Direct mail marketing is one of the oldest forms of modern promotion, but don’t let its age deceive. Mailing coupons or even catalogs to potential customers can significantly improve site traffic and sales conversions. While the exact origins of direct mail marketing are in question, there are examples of savvy business folk using the tactic more than 200 years ago.

Build Web Traffic With Direct Mail

For ecommerce businesses, traffic is king. The more visitors that an ecommerce site receives, the more that ecommerce site is likely to sell. In the effort to generate traffic, store owners will certainly use several marketing channels and campaigns, and by no means will I disparage search engine optimization, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, banner advertising, or even print advertising. But too many ecommerce marketers may be overlooking direct mail, which can provide very good conversion rates. It is far more measurable than other promotions and it allows a marketer to provide a full and rich presentation of a business’ value proposition.

The Potential for Outstanding Conversion Rates

As with any marketing tactic, direct mail’s conversion rates are as much a function of the quality of the messaging as they are a result of the media (direct mail). A poorly conceived direct mail campaign won’t offer much of a benefit, but because direct mail is not as limited as, say, PPC, it is possible to be far more creative and communicative in direct mail than in almost any other media.

As an example, consider a 2006 American Express direct mail campaign designed to increase renewals for the very exclusive Centurion Card in Australia. AmEx had just boosted the annual membership fee to almost $2,000 and had concerns that many of the cardholders would think that the fee was too expensive. But AmEx developed an impressive titanium card sample, etched a metal letter explaining the cards benefits, and sent the metal direct mailer to its target audience. The campaign generated a reported 85-percent conversion rate, and earned American Express millions of dollars, according to Royal Mail.

Similarly, a research report from the New York Department of Health Behavior found that sending a direct mailer to smokers explaining the health benefits of quitting and offering a free nicotine patch increased call traffic 36 percent and drove conversions up nearly 11 percent.

In general, a good direct mail campaign should convert about 1-to-5 percent of its recipients. So an ecommerce site that mailed out 10,000 postcards with coupon codes, should expect between 100 and 500 of the postcard recipients to convert, visiting the site and making a purchase. That sort of a response rate offers a lot of opportunity for ecommerce merchants.

Easy to Measure, Easy to Adjust

Ecommerce retailers, like all businessmen, want to earn the best possible return on their marketing investment, and direct mail makes tracking that return very easy. The simplest method for tracking direct mail campaigns is to use a custom URL or subdomain. For example, if your store’s URL is somestore.com, try purchasing the domain somestoreonline.com and using only this second domain in your direct mail campaign. Then monitor traffic through the new domain. Or if you are offering a 10-percent discount in your direct mail campaign, try using the subdomain discount.somestore.com, and track the web traffic to that subdomain and landing page.

Many marketers have taken to using personalized URLs. In this case, you might use a subdomain that included your prospect’s name. So if you sent a mailer to Jane Doe, the URL in the mailer might be jane_doe.somestore.com. You would be wise to include Jane’s name and a mention of the mail offer on the landing page.

Direct mail also makes it easy to test two versions of your marketing message. I once worked on a direct mail campaign for a large Fortune 500 company. The company was trying to generate web traffic. And the product was a tool that saved power. The company wanted to know if customers would be interested in a message about cutting so-called greenhouse gases or if they would be more motivated by a cost savings message. Turned out that talking about saving money generated eight times as many responses as promoting the product’s environmental benefits. In the next mail, we tested two cost savings methods, to determine if it was it better to talk about cost savings in terms of an annual total or a monthly total. In this way, we refined the campaign until it had a very high conversion rate.

Direct Mail is an Extremely Creative Medium

Finally, direct mail allows ecommerce marketers to be very creative. Mailers can be a postcard with great graphics, a catalog (which will generate a lot of extra traffic), or virtually anything that you can imagine. Direct mail campaigns are not bound to web safe colors or short text strings. American Express sent metal credit cards. Microsoft has sent IT managers Russian stacking dolls, and many companies (i.e. L.L. Bean, Sears, J. Crew, Victoria’s Secret) have built huge followings for their catalogs.

Because of this breadth of creative opportunity, marketers can better communicate a store’s value proposition and, frankly, do more to persuade customers.

Article Written by: Armando Roggio

Tags: Building Traffic, Cost Effective Advertising, Direct Mail, Mailers

Our latest feature to the website, the CSP Blog will be bringing you tons of industry related articles, tips, ideas, etc.  This is going to be an incredible resource tool for people looking to learn new ways to improve their functionality, customer base, and get over all tips from other industry professionals.  Stay tuned as is will definitely be worth your while.  New content is coming soon!

