Seminar: Driving Web Traffic: Building Audiences Using Email, Search Engines, and Links

Tuesday, July 26, 2005

The illustrious Vicki Allpress returned to Philadelphia for her second seminar on internet marketing, this time looking beyond website design to driving web traffic using email marketing, search engines, and links. Back at Settlement Music School, she offered a blow-by-blow PowerPoint presentation for approximately forty representatives of music organizations in the Greater Philadelphia region.

Her presentation began with an analysis of online customers: how they tend to browse and likely points of contact between them and a specific music organization. Allpress mentioned sites related to music publications, tourism, festivals, museums, theaters and concert listings, among others.

Regarding driving web traffic of potential customers, Allpress suggested using email strategically, sharing links with a number of other related sites, ranking highly in search engine results and having a quality website that will merit repeat visits. The benefits of email, she explained, are that it’s “inexpensive, fast, targeted, flexible, scalable, two-way communication, loyalty-building, and measurable.” Also, if used effectively, an email program can be a valuable tool for acquiring and tracking data regarding audiences.

Allpress went into detail regarding the building and maintenance of email lists, particularly regarding the increasingly sensitive issue of privacy and permission-based communication. In order to get and keep subscribers, she noted, it’s important to provide reassurance to customers and not ask for too much information. For storing and managing the information that is provided by customers, Allpress strongly recommended an Email Management System or some other kind of database that can be easily kept current and integrated with other databases an organization might maintain.

Within email marketing programs, Allpress pointed out decisions that must be made regarding whom to target, how the content will be generated for such communication, and how the organization’s website must be kept abreast of the e-news. She spoke about the challenge of getting people to open and read an email, quoting Loren McDonald in Email Labs: “The From line is what recipients use to determine whether to delete an email. The Subject line is what motivates people to actually open the email.” Subject lines, she argued, are best kept short, intriguing, and reassuring.

Allpress also emphasized the use of hyperlinks within an email marketing program to bring customers directly to a site. She discussed HTML versus text-formats, developing a consistent and appropriate look and tone for email programs, and giving customers the opportunity to unsubscribe or change their address. In addition, Allpress explained how taking care of an email list and its members is necessary to avoid being treated as spam: showing respect for privacy, never sharing email addresses, quickly removing unsubscribers or responding to any messages that are sent to you, and ensuring that your email is relevant useful to list members are all ways to build trust and loyalty with your customers.

Moving on to search engines, Allpress explained that Google, Yahoo, and MSN are the most popular engines, with Google receiving nearly half of all search engine traffic. Search engines, she said, rank sites according to relevance, which corresponds to the frequency and location of keywords on the page and to link popularity, as well as more generalization optimization of the website, such as having quality content and good usability.

In working with keywords, she encouraged organizations to, “Think from the customer’s point of view – what are they searching on? What question are you the answer to?” Keywords function best, she added, as two to three word phrases that speak as specifically as possible to the nature of the organization. These keywords should be placed in the title tags and meta tags of the supporting HTML code and not in graphical text, which cannot be read by search engine crawlers.

Allpress concluded with an overview of link popularity, including how to request an exchange of links with a relevant organization. She presented some ways to monitor the success of linkages, and offered several online and print resources on the web traffic topic, including Successful Email Marketing by Debbie Mayo-Smith, Email Marketing by Jim Sterne and Anthony Priore, Permission Marketing by Seth Gordon, and Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug.