If either of our companies are going to be truly effective, we have to be ruthless that people are getting only what they give us full permission to send them. We intend to clean up our act among all our clients and apply these practices to all future projects.

• There is a strong business case that we are just making people angry when we send them something they didn’t ask for.
• When our own website visitors opted-in to our email autoresponder, we have seen nearly a 100% conversion to personally contacting us.

We will be putting attention on getting new leads to double-opt-in with

• an irresistible offer
• and compelling message.

If they don’t double-opt-in, too bad for them but we won’t be sending them info to jam up their inbox with what could be easily called spam.

Fortunately in the B2B community, it is accepted practice to request phone numbers on lead forms so we can follow up with a phone call but that’s the end if there is no double-opt-in. They would then be scrubbed from our lists.

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Keeping B2B Clients out of "Email Spammer Prison"

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How Qualified is Your SEO Company

1. “Inbox Overload” is the Number 1 concern on the minds of email marketers, far exceeding concern over delivery and tracking issues

• • 36% report recipient mailboxes are swamped and all email suffers
  • Another 21% report Spam is eroding trust in email

Choosing a great subject line and repeatedly having content of interest to your mailing list are the number one ways to get your Email Newsletters and Promotions read consistently

1. What’s the best time to deliver emails?
   • Wednesday and Thursday have the highest “click through” (click through means they took the action you offered) average at 5%
   • Monday and Friday are second at 4%
   • Tuesday is next at 3%
   • Saturday and Sunday are at 2%
   • Lunchtime is primetime to do non-work related activities online
   • 83% of responses arrive within the first 48hours, make sure you are ready

Delivery Day does matter, particularly when you are targeting the B2B market.

1. Best practices for what is in an email blast or newsletter
   • Email address for feedback - 53%
   • Navigation links - 48%
   • Display recipient’s email address - 44%
   • Telephone contact number - 40%
   • Subscription link - 27%
   • Forward to a friend - 25%

Make it easy for people who open your email to respond to you. The best offer several ways to contact you so you can match the customer’s preferences at the time they open your email.

1. Over 85% of companies tested the subject lines of their emails
   • The easiest and most effective test an emailer can run
   • You have 2 seconds to make a favorable impression
   • Well-crafted, to-the-point subject line is best

If you have not been testing your Email Newsletter “subjects”, you are missing a vital tool to improving open rates.

1. Investment in TESTING (subjects, layouts, calls to action, etc.) will almost always result in enough learning to easily pay for itself in email campaigning
   • 91% of retailers use offer testing
   • Of those 91%, over 95% would recommend it to others (THAT’s an Ah Ha)
   • Only 70% of B2B marketers would recommend testing to improve results (more creativity required with the less flexibility in what they can “offer” as specials

Most companies spend all their investment in growing the list when TESTING is probably a more effective way to improve Return on Investment from an email marketing campaign.

1. What is the “Best Business Newsletter” content? (no surprise here, customers want information of interest to them) - Scores on a 4.0 scale
   • Articles on tactics or how-to - 3.5
   • Case studies of client’s experiences - 3.1
   • List of best practices (Top Ten lists) - 3.1
   • Articles on high level strategy - 2.2
   • Interviews with customers or analysts - 1.8
   • Aggregating industry news - 1.4

The high scores for “how-to, case studies, and Top Tens” show that successful email newsletters provide valuable information for the customers, not information on your company, products, or services.

1. 57% of B2B emailers are still collecting customer address, fax number, etc when contact data is obtained.

Unless you can connect the information you collect to a tangible benefit for your customer, you should probably not ask for it (note the emphasis on “customer” value)

1. For B2B marketers, the best ways to get high quality email opt-ins were:
   • Free trials/downloads
   • Sales alert/product announcement offers
   • Trade events
   • Newsletter offers (not so for the B2C companies)
   • Check boxes on registration and order forms

Two surprises were that in B2C, contests worked great to grow the list, but newsletter signups were not effective. People don’t think most B2C companies provide them value in their email marketing campaigns.

