Lesson 2:

Do: Qualify the e-mail addresses and information about the people and the organizations they represent.

Don’t: Carpet e-mail blast every address in your database.

The experts could not emphasize enough the importance of a targeted database with accurate information.  If a customer lives on the 5th floor of an apartment block, and if the customer gets an e-mail offering a $50 discount off on lawnmowers; its bound to upset them. They are not the target customer for this product and would not respond effectively to your campaign.Its all down to accurate targeting and segmentation.

If the segmentation is done correctly there is a Higher probability of getting more positive response to your marketing effort. Stay tuned for more interesting lessons on email marketing in the next few days. Thanks for reading and learning with Ginger Domain.

Here are a few quick branding fixes that will make it easier for prospects to find you, as well as some tips on getting more fans–or what I prefer to call interested prospects.

Brand the URL :- If your fan page URL is still set with a bunch of numbers, you are making it harder for prospects to find you and missing out on a branding opportunity. Facebook recently lifted the requirement that you get 25 “likes” before you can name your fan page URL. Now, all you need to do is go to www.facebook.com/username and set your name in the URL, which is great for branding purposes and easy link referrals. For example, instead of www.facebook.com/1283743grg3232, my link is now www.facebook.com/GingerDomain.

Name your page appropriately :- Once you reach 100 friends, you cannot change the title of your page, so make sure you choose wisely from the start. Your brand name is the ideal title to make it easy for people to find your page when they search. You still can change the title if you have less than 100 likes by going to edit page, selecting Basic Information from the menu at left, changing the text in the Name field, and saving your edits.

Take prospects to a welcome tab, not your wall :- When you send people to your fan page and have them land on your Wall, your posts probably won’t be enough to entice them to “like” you. Posts are just you talking. Even if you’re giving valuable information, prospects need a reason to be your fan. Instead of having them land on your Wall, set up a welcome tab. A welcome tab can include a greeting and an enticement, such as an e-book or video series, to encourage visitors to become fans. Such sites as www.Facebook.com/gingerdomain.

Engage potential fans :- You need to offer something that will engage people. For instance, you can use Facebook applications to create a poll or launch a game. These can be located on your welcome tab.

Check market insights :- Is Facebook Advertising for You? Recent enhancements to fan page analytics make it easier to know your prospects, including their sex, age and where they live. Also, you can see which posts they like best and follow a viral report showing if they did something on your page that their friends could see. Such viral activity extends your reach to friends of friends. However, this option only allows you to see that your fans are talking about you to other people; it doesn’t share information about whom they’re sharing with.

Facebook fan pages are quickly turning into Facebook websites and interactive business tools. With access to millions of prospects, it’s important to brand your page well, make it easy to find and keep the content up-to-date and engaging.

For more details visit our Custom Facebook page services : www.gingerdomain.com/online-marketing/custom-facebook-page-designing/

If it’s been a while, it’s probably time to refresh both your site’s content and its look. Here is a seven-step program for giving your site a tune-up :

Simplify. Do you have three sidebars crammed with different widgets? Get back to basics. Look at each page of your site and ask yourself what one action you’d like visitors to take — sign up on your email list? Pick up the phone and call you? Whatever it is, make that the only action to take on that page. Too many choices cause confusion and make prospects leave.Fix the problems. As websites get updated, things tend to get hinky in the design. One page uses a different color or font. Another has different margins or a different template. Links get broken. The next thing you know, the whole site looks chaotic or sloppy. Take the time to check each page, smooth out the bumps and make sure information is accurate and links are working.

Get a makeover. If your site hasn’t gotten a new look in several years, it’s probably starting to look Outdated. Customers become bored and feel nothing new is happening at your company. Consider a redesign that reflects your company’s current direction and attitude.

Add news and stories. Want some free media coverage? Start putting out press releases and posting them on your site. When reporters visit, they’ll scan those and get the sense that your business has a lot going on. Each of those releases might spark media interest on their own, too. For extra credit, post a specific media contact name, so reporters know just who to call.

Refresh the About page. Your About page is usually the second-most visited page of any site, which means it’s an important page that needs to put a friendly ‘face’ on the company. Rewrite it to include fresh company news — awards won, new products introduced, offices opened or new team members who’ve joined.

Blog — or don’t. If your business website has a blog that hasn’t been updated in three months or more, it’s time for a serious talk. Blogs can drive new prospects to your site, but a dusty, dated blog doesn’t send a good message. Make a decision to either kick that blog back into gear — posting at least once a week — or get rid of it.

Don’t be mysterious. You wouldn’t believe how many business websites we’ve scanned where the phone number, address, contact names, product prices and hours of operation are either hard to find or missing altogether. Check your site to see if your vital info can be easily found. Get those contacts in bigger fonts, up higher, and visible on every page of your site, not hidden under a ‘contact’ tab.

E-mail can be used by your business to market to customers, alert them to new product offerings, and offer loyalty discounts or promotions. At the same time, your customers can use e-mail to troubleshoot any problems they have with your products or services, provide you feedback, and ask questions.

