Enpiem Internet Marketing Blog

One of the most debated issues in email marketing is the most effective day of the week to despatch your email broadcast for maximum effect with recipients. Should Monday’s always be avoided? When is the recipient most likely to devote some quality time to their inbox? There have been many studies carried out to address this question. The general agreement is that you should carry out extensive testing on your own email database to determine their preferences from open to click to purchase or sign-up.

A study by Email Centre UK looked at sector differences and for B2B markets found that Wednesday was the best day for both opening emails and clicking on links within emails. Those receiving business emails displayed a number of characteristic behaviours. Early in the week, they believed recipients would be in a ‘delete mode’ when they return to the office after the weekend. They would be more ruthless in clearing their inbox and harsher when deciding what to read or not. Later in the week they were in a ‘wind-down’ mindset as the weekend approached. However, they claimed that content-rich emails such as best-practice documents and insight papers might be treated more favourably later in the week. This was also true for publishing and media broadcasts that featured quality content. They found an almost opposite set of behaviours when analysing broadcasts sent to consumer email accounts. For retail broadcasts, sending email marketing communications later in the week was more effective. Friday was an especially effective day so consumers could make purchases over the weekend.

Omnistar conducted research and believed that Monday to Wednesday were the most effective days for opening emails, but Friday through Sunday were the peak for click-through activity from email. However, they also acknowledge the early week inbox clearing behaviour. Both recommend testing days of the week using your own email database and tracking the open and click-through metrics. It is very difficult to predict a generic day of the week that will be effective to all sectors.

Alchemy Worx conducted their own research and found that just 9% of consumers believed they were influenced by either time-of-day or day-of-week. They believe that week-of-month is a far more effective metric for revenue generating email marketing. In their study they determined that week #5 was the optimal time of the month for revenue generation because this coincided with the majority of UK company pay-days and customers and prospects felt most affluent after being paid. A study into optimum week of the month found that the following week order was most effective: 5, 1, 4, 3, 2. They believed that consumers feel ‘richest’ during weeks 5 and 1, therefore discounting during these months wouldn’t be so necessary. If you needed a revenue generation push in weeks 2 and 3 then discounting would be more effective during that period of the month.

Ultimately, you will have to decide from your own knowledge of your customer base what is the most appropriate day to communicate with your audience by email. This will be based on day sales figures, the latency period between first exposure to the product/offer and decision making to purchase etc. Talk to your sales staff as they will have a wealth of this information. As stated by all the studies reviewed, continual testing is the key to optimising your broadcast effectiveness and giving the recipient what they want when they want it.

Enpiem Internet Marketing provide strategic consultancy for email marketing as well as full outsourced email marketing for b2b and b2c campaigns. Contact us to discuss your email marketing requirements.

We saw this on the Viralbank website – an HTML tattoo!

Have a very Happy Christmas and a peaceful new year from Enpiem Internet Marketing.

Whilst traffic analysis applications such as Google Analytics offer a rich insight into your site traffic and visitor behaviour – how can you assess your SEO at the pre-click stage short of typing in your assumed leading keywords and searching through pages and pages of results looking for your URL? And how do you discover keyword phrase variations that trigger your organic search listing that could provide a new stream of business to your site? Today we’ll look at two tools that can help you determine this.

Firstly is Google Webmaster Tools – a free solution that provides insight into both keywords triggering your organic results as well as those phrases driving actual traffic to your site. The ‘top search queries’ option (located within the ‘statistics’ navigation tab) provides the query that visitors entered into Google and your website was ranked for that keyword phrase. This goes beyond your assumed keywords and provides invaluable insight into phrases that customers are searching on. With the position assessed you can determine suitable resources to invest in improving the ranked position with additional SEO efforts for that keyword phrase. The statistics are split into impression searches and traffic searches.

