The Journal of Marketing

Internet marketing campaigns can boost your business with very low costs, if you plan them correctly. You don’t need to add your banners on hundreds of websites and to pay thousands of dollars. Select the websites that perfectly fit the profile of your customers and place there your advertisements. You’ll be saving a lot of money this way, and your message will still reach to your potential customers. Also, if you want to use pay per click advertising, knowing the profile of your potential customer is also very important.

• What is customer profile? It’s the portrait of your average customer. Every business owner has some empiric knowledge of his customer profile. There are specialized companies that can provide you extensive studies on this matter. Big corporations use this kind of services all the time, but for a small company it might be a little expensive. You can simply put on paper everything you already know about your customers: age, gender, preferences and so on. Once you have a clear idea of your customer profile, it’s the time to select the Internet marketing strategies.
• When it comes to adding banners on different websites, the customer profile will prove to be extremely useful. For example, if your products or services are designed for men with age between 30 and 40 years, you might be tempted to add banners on a lot of sports websites. That’s great, but you will be losing very important segments of your potential customers: the ones that read financial sites, for example, or those who are interested in news sites. When adding banners on sites, you need to select some general interest websites, and some specialized ones also, to cover all your basis. If you are selling sports equipment, don’t promote your products only on sports websites. Yes, people visiting those sites are probably interested in your products, but other 10 companies selling the same products advertise there as well. Wouldn’t be better to recruit new customers? Try placing some ads on women websites: they might be interested in buying sport equipment for themselves, for their children or for their partners. Remember, the most important ingredient of an Internet marketing campaign is variation.
• When starting an email marketing campaign, you need to use a reliable autoresponder. After you took all the time to put together an interesting, informative email for your customers, make sure your customers will receive it. The only way to get a good deliverability rate during your email marketing campaign is if you use a paid autoresponder service.
• Adding a link where your customers can unsubscribe is mandatory when sending marketing emails.
• One of the most important parts of a email marketing campaign is to count and analyze the results. See how many new customers the campaign brought you. Also, it would be very helpful to add a feedback form for the customers. This way, you will get very interesting hints on how you could improve your website, the products or the services you offer.