Due to its multitude of uses, e-mail marketing is part art and part science. It takes a combination of know-how and creativity to get customers and clients just to open your e-mail. We’ve talked to experts and nailed down some of the technical knowledge of what methods produce positive click-thru rates and even purchases. And, want to know what not to do? We’ve got that, too.

Lesson 1
Do: Keep it short and simple.
Don’t: Waste too much time crafting the e-mail.

The message needs to be clear and consistent from the subject line to the e-mail headline and skimmable body copy.If you put too much information or try to offer the reader multiple sales or promotions, you could overwhelm them and lose them. Don’t cram too many messages into a single e-mail or send large attachments that may clog subscribers’ inboxes. Readers are brutal with deleting e-mail. They are looking for reasons to delete and you have seconds to stop that from happening.

Part 2 to follow soon. Stay tuned at GingerDomain to learn more about the power of the web to change the course of business success.

On the more than 500 websites that Ginger Domain manages, nearly four of every 10 visitors enter the site from somewhere other than the homepage. They land on a page for a specific product or service, the About page, a page for a blog entry or even the Terms & Conditions page.

Unfortunately, most business owners and marketing managers focus 90 percent of their attention and resources on designing a stunning homepage and treat the other pages as an afterthought. Don’t make this mistake. Give every page the same care and attention you devote to your site’s homepage.

Check your website’s analytics to identify where visitors most frequently enter your site, and ask yourself whether each page channels visitors to the information you want them to see and to the actions you want them to take. If any one of these pages fails to support your business-related goals, it’s time to make some changes.

If you are unsure of your site’s purpose, this is the first issue to tackle. You should have a clear purpose for your site before you build it, but if you skipped that step, formulate a purpose now.

Every page, not only the homepage, should communicate your site’s purpose and steer visitors to the desired call to action. If you built the site to sell products online, every page should direct traffic to product pages. If the site’s purpose is to encourage visitors to call in for an estimate, every page should include a phone number.

Remember that with the long-tail nature of search, you never know which door a customer is likely to walk through when entering your site. Make sure every entrance offers a greeting, projects an air of professionalism, presents relevant content and actively serves your purpose for building and maintaining the site in the first place.

First, study your website analytics to find out how people use your contact page. If you don’t already have a web analytics solution–which helps you analyze your site traffic, including specific details of your visitors and how they navigate your site–sign up Ginger Domain’s Web analytics services to get a complete insight about your website.

Is this the only page people send queries from? That means you only have one contact form. Instead, why not have one on every page?

People are used to receiving information nearly instantaneously online. Attention spans online are very short and people will use only the most easily accessible information.

If your contact form is hard to locate and visitors have to go through many pages to reach it, few will use it. But having the form on every page or including a link that goes to a page with the form, it eliminates the obstacle of having to find it, enabling people to easily submit queries.

One great thing about this technique is that it reduces the visitor’s urge to close your website. If the contact form is right there, viewers are more likely to take action.

Now before you quickly move on and put a contact form or contact page link on every page of your site, here’s another technique for making your contact form more effective. Anyone can put a contact form on every page, but it’s the way you word your “call to action” form that makes the difference. Your “call to action” form must be worded in a way that clearly inspires visitors to take action and instructs them how.

Every website has a unique goal, whether it’s to contact your company, download a particular product, purchase a product, set an appointment, or sign up for your newsletter. Your call to action depends on the nature of your website goal. You need to craft your call to action to not just achieve your goal, but to relate that goal to your target traffic.

Here’s an example of a good call-to-action statement that relates to its targeted audience, describes clearly how to contact the business, and also offers a bonus incentive for doing so:

“To contact us, simply enter your first name, e-mail address, and comments below and we’ll get back to you as soon as possible.

Wording is crucial whenever you’re writing a call-to-action statement. Words are powerful and must be carefully crafted to get your message across quickly and effectively. Also, the call-to-action font size must be large so it can be easily seen amid your website text.

Here are few ideas to get you started crafting a good call to action :

• Include verbs or “doing” words.
• Offer an incentive for people to contact you, such as a free cup of coffee, coupon or discount, free initial consultation or e-book.
• Remove the risk factor for people by including words like “guaranteed” or “no obligation” so they don’t feel pressured to sign anything or think that they’ll lose money. Remember, no one likes to be pressured into doing things.
• Instruct people exactly how to contact you. You’d be surprised how many people struggle to find your contact form or have trouble understanding how to complete it. Remember, it may be easy for you, but not for other people.
• Don’t require people to give up a lot of information. Many internet users want to remain anonymous and fear the security risks of sending private information online. If you ask people for too much information, they’ll get scared or irritated and won’t want to fill out your contact form.
• Make the form easily accessible. Is it buried under layers and layers of pictures or text so it’s hard to see? Make the form stand out.
• Keep it simple.

Finally, direct visitors to an automatic thank-you page after they fill out the form. This builds trust and shows them that you care about them. It also ensures that the visit doesn’t immediately end after the form is complete.

The reader wants transparency and clarity: make him understand immediately who’s behind the website (use real first and last names, nicknames aren’t exactly synonymous with professionalism) and give him the possibility to quickly and easily contact you.

One way to do that is to not limit yourself to a simple form, but to provide, if possible, some valid alternatives. A telephone number, especially a land line or cell phone number, is always a sign of stability and instills a certain sense of trust in the reader or customer who would like to interact with you in more detail.

Lastly, whatever business is promoted on the website, dedicate a small section to testimonials: there’s nothing more reassuring than positive feedback, especially if it’s left by someone that can be traced. It’s important to add credibility to your testimonials by associating them with existing and verifiable e-mail addresses, telephone numbers, or websites wherever possible.

In Conclusion, using some of the above mentioned guidelines along with a strong sense of understanding of the customer/readers needs, one can utilize several simple, easily available and highly visible channels to communicate with the users of their website. What matters is the ability to apply them and always seek feedback from customers, peers, employees etc. to look for ways to enhance communication using one of the foremost mediums of communication in today’s technology savvy world. At GingerDomain, we will continue to provide simple, relevant and interesting views that will help enhance your experience with the Web.

Stay tuned for more interesting articles and blog posts in the upcoming months/weeks of 2012.

Text content is particularly important for search engine placement. Without original text content, most search engines will be unable to match search terms to the content of a site.

Communicate with well-structured content and good typeset:

• Use titles to direct attention and visually summarize the page’s text content. Separate the page in small text blocks and use <h1>, <h2>, and so forth, to avoid verbose and homogeneous pages that at first glance are tiring and take away the desire to read;
• Use bold to underline the most important concepts and make them stand out from the remaining text;
• Use good spacing, to make the text more legible and easy to read for visitors on the website.

Even though a business may organize to collect, contain and represent information online, content needs organization in such a manner to provide the reader (browser) with an overall “customer experience” that is easy to use, the site can be navigated with ease, and the website can fulfill the role assigned to it by the business, that is, to sell to customers, or to market products and services, or to inform customers.

The above guidelines although simple, and at times fairly logical do not show up consistently in several websites that we come across on a daily basis. Hence, making these websites extremely heavy on content, but very poor on quality and readability.

Stay Tuned for more in our series on Communication.

The wall on all brand pages attracts almost all respondents’ gazes. What you post matters. If you consistently create and publish great content — items that really matter to your fans and add value to their day or contain an appropriate call-to-action — you’re more likely to attract and retain those readers.

Walls also attract the viewer’s attention for the longest amount of time. Again, this reinforces the need for compelling content that builds on itself. Working in reverse chronological order (because that’s how posts appear), Wall posts should compel the user to scroll down the page, keeping their focus and attention on your Wall. You should cross-reference previous status updates as a way to get visitors to scroll down the page and consume more of your content.

Small pictures get attention, as 85 percent of those surveyed look at the smaller pictures just above the wall. As with all content on a branded page, pictures should be relatable to your audience and speak to a need or curiosity your visitors have.

Three quarters of viewers look at the larger picture of the brand’s product. Regardless of how long the user gazes at your profile image, having a great image makes a lot of sense. Look at EyeTrackShop’s own profile image and you’ll see how it isolates multiple images within the same profile picture. Now that’s smart. Follow their lead with your own profile image — include a photo and messaging or a call-to-action.

If you’re a merchant who doesn’t even bother with a Facebook page, you may be interested on the layout and content of storefront window displays for brick-and-mortar retail shops. That study suggests that time spent by shoppers looking at a window display has a direct correlation to sales. The most successful window displays, are those that hold the viewer’s eye the longest. Lots of intricate detail is good — and if it has motion, all the better. The longer a passerby is looking, the more likely that shopper will make a purchase.

The truth is, creating a website is a combination of numerous, complicated steps, each one linked to the next, and behind everything there’s a careful analysis of even more factors. What’s your target? The message to communicate? The competition? The client’s needs? What are the current aesthetic trends? The best colors to choose? The style to use? And so forth, until you have a clear idea of the work to be done.

The basic concept is: the website, once it’s online and at the mercy of your clients, communicates. And therefore it’s essential to keep working until the messages – more or less subconscious – perceived by your visitors are clear, positive, effective. In a few words, what do you need to look out for? In this multi-part series, we at Ginger Domain will try to provide some guidelines to help your website communicate the right way.

Part 1: Communicate the right message with the right colors::

The choice of colors for a web project depends, above all else, on the company colors (if there are any) and secondly, on the target you’re addressing, as well as the message you intend to communicate. Choosing the right colors is truly important, as the human eye is very sensitive and we tend to psychologically associate a meaning with each color. There’s something for everyone.

Before you choose the colors for your web project, grab pen and paper and make an outline of the most important concepts related to the the business you want to represent online. It can help to play with some key words: the website you’re creating is for a day spa? The concepts to work with could be: relaxation, silence, peacefulness, massages, essential oils, aromatic herbs, water…with a mental picture like this, would you ever design a black site? Or a red one? In this case, the right colors could be blue or green, in soft delicate tones. Using other colors could disorient the user and transmit an ambiguous or discordant message.

Stay tuned for more information in forthcoming posts on how your website can communicate the right way.