The second resource is Web CEO – an excellent tool for managing a portfolio of keyword and rank based metrics as well as competitor SEO information and page-optimisation. Here we will concentrate on the ranking tool. The ranking tool contains six report categories with drill-downs to further information as well as isolation of individual metrics for analysis:

• > site ranking – requires you to define a portfolio of keywords and a selection of search engines before it analyses keyword ranking across those engines to the desired SERP depth. Over time this report expands to show ranking trends
• > indexed pages – after your site has been crawled and pages catalogued, the software assesses if each page is listed on the major search engines (and which are not and therefore require further work)
• > competitor ranking - analyses your organic positioning in relation to your direct competitors (as specified by you) on the keywords you specified for the site ranking report. It also shows you how many other websites are listed for that search keyword so you can gauge competitiveness
• > competitor’s indexation - shows how many pages you have indexed by the major search engines in relation to your competitors, so you can determine their site footprint
• > ranking score - provides a concise summary of your prominence compared to your defined competitors such as how many top 10, top 20 etc. positions they hold as well as changes week on week
• > SE results snippets - shows the title and description that is used for your site across the major search engines or keywords so you can optimise your title and description tags

Both tools are free (or offer free versions) and very useful to keep on top of your organic ranking, saving you time manually assessing your positions or guessing keyword phrases.

Enpiem Internet Marketing provide a full search engine optimisation service including on-page and off-page optimisation, link building and copywriting. Contact us to discuss your requirements.

Live chat is an excellent way of providing real-time customer service and support that the customer is in control of and initiates. During the purchase process the prospective customer may have questions about the purchase, maybe this is their first visit to your website and they have issues about trusting your brand – live chat can help overcome these doubts and improve conversion levels.

Prior to the creation of the live chat application, suppliers relied on the visitor contacting their customer service team via telephone, email or enquiry forms. This often led to delays in problem resolution through delayed response to written enquiries or automated call-centre technology prolonging the time between call and human response. Live chat bypasses these issues offering a direct dialogue between the prospective customer and a trained customer service representative who is web-focused. There is no delay tempting the visitor to seek an alternative supplier.

With live chat the dialogue is initiated by the visitor at the point of their question/problem allowing the supplier agent to aid them immediately and answer their questions through their medium of choice – the Internet. Questions can be answered, confidence in the product and supplier can be instilled and completion of the transaction is re-focused. Therefore, it is very important to provide as many touch points as possible for your customers to initiate the live chat dialogue. This will include product evaluation, selection and transaction phases. The shopping cart is a critical area that live chat can assist with. It is very easy to close a browser window and abandon a purchase if you are in any doubt – reduce the opportunity for churn by remaining on-hand to aid the customer through the transaction process.

The visitor touch point with your live chat solution is often the presence of a live chat button that indicates whether the supplier agent is available or not to assist the visitor. If the agent is absent then alternative contact methods such as enquiry form completion can be provided and managed by the chat application. For frequently asked questions, stock answers can be prepared for quick response, speeding up problem resolution times.

There are many providers of live chat software and many of these offer free trials so you can evaluate the most suitable solution to meet your needs. How many chat agents do you need to manage likely volumes of enquiries? Can you identify the page on your site that the visitor is contacting you from and has questions about? Each site owner will have different needs and free trials will help you source the right solution for your needs and budget.

The live chat application is a very useful tool for providing real time customer support, but once you have identified potential stumbling points on your customer journey, you should learn from them and modify your site to remove the necessity for another customer to need assistance at that point. Were product specifications required? Was pricing not clearly explained? Learn from your chat dialogues and proactively provide the answers.

Enpiem Internet Marketing have experience selecting and implementing live chat solutions with online businesses. Contact us to discuss your requirements and how we can help you assist your customers with live chat.

Whilst email marketing is cost-effective and relatively quick to deploy, there are a number of common mistakes that can be made if you don’t plan your campaigns properly. Some are legal requirements that must be adhered to and others are good email etiquette. These mistakes include:

