If you’re wondering how your business can benefit from email marketing and how to get started, then this article is for you.

Many businesses get quite excited by the idea of email marketing, but in practice it’s assigned to the ‘too hard basket’. Or things start out with a hiss and a roar, but despite everyone’s best intentions the newsletters become less frequent and eventually die out entirely. This is all too common, as writing content is hard work and it’s often left to the last minute.

You may also be wondering if you really need to do email marketing now that social media are becoming such a hot marketing tool. It’s certainly true that sites like Twitter and Facebook can provide businesses with many additional marketing opportunities (such as viral marketing and very targeted advertising), but email is still the primary means of online communication and we very much doubt it will ever be taken over by micro-blogging.

So now that we’ve established that email marketing is still very relevant in today’s online world, let’s look at some reasons why it is such a useful tool for your business.

1. It’s one of the best ways to passively market your services to your existing clients without doing the hard sell. People often keep their emails for a few weeks, so they will come back to the email offer once they are ready.
2. With today’s technology, it is very easy to track the success of email marketing campaigns, so you can work out if it is worth the time and money you’ve invested (some systems even integrate with Google Analytics).
3. Email marketing is relatively inexpensive, in fact some email marketing systems allow you to send emails for free (up to a certain subscriber limit).
4. It’s a great way to build a relationship with potential clients that add themselves to your list. It may take a while before they actually buy from you, but each month you are quietly reminding them that you exist.
5. Many email marketing systems let you link your blog with your email marketing system, so you publish once and have your blog post delivered to your email list.
6. You can run different campaigns to different lists to test the success of different marketing messages.
7. You can segment your list or lists into interest groups so you are tightly targeting your marketing messages.
8. Emails can be forwarded to many people and most systems can track this – so email has a viral component to it.

So now let’s look at the options you have for email marketing:

1. Your normal email software. You can add your contacts manually to a distribution list in Outlook or your choice of email program. Most email programs have the ability to do this; you create the list and assign contacts to it. Make sure you send the email to your own email address and put the distribution list into the blind carbon copy (Bcc) address field. This last point is vital, as you don’t want your recipients to see everyone else’s email address. This method is inexpensive (you just need the software and the internet connection), but it’s time consuming as you have to manually manage subscriptions to the list. You’ll also make yourself quite unpopular if you keep emailing people after they’ve asked to be removed.
2. Start a Facebook group and use the built in email system.
3. Use a specialised email marketing system (the best option). There are many very good web based email marketing systems out there, and most of them will give you a free trial so you can take it for a spin. They all offer very similar functionality so it often comes down to personal preference and budget.  Email marketing systems are designed to meet the needs of non-technical users, so they will step you through the process. You’ll also be assigned a web link that goes to your newsletter sign up form (which you can add to your website or email signature). You’ll also get a snippet of HTML code so the sign up form can be added to your website. Subscriptions are managed automatically, which will keep you on the right side of New Zealand’s anti-spam laws. This also frees up time so you can really focus on your content.  These systems also provide a lot of reports for tracking things like how many people have opened the email, forwarded the email, and clicked on links within the email.

Email marketing systems for you to try:

1. MailChimp (our top pick)  www.mailchimp.com – accounts with less than 500 subscribers are free of charge, integrates with WordPress and Google Analytics.
2. MadMimi www.madmimi.com – $8 US a month for up to 500 contacts.
3. Constant Contact  www.constantcontact.com – has a free 60 day trial – accounts with up to 500 contacts cost $15 US a month.

To find more email marketing services search for ‘email marketing’ in Google. However in our opinion you can’t go past MailChimp for value and ease of use. The team at TML Web are also very familiar with the system and can help you set up your campaign properly, write your content, link your sign up form to your website, and design an HTML template for your emails.

To find out more, give us a call on 366 3340 or send us an email.

Social networking is a major trend that is radically changing the way we communicate and interact with our friends, family and colleagues. Today, if you want to plan an event, you can simply login to your social networking site of choice, create an event, email everyone within your network an invite and get instant RSVP’s.

As with many big trends online, it’s the early adopters who are the first to sign up to a new site and start spreading the word amongst their social networks. So the website usage grows exponentially due to viral marketing. Once the site reaches a critical mass of users it’s not long before the business applications become apparent. Usually this coincides with the website developers moving to monetise the site in various ways (such as pay per click advertising or pay only services).

So what does this all mean for your business? Well, if you’re still wondering if you should use social networking as a marketing method or if you’ve just tipped your toes into the water, then this article will go some of the way to explaining the benefits to your business and just how you can use specific social networking sites.

We know that one of the first things you’ll be thinking is ‘I’m busy enough as it is, so how can I possibly do justice to social networking as well? The answer is leverage. We’re firm believers in publishing once but distributing many times over. So the same piece of content can keep on working for you on different websites. This is possible due to the development of Web 2.0 where content can be re-distributed very easily so it can reach different audiences.

