Email marketing is becoming an increasingly important tool in both Business to Business & Business to Consumer marketing.

One key benefit of this channel of communication is the feedback you receive. With most offline marketing, you only get feedback if someone actively gets in touch, either with an enquiry or for some other reason. With email, you can track how people interact with your marketing, even where they don’t go as far as making an enquiry.

Although it is important to protect people’s privacy, and respect the fact that an individual did not choose to contact you directly, you can learn a great deal from email campaigns as to how your target market has engaged with your marketing and use this information to actively steer future campaigns and strategy.

While I was reviewing this topic, I found a white paper on the internet which discussed it in great detail. Rather than reinvent the wheel, I thought it would be worth sharing it with you. You can download the white paper here. (Be warned though, it is quite a big file at almost 6 Mb).

I found the paper at www.smartfocus.com – I certainly don’t want to be accused of plagiarism!!

Stop trying to attract customers, and start focusing on making your offering attractive to your marketplace.

Or so the author of a post I recently found on the web believes. You can read the full post via the link below!

Why you need to forget customers and focus on fans

It’s a subtle difference maybe, but one which can completely change your marketing approach.

Although I whole heartedly agree with the sentiment, I hope he is being a bit extreme in his views to make a point. Customers (people who buy from you) are vital to the success of a business, Apple’s huge fan base would be commercially useless if none of them bought any Apple products!!

But turning people into customers when they are fans is a much easier process. Focus on turning people into fans, and make it easy for them to buy your products or services, and the process of them becoming customers will take care of itself!

Obviously part of this process is communicating your message, but the web offers some great tools through websites, email, social networking, blogging, and if you get the offering & message right, word of mouth (probably the most valuable marketing tool!!).

If you read this & think “That’s it, but where do I go from here” give us a call, we would be happy to talk, and we may be able to secure some grant funding to get the ball rolling.

Although we do include social networking (Including Twitter) in the marketing mix for some clients, I have always had the nagging voice in my head saying “is this really worth it?”.

Being honest, although I believe the answer is probably “in some cases yes” I don’t really have an answer as yet.

I have however found an interesting thread on the UK Business forum, which I believe makes some useful comment on the subject, so I thought I would share it:

Twitter, Whats the point – From the UK Business forum

For a while now, we have been saying that when measuring online success you should focus on metrics that offer real value like site visitors and conversions rates. Rather than the usual ones touted by SEO companies (Google page rank, number of page 1 listings etc). With this in mind, it is good to know that the mighty brains at Google agree! As illustrated by this recent post on Webmaster central:

“Don’t worry. In fact, don’t bother thinking about it. We only update the PageRank displayed in Google Toolbar a few times a year; this is our respectful hint for you to worry less about PageRank, which is just one of over 200 signals that can affect how your site is crawled, indexed and ranked. PageRank is an easy metric to focus on, but just because it’s easy doesn’t mean it’s useful for you as a site owner. If you’re looking for metrics, we’d encourage you to check out Analytics, think about conversion rates, ROI (return on investment), relevancy, or other metrics that actually correlate to meaningful gains for your website or business.” – Susan Moskwa (Google Employee)

FYI, here’s the post

If you want some help adding Google analytics to your site, we are happy to do it for free – Click here for details

Traditionally redirecting a standard HTML page on a Windows server has been tricky especially if you don’t have access to the server config.

This may now have changed. I was watching an interview with one of the Google “Geeks”, and he was explaining that Search engines have agreed a new standard for redirects. (In addition to 301 which is still perfectly legitimate):

Here is a link to the interview if you are interested

The method is simple & involves adding a tag to the top of the page

link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.example.com/example.php”

where href = points to the page you want the search engine to index.

(note: This needs to be put in the normal opening & closing tags <......./> in the header of the document)

I read an article today in WebPro News regarding an experiment Google are running to allow users to specify the sites they want to prioritise in their searches.

Read the full article here.

From an SEO perspective this means that different people will see different results thus making the traditional ranking report obsolete.

From a marketing perspective it simply moves the priorities back to marketing. If you have good content on your site, people will list them as preferred, and a good message will get you onto more mainstream sites & blogs that people are already reading. Thus ultimately, the way to measure success is “Are people visiting your site and buying from you”. Now that is true ROI.

I saw this post on UK business forums, and although the thread is about light bulb moments & how people came up with business ideas, I though it also gives an inetersting insight into how people interact with their marketplace. So I thought I would share it

How did you come up with your business idea? – UK business forum thread

Recently at BSA we have been discussing how Search Engine Optimisation is developing, and how the focus seems to be changing from Search Engine Ranking to a broader view of Web Marketing.

Over the next month or so we will be publishing a free white paper on how we see the future of SEO & Web Marketing, but in the meantime, I think this interview with Matt Cutts from Google makes many of the points we have been considering. (Though it’s a pity that the representative of the worlds largest knowledge management company thinks that Thomas Cook is a bank!! – Watch the Video)

If you want to be sure of getting a copy of the paper when we publish it, then register on or website or blog, and we will be sure to let you know when its out.

Browsing the Forums, I found this post today, linking to a guide to SEO best practice published by Google, so it has to be worth reading.

Here is a link to it:

Google Best Practice Guide

Also here’s a link to the Original Form Thread

Found this post on the UK Business Forum, and thought it was worth sharing. Although SEO moves quickly, and the article is quite old, looking through it there is some good info in it, so it is definitly still worth a read.

seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors