To finish off the year, as usual, I’ve picked out a bunch of articles from over the last 12 months which I think still have a point to make. So this week I’m bringing you ten articles a day which you may like to dip into before launching yourself into your 2014 marketing. “An Article A Day” will be back on 6 January, with another Epiphany.
SEGMENTATION
The smaller the email list you have, the more effective it will be. “But wait a minute”, I hear you say, “my email list is what it is. I can’t just make it smaller.” Ah, but you can.
SURVEYS
If all you want from your survey is a pie chart for a presentation, then ask your customers to tick some boxes. But if you want feedback or ideas, send them some questions with big empty panels underneath where they can write in their answers.
TESTIMONIALS
If I visited 100 product pages online at random, I’d be prepared to bet that 80 or 90 of them would give no indication whatsoever that anyone had ever bought the product before. And nobody except the guy at the head of the Apple Store queue wants to be the first person to buy a product.
TRADE MAGAZINES
If you have a company blog, you have a wonderful opportunity to build relationships with trade magazines by commenting on the things they say.
VISITOR SOURCES
It’s useful to think about what a visitor could do which would distinguish their visit as a productive one, and ensure you’re measuring those specific actions. (Then, with Analytics, you can) answer the question: “where did those successful outcomes on the website actually come from?”
WEB PAGE ADDRESSES (“URLS”)
Many of you will be stuck with non-human-friendly URL formats. But for now, does it matter? Well, yes. And there are three reasons why.
WEBMASTER TOOLS
There are so many useful reports in Google Webmaster Tools that it’s hard to pick out the best. If Google traffic is important to you, you need to have Google Webmaster Tools running.
WEBSITE MANAGEMENT
Here’s a checklist of things you should know about your company website. It’s a good idea to have all this information written down somewhere, clearly.
WEBSITE NOVELTIES
Carousels were introduced as a temporary compromise to make everybody equally unhappy. But “hey, at least its democratic”.
WEBSITE TRAFFIC
I’d like to …encourage you to examine your data frequently and regularly, not just in a bored moment or when you have a marketing presentation to make. And the way to do this? Set up reports which are automatically generated at set intervals and have them emailed to you. It’s really easy in Google Analytics.