Nowadays, businesses have become more aware that having great looking websites is just not enough. With every competitor also owning a website, it takes more beyond good development for this particular digital channel to be able to contribute to the business. It needs to be discoverable, incorporates interesting content to make potential customers or clients stay and browse, and ultimately have proper call-to-action elements to convert them.

The work after a website is launched is much harder and requires more dedication to achieve the targets. While all those elements above were already considered during design and development phases, it is almost impossible to create the right formula without field tests and make data driven decisions based on the site’s analytics results.

All these lead to 3 components in general: online marketing, search engine optimization (SEO) and e-commerce strategy. The first problem to tackle is, most people (read: clients) may not be aware of the differences and consider them as the same. They might come to you and mention any of the terms and expect it covers everything.

Different agencies or professionals may have different interpretations to give explanation of each of those. Some just want to make the client’s life easier by not bothering about technical definitions and just provide a “full digital service”. These are really smart guys. However there are times when you really need to draw lines regarding each of these services to define scope of work and priorities between them.

Online marketing

I consider it as a marketing effort if you need to create an outline to be done in order to generate traffic to the website. Usually involving consistent actions over a course of time period.

In general, I classify online marketing into 4 categories:

1. Organic or non-paid online marketing
   This is done by promoting the website through different networks to gain some backlinks. Few examples:
   • Posting links to landing pages or blog posts on online discussions/forums
   • Notifying bloggers to review or feature a product or service offered on the website
   • Offline promotion (word of mouth) to lead customers to the website
2. Social media
   No company these days will be able to generate massive inbound traffic without the help of social media. By setting up a good social media profiles and consistently posting latest news and updates through these channels, it would increase the brand awareness faster than any other channel.
3. Email marketing
   Still one of the most effective channel. Never ever take this one out from your online marketing strategy, unless no ones literally uses email anymore.
4. Paid online marketing
   This can be done by creating ads on multiple networks, such as search engines and social media. My favorites, because of the ease of use, effectiveness, and popularity, are Google AdWords, Facebook Ads and AdRoll. Although keep in mind that every industry may have different niche and types of market, so you need to select carefully and always be ready to try different ones in order to get the best result.

Search engine optimization (SEO)

Unlike online marketing which requires financial investment in order to run, SEO is the organic solution. It is also the most difficult and complex to get positive results. The challenge is, you need to compete with billions of other websites and make the search engines to see your website as the most relevant when someone is searching with a particular keyword or key phrase.

The copy of your content is still the most relevant factor. However other technical elements such as site speed, URL format, page structure, sitemaps, they all weigh into the overall score. If your site is bloated and slow to load, it will probably end in lower search ranks compared to other sites with similar content.

It is not possible to break down everything about SEO in a single post. But to keep it short, when you work on your site’s SEO, it means trying to make it as friendly as possible to the search engines and ensure the content is relevant to your target audience.

E-commerce

In case your website does not actually sell anything online, we can also refer it as Conversion Rate Optimization. Every website has a function: to generate sales or leads, business branding, as marketing tool, etc. While the first two’s primary purpose is to drive people into the website, e-commerce or conversion optimization goals are to create a better experience to the users and ultimately increase the conversion rates.

There are many ways to achieve those, depending on the your set goals. For example, if it is an online store, then it will be to sale as many items as possible. This can be achieved by implementing these:

1. Very clear call-to-action (Buy) buttons
2. Product recommendations to cross-sell
3. Product bundles to up-sell
4. Free shipping offer
5. Special promotions
6. Featured products

In order to have a successful website, aside from having a well designed website, you need to consider all components mentioned above to ensure the online channel of your business is getting the results you expected.

The post Online marketing, SEO and ecommerce: how do they differ? appeared first on Michael Sunarlim.

To apply it, you only need to add one simple line on your GA code before the call to _trackTrans:

_gaq.push(['_set', ‘currencyCode’, ‘EUR’]);

More detailed information can be found on their Ecommerce Tracking documentation.

