Canon hit the mark with their email newsletters

I have a Canon camera and signed up for their newsletter a while ago. Unlike most consumer products newsletters, Canon's is focused on helping you get the best results from your camera. 

Each issue includes great photos from customers using top of the range SLRs as well as budget priced compacts. You can view a photo gallery each month and vote on which photos you like best. Alternatively, you can download a high res version and even order a high quality printed sample using the Canon printer of your choice. Presumably you will be so knocked out by the print quality you will order a new printer.

It also includes a 'How Do They Do That?' section where the photographer explains how they produced such a stunning photograph. The email also includes features, news and a competition.

Unlike most emails, it grabbed my attention and compelled me to look at the content. When I am next thinking of changing my camera or printer, Canon will be on my shortlist and each month it sends me a gentle reminder of 'You Can with Canon'. 

This email works for prospects by showing what they could achieve with a Canon camera. It also works for customers by making them feel part of the Canon club and improving their brand affinity.

This is one of the emails that I look forward to receiving each month and is a good example of how email marketing can help make a smart sell.

Remember...web marketing is about solving customers' problems profitably.

Peter Hawtin is an internet marketing specialist with Brand New Way, a UK web marketing agency which helps companies to attract and retain valuable customers online.

Is it worth paying more to be number 1 on Google PPC?

For many companies, using Google Pay Per Click is a good strategy to attract target prospects. It is important to be on the 1st page of Google as typically only around 1/3 of people using search will look beyond the first page and fewer than 1 in 6 will go beyond page 2. 

Higher ad positions achieve better conversion rates

According to Google, having an ad position of 2 (2nd from top) will have a conversion rate of around half the ad in the top position. 

With my PPC experience I would agree that the higher the ad position the better but there are exceptions for individual brands / ads. The data below (from one of my PPC clients) shows the improved performance the higher the ad is shown, compared with ad position 8. When the ad was shown in:-

• ad position 1, it attracted 90 times as many visitors
• ad position 2, it attracted 30 times as many visitors
  
• ad position 3, it attracted 20 times as many visitors
  
• ad position 5, it attracted 10 times as many visitors
• ad position 7, it attracted   5 times as many visitors
  

So the obvious start point is to aim for the highest ad position. However, the actual ad position achieved will depend on your maximum Cost Per Click bid and your Google Quality Score. The quality score will depend on a range of factors including your account history, the landing page and ad text.

Can you afford to bid for the number 1 position?

In the above example, let's suppose that when the maximum Cost per Click bid is £1 you achieve an average position of 3. Moving to position 1 will provide 4.5 times more traffic. The extra amount you will need to bid to achieve an average position of 1 or 2 (all other things being equal) will depend on the competition for that keyword. It might be that you only need to bid a few pence more. Alternatively it could be £3 or £10.

The right strategy will depend on how well your site converts these visitors to customers and the value of a profitable customer. The best way to approach this is to:-

1. calculate the value (not revenue) of a target customer e.g. £100
   
2. identify the customer Conversion Rate e.g. 1% of visitors
3. calculate maximum Cost Per Click bid price = Avg Customer Value / Conversion Rate (in this example £1)

So in this example, £1 maximum bid price would provide an ad position of 3rd from the top. Although, higher bid prices would attract significantly more website visits, the higher cost of achieving the extra visits would exceed the value / profit of the extra visits. i.e. There is no point paying £150 to get a customer worth £100.

So is it worth paying more to be number 1 on Google PPC? 

Sometimes the answer will be yes but it will depend on analysing the various factors outlined above and calculating the maximum bid price based on the value of your customer. 

Read more on Marketing ROI

Remember...web marketing is about solving customers' problems profitably.

Peter Hawtin is an internet marketing specialist with Brand New Way, a UK web marketing agency which helps companies to attract and retain valuable customers online.

Do you want your brand to appeal to everyone?

One of the first questions I always ask my new prospects or new clients is 'Tell me about your target audience?' The answer is usually illuminating. More often than not, companies (big and small) want to appeal to everyone. 

A typical answer is 'Everyone has a sofa / fridge / mobile phone / needs a car loan / watches TV / buys CDs (or add your own product or service to the list) therefore my target audience is everyone. Although everyone may have a sofa at home, for some people, Argos will be there 1st choice retailer. For some others it will be John Lewis. There are very few people who will equally consider shopping for a sofa at John Lewis and Argos for the same product. Each person's preference will be based on a range of criteria including quality, range, price, location, experience and crucially, their mindset. 

It's understandable why companies think this way but it's based on the mistaken belief that appealing to more people will naturally grow your market size and increase sales.  In my experience, brands that try to appeal to everyone usually end up appealing to no-one. 

Here are some of the UK's biggest brands. Even they do not have universal appeal:-

• ITV (the UK's largest commercial channel) has an audience share of less than 18%
• HP (global number 1) has a 18% share of the global PC market
• 38% of adults shop at Tesco

The above brands have been around a long time, they have huge resources and huge marketing budgets, yet still do not appeal to everyone. What chance is there that your brand will appeal to everyone? 

So don't make the mistake of trying to appeal to everyone. It can't be done. Instead, identify a valuable target audience with a common problem that you can solve profitably. Then develop a compelling brand thought that communicates your solution more powerfully than your competitors. 

If you have a clear idea of who is your valuable target audience, you will know which target prospects that you want to attract to your website. 