1. How often is “too frequently” to send emails?

• • As often as they will read it - If your customer thinks it’s too often, they WILL consider it spam
  • Should have mostly to do with the needs of your customers
  • Let it ebb and flow along with your customer’s sales cycles
  • Segmentation by sales cycles would be very powerful to be in sync with your customers
  • Don’t bother people that just purchased from you
  • If you have a hot lead for a big-ticket item, send them a different, thought provoking email every day for a week

Sending email newsletters or promotions requires “careful thought” to get the frequency right. Put yourself in the customer’s shoes and ask whether you are sending them at the right frequency.

1. 20% is about the average “open rate” for both sales blasts and newsletters

• • Rates vary from a high of 28% for Banking/Finance companies to a low of 9% for Wholesale/Distribution companies
  • Consulting is tough at 10.8%
  • Manufacturing average is 15.6%

This data shows that we really have to work hard on our subject lines and content to make newsletters and blasts of value to our customers.

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B2B Email Marketing Top 10 Benchmarking Results

Summary Results of B2B Survey

• “…even we were surprised by just how important respondents to our survey indicated that online research was to their purchase decisions”
  • There was a clear spark of interest from a trade show, colleague, or friend and then they went to SEARCH
• The match of a good vendor website and a recommendation from a peer or colleague was a clear winner
• Price and Product Information in clear text is the #1 thing purchasers want in all phases of the buying process
  • They want this in clear, simple text
  • Less important were rich media, online video, and podcasts
  • Simpler is Better
• Google Dominates B2B search with 77.7% of the market
• B2B Verticals like Business.com, Knowledge Storm, and Thomas Net were important later in the buying decision process to compare alternatives
• 50% of B2B online interactions convert to a sale. This was a surprise that it was so high
• Where “on the page” are B2B buyers clicking? (This is confirmed through other recent eye tracking studies)
  • 74.4% organic listings; 18.7 Paid Ads
  • 27.1% on the Top Organic Listing
  • 52.6% on the Top 4 Organic Listings

Methodology of Enquiro Survey

• Published by Enquiro Search Solutions, Inc.
• 1086 participants
• 37% were looking for Supplies (i.e., industrial or office supplies, furniture, tools, etc.)
• Participants by price of the purchase they were considering:
  • 63% <$1,000
  • 23% $10,000 to $50,000
  • 13% >$50,000
• 46% were the “economic buyer”; they had spend authority for the purchase
• 49% were in the “research phase”; gathering data and refining their requirements

MOST SURPRISING RESULTS

• There was a significant increase over previous studies in people who made their purchase online after researching online
  • 51% made their purchase online
    • 55% for <$10,000
    • 31% for >$100,000 (That is still a large percentage on big purchases)
    • For PARTS, 69.8% preferred purchasing online
• “Influence” of the vendors website had the same importance (5.5 on a scale of 7) as a word-of-mouth recommendation from a colleague

CONCLUSION: “As awareness is formed, a large percentage of prospects will use online resources to find out more information and they will use “search” to locate the vendor’s website. Search visibility is essential at intersecting the prospect at this point.”

Detailed Results – Just the Facts

• 85.3% reported they would go online before making a purchase
  • 92% in the Awareness phase
  • 91.6% in the Research phase
  • 66.4% in the Negotiation phase
  • 81.3% in the Purchase phase
• Over 70% of B2B purchasers started out from a “Search Engine”
  • 51% from Google, Yahoo, or MSN directly using search
  • 12% from B2B Search Engines (Business.com, Knowledge Storm, Thomas Net)
  • 12% used the search engine to find the Vendor of choice website
• General Search Engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN) dominate early in the purchase cycle
  • 65.3% in Awareness phase
  • 51.8% in Research phase
  • 42% in Negotiation and Purchase phases
• Only 12% of purchasers had their vendor of choice website bookmarked at the start of their search
• By the Purchase phase, 80.7% were able to type the vendor website URL directly into their browser or had it bookmarked

CONCLUSION: You must capture the buyer’s attention early in the Awareness or Research phases so you are bookmarked by the final phases

• Google dominates B2B search
  • 77.7% launched search in Google
  • 13.8% in Yahoo
  • 6.6% in MSN

