e-Newsletter 2

Introduction

In this second issue we look at why you should have a web site-Marketing Plan and the steps required to develop such a plan. Next up we continue with the web site re-design series perhaps more accurately referred to as "tune ups". The third article looks at developing a personalised electronic newsletter (e-newsletter) service.

Please

• Forward this e-Newsletter to others who may be interested.
• Suggest topics for inclusion into the e-Newsletter.
• Add the e-mail address "pierre-w@p-inspire.co.nz" to your address book or personal white list. This will ensure that the latest issue of Web-Inspirations will go into your Inbox rather than being blocked by a spam filter.

Kind regards,
Pierre Woolridge
Website Developer

In This Issue

The Beginnings of a Web Site Marketing Plan

"Tune Ups" – web site Statistics

Developing a E-Newsletter

The Beginnings of a Web Site Marketing Plan

These days most companies have a web site. But having a web site is just not good enough. People need to know of its existence, and they need a reason to visit, re-visit and, better still, refer your web site to others. There are plenty of ways to promote a web site. But before you start, take time to step back a bit to consider why your firm has a web site, what the expectation are for that web site, and how it all fits into the marketing mix. In short, you need a web site-marketing plan.

It takes hard work, and a long time, but a web site-marketing plan is worth it. To be effective, the plan must form part of your overall marketing plan and associated communication strategy. Indeed, the days of having a web site as an afterthought, as a “nice to have” are coming to a close. A web site should be central to most companies marketing effort. Such an approach ensures good integration with other communication and branding matters.

Creating a web site marketing plan or indeed any marketing plan consists of around six steps:

• Gathering and analysing information about your business, the industry, and competitors (and the Internet is a good place to begin).

• Determining the web site marketing challenges facing the organisation.

• Clarifying the rationale or purpose for having a web site (e.g. brand identity; shareholder information; staff communication; generate sales leads)

• Developing a set of objectives to support the rationale for having a web site. Objectives they are Specific Measurable Attainable Results orientated Time bound. For example, if the web site is been developed to generate sales leads, then the objectives could well be: “To promote the web site” and “To enhance web site content”

• Devising strategies to support an objective. Strategy details how your organisation is going to meet its objectives given the desires of the organisation, its current situation, the market place and so on. If for example, the objective is “To promote the web site”, then a supporting strategy could well be “To ensure the web site is optimised (or built) to meet search engine requirements”. Another strategy might well be “To provide a e-newsletter service”

• Formulating tactics or “action plans” to explain what will be done do to implement the strategies. These are the things you actually do during the course of the year. Based on the above Promote strategy, a suitable tactic may well be “To submit the web site to relevant search engines and directories”.

"Tune Ups" – web site Statistics

As part of the tune-up of your existing web site, have a quick peak at the web site statistics (as provided by your web site host company or if you do your own hosting, from software sitting on the firm’s host server). There is usually a wealth of statistics. So much that you could drown in them. The trick is to consider the ones that are important to the redesign. Do not get side tracked by other equally interesting but irrelevant information (such as browser type).

To view the statistics, access your account on the host site. This is frequently done via a control panel provided by the web site hosting company.

What you are looking for is information on the popularity of the various pages. Ignore the information on “hits”. (A hit is basically any item down loaded to a browser be it, for example, images, text, script, or style sheets (the last two items are instructions to the browser)). Focus on visits per page (i.e. the number of times a page is viewed in a given month). Have a look at several months’ worth of statistics. This will give an indication of your most popular pages and conversely the least popular. Of course the statistics will need to be interpreted in terms of possible reason(s) for a particular ranking and in terms of trends. Once the analysis is completed add the conclusions to the rest of the review information.

Likewise review the statistics on the keywords and phrases that viewers have entered into a search engine when they were looking for the product or service offered by your company. Then engage in some brainstorming to develop new keywords and phrases (bearing in mind your target market). Following on from this use a service such as Wordtracker (http://www.wordtracker.com/) to help you discover other suitable keywords and phrases. Once you have determined which to use, incorporate them into the text of your re-designed web site order to achieve higher rankings in a search engine and to make the page more useful to clients.

Developing a E-Newsletter

Personalised electronic newsletters (e-newsletters) maybe a great way for you to attract and retain customers or clients. Highly targeted, permission-based e-newsletter campaigns can help build strong customer relationships. They are a great way of keeping your clients up to date with new products and services, drawing their attention to “white papers”, “pushing” them to your web site, or just reminder that you are still in business.

Some commentators argue that e-newsletters are now mainstream marketing and that you cannot afford not to have one! So how do you go about creating an e-newsletter service?

To my mind one of the first things you can do is to analyse other organisation's e-newsletters. This will help you gain an idea of what you would like your e-newsletter to look like/not look like and may well give you some ideas as to what you e-newsletter might usefully contain.

My analysis showed that some are very basic, little more than a mass mail out using e-mail. Others are far more sophisticated starting with a Dear Pierre, include images, control of the size, colour and positioning of the text, and include menus for items within the e-newsletter and links to the web site. Likewise the message or purpose varies considerably. Some contain useful suggestions and ideas, reports on industry trends that is of interest to clients. Whereas others, are largely centred on the company – on its business activities and staff.

- We welcome your feedback.

- We are interested in suggestions for topics to cover.

- Should you wish to reproduce one of the articles contained here please do. All we require is an acknowledgement of the source with a link to our web site.

- Previous e-Newsletters.