The easiest way to illustrate the benefits of social networking is with an example. We’ll use a fictional company called Acme Adrenaline Adventure Tours. They put together custom tours of extreme adventures throughout New Zealand. Within the team they have several good writers and keen photographers and they have lots of exhilarating videos of their tours. Every week they are in a different part of New Zealand. They are a prime candidate for social media marketing.

A company like this could use the following mix of sites and technology to reach the right target audience of adrenaline junkies and capitalise on the power of online word of mouth marketing.

YouTube – www.youtube.com, upload their videos each week to the YouTube website. Having a YouTube account solves the problem of how to get videos internet ready and how to store them. It also makes it very easy to add your videos to your website (with cut and paste embed codes). And lastly and probably most critically, the viral marketing benefits of YouTube are massive, so videos could end up on hundreds of websites and blogs. YouTube videos can also be found through normal Google searches (do a search on bungy jumping for example).

Flickr – www.flickr.com – they can upload their photos each week to Flickr.

Facebook – www.facebook.com – create a Facebook page so clients can become fans. Every time someone becomes a fan, the business will gain exposure to the people in the fan’s network – so the fan base can grow virally. They may also like to try the pay per click advertising on Facebook so they can reach their niche market based on demographics and interests. They may also like to create a group on Facebook. One of the big benefits of a group is the ability to email all of your members.

Twitter – www.twitter.com – they can send short micro-blogging updates to Twitter via the web or cellphone. People can follow their updates, and people can discover their Twitter account through keyword searches on Twitter. Twitter can be updated via the web or from a mobile phone through text messaging.

Blogging – They should have a blog with an RSS feed. An RSS feed allows their blog posts to be syndicated to other websites. The YouTube account and Flickr photostream can be linked to the blog so they have a page listing their videos, and Flickr photos can be automatically displayed on the blog as well. They can import the blog’s RSS feed into Facebook as notes – so every time they post a blog it creates a note in Facebook and their fans get notified of the new note. The Twitter account can be linked with the blog, so every time they publish a blog, a notification is sent to their Twitter account with a link to the blog post.

No matter what social networking sites you use, the end result needs to fit into your overall marketing goals, and results need to be measurable. Fortunately, there are excellent tools at your disposal for tracking visitors to your site, and you can quickly discover if you are in fact getting referrals from Twitter for example. Check out our blog post on tracking your website metrics for more information. 

If you’d like help developing a social networking strategy for your business, email us on info@tmlwebsign.co.nz or phone us on 03 366 3340.

There are lots of excellent resources and tools that can assist you with your website, you just need to know about them, and how to find more when the need arises. Here we’ve listed some of the most useful tools for website owners.

Google Alert – be notified by Google whenever a website or blog mentions your business name online. Register for the alert at www.google.com/alerts/. You’ll then receive notifications by email from Google.

Google Insights for Search – http://www.google.com/insights/search/ – find out what people are searching for online by season, topic categories, and geographic location.

Google Analytics – reports on the visitors to your website. It’s free to use, you just need to add some tracking code to your website. http://www.google.com/analytics/

Google Website Optimizer – www.google.com/websiteoptimizer – allows you to test out different versions of content for a page as an experiment to see which version converts better (you will need the help of a web designer).

Firefox is a popular alternative to the Internet Explorer browser. Firefox has a lot of extras you can download that can extend the browser’s functionality. Download Firefox from http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/personal.html

Google Page Speed – http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/ – this is an add-on for the Firefox web browser.  It reports on how fast your website is and offers suggestions on how to improve it. You will also need to install Firebug to use Google Page Speed.

Photo editing – www.pixlr.com – upload your photos to Pixlr, crop, resize and touch up, then save back to your computer. You can even import photos from the web or create new images.

Photos – great photos can really make a website, and they don’t have to cost the earth. In fact there are several sites online where you can get free images, and even more sites where you can get photos for only a few dollars each.

Free Image Websites:

• www.sxc.hu
• http://freerangestock.com
• www.everystockphoto.com

Royalty Free Image Websites (paid images)

• http://www.stockxpert.com
• http://www.istockphoto.com
• http://www.gettyimages.com

Icons – looking for the perfect icon for your website? Then visit www.iconfinder.net to search through more than 100,000 icons.

If your business is motels, then having a successful website should be on your list of ‘must haves’. So let’s start by defining just what makes a motel website successful.