The minor problem is the example only shows the code for newer Asynchronous Syntax. What if you are using the Traditional Syntax? Well you can either update your code to use Asynchronous Syntax or use this line:

pageTracker._set('currencyCode', 'EUR');

Thanks Google!

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What is spam? Quoting from Wikipedia:

Spam is the use of electronic messaging systems to send unsolicited bulk messages, especially advertising, indiscriminately. While the most widely recognized form of spam is e-mail spam, the term is applied to similar abuses in other media.

I particularly find the word indiscriminately to be spot on. You are not expecting it, decide not to receive it anymore, or whatever other reason, but you cannot stop it from keep getting into your inbox. Even if you have a legitimate business and only send one or two emails a year with “hard to resist” offers without giving your customers to opt-out from your list, to me that is spamming.

Some countries have created laws to regulate these types of advertising by requiring any type of business or person to put an unsubscribe link in their promotional emails. Unfortunately for many businesses which base of operations are in countries that do not have local rules that enforce it yet, they feel that it is not required. The main reason is mostly because they do not want to loose their potential market and believe they have nothing to loose. Well, I beg to differ. There are risks involved, which I am going to explain below.

Getting your email and IP addresses banned

By not allowing your recipients to unsubscribe, you are increasing the chance of them to mark the email as spam and it will go to their junk mail inbox instead. Note that when anybody marks an email as spam, the email service provider will also log its sender email address and IP. When it receives too many complaints from the same sender, it can put your email or IP address into a blacklist and you cannot send to all customers that use that email service anymore. Imagine if 30% of your customers use Gmail and your server is banned by them, that will be a big loss.

Cost efficiency and effective targeting

If you run your email campaigns from a third party service provider, there are usually two types of pricing:

1. Pay by the number of your subscribers on your lists
2. Pay by the number of emails sent

In any case, the bigger your list then you are paying more money to maintain it and send out email campaigns. If you have 100,000 subscribers but with only 10% of average open rate, compared with 50,000 subscribers with 20% open rate, you are probably already saving half of the operation costs.

What about if you send out the emails from your own server? Speaking from my own experience, hosting your own mailing list application takes a lot of resources. With every extra email you send out, you need to provide extra time for the spooling, server resources (CPU, memory), and bandwidth. Why doubling your hosting costs just to send out emails that will only end up at junk inboxes?

Building better trust relationship with your customer

Do you get annoyed by sales rep who is pushing you every single week with new product offers that you are not interested at all, even after you said no already? Do you prefer to deal with reps who can provide the information you need but allow you to think first before making a decision? The same rule with emails. By allowing them to decide when to receive or stop information from you, it builds better trust and respect from your customers.

In conclusion, I would like to state that you have more things to loose by not placing that unsubscribe link on your emails whether it is required by the local laws or not.

The post Put That Unsubscribe Link on Your Email Campaigns Despite the Law appeared first on Michael Sunarlim.

Before we go, note that generally there are two types of social media software: for management/monitoring and for creating app-powered content. A few offer both as an integrated solution, on a higher priced plan. What I want to talk about is the later, platform that offers you tools to create specialized content on your social media page, in this case specifically for Facebook brand page.

When you research for these tools or are reached by their sales rep, the most-popular and biggest selling point is usually the contest module. With this you will be able to extend your audience as you can encourage the entrants to share it with their friends and hope for them to be more familiar with your brand or products. Your loyal customers will be excited to participate and post about it on their own social media timeline(s). From there, you are reaching to an almost unlimited number of new potential followers like the number you see from “Friends of Fans” info on Facebook’s insights.

If you are building a solid brand social media profile, the first item will very likely come to realization. If you plan your campaign well, in no time you will start receiving a few dozens or even hundreds of entries. But to expect the massive ‘viral effect’ by making the number into thousands is the next big challenge, especially if you do not have tens of thousands of followers to start with. Only relying on your current number of followers most of the time may not be able to boost the campaign to your expectations.