• Vertical B2B search engines had a strong place in the purchase process. Typically purchasers started on the general search engine, then used the vertical later to compare alternatives

• The top three vertical search engines are
  • Business.com 73% - business supplies and services creates a large percentage of users
  • KnowledgeStorm 22% - technology purchases, enterprise hardware and software
  • ThomasNet 5% - industrial and manufacturing solutions accounts for lower percentage in this study

• Major “website” factors for B2B purchasers
  • Price (at least a price range)
  • Product Information
  • Downloadable product/service information, particularly in the final stages
  • Comparisons
  • Company approach to Customer Service

• Support Information was of secondary importance
  • General company information
  • Case studies and testimonials
  • Downloadable white papers
  • Knowledge bases

• Multimedia was not that important
  • Podcasts
  • Webinars
  • Video
  • Online chat

• Top Site Factors by phase were:
  • Awareness – “Price”
  • Research – “Price” with Extensive Product Information a close second
  • Negotiation – “Downloadable Product/Service Information” to pass around to colleagues
  • Purchase – “Price” again with Product Information a close second
    • In this final phase the “Company Approach to Customer Service” was bumped up to a tie with Product Information

• Importance of Search Engine Rankings (Repeatable numbers from other recent eye tracking studies)
  • 74.2% click on “organic” listings first
  • 18.7% click on Pay-per-Click ads first
  • 27.1% click on the Top Organic listing first
  • 52.6% click on one of the Top Four listings first
  • Only 6.9% do not click on a first page listing

• Top Factors in Click Through to a site from a search listing or ad
  • Ranking
  • Title – bold relevant terms
  • Description – scanning clusters of words (Much less important than title)
  • Brand – if all the above don’t work, user will not see brand. But brand can “close the deal” and capture the click through if it is seen

• 70.7% of B2B buyers are searching to
  • Learn more about a product/service (pricing, availability, requirements, features)
  • Compare products/services against each other

• 95.8% of users found all or most of the information they needed to make a decision from online
  • 61.3% were Fully Successful; they found everything they needed online
  • 34.5% found some information but used other resources before making a buying decision
  • Only 0.9% of people reported they never found what they were looking for

Next Steps

• CLICK TO CALL AVALANCHE
• CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE ENTIRE STUDY
• CONTACT US

Internet Marketing Charleston

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Surprising New B2B Online Purchasing Decision Data Announced by Enquiro 2007 Survey

Sea & Shell was founded in 1999 and born from a passion for the sea and is located on the corner of North Market Street and Church Street in historic Charleston, South Carolina. Since opening, the store has become a perennial favorite for new customers and old friends.

Marilyn makes many of the mirrors, tables and statuary that is encrusted with shell. This side of the business continues to grow with the appeal being magnificent mirror and furniture that can be custom designed.

Opening an oyster that is guaranteed a pearl has been a favorite of everyone’s since the store has opened. Beautiful cameo and pearl jewelry, children’s items, and a wide range of boats, have proven that Sea & Shell is a nautical adventure that can be enjoyed by everyone.

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Announcing Launch of SeaandShell.com

We offer a Money Back Guarantee that won’t be matched

and Only 30 companies means great customer service for you

How do we deliver to make you a leader in your Internet space?

• Apply a proven SYSTEM; processes and rules that produce repeatable results
• Select Best of Breed products and services
• Tailor solutions to your unique company

We focus on, in order:

1. Your business
2. Marketing to your customer base
3. Utilizing technology

How will it feel to be on top and growing? Be proud of where you stand on the Internet. Be an Avalanche 30 company.

Invest in an “asset”, your Internet Marketing SYSTEM. How long will it be before “Internet Location” is more important than “location, location, location”?

Our Avalanche 30 companies are going to be in front of the competition. Will you join us, or stand on the Internet sidelines for another year?

We want to help you grow. Call us today at (800) 494-6212 to learn more or contact us via email.

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Nail the Internet for Business Growth - Join the "Avalanche 30" System

Think that says it all

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The Breakup - A True Story About Advertising

However, I did want to write today as a bit of good will for the smaller businesses which are not quite ready for the commitment required to join the Avalanche 30 program. Some larger businesses may be interested in this as well. A prominent search marketer on the other side of the pond has developed a set of tools that will help automate some of the more mundane, and frankly, difficult tasks for many small businesses.

