Hard driving
- Article 19 of 26
- M-iD, June 2005
It is easy to build a web site, yet difficult to attract and keep an audience for it. But there are strategies organisations can follow to overcome this challenge.
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Yet banner and skyscraper adverts (and other forms of online advertising) have negligible 'click through' rates. Between just 0.01% and 0.25% will click on an online advert to find out more.
Indeed, many experienced Internet users today mentally block them out. Usability studies show - usually by tracking the eye movements of test subjects - that most people do not even look at banner adverts anymore. As a result, banner ads are highly ineffective at generating anything except brand awareness, at best.
Direct emails have a whole host of well-publicised problems. The bottom line is that any direct email campaign needs to be very carefully vetted and managed.
To start with, the European Union's directive on privacy and electronic communications, which has now been incorporated into British law, forbids the sending of unsolicited commercial emails.
This means that organisations can no longer approach email marketing in the same way that they would with a traditional direct mailing campaign - buying a list of supposedly appropriate people to target.
The proliferation of spam has made filtering email mandatory at most organisations and many legitimate email campaigns will be identified as spam as a result of these filters. What is more, if enough of the recipients regard the email as spam, there is the risk that the sender will be reported to an email blacklist.
When that happens, all future email from the sender risks being filtered by all organisations that use the blacklist to weed out spam. “Spamming means you need to be more focused and careful about where you're sending to,” warns Nick Sharp, vice president of sales and marketing at web analytics company WebTrends. “You need to be sure of who you are targeting.”
While email campaigns can be effective if correctly targeted, organisations still need to be sure they do not inundate customers. Email marketers need to carefully assess their targets and how often they send email campaigns to the same targets.
Payment by results
Probably the most effective way of generating traffic, however, is through the use of sponsored links, such as Google Ad Words, in search engines.
These either appear inline with search results, at the top of search pages, or at the side.
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