of display adverts on other websites to drive people to your website or the use of pay per click (PPC) advertising on search engines. See the page in this guide on display advertising and sponsorship.
• Social media sites – the use of social media such as blogs, social networking sites, video and photo sharing sites, etc can help you build a community around your brand. You can set up your own communities or join in the discussions on other sites, referring people to your website when appropriate. See the page in this guide on community building and social media.
• Reciprocal marketing – finding sites with complementary content and agreeing to have links or banners to each other’s sites.

Search engines

Increasingly, visitors to your website are coming through search engine referrals rather than direct navigation. Search engines combine natural listings, ie a free listing, with PPC or sponsored advertising.

The vast majority of those using search engines will not go beyond the first page of results. If you are expecting your website to generate significant commercial returns, it will be well worth spending the time and effort to ensure your website gets the most visibility out of its search engine placement. The major search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing offer search engine optimisation tips, as well as their own PPC schemes to help you improve your website’s search engine placement. Read our guides on pay per click advertising and search engine optimisation.

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Display advertising and sponsorship

There are various techniques that can be used for advertising on websites, and most involve the use of rich-media content, including graphics, film, sound and animation. These are all intended to grab your attention and then guide you through to the relevant website. New technology even allows you to place your microsite in an ad space which allows you make sales while on your ad host’s website, although this is rather expensive.

Technology is moving fast in this area. Current types of display advertising include: 

• Banner – these occupy designated space for rent on web pages. They are similar to the print advertising model used by newspapers and magazines, except they can include video, audio and interactive capabilities in just a few square inches of space. Most banners work on the basis of click-throughs – when users click on a banner, they are linked through to the website that is paying for the advert. Response rates tend to be very low.
• Video – appears onscreen like a banner, but streams video clips (or audio files) instead of static content. Often used for web versions of TV ads.
• Interstitial – a full-page or full-window ad that appears before a user reaches the page or feature they want – often used with audio or video content.
• Pop-up – opens up as a window in front of the page, showing a small ad or covering the whole page.
• Pop-under – a new window hidden behind the page that the users sees when they close that live window.
• Wallpaper – acts as background to the editorial content on the page.
• Expanding – grows across the page as it downloads.
• Floating or running – hovers above the content or moves across the screen.
• Polite or courtesy – the advert appears in tiles, fragments or pieces, in order not to irritate the user. Tear-backs are a variation that allow the user to ‘peel’ back the ad in order not to be distracted.

Planning an online advertising campaign

While most online advertising is pay per click, some types of ad are a one-off cost. Apart from the cost of creating the content of your ad – whether it is a short film or a simple background design – you should first investigate your online display buying options.

You can buy space to rent directly through a network or by affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is where a commission is paid to the affiliate that drives traffic back to your website. Viral marketing is a form of marketing that encourages web users or websites to pass on a marketing message. When successful, viral marketing increases the marketing message visibility and effect. 

Campaigns include the following types of ad – video, interactive games, advergames, brandable/branded software and images and vouchers. See the page in this guide on sales promotions.

Find out how to plan your online ad campaign on the Internet Advertising Bureau website- Opens in a new window.

Recently, some firms have been developing behavioural marketing methods to plan their ad campaigns. For a business with a commercial address and not just an online presence, this means collecting information about your customers to work out how, why and when they spend. Online marketers also use the results to improve the user experience of the retail pages of their site.

Typically, web analytics results in assigning each user a unique ID (from a cookie) allowing behavioural marketers to build up types of customer (known as personas) that create, sometimes literally, a clearer picture of the business’ customers. These customers are then fed targeted material while they are on site – known as searchandising.

However, businesses must take care to comply with laws on their customers’ privacy. See our guide on privacy and data protection in direct marketing.

Sponsorship

Many businesses are developing partnerships with website owners to combine useful content with advertising. This content may contain references to their own products or services. Alternatively the webpage itself can include advertising links through to their own website.

The sponsorship approach can work particularly well where the quality of the editorial content is high, or where the website is recognised as a good independent source of information. As with traditional magazines, the advertorial approach of blatantly plugging your own business can quickly put readers off.

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Sales promotions

Sales promotion activities are widely used on the web. Most online sales promotions are targeted at consumers and are used in combination with advertising.

Viral marketing and viral advertising use customers’ own social circles and social networking sites to boost sales. Your sales message can be delivered by personal email and/or enhanced by rich-media online designs such as film clips, games, and worthwhile ‘pure’ non-sales content.

Viral marketers target users with the buying profile your business caters to. They then create viral messages specifically to appeal to this customer segment. Sales incentives, such as e-coupons, vouchers, discount codes, or some free content, work well. See the page in this guide on community building and social media. 

E-coupons and vouchers

E-coupons and vouchers offer your online business the opportunity to increase sales in much the same way as conventional coupons do for traditional businesses. They can be used creatively in a number of different ways:

• frequent shoppers can be rewarded when they reach a certain level of value or purchases
• shoppers can be encouraged to return with an e-coupon or voucher towards future purchases
• incentives can be used to encourage customers to purchase immediately rather than waiting for a better deal or shopping elsewhere
• first time customers can be offered special deals in order to help turn them from browsers into purchasers
• subscriber-only e-coupons can be used to encourage customers to sign up for e-newsletters, with the newsletter helping to increase sales and build your customer database

Coupons and vouchers usually include a code that the customer is required to enter before they finalise their order to receive the discount.