• > Ignoring opt-in permission - violating data protection and PECR legislation by emailing a recipient that hasn’t given explicit opt-in consent to receive marketing communications as defined by the legislative guidelines
• > Confusing transaction & marcomms permission – a client that makes an online purchase will expect transaction emails from you as part of the purchase process. For example this could be an order confirmation or form data supplied for account set-up etc. This is not automatic consent to receive marcomms communications
• > Rushing campaign creative – leading to poorly written copy and poor quality HTML coding that doesn’t render correctly on recipient’s email client
• > No usability testing – failing to assess the integrity of the email creative by not checking how it looks on several email applications and webmail browser clients. For example, do images appear or are blocked, is ALT tag data present on images, are table structures maintained, do colours appear properly or is the email blocked by an ISP spam filter?
• > Content errors – failing to thoroughly check the email copy for errors such as spelling and grammatical mistakes and broken links. This shows a lack of professionalism in your organisation and could raise doubts about your attention to detail with your products
• > Poorly chosen From name – for commercial email communications this should be the name of the company/organisation promoting the product or the name of the brand/publication. It should not be from a named individual unless this is a recognised figure within your market sector that recipients will know
• > Badly chosen subject line – poorly chosen subject lines risk automated deletion by spam filtering software with your recipients ISP or email application or risks deletion by the recipient because of unfamiliarity with your product, brand or
• > Frequency – sending too many marketing emails to the recipient causing them to become overwhelmed/annoyed with your regular presence in their inbox. How often is the customer likely to purchase your product? Is there a seasonal pattern to purchase habits? Try and learn from your customer behaviour as to how and when they choose to purchase your products then aid this behaviour with useful and helpful email communication
• > One size fits all – adopting a ‘mud thrown at the wall’ approach to database segmentation and sending an untargeted communication to every contact on the broadcast list. Segmenting your database will almost certainly return higher click-through and conversion rates, again, learn from customer/prospect behaviour to focus your email marketing
• > Ignoring campaign response data – your previous campaign data will be invaluable in helping you learn from your email marketing and targeting future broadcasts for better responses. This includes open rates, subject line tests, click-through figures, landing page tests and creative variations
• > No clear call-to-action – sending a sales email with no obvious call-to-action such as buy a product or learn more about the product on your website. The recipient reads your email but doesn’t know what you want them to do next and therefore fails to respond how you intended them to
• > No specific landing pages – forcing the recipient to search for how you want the call-to-action to be completed. For example sending the email recipient to your website homepage, then expecting them to navigate or search for the product or service promoted in the email. If you have a specific information page clearly explaining the products USPs or the start of your transaction process this will cut out unnecessary pages that risk purchase abandonment
• > Complex unsubscribe process – forcing the recipient to jump through hoops to stop receiving further marketing communication emails from you (which is a PECR compliance requirement) and will lead to complaints about your customer service
• > Lack of personalisation – whilst email marketing is a mass communication channel, you should still aspire to talk to each recipient on a 1-to-1 basis. At the most basic level, this can be achieved through  email personalisation such as named salutation, through to complex personalisation referencing purchase history, spend level and geographic location

Enpiem Internet Marketing provide strategic consultancy for email marketing as well as full outsourced email management for b2b and b2c campaigns. Contact us to discuss your email marketing requirements.

There are four match types in Google Adwords campaigns which dictate how inclusive or exclusive the keyword matching is. This provides a useful way of further targeting your user traffic, especially on short-tail, higher traffic phrases and determining further keywords. The four match types are: broad match, phrase match, exact match and negative match. The default match type in Google Adwords is broad match.

Broad match is the most inclusive match-type and allows your ad to show if the keyword phrase words are entered by the user in any and with any other words before or after the keyword phrase. For example, if the keyword is ‘broadband modems’ then the search phrase ‘cheap broadband modems’ and ‘buy broadband computer modems’ would trigger the advert.

Phrase match is a more targeted and restrictive match type than broad match and requires the search query to contain the keyword phrase in specific order. although it does allow for additional words to appear before and after the keyword phrase. With our example of ‘broadband modems’ as  a keyword, phrase match typing means that the search query ‘broadband computer modems’ will not display the advert because ‘broadband’ and ‘modem’ do not appear directly together as in the keyword phrase. Phrase matched keywords are denoted in Google Adwords with quotation marks either side of the keyword phrase. Our example keyword would appear as “broadband modems” to be a phrase match type.

Exact match is the most targeted and restrictive match type in Google Adwords. It requires the keyword phrase and only the keyword phrase to be the search query and in that exact order. The example keyword would only be triggered if the search query was nothing more than ‘broadband modems’. The ad would not show for ‘cheap broadband modems’, ‘modems broadband’ or ‘broadband computer modems’. Exact match keywords are denoted in Google Adwords with brackets either side of the keyword phrase. Our example keyword would appear as [broadband modems] to be an exact match type.