So what to do in this situation? You will need to actively promote the campaign, not only as posts within your profile(s), but use your existing (and new) digital marketing channels too. For example, most of these services will encourage you to create Facebook ads for campaigns that you are running as the catalyst to reach wider audience. Considering the acquisition cost of Facebook ads can be as high as $0.88 (source), this can add a significant cost to your budget if you are expecting hundreds of new entries from that channel alone. You can also submit your contest to giveaway directories, some offer to post it on their premium listings for a reasonable fee, but from here you can expect a higher ‘drop-out’ rate once the campaign is over. If you have significant traffic on your website or blog, it can be an excellent medium to pass on the information about the contest too.

So, before you propose that budget to sign up to the best social media marketing software you found, do consider the possibility to add promotion costs on top of it. I am not saying it is the only way to reach social media success, there are case studies of very successful campaigns where the only factors are the company itself, its loyal customers and partners, but having up a supporting plan is always a good idea. As social media has become a mainstream channel to any business, you are not the only kid on the block who can offer this kind of promotion therefore the new standard is born.

The post What They Probably Don’t Tell You Before Signing Up to Social Media Promotion Software appeared first on Michael Sunarlim.

Had the interview back in October 2012, but have not been able to share it here. Check it out, I can honestly recommend ViralSweep if you are thinking of running a giveaway on your website.

The post ViralSweep for Your Social Media Powered Giveaway appeared first on Michael Sunarlim.

Here are a few items that you should check with your online marketing and e-commerce strategies before deciding whether to place them and where.

Know the difference between “sharing” button and “follow” button

I have to bring this up, as not all people truly understand that these have totally different functions. Sharing button is like giving a thumb up to that specific URL but that person will not become a fan or follower on your social media profiles. For that you need the follow button, which is like an invite to follow your updates.

Consider the content that you want your visitors to share

Do not, I repeat do not, put social sharing button on every single page on your website. Please consider how likely visitors will want to share the page(s). If your website is talking about, then most likely you want to put the buttons on the product pages. You can exclude the other ‘boring’ information pages like Privacy Policy etc. If you have a blog, then you can put the buttons on each of your post.

Think of it as an encouragement tool not reinforcement tool

Unless you are offering something very special in return, do not force your visitors to like or share the page. This is not how social media works. Instead you are putting the buttons to make it easier for them to distribute the content to their friends/followers. To be able to share and discuss about interesting information they find on the web is the basic principle of creating online buzz.

Carefully decide on the placement

The last thing you want to do is to make the buttons reduce the overall experience in browsing your website. You do not need to place them everywhere (read above, visitors will share if they want to), just pick a spot where they can complement your page layout.

Pick the right networks

Every social media network has its own personality of followers. While Facebook and Twitter are the two with biggest users base and cover practically every type of Internet users, there are specific networks that probably fit best to your content. For professional and business, you can consider including LinkedIn, Pinterest is great if you post nice graphic assets, and so on.

Create a starting point or evaluate the results

By the end of the day, like any other features that you embedded into your website, measure the effectiveness of your social sharing functions. This can be analyzed from traffic and social media reach growth, number of shared content, interactions and so on. By marking the “before state”, you can later evaluate if the approach is positive or only lowers your site’s overall score without providing a reasonable gain. Remember that your site’s load time and design are directly impacted by this.

Now that you are ready to start, I can recommend AddThis to easily create customizable widget that allows you to pick and add buttons to many popular social media networks.

The post Before You Add That Social Sharing Buttons… appeared first on Michael Sunarlim.

Pretty excited to see how effective Google Analytics Remarketing will help in re-engaging our customers.

The post Remarketing with Google Analytics and AdWords appeared first on Michael Sunarlim.

Bluelounge

We launched 7 products this year, should be more if we consider the soft goods as multiple items! All of them are amazing too, but MiniDock and Milo got the most attention. In case you have not heard of them, then you should check them out. My personal favorite is the Bonobo iPad Sleeve. Here are the complete list:

• Nest
  
• MiniDock
  
• Kicks
  
• Milo
  
• Sumo
  
• Shell
  
• Bonobo Series
  

On top of those awesome products, we also launched EU Web Store. I cannot really provide you the link as it was designed to automatically detect your IP address and direct you to the correct store based on the region you are in. You can switch between stores from this page. Our EU Store only ships to 36 countries within Europe, while the US and Global customers will still be shipped from our LA warehouse.

