By Erica Wenham,
Tuesday 12 March 2013.
Digital Technologies
For Marketing (Week 22)
Email Marketing
According to Safko (2011), research states that UK
teenagers favour social networking sites to connect with friends, supports a
common view that email as a marketing tool is now ‘unfashionable’, however
email marketing is far from obsolete. Why? For the simple reason that is works.
According to research carried out by Vertis
Communications (2007), 21 per cent of adults have responded to email marketing
in the month prior to the survey, admitting to having responded by ‘clicking
through’ to the senders website. Email is most widely used as a marketing tool
for customer conversion and retention, this is done by the current or potential
consumer giving the website or company permission to contact them via this
service.
Effective email
marketers adopt a strategic approach to email and develop a contact or touch
strategy that plans the frequency and content of email communications.
Key Advantages of Email Marketing:
ü Relatively
low in cost
The physical aspect of email
marketing is substantially lower in cost than its rival direct marketing.
ü Direct
response encourages immediate action
Email marketing encourages and
enables the receiver to ‘click through’ to the senders website where they can
view the original intention of the email, whether that be a discount code or
new products. This increases the probability of the receiver to act upon the
email immediately.
ü Ease
of personalisation
It is easier and cheaper for the
marketer to personalise an email rather than the medium of physical print
mail. This gives the receiver an
indication that the company do not see them as a number, however a valued
individual.
Key Disadvantages:
û Deliverability:
The difficulty of getting
email messages delivered through different internet service providers (ISPs)
and company firewalls. This increases the risk factor of possibly missing out a
large target audience.
û Render
ability:
The difficulty of displaying
the creative works as intended within the in-box of different email reading
systems. For example, if an email is predominantly imaged based and is not
displayed by default in the receivers email reader, this will decrease the
response rate.
MailChimp
According to MailChimp, (2013) more than 3 million people
use MailChimp to create, send, and track email newsletters. MailChimp cater to
all types of businesses, whether there user is a ‘one-man-band’ or an
international brand, MailChimp has features and integrations that will suit all
email-marketing needs.
MailChimp offers the user tailored bespoke solutions, for
example, allowing the company to incorporate their brand's look and feel into
their design of their email marketing campaigns. Additional features allows the
user to send their subscribers product updates, event invitations and announcements - and that is just to name a few. Analysing
data can be a drag to some marketers, however their reports are simple and
pleasing to the eye, displaying relevant information that will allow the user
to efficiently evaluate the subscribers responding actions.
Constant Contact
Constant Contact, (2013) launched into the market in
1998, Constant Contact has provided email marketing services to the needs of
small organizations, providing them with an easy and affordable way to create
and build successful, lasting customer relationships.
The Constant Contact aim is to provide to all types of
small businesses and organizations to help them create successful campaigns
resulting in finding new customers, driving repeat business and generating
referrals. Unlike the free service of Mail Chimp, Constant Contact’s is a
paying email marketing service, however the option of exploring the software is
available for free on a 30 day trial basis.
MailChimp is free for lists of up to 2,000 subscribers.
More than half a million customers worldwide trust Constant Contact to help
them drive success.
Banner Advertising
Banners are typically rectangles seen at the top or
bottom of web pages which users are invited to click on to gain more details. They
can vary from simple logos to sophisticated graphics with moving images, and
can be used to convey a stand-alone brand message, or provide a teaser that
attracts the user to click through to the advertiser’s website.
A clickable banner advertisement can take the user
straight to the advertiser’s website or direct them to a micro site. Micro
sites have the advantage of enabling marketers to interact with their target
audience without necessarily taking them away from the environment they had
initially chosen to visit.
The context in which a banner advertisement is placed can
be as important as the content. The rate of response can be influenced
significantly by the environment in which it is placed. Great content in the
wrong place is useless, and banners should be placed in areas that address the
same consumer needs as the product or service being promoted.
Triggered Banners
Banners can be targeted more closely by triggering them
to appear only in response to key words, typically on a search engine. By implementing
key words, it is possible to ensure that a banner is displayed only when the
target audience keys in those words for a search.