The forth match type is negative matching. A negative keyword is applied at the ad group level and applies to all keyword phrases in that group. For example if your ad group used the keyword ‘cheap flights’ but you didn’t offer flights to france and spain then the negative match inclusion of france and spain would exclude your advert being displayed if the search phrase included your primary keyword phrase plus the negative phrase (e.g. cheap flights to spain). You could then keep the primary phrase on a broad or phrase match type without generating traffic for the countries you couldn’t offer flights to.

In practice many campaigns begin with keywords using broad or phrase match to ascertain impression volumes and effectiveness, then they are narrowed to an exact match by running search query reports and determining more targeted phrases that you haven’t initially included. Google Analytics data can further help by identifying search phrases.

Enpiem Internet Marketing offers a full paid search marketing management service from keyword discovery to ongoing management, optimisation and reporting. Contact us to discuss your paid search requirements.

An important part of your SEO work is the creation and submission of an XML sitemap file. The XML sitemap is a webmaster resource that provides search engines with information to assist their indexing and crawling of your website. The file contains a list of URLs plus additional meta data such as frequency of change, importance of the page (within the site) and when it was last modified. The XML sitemap is especially important for sites that don’t have easily indexed navigation such as flash-heavy websites. The sitemap file follows a standard format with an entry looking like this:

<url>
  <loc>http://www.example.com/pagename.htm</loc>
  <priority>0.9</priority>
  <lastmod>2008-11-14T20:16:26+00:00</lastmod>
  <changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
</url>

The full path URL must be included and prefixed with http:// and the file should be placed in the root directory and follow the UTF-8 encoding method. The URLs in the XML sitemap must be on the same host as the XML sitemap file. It should be noted that provision of an XML is no guarantee of a page being indexed or where on the SERP it will appear, it simply provides assistance to the crawler when indexing. Page importance or priority is not determined by the order of URLs specified in the XML sitemap.

The XML sitemap file should be no larger than 10Mb and contain no more than 50,000 URLs. If your site contains more URLs than this then you need to create multiple sitemaps and create a sitemap index file. The sitemap XML file complements robots.txt.

Sitemaps can be generated manually in notepad or similar text editor, although there are sitemap generators online that do this automatically such as http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ which generates sitemaps for sites with up to 500 pages.

Enpiem Internet Marketing create XML sitemaps a standard part of all website development projects as used by major search engine webmaster tool applications. Contact us to discuss your requirements.

In addition to the tracking and analysing of website visitor data with applications such as Google Analytics, it is also important to set up a Google Webmaster Tools account (which is free) as well. The Webmaster Tools service is a two-way dialogue between you (the webmaster) and Google. You benefit from accessing Google data about the indexing of your site and how Google users find your website. Google benefits from your guiding their indexing application (Googlebot) to more effectively and efficiently interact with your site and its content. So what will you be able to do with your account?

• > Sitemap management – creating an XML sitemap for Google provides it with further information on how it should treat your site. The sitemap could include pages that aren’t linked from the homepage and therefore might not be indexed otherwise. It also allows you to specify the importance of each page and the frequency of change to each page (for example an ‘about us’ page might change on once every year but a ‘news’ or ‘frequently asked questions’ page might change weekly or even daily)
• > Search queries – this helps you identify which search queries return your website in the organic listings and which position they are in on Google. In Google Analytics this information relates to the keywords that actually brought traffic to your website rather than those words that were ranked on the results page. This tool can help you focus on specific keyword phrases that should be improved to enhance your organic position and hopefully increase click-through
• > Site diagnostics – shows useful information such as page link errors where an internal link resolves in a missing page (such as an internal link to a page that was deleted or renamed). You can also check for issues such as duplication or missing tags (such as title or description) that would affect listing with the Content Analysis function
• > What Googlebot sees – provides information on how Google’s indexing software views your website and the inbound link keywords and anchor text and page content it reads. This can help you to better optimise your inbound links as well as improve site content to enhance certain valuable terms and keyword phrases
• > Statistics – provides links to queries such as how many pages of your site have been indexed by Google (remember that not all pages on your sitemap will end up included). Crawl stats show the previous 90-days activity by Googlebot and the average number of pages and data analysed

Google Webmaster Tools is a free resource that only takes 5-minutes to set-up and requires validation of your status as webmaster by either adding a META tag to your homepage or uploading an HTML file with an alphanumeric name determined by Google. If you are able to upload either of these to your webserver you are allowed to view Webmaster data about the site.

