It’s been crazy busy around here the past few weeks and for good reason. The whole thing came to a head over the past few days.  Because in the last two days I launched all 21 videos for Sabdamala.com to hundreds of prospects.  So, in the last 48 hours I had to coordinate a free and paid membership section of the website, create email newsletters with explicit offers and update a plethora of documents.  All of this was a huge task indeed. I’m glad to have it all done and behind me!

In the midst of this process a friend of my asked me what I was doing to drive traffic to my website and hence develop this market. This friend is fairly new to Internet Marketing and hence he wanted to hear about the fundamental tools I had used. I decided to write this up to not only answer his question but also make it available to anyone else who might be interested.

So, here is the list of tools I used to drive traffic, build a email newsletter database and eventually drove revenue:

1. Google AdWords (Pay-per-Click) – I needed quick instant traffic so I turned to Google’s AdWords program. Since the search volume on my top keywords is not very high I decided to only use the content network. The content network allowed me to gain exposure via relevant websites and also helped to drive relevant traffic. At first I let Google find the sites for me, but over time I started to be selective about the sites and also included some of my own.

2. Facebook PPC – Unlike MySpace, Facebook has a superb ad business model that allows small businesses to reach its 400 million plus members. My market is fairly small in the greater scheme of things.  However, with the right descriptor phrases I was able to find over 15,000 FB members within my geo-target. I created two ads with differing ad text and eventually settled one one (based on performance).  I was able to drive a lot of traffic this way with only a $5 per day budget.

3. Affiliate Marketing Partners – From the very beginning it was my goal to develop a group of very strong affiliate partners. I was able to identify two very strong partners with exceptional websites. These partners included my ad on their websites and also sent out emails on my behalf. Currently I am tracking the traffic from these sites and will be sharing revenue with them as it comes.  I have learned that having affiliate partners who believe in your product is very important if you’re seeking to drive traffic to your website.

4. Association Marketing – This is a bit unique to my market but there are 15-20 associations that I was able tap into in order to get the message out to my market. These are regional associations that serve this particular market at the local level. I personally emailed association leaders seeking their support. The response wasn’t as enthusiastic as I’d expected, but that was due more to the newness of the relationship than anything else. In the end support from these associations helped drive awareness and acceptance.

5. Traditional media – Internet marketers love to focus on the latest online tools and services and oftentimes forget about the power of traditional media. By sending out press releases and providing radio interviews I was able to obtain a fair amount of exposure in my target market. I was also able to enhance the credibility of my business once articles appeared on traditional media outlets. This reputation building helped to assure customers of the product and service.

With all this great traffic coming to the website I needed something to create a dialogue with visitors. If you think about it this is the most important part of the whole process. You need to have a specific strategy on utilizing this traffic. If you don’t then you’re making a fundamentally bad mistake.There are lots of things you can do with this traffic.  And I ended up asking them to join my email newsletter.

After capturing their email addresses I communicated the value they would receive and why the needed to subscribe if they wanted to benefit from my services. Once I had their email address I communicated with them on a weekly basis. I set up an account with Constant Contact to facilitate this process. I found that about 20% of visitors were leaving their email addresses. In a few short weeks had a database of over 400 prospects. All of a sudden I now had a database to market to and that is where I was able to walk prospects through a purchase cycle!

The rest as they say is history.

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Today I received an electronic newsletter via email. This is from a small company here in town. I just realized that they broke one of the cardinal rules of email marketing. Take a look at this image (I’ve included my thoughts on the image – click to enlarge):

I wonder what her open rate is with this format. One of the foundational principles of email marketing is to never make your entire email into one image. Many mailboxes block images and so your recipient sees nothing – as in this case. It is advised that you find a good balance with text and images. I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings but I am thinking about writing back to her with my advice. What do you think?

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There is a new study out showing only one spam email out of 12.5 million receives a response. But apparently that is enough to keep them in business and spamming to the rest of us. My question is can we please find who it is that responds to these emails and ask them to stop the insanity? I’m assuming its a handful of people with lots of time on their hands.

A new study details how spammers – the bane of our email inboxes – still make pots of money, despite only receiving a response to one in every 12,500,000 emails they spam out.

Yet even with this apparently abysmal response rate of less than 0.00001 per cent, the researchers still estimate that the controllers of a network the size of Storm are still bringing in about $7,000 (£4,430) a day or $3.5m (£2.21m) over a year.

Help stop spam by just refusing to respond – no matter how tempting it is to you personally!

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Yesterday I attended a program organized by the AMA Phoenix Direct Marketing Shared Interest Group (SIG). The topic was “Personalized Marketing Using Cross-Media & Multi-Channel Campaigns Delivers Superior Results”.  It was a presentation from Executive Vice President of Mindfire Inc, Joe Manos. He began the presentation by discussing how important analytics and measurement were in marketing. He cited the fact that the average tenure of a CMO has fall from 33 months to 18 months in the past few years. The main reason for this revolving door is CMO’s are, for the most part, unable to adequately quantify the success of marketing programs.

With that in mind he presented the PURL (personalized URL) and CURL (campaign URL) technologies which Mindfire Inc deploys to deliver a personalized marketing message to a target audience. The benefit of course being that you are able to then track the results from this. I was impressed.

The driving force behind the success of PURLs is of course that according to a DMA study 1 out of 3 consumers have said they want to respond to messages online. Online is preferred over 800 numbers or business reply cards. I personally think this number will only grow with time (but he didn’t say that in his presentation and I am sure he would agree). Mr. Manos pointed out that the weak point for many companies is that their websites are not designed to be response vehicles. So, when a potential customer wants to respond to a message and goes to the website the proper vehicle is not available. Hence they abandon their quest.

He had one case study of a Honda dealership in upstate NY that used a PURL campaign which was highly successful. The thing about this campaign he said was that on the creative end it was very weak. In fact he showed us their materials and I agreed it was VERY weak. However, the results were stunning. The dealership sold 40 more vehicles on the promotional weekend using PURL’s than they did the prior year when they didn’t use PURL’s.

Bottom line: As a marketer you need to consider using PURL’s in your marketing mix.