As businesses increasingly look for new ways to cut costs and trim their spend, there is a surprising trend in the increasing amount of time, money and effort being ploughed into digital marketing or e-marketing.
There are multiple reasons for this trend shift, but in the main this has occurred because:
e-marketing gives businesses of any size access to the mass market at an affordable price and, unlike TV or print advertising, it allows truly personalised marketing.
Specific benefits of e-marketing include:
• Regional, National or Global reach – a website and an e-marketing campaign allows you to find new markets and trade for only a relatively small investment.
• Cost effective – a properly planned,targeted and executed e-marketing campaign can reach your potential customers at a much lower cost than traditional acquisition methods.
• Trackable, measurable results – analytics programmes and other online measurement tools make it much easier to gauge the effectiveness of any initiative you carry out online. In-depth reports are now the norm in the digital marketing arena and when analysed and acted upon can make exponential differences to the performance of your digital assets and even help you monitor the effectiveness of specific advertising campaigns.
• Customer Profiling – There are tools available to personalise your customer’s experience on your website, creating a more intimate one-on-one experience between the site and the browser that can pay dividends on the bottom line. The more a client visits your site, the more you can finely hone the client profile to deliver an browser experience that is almost custom made to the visitor. Amazon does it with their recommendation engine, which uses your previous searches and purchases to subtly promote other offers to you, based on your profile preferences.
• Openness and Crowdsourcing – Social Media has given the power back to the people when it comes to openness on the web. It is now important to use Scial Media to not only interact with your customers but also to monitor what the ‘vox pop’ is saying about you. By positively responding to negative comments, you can enhance your reputation even further than those who never seem to receive a negative comment! Remember, Social Media in the wrong hands can be a business killer – use it to engage with your customers and monitor your brand reputation.
• Rich media engagement – multimedia approaches – audio, video, animation – all engage with customers at different levels. A well thought-out campaign can have huge benefits and if done really well will go viral as the audience shares the message with their friends and peers.
• Purpose-driven campaigns – e-marketing gives you the ability to drive extra visitors to your company website, and if you play the averages, a certain number of visitors will turn into a certain number of sales. Therefore if you know the metrics: the cost of driving a specific number of visitors to your website and the average number of visitors it takes to generate a sale, you can quickly work out your acquisition cost per customer. And from there you can determine just how much you can spend for the initial acquisition. This can be a skewed figure, because ultimately what you need to know is the lifetime value of a customer – how long they will stay with you and how much they will spend in that customer ‘lifetime’. Wise marketers will often spend many multiples of the initial spend in acquiring a customer because they know that the ‘back-end’ sales can be extremely profitable in the long run.
With a website in place your customers are only a few clicks away from your sales message and a potential sale.
Just make sure you know how the numbers stack up for your marketing spend.