-The CSP Team.

Tags: B2B Blog, For Businesses, Industry Information, Our Blog, Welcome

Some years ago, it was enough to get many inbound links to get high rankings on Google. It didn’t matter from where these links came as long as there were many links that pointed to your website.

As Google and other search engines continually improve the way they rank web pages, getting the right links is crucial if you want to be listed on the first search result page.

Unnatural links can be bad for your Google rankings

Google is able to detect unnatural linking patterns. That is why the following type of links don’t work:

Link farms and automated linking systems

Some online services promise hundreds of links in a short time with no work involved. All you have to do is to put some code on your website or to join a system that will help you to get links from other sites quickly and easily.

These automated linking systems don’t work and Google can detect them. Actually, Google thinks that you’re spamming if you participate in such a system and they might penalize your website by lowering its position in the search results.

Paid links

Google’s anti-spam guru Matt Cutts has made clear that Google considers paid links spam. If you don’t want to lose your rankings on Google, you should be very careful when buying links.

Natural links have a positive effect on your Google rankings

Natural links are links that make sense to your website visitors. For example, if you have a website about Linux, a totally unrelated link to a car parts website would look strange.

100% Natural

The links that point to your website should be from related websites and from sources that would “naturally” link to you, i.e. Internet directories, social bookmarking services, blogs, etc. The more related websites link to your site, the higher your website will rank on Google’s result pages.

How to get the best links to your website

There are a few things that you can do to get as many good links as possible to your website.

1. Create a linkworthy website

If your website is only a collection of affiliate links then you cannot expect that other webmasters will link to your site. Create a website with good content. You might also consider creating web pages whose sole purpose is to get inbound links. This could be “How to” articles, top 10 lists or even a controversial statement.

The more interesting your web pages are, the easier it is to get links from other websites.

2. Contact related websites and blogs

Contact related websites and point them to the interesting content on your site. Do you have an article on your website that solves a specific problem?

Contact websites that also deal with that topic or bloggers who have written about that topic and tell them about your article. Chances are that these websites will link to your site.

3. Submit your website to related Internet directories

Internet directories are an easy way to get inbound links. However, only submit your website to Internet directories that are relevant to your website and only submit your website to the right category.

A link from the right directory and the right category to your website can have a positive impact on your Google rankings.

4. Make it easy to add your website to social bookmark services

Add a bookmark link to your website so that it is easy for your website visitors to bookmark your site.

5. Get links to different pages of your website and vary your link texts

Most links go to the home page of a website. It usually helps to get direct links to the web page that you want to promote on search engines. The websites that link to your website should use different but related texts to link to your site. If all web pages use exactly the same text to link to your site, this will look unnatural.

Getting the right kind of back links is very important if you want to get high rankings on Google and other search engines. First of all, create interesting and linkworthy web pages and optimize the content of these pages for search engines.

Make sure that your web pages are user-friendly and interesting. If you then get the right kind of links to your website your rankings will increase.

Tags: Get Higher Rankings on Google, Get Higher Rankings on Search Engines, Google Rankings, Natural Links, Natural SEO, Organic Marketing, Organic SEO, SEO, Unnatural Links, Using Natural Links

When it comes to pay-per-click advertising campaigns, the most important tools are targeted keywords and relevant landing pages. For targeted keywords, it is possible to develop dynamically inserted keywords simply by monitoring search activity on your site and in your ad campaigns.

Identify Targeted Keywords

Below are some practical tips to help you discover the key phrases consumers are typing into search boxes, and how that knowledge can be used to your advantage.

Here are some suggestions to help develop dynamic keywords:

• Create separate campaigns for product groups; ad groups within each campaign would represent actual products or product types/models
• Take advantage of the “search” function on your ecommerce site. Talk to your developers to see how you can dynamically pass pay-per-click keywords through the search function of your site, so that users will always see dynamically generated results as generated by your site’s internal search function

Use Dynamic Keyword Insertion

Dynamic keyword insertion allows you to insert the user’s actual, or close to actual, search query into the text of your pay-per-click ad. This is because search engines match users’ queries to the closest keyword on your list. You end up with an ad that very closely resembles the actual keyword phrase the user typed in, which attracts more user attention on the search results page. This will likely increase sales from your pay-per-click ad, as follows:

1. More attention = higher click through rate
2. Higher click through rate = higher Quality Score
3. Higher Quality Score = cheaper clicks
4. Cheaper clicks = more clicks for a given budget, which leads to more sales.

Be careful, though. You do want to improve your click through rate, but you also want quality clicks. Keep an eye on ads with dynamic keyword insertion to make sure they are converting users at the same or better rate.