According to Chaffey, (2010) “The most popular
advertising format in the Internet’s short advertising history has been the
static advertisement known as a display, or banner ad. Banner ads, a staple of
Internet advertising, are static ads- somewhat analogous to print ads placed in
magazines and newspapers – that appear on frequently visited websites.”
Internet users pay attention and solicit information from
only a small percentage of all the Internet banner ads which they are exposed
to. ‘Click-through’ rates (CTRs) to banner advertisements are very low,
averaging less than 0.3%. Banner ads for B2B companies receive however somewhat
higher CTRs than do those for B2C companies.
A visitor who ‘clicks’ on an interactive banner as is
then forwarded onto the site of the company who has paid for that advertising
banner space, this then links them through to the destination website.
Interactive banner advertisements can help build traffic, but it also has a key
role in building brand recognition.
Many companies and brands strategically link interactive
ads to specific campaigns microsite. According to Chaffey, (2010) “This provides
content tailored to the campaign that appears immediately on ‘click through’
without the distractions of a link to the standard site. The microsite can be
independent of the media owner site, or it can be part of it, which can
potentially improve the response.
Although display advertising is often thought of simply
as a traffic building technique, there are several alternative objectives which
were first summarized by Cartelleroeri et al, (1997):
ü
Deliver Content
ü
Enable Transactions
ü
Shape Attitudes
ü
Solicit Response
ü
Encourage Retention
Disadvantages:
û
Poor and Diminishing ‘Click-through’ rates
û
Relatively high costs
û
Branding effect difficult to quantify
Affiliate Marketing
According to Chaffey (2008), affiliate marketing is “the ultimate
form of marketing communications since its pay-per-performance – it’s a
commission-based arrangement where the merchant only pays when they make the
sale or get a lead”. The model below summarises the affiliate marketing
process;
The main advantages of affiliate marketing are;
ü
Retailers websites can gain more visibility in
the paid and natural listing of the “SERPs” (increase of “share of search”);
ü
Different affiliates can be used to target
different audiences, product categories and related phrases;
ü
Affiliates may be able to identify gaps in
marketing strategies. For example, they may be quicker at advertising new
products, or may use key-phrase variants that haven’t been considered
previously;
ü
Affiliate marketing can reach customers on
generic phrases (e.g. “women’s clothing”) at a relatively low cost if the
affiliates secure better positions in natural listings;
ü
ASOS, New Look and Topshop can increase the
reach of their brands or campaigns since affiliate ads and links featuring
their name will be displayed on third-party websites;
ü
Awareness can be easily generated for the brand
or its new products which aren’t currently already well-known;
ü
The use of affiliates can reduce the risk caused
by temporary or more fundamental problems with SEM management;
ü
Pay per performance – the costs of acquisition
can be controlled well.
However, there are potential disadvantages to affiliate
marketing programmes such as;
û
Incremental profit/sales may be limited
û
Affiliates may exploit the retailers’ brand
names – This is particularly the case where affiliates exploit brand names by
variations of it (for example “ASOS”, “ASOS Marketplace” etc.) or by gaining a
presence in natural listings. Here, there is already awareness. It is important
for organisation’s to prevent this from happening and many affiliate programmes
exclude brand bidding although affiliates can have roles in displacing
competitors from listings for brand terms;
û
Brand reputation may be damaged – Advertisements
may be displayed on websites inconsistent with the original brand image.
Alternatively, creative may be out-of-date which could be illegal;
û
Programme management fees & time – If using
an affiliate network to manage campaigns, they may take up to 30% of each
agreed affiliate commission as additional “network overridge”. Affiliate
marketing is found on forming and maintaining good relationships. This cannot
be done through an agency alone – marketers within a company need to speak to
their top affiliates.
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| Affiliate Marketing in The Online Fashion Retail Sector (via YouTube/Marketing) |
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| Affiliate Marketing in The Online Fashion Retail Sector (via YouTube/Marketing) |
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