Enpiem Internet Marketing create Google Webmaster Tools accounts as a standard part of all website development projects and also use these accounts when providing SEO services including on-page and off-page optimisation, link management and copywriting. Contact us to discuss your requirements.

Inbound links are vitally important for both direct traffic generation to your website and a fundamental part of organic search engine ranking. In an earlier blog entry we looked at backlink analysis and how you can monitor and assess how optimised your existing inbound links are. Here we are going to look at some points to note when considering adding additional inbound links.

• > Link page SEO – how effective is the link site/page’s SEO? Within context of your sector/market does the page rank highly in its own right? If the link target page is highly ranked, this will mean the link carries more weight when linking to your site
• > Content relevance – does the content of the link target page compliment your own content type? Is there a logical link between the two sites (i.e. a gardening tools website linked from a gardening forum)
• > Google page cache – has the link target page been cached recently? This will give some indication of how current the site is and when a subsequent crawl might find your website via the link on this page
• > Robots.txt – is the link target page excluded for indexing within the robot.txt file? If it is excluded then future visits won’t be made to this page for indexing
• > Page development – is the page complete or under some part of development? Are there any mentions of ‘under construction’
• > Link volume – how many links does the host page currently have? Are these contextually relevant links like your own or irrelevant links/ads to other sites? The less outbound links on the page is better for you as this makes your own link more exclusive

When you are satisfied that the site and link page will offer the greatest benefit your site, ensure that the link that’s requested is to your most contextually relevant page and the anchor text of the link is the lead keyword phrase to your landing page. For example, our garden tools site would seek to have a link to their hedge trimmer products with the words ‘hedge trimmers’ as the link text rather than the name of their company.

Enpiem Internet Marketing provide a full SEO service including on-page and off-page optimisation, link building and copywriting. Contact us to discuss your requirements.

A lot is said these days about the practice of ‘social bookmarking’ – the creation of private and publicly accessible ‘favourites’ lists allowing you to gain access to your list of favourites from any computer and other users to benefit from your recommendations (human classification rather than algorithmic categorisation). However, it is important not to lose sight of the original method of bookmarking – providing a link on your website for visitors to quickly add the page to their local ‘favourites’ list, and easily find your website again.

In the current economic climate the old adage of it being many times cheaper to keep a customer than acquire a new one has never been truer. It costs enough in time and money to attract visitors to your website in the first place (whether this time to write compelling content or expenditure on advertising) so when you have attracted the visitor you should provide every assistance in helping them find you again.

These days customers are increasingly more likely to ‘shop around’ and compare product and service providers online as times get tougher. USPs are evaluated and scrutinised as less impulsive purchases are made. Do you really need the product rushed to you within 24-hours or is a USP of £10 off the retail price more attractive to the prospective buyer? If the viewer of your website/page is visiting your site as part of the research phase of their procurement process – it may be that this is the first of several visits before a subsequent transaction is completed. Providing the visitor with an easy method of remembering your site is a vital step in this process.

Adding code to your website for bookmarking is very simple and there are many variations of code freely available online that can be integrated to your page and style sheet. The following is an example of basic bookmarking JavaScript that will allow visitors to save your website name and URL on Internet Explorer:

<a href=”javascript:window.external.AddFavorite(’http://www.your-url-here.com’, ‘your site name here’)”>Bookmark this page</a>

When this is done, note your unique and repeat visitor metrics in your analytics software and see if users are returning to your site – and specifically, which pages.

Enpiem Internet Marketing recommend using bookmarking links for your site repeat visitor development and provide this as part of all website development projects. Contact us to discuss your site development requirements.