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Channel Marketing When thinking about online marketing, I think of every stream of traffic as a channel. This allows me to closely monitor the cost, traffic and results of every stream. In online retail marketing there are a couple vital channels - search engines and shopping sites. Search engine advertising, in the form of text ads on keyword results pages, is a quick way to find your audience. These ads cost between 5 cents and 5 bucks a click, so profit margins must be closely watched. Shopping sites, such as Yahoo! Shopping and Shopzilla, compare product prices of competing retailers. Each of these sites allow retailers to submit text-file feeds with their product prices and links. The retail system I built automatically publishes the feed daily to these sites and reports the results (see report example). Email is another vital channel to communicate with current and prospective customers. This is often the most neglected of all the channels, although it is the cheapest to use. In the past I have designed and built my own email marketing systems, but more recently I have begun to outsource this task and focus on managing the results. My back-office system exports a clean list of emails based on parameters like 'previous brands purchased', 'number of times ordered', 'total amount spent', etc and imports into any email campaign manager. The campaign manager I've been using is Benchmark. Once the channels are fed, and emails are sent, all of the activity is watched through my reports. By quickly glancing at the report I know how many people come from each channel and how much revenue the channels are generating. Channeling will make or break a website. The more control a site owner has over channel costs, traffic and revenue, the more profit he can squeeze out of the web. Here's some quality resources on channel marketing: eMarketer - E-business research and data analysis. They usually have great stats and articles on trends. Marketing Sherpa - Thousands of online marketing case studies. Most are free for the first 10-days after publication. Get on their newsletter list to find out when new case studies are published. Web Marketing Today - Dr. Ralph Wilson's site and famous newsletter. His articles about online marketing have a tutorial focus. He covers a wide range of topics and explains everything well. His marketing newsletter is one of the oldest on the web, started in 1995. Larry Chase - His Web Marketer's Digest is one of the best, most informative newsletters I get in my mailbox. Every week he posts a new list of resources that is relevant to current online marketing issues. iMedia - Community-based marketing information site. Good for feeling out the what's-hot of the marketing world. Channel Links - Search Engine Watch's list of search related links. Includes shopping engines and keyword search sites. Adbrite - Sells text ads on thousands of targetted blogs at 5-10 cents a click. I use this system when I'm trying to figure out the target audience for a site. Place an ad on a cooking blog and a home decorating blog and see which one converts. Bingo! You find your market for about $20. Channel Intelligence - Tech vendor that takes product feeds and pushes it out to about 60 channels. Reasonably priced. A couple of my clients use them for their feed aggregation. Benchmark Email - My preferred email campaign manager. Allows full control of your email campaigns and its dirt cheap. |
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