Pre-Review of the Toolset

Let’s run through the tools they’ll be offering, along with their description, and then I’ll tell you why you should care

Link Backrub

This tool will increase your backlinks massively by scouring the Internet for sites that link to you, that are not indexed in search engines. Any links it finds to your site, which are not indexed by Google, it will get them indexed - almost instantly, thus letting Google see all of your backlinks. This will of course, improve your rankings.

A large proportion of the web actually doesn’t appear in Google’s index, and they drop pages like flies these days in order to provide only the most relevant info (and save money - they’ve gone public. It was bound to happen). This tool will find all the pages on other websites and get your links noticed. This will increase your rankings in the search engines, and increase relevant traffic passing from search engines, to those pages, to yours. Referral traffic generally converts much higher than traffic straight from search engines

Flashdex

This tool will get ANY page indexed in Google within 1 hour - guaranteed.

The way most companies work is a slow progression and then a mad rush at the finish to get work done. Hey, we all do it - it’s called procrastination. Let’s say that you have a promotion coming out - tomorrow. To get a page showing in Google these days, you either have to make sure Google’s crawler is coming by that day (which you can’t guarantee, and they crawl more infrequently each day), or you have to launch a press release, which costs a large chunk of change. Now, sometimes a press release is good, but what if you’re just putting up content that would benefit your business, but isn’t really “newsworthy”? That’s where this tool would come in.

Social Storm

This neat little bit of script can get a single page - or multiple pages socially bookmarked on the top 20 social bookmarking and tagging sites over 190 times, automatically, from different IPs at random times over the course of weeks. This can give you massive traffic boosts.

Social Marketing is the new Social Marketing It’s always been around, but now there are more websites available where this is a goal, rather than a by-product so it’s getting plenty of buzz in the world of marketing. Digg, del.icio.us, reddit, are a couple examples. What good is a great idea if nobody knows about it? The web is full of those who didn’t answer this question. Another benefit of Social Storm is that you can also get some nice links which will help your search ranking, on occasion. This tool will automate the process by getting your content in front of the eyeballs of the users without wasting a ton of your time, or getting you banned.

StumbleXchange Automator

StumbleXchange is a great site, but it takes so damn long! This downloadable program will automate the entire process for you! No more hours of stumbling other peoples pages, just click and go to sleep!

If you use Stumbleupon, then this is like a co-op where people cross-promote each other’s sites. Most B2B sites may not use this much, but there is some value.

Link Buster

My favourite tool - This tool will build you over 100 relevant links per month, to any page requested - and it’s not blackhat!

Getting deep links (pages in your website other than the homepage) is very difficult. It requires either arduous work contacting tons of webmasters with every appeal known, creating remarkably noteworthy content that people want to link to (other than just listing the “me, me, me” seen on most company sites), or by buying links from relevant websites. We do link building for our clients and charge a hefty fee - because it’s hard work. How valuable are the links? That’s a good question, and hopefully we’ll find out for you and get to run some tests of our own.

Want More Info About the Toolset?

Digerati Marketing is nearing beta testing stage and hopefully we will be able to assist them in making sure the tools are top-notch for you, the aspiring web kingpin of your market niche. Our years of experience in not just Internet Marketing, but in high-level corporate business strategy and decision-making means that you’ll get a well-rounded review of these tools.

Check out Digerati Marketing if you have any other questions about the tools, which are slated for release later this year, or subscribe to our RSS feed and we’ll keep you posted.

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SEO Tools Automating the Grunt Work for Your Websites

If we value the pursuit of knowledge, we must be free to follow wherever that search may lead us.
–Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

Anyone out there old enough to recall what life was like before the big search engines like Google, Yahoo Search and Microsoft offered the enormous virtual pathway to knowledge that has forever changed the way information is gathered and disseminated? Hard to believe that 550 million U.S. and 2.7 billion global searches are conducted daily worldwide.

