Helpful safety tips
Return to Make a philosophical shift
After you have developed an online marketing strategy with room for failure and a reasonable timeline to review results, consider the technology you need to support your online marketing engine. Here are a few helpful safety tips:
Content management is the key enabler of your online marketing message
You should be able to manage the content for your website and email messaging from one tool. You should be able to review the messaging and quickly change your landing pages, your website and all of your content. Every piece of content should (ideally) be a champion and have a challenger, waiting to take over if it gets better results. Nimble web content management solutions offered as SaaS play an important role here. Look to solutions as diverse as CrownPeak (my company) to Visual Sciences and Hot Banana as options.
Analytics is much more than how many page views you get
Make sure your website management strategy has the ability to track individual users, especially those that are coming through different mechanisms. The key here is establishing the relationship users have to your content. If you have 100 people hit one page and go away vs. one person hit another and convert to a customer, guess which messaging is working and which isn't. Basic web analytics won't tell you that. Consider solutions that allow you to track those users. Most of the primary vendors, from WebTrends, Visual Sciences, Omniture and Core Metrics, are offering these capabilities.
Email is a communication tool, not a campaign
Make sure you're delivering relevant messages to your targeted audience. The message itself should contain some value to your intended customers, so they are enticed to commit just a bit more by visiting your website. Then, hopefully, they commit just a bit more by signing up for the next step, and so on and so on until they are your customers.
Consider email solutions that do two things: first, they allow you to personalize your messages based on demographic; second, they tie into your web analytics and web content management systems (above) so that all three provide for a complete, closed loop marketing engine. Again, look to SaaS vendors to play an important role here; solutions such as ExactTarget, Responsys and EmailLabs.
If Web 2.0 is teaching us anything, it's that experimenting and communicating with our customers on a one-on-one basis is becoming easier, not harder. The vision that "Permission Marketing" laid out in 1999 is now less expensive, less risky and easier than it has ever been. As digital marketers, we can truly experiment with different tactics and learn to fail early and often. And "success," as Winston Churchill appropriately said, is "going from failure to failure without a loss of enthusiasm."
I wish you a lot of failure on your way to true success.
Rob Rose is vice president of marketing and product strategy for CrownPeak Technology. Read full bio.