Monday 9 April 2012

Are Your Internet Marketing Tactics too Aggressive?

Internet marketing isn’t just about advertising to people to get them to buy from you. It’s also about building relationships with your audience so that they will want to do business with you and so that they will want to refer others to you, too. If your marketing tactics are more like pressure sales tactics, you probably won’t do very well. Most people prefer a soft sell to a hard one and it can take time to build trust, particularly online.



Here are some things to remember when you do your internet marketing:

Check your bounce rate regularly. Is it climbing higher?
Watch subscriber numbers. Do people quickly unsubscribe or un-follow?
What’s your rate of repeat customers?
What’s your rate of referring customers?
What’s your online page rank? Who’s linking to you?


Bounce Rate: A bounce is a person who leaves the same page of your site they arrive on. Something about the page did not appeal to them or maybe it turned them off. Your website statistics will tell you what your bounce rate is. Take this seriously on a per page basis so you can tweak every single page that people land on to make sure nothing is off-putting or too aggressive.

Unsubscribers: If you’re building an internet marketing mailing list and trying to market via social sites, the numbers are very revealing. If, for instance, you lose a bunch of subscribers after a specific activity, this can tell you that the activity was either annoying, aggressive, or badly orchestrated. Learn from these mistakes. And conversely, if numbers surge after specific activities, this tells you that certain things are appealing to your audience. Watch your social media follower numbers as well. A big drop or a big jump warrants analysis on your part.

Repeats and Referrals: If people buy from you once and then never buy again, either they weren’t happy or you simply didn’t take advantage of the fact that they might be open to buying again. Make sure you strive to capitalise on new customer activities so that you don’t miss out on opportunities to engage them again. Test out some different techniques to find the right one for re-engaging past customers.

Initiating a referral process is smart, too. Reward people for referring others, if possible. And try to develop a method of finding out how people find you. People often refer business when they’re happy and getting a high number of referrals will tell you that you’re doing something right.

Measure your online reputation: Do you have a good Google page rank? The quantity and quality of sites that point to your website can be telling about your online reputation with people and with search engines. The first few pages of Google and Bing results are going to be telling, too. You want to know what people will find when they search for you. If your site is quite new it can take time to figure this out but keep it in mind when measuring your internet marketing campaigns so you’ll know if your reputation is helping you, hurting you, or if you need to do more to manage that reputation.

Internet marketing is a work in progress. It’s an ever changing climate in the world of online business. Finding the right approach to foster and nurture relationships can take time. Working continually at refining your processes will serve you well and help you maximise your return on investment in internet marketing techniques.

This post is brought to you by Chris Jenkinson who can help you with your internet marketing needs.

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