A successful motel website:

1. Presents your motel in the best light but is never misleading
2. Answers the top three questions visitors to your website have:
   1. Where exactly is the motel and what is it close to?
   2. What kind of rooms are available and what is the configuration of beds (single, double)
   3. How much do the rooms cost?
3. Anticipates and answers lots of other little questions that even the visitor may not realise that they want to know
4. Makes it easy for people to contact you by phone or email
5. Makes it easy for people to book online
6. Can be found online in the search engines
7. Can be found online in national and local tourism and accommodation web directories

1. Presenting your motel in the best light

The place to start is with high quality well framed and well lit photos. Anyone who has tried to photograph a small room in poor light will know just how hard this is. You either need a very good lens on your camera, soft natural light, or supplemental lighting, and know how to expose properly. It’s easy to end up with a photo that is overexposed in one place (usually by the windows) and too dark in others. Your photos are a huge part of the first impression your motel will make online, so we highly recommend you invest in a professional photographer. Sure, Photoshop can fix up photos to a certain extent; but it can’t work miracles. The type of photos to take include; the rooms with the bed/s as the central focus, night shots of your building façade with all the lights on, reception areas, facilities, playgrounds, the swimming pool, the bathrooms and so forth. Essentially you want to give visitors to your website a very good feel for the standard of accommodation you provide.

Ratings, Reviews & Testimonials: Positive reviews from third party sites like Trip Advisor should be added to the site. You can even go one step further and link directly to your listing on Trip Advisor (make sure you have an account with Trip Advisor so you can be notified of new reviews). If you have a guestbook, put recent comments onto the site as well. If you are Qualmark rated, add your Qualmark logo(s) to the site.

2a. Where is the motel and what major landmarks or facilities are within its immediate vicinity?

Mmany of your guests will be unfamiliar with your town/city but they will know of major landmarks. So if you are a Dunedin motel and only 5 minutes walk from the Octagon, that should get a lot of emphasis (we recommend putting a statement like that directly under your logo). People also like to be close to; beaches, airports, stadiums and venues. Have a Google map on your site that has a pin showing your exact location. Provide easy to understand driving instructions (especially if your city has a lot of one way streets and you’re on one of them). Be fair in your estimates of walking and driving times, as stating you are just a 5 minute walk to the CBD when it’s more like a brisk 15 minute walk will only serve to annoy your guests (and they will inevitably end up as a comment on Trip Advisor).

2b. Rooms and Bed Configurations

Make it as easy as possible for your visitors to understand your room types, the bed configurations, and what’s in the rooms. Many motel websites are horribly confusing because rooms are so poorly described. Standardising your room names also helps considerably – most people will know that a deluxe room is going to be that bit nicer than a ‘standard’, but it’s much harder to tell the difference between a Tui room and a Bellbird one. Make sure you have at least one image of each room type.

2c. How much do rooms cost?

Pput your tariffs online in a prominent place, on a tariffs page, or on your room page listed under each room type.

3. Anticipate questions

When browsing sites online it’s very easy to forget about the small details that can actually make a big difference to your accommodation experience. These types of questions include things like; is it quiet, are there bus stops handy, heated towel rails in the bathrooms, hairdryers supplied, is there a dairy nearby, check in and out times, cancellation policy, are there any savings for multi-night stays, off-street parking, internet (wireless broadband in room), wheelchair access, sound proofing, restaurant on site or continental breakfasts, etc.

4. Easy to contact

Put your phone number at the top of your website on every page, have it in your footer of every page, and have it on your contact and bookings pages.

5. Easy to book online

Don’t try and do this yourself if you are taking credit cards, use one of the reservations systems as usually it’s as easy as having your web designer drop a small piece of code onto your site.

6. Can be found online in the search engines

This comes with a caveat – as it’s tough out there with hundreds of motels competing for the first 10 spots for ‘your-city motel’ and large tourism directory sites nabbing the first few spots. But you’ve got to at least try for those phrases. Ranking for your motel name is pretty easy to do, but getting those very generic rankings can be a challenge. Go for them, but also think about what other phrases your site could be optimised for (if you’re a beach side Christchurch motel, then that’s one of your phrases). Optimising a website for search is all about making them more relevant, and this is done by using the right mix of words on each page, within links and what is called the Meta data of your site (HTML code). Specialist optimisers can assist you with this. Note that all TML Web Design sites are optimised by our in-house SEO specialist.

7. Found online in national and local tourism and accommodation web directories

Tourism portals will often rank well in the search engines for the phrases you want to rank for, so it’s important to get a listing on these types of sites as the link can help with your rankings, and it also gives you more exposure online. So you may like to consider adding your motel to our sister site www.destination-nz.com for starters.

If you’d like more assistance with your motel website, complete our online enquiry form and we’ll be in touch with you as soon as possible, or email us on info@tmlwebdesign.co.nz.

This article should answer any questions you may have about tracking your website’s performance and provide you with a few new ideas as well. If you have any questions at all, email info@tmlwebdesign.co.nz.