Sampling

Some e-commerce sites allow users to sample digital products prior to purchase. Many software companies, for example, provide free downloads of demo software that normally expire after 30 to 60 days. At that time, the user can then choose to purchase the full product if they wish.

Gift certificates and wishlists

Providing existing site visitors with the facility to build a personal wishlist, which they forward themselves to their own contacts, will attract new visitors to your site. 

Free content

Offering valuable content on a site – a useful guide to a subject, expert advice on product choice, impartial reviews, or news and views from your sector – can attract users. Many marketers insist that firms only offer their most valuable information in exchange for user registration and an email address – but others explain that registration reduces users greatly, and that your business benefits more from many more people consuming and spreading freely available content.

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Community building and social media

Online content has become richer, more collaborative and social. Increasingly, customers expect to engage with a business online in a variety of ways. The term ‘Web 2.0’ is commonly used to describe this ‘second generation’ of the internet. Whereas the ‘old’ internet was about static content and online information, the ‘new’ internet is about dynamic, user-generated content or ‘social media’. This change is altering the way that businesses build customer relationships online.

Social media such as blogs and social networking sites will help you engage with your customers and create a community around your brand. Some website owners try to build up a community through the development of blogs, online chat rooms, discussion groups and online events. Such groups encourage users to feel part of the site by posting their own information and responding to other users.

Alternatively, you may look at setting up a group on a social networking site such as Facebook or LinkedIn. With all social media, it is important to maintain brand honesty with your customers, while also protecting your business’ reputation. See our guide on Web 2.0: a guide for business.

From an e-marketing perspective, such communities will provide you with a highly targeted group of customers to which you can market your product or service. Customers will feel more involved with your brand and will be more likely to return to your site. Social media content will also keep your site fresh with new content and impact positively on your website’s search engine optimisation. See our guide on search engine optimisation.

Marketing opportunities

There are different ways in which you can seek to utilise online communities for your own marketing purposes.

• If you operate in a specialist field, then you could consider setting up your own blog, user forum or online community for other people with similar interests. Users generally value both the information and the social bonding they receive from such a community. The business that builds the community can present products and messages that are customised to the group’s interests, forging relationships with the individual members in the process.
• If there is already a well established user community in your area of business, then you might wish to consider joining it and using it as a means of making other users aware of the products or services that you offer. For example, you may wish to contribute to an existing blog or join a group on Facebook or LinkedIn rather than creating your own online communities. See our guide on online business networking and social networking.

However marketing on the social web should be handled with care. Avoid simply placing the same messages you use in other marketing channels into a social web context. Instead, tailor your campaign so that it will sit comfortably with both the site and its users. See our page on legal implications and best practice when using social media in our guide Web 2.0: a guide for business.

While consumer communities are the most visible, you should note that business professionals also subscribe to discussion forums and online networking sites with groups that focus upon their own particular field. Communities can, therefore, be used to enhance relationships with customers and prospects in both the business-to-consumer and business-to-business marketplaces.

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CASE STUDY

Here’s how I marketed my products and services on the web

Brown and Forrest has been producing its traditional range of hand-smoked fish and meats for over 20 years near Langport, Somerset. Owners Michael and Utta Brown started their website and online shop, www.smokedeel.co.uk, four years ago to complement their existing shop, restaurant and mail order service. Michael explains how they set about it.

WHAT I DID

Get professional help

“I knew a website could raise our profile, reach more customers and open up a new sales channel, so I went on a course to learn more about it. The course made me realise that building and maintaining a good e-commerce website needed more time than I had to spare. I began looking for a designer and an IT specialist to work with us.

“The people we chose not only had the technical expertise, they were also in tune with our business. We wanted the website to reflect our company culture and values. Some web developers were more concerned with trying to sell us expensive extras.”

Make content customer-focused

“Once we’d decided on the basic look and feel and sorted out online ordering and payment systems, we developed the website content. Our typical customer has a natural interest in traditionally produced food so we included sections on the origins of smoked food, the methods used and our company history.

“The site is interactive and we encourage customers to develop a relationship with us. As well as email requests for information and catalogues, we invite visitors to contribute recipes and send us suggestions. We store all customer data we collect, in accordance with the Data Protection Act 1998. Managing the database is a key responsibility for our IT manager – she spends as much time on it as she does maintaining the website itself.

“We also use the website to market other aspects of the business that customers might not be aware of, such as our weekly market stall.”

Promote the website and keep it fresh

“When the website went live, all existing customers were notified via our regular newsletter. The website address was included in all our merchandising and marketing material too.

“To keep customers coming back the website has to be kept fresh. Changing photos and text design are simple ways to update the look. We also post the latest version of our newsletter on the site so there’s something new to read.

“The website complements rather than replaces existing marketing activities, but it’s becoming more important every year. Out of our six sales channels, the website has risen from sixth to third in terms of orders generated. It’s boosted overall sales as well.”

WHAT I’D DO DIFFERENTLY

Segment the marketing

“The database we’ve built up is invaluable but I wish we’d segmented it sooner by product sales, location of customers, and value of purchases. We’re now looking at software to help us refine our online marketing to different sets of customers.”

Redesign sooner

“In retrospect the site was ready for a complete redesign after two years, whereas we left it for three. In future, we’ll review it more often.”

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