| Marketing Tips That Work (2) |
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Here is the next instalment of 30 (of 101) marketing tips covering most aspects of marketing, designed to provide you with some basic guidelines on what marketing is all about and how to use the tools.Direct Marketing1. Australia Post recently published a survey on direct marketing in Australia, and found that 25% of all direct marketing to consumers is not even opened, and then thrown away. 2. Direct marketing, it would appear, can be a hit and miss affair. That's the bad news. 3. DO your research so you can hit the right targets with the right message. 4. Well executed and well researched direct marketing can produce very successful double-digit results. That's the good news 5. Mass distributed direct marketing, with little research behind it, can produce results of maybe a 1% hit rate. 6. Direct marketing is the method, but the content is all important. It must be persuasive in order to achieve successful results. 7. It is easy to measure the value of your direct marketing campaign, as the costs are easy to calculate, and the results are equally easy to collate if measurement methods are in place. 8. Make sure your data base is up to date and accurate. 9. Personalise any direct mail if you can. 10. Don't make assumptions - not all women are Mrs and not all names like Chris belong to males. 11. Provide easy to respond to offers. Loyalty Programs12. Loyalty programs are aimed at rewarding and retaining existing (loyal) customers, as well as engendering loyalty from customers. 13. Airlines are a good example of loyalty programs, but opinion varies on how well they are executed. Many people were "burned" by loyalty programs with the collapse of Ansett Airlines, and the collapse of their frequent flyer points along with it. When consumers redeem loyalty points, they are also "free" to join with a competitor's program and start again from scratch. 14. In the rush to acquire new customers with special offers, don't forget something for your existing "loyal" customers. 15. Customers are loyal when their experience with a company is good, memorable, and on some emotional level. 16. Rewarding customers' loyalty with price discounting may work in some cases, but it is advisable to also find other ways to reward loyalty. Internet Marketing17. Before you do anything, develop a strategy. You may approach the use of your website in several stages; Stage 1 is to develop a point of presence site. Stage 2 could be to update the site to enable some interaction with your visitors Stage 3 may be an early stage of e-commerce 18. Choose a web developer who could potentially deliver all of the above stages for you. 19. When designing your website, DO make it consistent in look and feel to the rest of your marketing materials. 20. DON'T fill it with clever animations and graphics. It makes it slower to download. 21. DON'T make you site boring 22. DO make the site easy to navigate. 23. DO promote your site. 24. Do give visitors something to register for, or a reason to leave you their email (for example, to register for a free newsletter), so you can build a database of prospects. 25. DON'T send information en masse. Email marketing like this is referred to as SPAM - electronic junk mail. 26. DO invest time registering your site with search engines. 27. DO spend some time identifying the keywords for your website - this will dramatically improve your ranking among the search engine listings. 28. DO link your website with other sites if appropriate, as it will likely generate traffic to your site from other sites. 29. DON'T confuse "hits" with unique visitors. The latter measures how many new visitors are coming to your site. 30. DO update your site with news on a regular basis. People will return for "new news". So, there you go, the next instalment of 30 tips. Next issue we will cover another 30, including public relations and customer management. Tony Martin - Director |
+ 61 8 8333 1944