Clearly, there is no longer anywhere to hide- now it’s all out there for the hunting, pecking and searching. And that can be a really good thing when you know how to get yourself, company and/or cause out from under the radar and into the Web strobe light of awareness, recognition and hits.

Now only a very small minority don’t search on line before making a purchase decision. A recent study Google ( now so pervasive we’ve added it to the lexicon as a verb) undertook with Forrester Research shows 80% of respondents rating the Web as the number one resource for finding information prior to a purchase, whether on line or off.

Data further indicated that 64% conduct research on line for a purchase they then make offline, indicating that even companies who sell entirely off line (lawyers, doctors, architects, engineers, accountants and many more) must have an online presence to carry the target from a casual search of key terms that might fit your category or industry (and your competitors) straight to your Web site, in the most direct possible way.

Your site should be relevant enough to jump up in the search engines databases because online and offline, as long as one can remember, information still leads to awareness and influences the buyer to make a purchase decision. A recent Piper Jaffray survey showed that 96% use a search engine to locate and learn more about professional service firms and professionals; 93% use it for health information; 89% for entertainment and 78% for real estate. What that means is that a company can’t afford not to optimize its online presence in today’s super e- highway.

So how does all of this work? The search engine, which is in essence an information retrieval system, leads you to content via search terms that relate to your industry in general or your company in particular. When Google rose to success in 2001, they were using PageRank and link popularity, in addition to 150 other criteria, to assess the relevancy of a Web site. The algorithm remembers where it’s been and the cross links join those into groupings that can raise your chances of being found in a search.

Web search engines store information about Web pages, which comes straight from the Web and are retrieved by a Web crawler (or spider, as it’s sometimes called) that follows the links it sees. Web page content is analyzed and then indexed based on key words that are on the site, and how relevant or popular that particular site is. So in essence, search engine optimization (SEO) is an attempt to improve the rankings for key words in search results by improving a Web site’s content, structure and links. If you go to search “real estate listings in Charleston,” you want to be the first realtor that best matches those search terms.

Search engine marketing (SEM) employs different marketing methods to increase the visibility of a Website, such as search engine optimization, as noted, and pay per click, where a company bids on key terms, the price of which can fluctuate based on the popularity of and demand for that term or terms on a given day. SEM can also involve paid inclusion, which feeds listings into search engines, most often shopping and price comparison sites (think bizrate.com or NextTag).

Paid direct links (vs. natural links that may be embedded within a site) are ad links, sometimes purchased from a search engine site. They’re like the links you see to the top or right of the Google et al search page(s) that companies pay for to increase the chance they’ll pop up faster in the search results. Paid link brokers have made a fortune selling these links, but they do pose issues for the search engine algorithms by changing the landscape of paid vs. natural links and the site’s almost autonomous (think site-inherent, earned) vs. forced (think paid, sponsored) popularity.

Two other search tricks of the trade to consider are “social media” optimization, which places opinions, thoughts and commentary within online communities via blogs, for example, hoping to spread ideas virally. Video search marketing places short video clips on sites (a highly popular one of which is YouTube) to be picked up by search engine crawlers/spiders and then promoted via better ratings.

And since we all know that the one constant is change, and the online marketplace by nature changes instantaneously, buckle up fast, as evidence of the almighty dollar behind the web comes in the form of mergers and acquisitions the likes of Microsoft buying digital marketing firm aQuantive, and global communications firm (and former employer) WPP Group buying 24/7, and Google outbidding Microsoft for DoubleClick, a leading online advertising, “rich media” agency.

These deals alone represent about $11 billion changing hands but maybe that’s small change to these media buying giants when you consider that advertising revenues are increasingly shifting to online and interactive channels (projected by Microsoft to be $40 billion this year). Change, change, kaching!

So this just scratches the surface of all there is to know about the power of search engines and how to make them work for you. The internet has forever changed the way businesses promote themselves and now that we know just how many (and often) consumers flock there to learn, find and buy… now’s the time to rev up your engines, search and be found.

Elizabeth L. Boineau runs E. Boineau & Company, a strategic marketing communications and public relations firm based in Charleston.
You may reach her at eboineau@eboineauandco.com.

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Searching for answers in all the Web places…

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