We agree that a good ranking in Google certainly helps things along, but it’s really only a part of a bigger campaign. It’s all got to be backed up with a bit of advertising, some networking (both in person and online with social networking applications) and, most importantly in our opinion, a database of relevant email addresses.

Email marketing, when carried out properly, is an extremely effective form of marketing. The difficult part is getting the list of contacts. You can purchase a mailing list of 10,000 addresses from a reputable company, but that’s really just the same as printing 10,000 leaflets and sending them around the doors. A typical response rate for this is around the 1% mark, so if you send enough out then you may actually do alright, but we think there’s a better way of doing this.

For the most effective long term strategy you need to begin collecting email addresses from interested customers now. You need to have a ’subscribe to our mailing list’ function on your site, you need to be able to add addresses manually, and you need a way of managing these contacts and communicating with them via some form of mass mailing system. It’s a slow burner, we have a customer who we advised to start building a database of contacts around 5 years ago. Today they have over 11,000 contacts, every one of which actually asked to be kept up to date with news and special offers. We can expect a far better response from this than from the 1% response rate from a leaflet drop!

The best systems include features like auto-responders where a specific email is automatically sent out after a user subscribes, and link tracking where you can view which hyperlinks within the email a subscriber followed. You can then target an additional email to specific subscribers based on this.

One company who is particularly good at this is Dabs (http://www.dabs.com) who sell computers and IT equipment online. They continuously profile their customers depending on the links followed in previous newsletters, so that when new newsletters are sent to you they contain all the items that you are more than likely going to be interested in. Have you followed a link to the ‘monitors’ section of their website from their email newsletter? If you have then you can bet that a relevant email telling you about monitor special offers will be on it’s way to you very soon!

So, what packages are on the market? We can recommend a very good third party system that does all of this, and we can set it up for you if you’re not sure about doing it yourself. It’s not cheap at around £300, but it’s very, very good. Alternatively, we can take care of this for you and use our own in-house system and provide you with login details for a small monthly fee.

Whichever way you decide to go we think it’s vital that email marketing to a targeted database of interested contacts is something that you simply cannot overlook. We really think that it’s more valuable than a Google number 1.