Comparison of Direct Mail Marketing and Email Marketing

Comparison of Direct Mail Marketing and Email Marketing

For direct marketers, the print-to-online transition is an ongoing one. Consider the following facts comparing direct mail to e-mail for marketing purposes.

Paper costs

The 20 percent increase in the cost of paper over the past two to three years is being caused in part by higher labor costs as well as higher fuel costs to get wood to the mill, run the papermaking machines and transport the finished product to warehouses and on to printers.

Moreover, many paper mills are making investments to become more eco-friendly, incurring costs to train employees in new processes and procedures. Printing and postage costs are also rising, and additional paper price increases are likely.

E-mail costs

For companies whose customers are largely online, e-mail is a cost-effective replacement to direct mail. For organizations that have a blend of online and non-online customers, it can be a welcomed alternative for e-mail-equipped recipients that also lowers the cost of marketing for the company.

Direct mail efficiency

A direct mail campaign can take weeks to design, lay out, print and mail. Moreover, while deliverability and response are trackable with direct mail, they take time. Undeliverable mail can take weeks to be returned and addresses must be manually removed from a list. In addition,response can take days by postage paid reply.

E-mail efficiency

An e-mail campaign can take as little as a few hours to a few days from concept to receipt, enabling companies to respond rapidly to market dynamics and competitive pressures. In addition, with e-mail sent by an advanced e-mail delivery system, bad addresses are discovered within minutes and culled from a list. Then, marketers know exactly how many recipients opened the message.

With links back to a Web site, purchases can be made immediately and tracking systems can show which pages or items were viewed, providing invaluable customer data for future campaigns.

Green marketing -- direct mail

While many direct marketing firms are instituting green standards in their companies, the direct mail business is under environmental pressure because of the huge amount of paper it consumes and the waste that paper generates.

Green marketing -- e-mail

While e-mail servers require electricity, no trees are destroyed, no pollutants are sent into the air, and no gasoline or other petroleum-based products are used to get a marketing message across with e-mail.

Source:http://www.emarketingandcommerce.com/article/direct-mail-versus-e-mail-you-decide/1 by Berry Abel

Marketing Tips for your Blog

How many times have you visited one of the many “professional” blog advice sites, and left with little more advice than the ubiquitous (and unhelpful) “build great content?”

If building a great blog was as simple as writing quality posts, we’d all be tied for number one on the Technorati Top 100 blog list. I’m not about to start my own ProBloggingPilgrim.com web site, but I did want to start sharing tips that I’ve personally found valuable when building the traffic to Marketing Pilgrim.

It’s possible that these tips have been shared before–perhaps they were lost among all of the “great content” on the web–but I’m pretty sure these will be fresh ideas. I initially thought I could fit half a dozen tips in a single blog post, but as I started writing, I realized that each tip easily fills a single post. So instead, I’ll start with Tip #1 and see what you think. Leave a comment if you’d like to see more tips in the future.

Tip 1: Your Blog Post Titles Have Two Audiences
You’ve no doubt read that you need to make your blog post titles “search engine friendly,” but doing so often kills the creativity and initial appeal of your writing. Instead of trying to appeal to your loyal readers and Google at the outset, approach the two difference audiences in separate stages.

Stage One – Your initial blog readers
Your initial audience is likely going to be those that have already subscribed to your blog’s RSS feed–or happen to check your blog every day. They want to be thrilled, excited, and given a reason to not only read your post, but also share and link to it.

When you first publish your blog post, follow this advice:
Make your post title interesting – it could be that you ask a question, share a scoop, or offer a cryptic title that peeks your reader’s curiosity. I’ll often use a blog title that sounds like a scandal/scoop, but is really just a question. For example, “Microsoft Buying Yahoo?” I ran that headline last year–before Microsoft made its bid. It generated a lot of traffic then and even more so now.

Keep it short and sweet – if you make your initial post title too long, you run the risk that you’ll either confuse a reader or give them so much information, tthere’s no need to read the post itself. Back to my example, “Microsoft Buying Yahoo?” leaves a lot of unanswered questions that just beg the reader to click through to view the entire post. If I had used “Rumors that Microsoft May Buy Yahoo, but No Confirmation Yet,” how many of you would have clicked through to read the entire post? Not many.

Appeal to keyword scanners – When you read posts in your RSS reader, do you sometimes scan the titles looking for keywords that you know will interest you? Apple, Google, Wii, and Blue-Ray are all examples of keywords that might appeal to your specific audience. This is not the same as keywords for SEO–that comes later–at this stage, you’re simply looking to include words that will make your post stand out to your readers. Use popular keywords in your post titles and your post will have a greater chance of standing out among all of the other posts in your reader’s RSS aggregator.

In stage one, your goal is to appeal to the initial readers that will likely view the post on the day that you publish it. But what happens after your post is relegated to the archives? It’s unlikely someone will spend hours just wondering through your archived posts. Instead, they’ll likely discover your “great content” via one of the search engines. OK, only one search engine: Google.
With this in mind, you need to massage your post’s title so that it can go to work for you in Google’s search results.

