Imagine you owned a retail outlet and that everyone who came into your store was kind enough to complete a customer questionnaire for you.
In this imaginary world, time wouldn’t be an issue. You could ask a whole lot of questions, such as how people had heard about your store, where they’d just come from, if they’d been to your store before, and what sort of thing they were looking for when they came to you.
How does a search engine know that your site is important?
The web is based on the interconnection of websites via hyperlinks. After search engines, links from other sites are the most popular method of finding new websites. Not only do people use these links to visit new websites but search engines use the number and quality of these links to determine the “online reputation” of a site and then ranks them accordingly.
What Is Email Advertising?
Email advertising is when you place an ad in an email sent to a list owned by another site. For example an advertorial in a site’s regular newsletter. There are also permission lists where subscribers have given permission to receive emails from companies offering specific products or services.
Ads have traditionally been text editorials but with the adoption of HTML email clients’ banners and forms can now be supported in email advertising.
Online, banner ads are the closest thing to offline advertising as they contain a high degree of creative and reach a large audience. Mainly for this reason they have dominated online advertising budgets over the past few years. However they are far more powerful than offline advertising as they can be interactive and be placed in real time allowing rapid A/B testing. Unfortunately due to their cost and consumer behavior online they can produce poor ROI if used inappropriately.
“The average site could increase sales as much as 79% through improved usability.”
The business strategy will identify the site functionality, technology and processes that are required to maximise the sites business potential but the way in which these are implemented can affect their overall effectiveness. It is important that all the relevant conversion scenarios be identified, tracked and optimised.
Affiliate marketing is an essential part of marketing any e-commerce website and in fact most non e-commerce sites can utilise this technology to implement performance marketing campaigns.
Affiliates link to your site using a special link that allows the affiliate tracking system to record all sales generated from each particular affiliate. You then pay the affiliates a commission based on the revenue they generate.