Tools for Measuring your Web Metrics

There are a lot of different website statistic packages out there. Some of them are better than others as they provide more detailed information. Generally, most packages will give you enough information for you to measure some of the key performance indicators of your website. Website stats packages will also measure traffic slightly differently, but you shouldn’t be too concerned over just how your traffic is measured, as the goal with web metrics is to track trends over time. If you haven’t already, take advantage of the excellent Google Analytics system – it’s free and it will give you some excellent insight into user behaviour on your website (more on that later).

Excel

We highly recommend that you create a spreadsheet for your website using Excel, creating a sheet for visits, Google referrals and rankings. One of the big benefits of tracking your key webstats in Excel is that should you ever move your web hosting you will have a backup of your most important data.

Unique Visitors, Visits, and Page Views

Each month you should track how many visitors your site is getting and the percentage increase or decrease in visitors. There are three metrics you can measure: unique visitors, visits or page views. ‘Visits’ is the total number of visits your website receives. So if one person visits your site five times over a month, then five visits will be recorded. ‘Unique Visitors’ is the number of individual visitors your site receives, so a visit from one person will count as one ‘unique visitor’. Unique visitors are tracked by using an IP address (every computer on the internet is assigned either a temporary or static IP address). The Unique Visitors number is not always accurate as the same person could be assigned a different IP address every time they log on to the net. ‘Pages’ is the total number of pages that have been viewed by visitors, so if you have two visitors and they both view five pages, then your site will have 10 page views. You don’t need to track all of these – ‘visits’ is more than sufficient. Copy the visit number for each month into your Excel spreadsheet. You can then do graphs or line charts for a quick visual guide.

Search Referrals

By ‘search referrals’ we really mean ‘Google’ referrals, as in our experience the majority of websites receive the bulk of their search traffic from Google. If your website is in the minority then track the search engine that sends you the most traffic. You could also lump all the search engines together and just track-search traffic for each month. If you track Google referrals, enter the number of monthly referrals for all of Google (including all of the country-specific Google websites). The goal is to have an ever-increasing number of visitors from Google.

Referring Sites

If you are paying for a listing on a directory website, then track the number of referrals you get from the site. If you have a blog that is separate from your website, track the number of visitors you get from it. Perhaps you have gone onto Twitter. If so, you’ll want to track all of the different Twitter-generated hits (including from sites like http://twitturls.com).

Keywords

Keywords are the phrases used in the search engines and which result in a visit to your website. They are logged in your website statistics and are a rich source of information about how people are searching for your product or service. You can also measure whether a recent blog post or article topic has started to generate traffic. Generally, there will be three or four main keywords that generate a lot of traffic.

Rankings

Getting high rankings (top 10) in Google is a sure-fire way of bringing in new visitors to your website. It doesn’t take long to manually check the rankings for your top five keyword phrases. These are the phrases that describe your product offering, e.g. ‘Christchurch restaurant’. Add these phrases to your spreadsheet and enter in the corresponding number of where your site is positioned each month in Google. You can choose to track rankings in either Google.com or Google.co.nz, as the results will differ slightly. If you get the bulk of your traffic from Google NZ, then track your rankings in that version of Google. Most searchers don’t go past page 2 of the results, so you only need to track up to position 20 or 30. If you have a Google account, be sure to log out of it before you start checking your rankings, as when you are logged into your account the ranking results are personalised to your web history.

Conversions

The goal with any website is to get people to act in some way. If they do what you want them to then you have achieved your goal and a ‘conversion’. You can track conversions manually (i.e. keeping track of the web forms completed on your site), or you can use Google Analytics to set up specific ‘goals’. If you have an enquiry form on your website that has a ‘thank you’ page, then set up a goal of visitors reaching ‘thankyou.html’ (or whatever your page is called). Google Analytics will then track this goal for you, so you can find out what your conversion rate is (and which page is converting the best). If you are in a business where people are more likely to pick up the phone and ring you, then get into the habit of asking how they heard about you.

Bounce Rates

Every page on your website can have its own ‘bounce rate’. This is the number of times (expressed as a percentage) that this page is the only page viewed on your site (also called ‘single page’ visits). So a visitor may land on your ‘history’ page from a Google search, stay for a 30 seconds and then leave without going to any other pages. Bounce rates indicate how well your website and its specific pages hold the interest of your visitors. A high bounce rate (anything over 50%) is a cause for concern, so you should look at ways of improving your page content. Bounce rates can also differ based on the source of the referral to your site, so a referral from Google may have a lower bounce rate than one from Twitter (and vice versa). This can help you measure the worth of links coming into your site.

Evaluating Website Success

To a certain extent there is an element of ‘organic growth’ with a website that is achieved by a website maturing online and getting some history and links. However, a growth rate of 20 or 30% or more each month in Google referrals or visitors would be over and above any organic growth and is an indication that any marketing or SEO you are doing is working.