Stage Two – Your Google readers
That cryptic, enticing post title you used to attract your initial readers isn’t going to cut-it when it comes to attracting Google search engine users. Sure, you want your post title to entice a click from the SERP (search engine results page) but if your post is sitting on page 10–and not page 1–it doesn’t matter how engaging your post title. In stage two, you need to give your post title the Google-juice it needs to make the first SERP.

Add keywords to your title – you should have already included a relevant keyword that appeals to the human “keyword scanners.” Now that it’s Googleblot scanning your post title, it’s time to pump-up your keyword count. Now, don’t go overboard and add half a dozen keywords to your post titles–you want the title to remain targeted and enticing–but you should look for opportunities to include additional keywords. Compare this before, and after post title. Before: “Ten Ways to Avoid a Google Reputation Management Nightmare.” After: “Ten Ways to Fix Your Google Reputation & Remove Negative Results.” Both are engaging, both convey the same meaning. Yet, the revised title removes keywords that are not likely to be Googled such as “avoid” and “nightmare,” while adding keywords that are searched often, such as “fix” and “remove negative results.”

Change the word order – I always try to take into consideration my potential Google ranking, when writing my post titles. However, there are many times when I see my post sitting at #11 on Google, because the word order I used–while appealing to my initial audience–isn’t doing me any favors in the SERPs. So, like a good optimizer, I go back and change the word order so that the beneficial keywords are closer to the beginning of the title (which is where Google prefers to see them). Here’s a before: “26 Free Tools for Buzz Monitoring.” And after: “Buzz Monitoring: 26 Free Buzz Tracking Tools.” (Notice I also added the keyword “buzz tracking” to the title).
Optimize your TITLE – When you first publish your blog posts, you’ll likely want your TITLE (aka title tag) to match your actual post title. Once you start focusing on your Google audience, it might make sense to tweak your page TITLE so that it’s even more optimized than your post title (side note: most blog software will simply match your page TITLE to your post title). If you’re using WordPress, consider installing the SEO Title Tag plugin to do just that! I don’t use it on Marketing Pilgrim, but on other blogs, I’ve found it a great way to further optimize my TITLE–which is what is displayed in Google’s SERP.

Don’t play with slugs – I’ll write more on the topic of page “slugs” (aka permalinks) but I’d be negligent if I didn’t warn here that, while you should change your post title, changing the actual page slug is to be avoided.

I hope you’ll find the above tactics to be fruitful in your quest to increase both initial, and Google-referred, visitors to your blog. I’ve got plenty more tips I can share, so let me know what you think and if you’d like to read more blog promotion tips.

Thanks to:http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2008/03/optimize-blog-post-titles.html

Glossary of Internet Marketing Terms

Ad Click : Number of times a particular ad is clicked.

Ad Views : Also known as impressions. The number of times an ad is viewed by a browser. If an ad is blocked by a firewall or web filter and not seen by the consumer, but the browser attempted to attain the information, often the ad is considered viewed even though it was not.

Bandwidth : The amount of information that can be sent at a time through an Internet connection. This is often also referred to by a host ISP as how much total information can be sent in a month from your website to visitors to your website.

B2B – Business-to-Business: This often refers to a retain business working with an advertising or e-commerce business.

Banner : An advertisement on a webpage, similar to a yellow page ad, except it usually contains a link to the advertising page.

Broad Keywords: These are very general keywords that are searched often. Many times are searched for information purposes as much as purchasing reasons. For some sites and keywords, these can convert well enough to have a positive ROI, but in general they don’t have the conversion rate of the other keyword types. (i.e. travel, real estate)

Browser: The program used to view WebPages. (i.e. Netscape, Internet Explorer, Opera)

Browser Caching : Often a browser will store WebPages in temporary folders on your computer to aid in surfing speed. When someone revisits your webpage and they have a cached version, they will view the old page instead of the new one (there are some metatags and browser settings that will prevent this) leading to your website being undercounted in total page views and visitors.

Click : When you right click on a hyperlink or follow a link to another webpage you have “clicked” the link.

Click Through : Most often referred to as a percentage. The amount of times an ad or link was viewed and then clicked on. If an ad was viewed 100 times and clicked on 10 times its click through rate is 10%.

Cloaking: Also known as a Cloaked Page or a Stealth Page.

Cookie: A small text file placed on your hard drive to store information about the site you visited. They usually have two purposes. One is to track visitors and how often they come back to a webpage or how long they stay on a website. The second is to store your preferences about a website so when you revisit the site your preferences are viewed instead of that websites default view.

CPC – Cost per click: Often referred to for PPC accounts. It is the amount of money paid each time a visitor clicks on a link.

CPM : Cost per 1000 impressions. This refers to ad impressions and how much it costs the advertiser every time an ad is displayed 1000 times.