The key is to supply the customer with immediate gratification. All the talk about relevant search engine results and “quality” ratings comes down to just that. Test the strategies outlined above and you’re like to see promising improvements in the performance of your PPC ads.

Proper Landing Pages

Always make sure you’re sending people to the most relevant page of your site. Remember, your home page is not usually the most relevant page. If someone is searching for “widget 123” and you happen to sell it, be sure to send that person to the “widget 123” page.

Click here to learn how Chi-Sky can help with this.

Tags: Dynamic Ad Text, Dynamic Keywords, Dynamic Text, Internet Advertising, Internet Marketing, Keywords, Landing Pages, PPC, PPC Advertising, Relevant Landing Pages, Targeted Keywords

Whether you are just starting a web design project, looking at revamping an existing site, or just wanting to double check the usability of your current web site you should consider these 7 Basics of Good Web Design.

These basics are aimed at new visitors/customers; your repeat customers will be judging your web site on different values. Just like wearing the appropriate clothes for a job interview, these basics will help you pick out the “look” of your web site so that you make a good first impression.

1. Fast Loading Web Site – Any way you look at it, a fast loading page should be your number 1 concern. The web is all about speed, fast searches, fast purchases, fast information. You can’t have any of that with a slow loading page. Ask yourself this question – have you ever been on Google doing a search for something important and a link you clicked on didn’t open up immediately? What did you do? Patiently wait for the page to open or move onto the next link on the page? My favorite sites open almost immediately.

So, a few suggestions: Make sure that your images are properly optimized. Don’t use very many large images, save those for a different page. Keep any auto-running multimedia to a minimum, provide links to run media instead. Check your code for anything else that could affect your page loading times. Since text loads almost instantly go ahead and use all the text you want, just keep everything else under control.

2. No Meaningless Splash Page – Do you appreciate a fancy animation page that doesn’t tell you anything and you have to wait for before the web site will open? Neither do I. The last thing I want once I find an interesting site is to wait through some animation before getting to the first page. This doesn’t mean that I don’t want multimedia on a site, I do. I just don’t want an animation before the first page that forces me to wait for it to finish before getting onto the site. It’s like having to wait for a salesperson to finish their memorized speech before you can ask them a question. No thanks! I like animation, just in the right place and at the right time. Plus, if I am a returning customer, I will have already seen that animation and don’t need to see it again.

My suggestion is to use a smaller animation contained in your main landing page which also includes your main message and links to the rest of your site. It will make for a faster loading page (smaller file) and your visitors can go ahead with accessing your site without having to wait for the animation to finish.

One final note, don’t ever put your logo as the only content on your landing page with a link that says “Enter Site”. This just screams Unprofessional and will drive away potential visitors in droves. The last thing I want to do is to click on another link just to get into the site. This is a total waste of my time. I usually will skip a site if I see this.

3. No Annoying Web Gimmicks – Now that you have your visitor on your site quickly the one thing you don’t want to do is to drive them away just as quickly. So, don’t put anything annoying on that first page. No loud background music that makes them quickly hit the volume control or the back button on their browser. No flashing animations while they are trying to read your content. No popup, flyout, expanding ads that cover your home page. Basically, leave the gimmicks alone until you are sure that your visitor will stay on your site. Most casual visitors will leave your site in just a few seconds, no sense on driving them away more quickly.

Multimedia is great on a web site, just don’t bombard your visitor with it first thing. If you want audio, then put in a nice picture with a link, like a picture of yourself with text saying something like “Let me tell you how to make fifty thousand this month!” If they are interested, they will click on the link and listen to your message; if they are not interested in audio, then you should be using a different pitch anyway.

Also, monitor what advertisers are putting on your site if you sell ad space. I am sure you have seen those ads with the animated dancing figure, cute the first time you see it. But after seeing it 10,000 times with every imaginable character I have added the company to a líst I keep of companies I won’t do business with. So their animation has gone from “look at me” to “you annoy me” in my mind. Ads like these will impact your visitor’s experience. So even if your site is perfectly designed, one misplaced ad can ruin all of your hard work.

4. Have a Clear Message – Too many web sites are a mish-mash of content. This is especially true of blog pages. Certain types of sites lend themselves to stream of consciousness content, but most don’t. Make it easy for your viewer to understand what your web site is about, don’t make them guess. Have a clear topic headline, followed by clear and concise text. This is also where a picture is worth a thousand words, but only if the picture directly pertains to your message.