Web Projects

Outside of Bluelounge, I was also given the opportunities to work on few exciting projects:

• id-connect design solutions
   
• Mario Khoe Portraiture
   

Sorry to keep this short in the end. Many stuff could be talked about here, but since this is the last day of the year I should enjoy it more instead of still stuck in front of my laptop. Next year I will try to post more often, the determination from a year before which I totally failed Happy New Year!

The post Quick Recap of 2011 appeared first on Michael Sunarlim.

Preparations

Whatever your target is, you need to make sure that you have prepared most of the aspects so you can measure or benchmark the campaign performance. Here are a few tips I can share in order to do so:

Prepare your analytics code

In this case and most of my posts, I am going to refer to Google Analytics since it is the most popular analytics tool and free. I am not going to explain the steps as I am sure most of you already know how, but make sure you have set the following settings correctly:

• time zone
• e-commerce and currency
• default page

Those settings are to make sure you will get the most accurate data when Google is collecting your visitors’ information.

Set your analytics goals

Within your Analytics panel, set your goals and test to make sure they work and trackable. If you run and online store, make sure the analytics code is working so you can track the transactions accurately. Most modern shopping cart systems have modules that are optimized to integrate nicely with Google Analytics.

If possible, create custom links for your campaign

You can track the source of traffic in most cases within needing any additional preparations, but you will have more advantages if you can set unique links used within your campaign. In case the system you use does not support auto-URL generation for this purpose, you can always use Google Analytics’s URL Builder Tool to generate them manually.

Getting the results

Once you are done with the preparations, then you are good to go with your campaign. Schedule the most effective time, get it started, then sit down and wait. I would suggest to wait at least 24 hours after the campaign has ended before checking on the results, unless you do not need the most accurate data yet.

So what are the things that we need to look at?

Increase in traffic

Your campaign would be considered a total failure if you do not get any extra number of visits during your campaign period. If you run it with a web marketing partner, you may want to compare the traffic they promised to drive with the actual one you are getting. Let’s say they claimed to reach 100,000 users, then you should expect at least to get additional 5,000 new visitors (5% click-through rate) from their network.

Checking the number of visits is not enough though. The following dimensions are also important to measure if you have reached to the right market:

• Pages/Visit – indicates the level of interest to your company/brand/website
• Average Time on Site – shows the level of interest to your specific product/page
• Bounce Rate – lower means a good thing

Number of transactions and revenue

If you run an online store, this is most likely the most important–if not the only–thing that counts and you would expect to get as high of numbers as possible here. A successful e-commerce campaign means you gain more in revenue than what you spent, although it is not always the case. More interesting details can quickly be drawn from these values:

• Conversion Rate – high conversion rate means you are hitting the right market
• Average Transaction Value – are you getting higher or lower average transaction compared to your regular traffic?
• Average Number of Products per Transaction – good to know if your products can encourage sale between each other

For those of you who offer a special coupon code for the campaign, that can be the easiest and more “real time” method to measure the results. Just look from your shopping cart system for orders that use XXXX code, those are conversion from your campaign.

Check the results from other goals/targets

Getting direct web sales are not the only score you can use, you might not even have an online store to begin with. So what else to check, what are the valuable items can be extracted? Well here are few, just to give you an idea:

• Newsletter sign up – consider visitors who sign up to your newletter as your “warm prospect”; they are definitely interested with what you are selling, but maybe the timing is just not right
• Social media sharing – this actually can generate more traffic if your visitors decide to share the link to whatever social platform they like, whether it be Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, etc
• Contact you – if you are offering a service instead of product, then getting contacted denotes a successful conversion; even if you are selling a product, a potential customer inquiry is a very positive thing

There are still many things to talk about based on this topic and have probably been covered by many blogs and books. I am just writing the short and practical version for small-medium business. I think I am going to update this post often, should I get many interests from you.

The post Measuring Your Web Campaign Performance appeared first on Michael Sunarlim.