Direct Keywords: These keywords are directly related to your products or services. They usually include a descriptive term. These keywords make up the bulk of most campaigns, and usually have a positive ROI. They are not searched for as often as broad keywords, so sometimes a campaign can be helped by the increased exposure from broad keywords. (i.e. Mexico travel, Pennsylvania real estate)

Domain Name : The Internet address of a website. For example, iDjinni’s domain name is idjinni.com.

DTC – Direct to Consumer: is a term often applied to advertising targeted at consumers and not businesses.

Doorway Page: Also known as a Gateway page, it is a page specifically made to rank high in search engines. There are legitimate ways to use this technique (see FAQ Do we use Doorway Pages). Often pages made with Flash coding or a lot of Java are unindexable by search engines and thus need a corresponding page for search engines to index.

E-mail : Also known as electronic mail, it is the transmission of a file from one communication network to another. It is the most common form of communication on the Internet.

Flash : A type of coding generally used for animated graphics.

G: Short for Google

Hit : Each time a page is loaded, it receives one hit. If a page contains two images, the server logs will indicate one page and two image hits. This is used to measure the amount of traffic pages receive.

Host: A machine that is connected to the Internet. It usually refers to a machine that “hosts” or contains code or programs that are accessible by others connected to the Internet, the most common code or program is a webpage

HTML – Hyper Text Markup Language: This is the base language used to build WebPages.

Hypertext: Also known as a Link, it is text or an image that can be clicked on to call up another document or another section within the same document.

Impressions : This often refers to every time an advertisement is viewed. When one document calls for an ad to be viewed (usually weather is it actually viewed or not) one impression is recorded. See also CPM.

IP Address – Internet Protocol Address: Each machine connected to the Internet has its own address reflected in numbers. For ease of use, most people use a domain name instead of the IP address. However, over time these terms have been mistakenly interchanged.

ISP – Internet Service Provider: This refers to a machine that provides people a way to connect to the Internet. When you dial into the net, your modem is connecting to your ISP. Once you are connected, you can access the Internet.

JAVA : A general programming language, similar to C++ developed by Sun Microsystems. It can be used to add various features to a webpage when viewed through a JAVA enabled browser.

JAVA enabled browser: Referring to a browser that supports the JAVA language. Some browsers need a special plug-in to allow JAVA to be viewed. Also, when changing the security functions of a browser, you are often changing if JAVA can be viewed by your browser or how the JAVA language is handled.

Keywords: Words entered into a search engine to form a query.

KW: Short for keywords

Link : Refers to Hypertext, it is text or an image that can be clicked on to call up another document or another section within the same document.

Log File: A file that contains information about past actions. The most commonly referred to Log File is whenever a webpage is viewed the hosting machine logs the documents that are requested.

Meta Tags : HTML coding that gives information about a webpage.

Negative Keywords: These are filtering words. If your keywords contain a negative keyword, and that word is included in a search term, your ad will not show. (i.e. If your Google AdWords keyword list looks like: Blue Widget-fuzzy (the – sign meaning negative inside an AdWords account)

A search done for blue widget would show your ad, a search for green blue widget would show your ad, but a search for fuzzy blue widget would not show your ad because it contains a negative keyword.

Niche Keywords: These keywords are highly specific, but have low search rates. They usually have the highest ROI and conversion rates among all keywords in a campaign. Often, there are not enough niche keywords to only rely on these to make up a campaign as there just are not enough searches done in a month for them to sustain a business. They are a nice addition to direct keywords as they usually have a lower bid price. (i.e. Mexico city vacation packages, Philadelphia real estate)

Opt-in: Usually referring to e-mail, it is when permission is given to send e-mail (often newsletters and email advertisements) to a specific email address.

OV: Short for Overture (now called Yahoo Search Marketing)

Page Views : The number of times a particular web page was viewed. A website is generally made up of multiple pages.

Portal : A website that has links to a multitude of links organized by categories.

PPC – Pay-Per-Click: The amount a website pays another company when someone clicks from one website to the advertising website.

ROI – Return on Investment: ROI generally stands for the amount of profit made from an advertising campaign versus the amount spent on the campaign.

Search Engine: A website that indexes other websites and when a search is performed, queries its database about the search and shows the most relevant websites.

Server: See Host.

Spider: A program that indexes WebPages and follows links on WebPages to find other WebPages to index. This is the most common way a search engine updates and adds to its database of WebPages.

Sticky: A term used to describe websites that visitors spend a long time viewing. A website with search capacity or in depth content pages is generally more sticky than one without such features as a visitor may spend time searching the site and reading articles.

Unique Visitors: The number of different people who visit a site over a given time frame. If three people visit the site, and two of them return later. The site has five hits, but only three unique visitors.

URL – Uniform Resource Locator: It is the exact address of a webpage. URLs are generally shown as links on WebPages.

Visits: The total number of hits a particular page, often referred to as visits per month. If three people visit a website, and two come back within the month, that page got five total visits that month.

Source:http://www.bgtheory.com/marketing-glossary/glossary-of-advertising-marketing-and-internet-terms/#more-196