You want your visitor to quickly understand what your message is. If they like your message, they will take the time to read the rest of your page and look around your web site. If they don’t like your page, then it won’t do you any good having them stay on your site anyway. So, don’t make your visitors guess, let them know what you are about quickly and cleanly and you will have happy visitors. And when thinking about a sales page, a happy customer is a buying customer.

5. Coordinated Design – This one should be self evident, but it is surprising how many sites change their design for every page. You want your visitor to be comfortable in your site and one way to achieve that is by having a coordinated web design. Having a consistent logo, using a consistent color scheme, keeping your navigation in the same place. All of these help to create a coordinated design. This does not mean that you can’t change colors or the “Look” on different segments of your site, but if you do, the changes should not be so drastic that it feels like you have moved on to a different site.

If you select one place for your logo, one place for your navigation, one look for your buttons or other common graphic elements and stick with those then you will be well on your way to a coordinated design. If you change colors for a different section, but keep the same logo location, the same navigation location, the same button shape, then your visitors will not become lost as they move from page to page.

6. Easy Navigation – Once you have grabbed your visitors attention you want them to be able to easily move around the different areas of your web site. This is done with easy to use navigation. There are three standard, accepted locations for navigation elements on a web page: along the top, on the left side, and at the bottom. I will usually put my main navigation either along the top or along the left side. I will then put text based navigation at the bottom of the page, this text based navigation is more for the search engines than anything else, but it also makes it easy for your visitors to move to the next page when they have reached the bottom of the current page.

Most people start reading a page from the top left and then read towards the bottom right. So navigation at the left or top will be seen as soon as someone enters your page. Also navigation at the left or top will not move or change position if the browser window is adjusted in size. The worst thing you can do is to put your main navigation on the right side of the page and have your page set for a large screen size. Let’s say that your page is set for 1024 across with the navigation on the right, and someone views your page at 800 across, they will not see your navigation at all. The left side of your page will show perfectly, but the right side will be hidden outside of their viewing area. Of course by using floating or popup menus you can overcome some of these design limitations and keep your navigation visible at all times.

Unless you know that your audience will enjoy it, don’t use Mystery Navigation. This is where your navigation is hidden within images, or spaced around the web page in some mysterious random order. This can be fun on gaming sites, or social networking sites, but in most cases the navigation should be easy to see and easy to use. If you do want to use Mystery Navigation, I would recommend keeping the text based navigation at the bottom of the page, just in case.

7. Have a “Complete” web site – And finally, no one wants to go to a web site only to find that the site is “Under Construction” and the content they are looking for is not there. These are words that you shouldn’t ever use. If a section of your web site is not ready for prime time yet, then simply don’t show it yet. It is better to have your site look complete and professional, then to have it look like a work in progress that should not be up on the web yet.

You can easily tell your visitors that you will be having more content in the future without having your site look like it is unfinished. Just use phrases like “Content Updated Weekly” or “New Products Added Monthly”. Both of these will tell your visitors that it would be worth their time to come back and visit later, but neither one will make your site look unfinished. So no matter how small your web site is, give the impression that you have taken the time to complete the site before putting it up on the internet, this makes for a more professional presentation and a better visitor experience.

In Closing – By following these simple 7 Basics of Good Web Design you will be well on your way to having an easy to use and successful web presence. Just keep in mind what you look for when you first land on a web page after doing a web search in Google or Yahoo, or other search engine. If you want fast loading pages, make sure your pages load fast. If you want to be able to find what you are looking for quickly and easily, then make sure you have easy navigation. Just keep your first time visitor in mind, put yourself in their web shoes and make your web site an enjoyable place to visit and success should follow.

About The Author
George Peirson is a successful Entrepreneur and Internet Trainer. He is the author of over 40 multimedia based tutorial training titles covering such topics as Photoshop, Flash and Dreamweaver. To see his training sets visit www.howtogurus.com . Article copyright 2009 George Peirson

Tags: 7 Basics of Web Design, Basics of Web Design, Clear Message, Coordinated Design, Easy Navigation, Fast Loading Web Site, Finished Site, Good Web Design, Meaningless Splash Page, splash Page, Web Design, Web Gimmicks

Hello Everyone,

With the new addition of the CSP Blog we would like to start by using this feature to ask you, the client, what you think about CSP as a service provider.  Do you think there are areas we can improve upon?  Are there changes you would like to see?  Are there other products or services you would like to see us add?  Are we performing to your standards?  We would love to hear that too!  Your feedback can help us improve and service you better, which is our #1 priority here at Chi-Sky Productions.  Thanks!

-The CSP Team.

Tags: csp changes, csp complaints, csp compliments, feedback, Tell Us