If you have clearly identified your target prospects problem, it should be possible to develop a strong solution and a compelling, distinctive brand thought that is likely to have the greatest appeal to your target prospects.

By communicating this brand thought effectively across your website and web marketing you will have significantly increased the probability that you will convert web visitors to valuable customers. It will also help when developing strategies designed to grow customer lifetime value. 

For me it is a no brainer: it is always better to strongly appeal to a segment of valuable prospects / customers than have low appeal to a much larger audience.

Remember...web marketing is about solving customers' problems profitably.

Peter Hawtin is an internet marketing specialist with Brand New Way, a UK web marketing agency which helps companies to attract and retain valuable customers online.

Can you afford not to analyse your website performance?

I passionately believe that having an effective website can play a crucial role in attracting and keeping valuable customers. Yet, based on over 12 years web marketing experience I suspect that 95% of UK business websites fail to perform well.

One key reason is that so few companies use a web metrics specialist to analyse which parts of their web marketing are working and which are not. 

Having goals for the website is an essential pre-requisite for success. Once the goals have been defined it is possible to evaluate how well different aspects of the web marketing and website perform in attracting and converting target prospects to valuable customers. 

However, many companies I meet do not have sufficient (or often any) resource allocated to analysing website metrics or performance. The reasons vary but sometimes it's because:-

• they don't know how to do it 
• they have tried to use Google Analytics but can't see the wood for the trees
• they don't have the time
• they can't afford it

Can you afford not to?

Consider an example of a company that sells a product for £40. If their marketing cost per visit is 50p and they have 10,000 visits then their total marketing cost is £5,000.

If they covert 3% of visitors they will make 300 sales @ £40 = £12,000 revenue. If their product profit margin is 50% their product costs are £6,000.  With the marketing cost above of £5,000, this gives a profit of £1,000 and a marketing ROI of 20%.

However, consider if the analysis of web metrics leads to a number of improvements that increase conversion from 3% to 4%. The sales revenue would increase to £16,000 (10,000 *4% * £40). The 50% product profit margin means their product costs are £8,000.  With the marketing cost remaining the same at £5,000, profit has increased from £1,000 to £3,000.

So an improvement in conversion of just 1%  triples profit and triples Marketing ROI from 20% to 60%.

So can you afford not to analyse your website performance?

Read more on Web Marketing ROI

Remember...web marketing is about solving customers' problems profitably.

Peter Hawtin is an internet marketing specialist with Brand New Way, a UK web marketing agency which helps companies to attract and retain valuable customers online.

Why is UK internet marketing spend continuing to grow despite all other marketing budgets being cut?

The decline of traditional media

The latest quarterly survey of UK marketing spend by the IPA reveals that marketing 'budgets have been revised down for the third successive quarter.

As confidence reduces, some companies view their marketing budget as a 'discretionary' spend and make cuts. Many bigger brands are cutting budgets for TV, press, outdoor, radio & cinema advertising as well as PR, events and research.

Direct marketing and sales promotion have traditionally been more resilient to downturns because they are seen as providing a 'stronger relationship' between spend and return. 

However, even these 2 sectors are seeing budget cuts.

The continued growth of the internet

Internet marketing is the one sector that continues to grow. The Guardian reports that 30% of advertisers said that they were increasing their marketing budgets. Over 17% of companies said that they now allocate more than 10% of their budget to internet marketing. As few as 11% of companies have zero internet marketing budgets.

Why is the internet the exception?

The IPA represents advertising, media & marketing communications agencies who tend to be the bigger agencies with the bigger clients. Many of these companies have a long heritage of spending large budgets on big brand campaigns using traditional media like TV. Many have been slow to switch money to the internet. However, as budgets become under pressure there is a pressing need to make the marketing budget work harder and become more accountable. Internet marketing can provide many advantages:-

• improved targeting - with SEO & Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising you can reach people actively searching for your product or service

• lower costs - email marketing, blogs & PPC are much lower cost than traditional media

• improved cost efficiency - with traditional advertising you often pay to reach an audience (e.g. readers of a magazine) whether or not they have read or can recall your ad. With PPC you only pay when prospects react i.e. they click to visit your website

• greater control - it is much easier and faster to increase or decrease spend with PPC and email marketing

• improved measurement - advanced email systems, PPC and web analytics make it possible to speedily identify what's working and what isn't and make appropriate changes faster and more often

• more tests - advanced email systems, PPC &  web optimisers enable multiple tests to be implemented with instant results e.g. testing multiple propositions, headlines, copy, images, calls to action etc

• greater accountability - when budgets are under pressure it is even more critical that the marketing budget is being spent as effectively as possible. The above advantages all help provide greater accountability.

What does this mean for smaller companies?

As most smaller businesses do not have a legacy of spending large budgets on TV, press etc I would expect them to spend a significantly larger share on internet marketing than bigger brands. 

Often smaller companies will not have any in-house expert marketing support. They naturally will want to get the best results from their budget with minimum resource, waste and risk. 

The internet has huge potential to help businesses (big and small) to improve their business by attracting new prospects; converting them to valuable customers: and growing customer lifetime value. However to fully realise this potential (and avoid having one of the many websites that fails to perform) make sure sure you either have the right web expertise in-house or find a web marketing expert.

Remember...web marketing is about solving customers' problems profitably.

Peter Hawtin is an internet marketing specialist with Brand New Way, a UK web marketing agency which helps companies to attract and retain valuable customers online.