A Comparison Between Social Media, Email Marketing and SEO.

With the expanding availability of online retail outlets comes the increasing need for online marketing. While online marketing may sound too intimidating, too broad or too tacky (flashing banners, spam mail and annoying pop ups come to mind), when done well it is a highly effective and necessary tool in your 2010 marketing strategy. It can do wonders for your branding, is trackable and comparable, provides valuable insight into your consumer’s minds, and most importantly, generates leads and sales. The main question then is, what kind of online marketing strategy is best for your business, and how do you go about executing it?

The main techniques in the online marketing pool are email marketing, search engine optimisation and social media. These options can be employed to achieve different outcomes depending on your business and its resources; resources not necessarily including money. Learn what online tools generate what results, and how you should use them.

HOW TO USE SOCIAL MEDIA

It’s really quite simple. Social media should be used a brand building tool to strengthen your brand’s personality, increase brand loyalty and to communicate with your customers on a one on one level. To identify with your customers online your tone, language and topics need to be relevant to your audiences needs and have a personal feel to it. Your posts or tweets need to be constantly updated and monitored – take in what your followers are saying and directly respond to them in order to build a relationship. If you take a long time to update your Facebook or Twitter, and ignore what your customers are saying to you, they will lose interest fast. Do not use your posts or tweets as a billboard. They need to contain something that is valuable to your customers. This might be an online voucher, an update about a big sale, or even a link to something interesting that is relevant to, but not directly related to your business, such as an up and coming fashion blog. Give your customers a reason to keep following, and a reason to spread the word about your brand.

WHAT RESULTS YOU CAN EXPECT

Social media can be very cost effective when implemented well using in house resources. It can be more or less successful depending on your branding, fit and target audiences and will take some testing of the waters to tell if your brand can make a success of this strategy. However, when it succeeds it can be an extremely powerful tool. A consistent and dedicated approach to social media will increase brand loyalty and build your following through word of mouth, indirectly resulting in increased sales in the long term, and impressive bang for buck. Twitter and Facebook should be used with a slow and steady wins the race mindset, and they need to be focussed on building relationships with customers in order to reap long term sales benefits. For a loud, nationwide cut price sale, social media isn’t your man, but for long term brand loyalty and a cult like following, it’s your key tool.

HOW TO USE EMAIL MARKETING

Email marketing only works on your existing customers but is proven as highly effective, particularly when personalised. Although it is typically a mass marketing tool you should still use as much personalisation as possible such as name, gender, location, and VIP only emails in order to identify with your customers and get the best response rates. It can typically work in two ways, in a blog/newsletter type format for brand building, or in a promotion/advert type format to grow sales. The key thing to remember is that you’re only as valuable as your last email. Don’t send it unless there is something worthwhile in it for your customers. While you don’t want to send too many emails (think large homewares retailer, the sale draw card really loses its sheen when there’s a giant clearance on every weekend), there is nothing wrong with a fortnightly mailout providing its content is relevant, interesting and valuable to your database.

WHAT RESULTS YOU CAN EXPECT

Email marketing is a powerful tool for maintaining top of mind awareness and is typically employed to produce instant sales. It is adored by businesses online as they have the ability to track almost everything once the email has been received. You can see how many people have opened it, how many have clicked a link and what link they’ve clicked. This makes for great progress as you can soon figure out exactly what works in an email campaign and what doesn’t. A well executed email campaign can expect conversion rates of 20% and up. Your conversion rate is the percentage of people who opened the email and then proceeded to purchase something in your webstore. The best part is that you are sending this information to people who have requested it, meaning they already have an interest in your product. All your email has to do is get your customers to your webstore, preferably with an incentive to purchase. A good email campaign is an excellent place to put your online marketing spend due to its proven results, traceability and potential  to produce high conversion rates, and can give you impressive bang for buck.

HOW TO USE SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION (SEO)

Search Engine Optimisation is an essential long term strategy for an online retail store as it largely influences how much new traffic your webstore gets. It helps customers who want your product but don’t know your company to locate your website via search engines such as Google. SEO is when your websites content is optimised in a way that increases its relevance to search engine keywords. Optimised content can include various aspects of your webstore such as text and navigation menus. When a keyword is entered into a search engine your webstore will appear higher on the list of search results depending on your contents relevance to the search term. It is important you determine what keywords your customers are searching for when they are looking for your product. There is no point optimising your webstore for the key word “jeggings” if your customers are searching for “denim leggings”.

WHAT RESULTS YOU CAN EXPECT

Search Engine Optimisation produces highly desirable results if you are willing to invest time into it. It is particularly effective in reaching out to new customers, increasing traffic levels and improving conversion rates, making the consistent research and maintenance a worthwhile endeavour. Trust is a massive factor when it comes to people spending their money online, and it is essential that you reduce their perceived risk when it comes to your webstore. Customers are far more likely to trust a site high up on a search results list than one five pages down. The top one is always the best right? Therefore it is essential to invest in some quality SEO in order to increase consumers’ confidence in your webstore and maintain solid levels of traffic. This is achieved by making sure people can actually find you, and that you sell what they are searching for. If they are on the hunt for a product that you already stock half the battle is over, it is just up to your SEO to get them to your store.

All three strategies have different marketing implications for your brand. Social media helps with long term branding and loyalty, email marketing targets mass databases and can result in quick sales boosts, and SEO creates new customers and ensures that your webstore is found by people who are looking for you or your products. Email marketing and SEO should be your essential strategies for this year due to their tried and tested results and ability to be monitored, while social media should be seriously considered as a contender in your marketing plan depending on its fit with your brand and target audience. Make this year the year to implement your online strategies fully; it is easier to build a presence online when less people are doing it, and with the numbers of online shoppers on the up and up it won’t be long before inboxes, Facebook profiles and Twitter accounts are overrun with businesses sharpening up to the latest marketing requirements.