The adoption of social media is an ongoing project for many businesses learning how to best optimise their web presence for effective audience engagement in today’s multichannel emarketing world.
The great challenge is to create an integrated ecommerce policy that involves a company’s traditional online marketing campaigns linked to compatible social media content / message delivery processes. In truth, over three quarters of businesses have staked their existence upon qualified lead generation through email marketing followed by pay-per-click campaigns.
It’s not surprising that paid search is the second most used category of online marketing, just ahead of general event marketing, presentations and the sending out of Press Releases in third place. Diversity of channels, platforms and social sites has led to increasing fragmentation of consumer behaviour and expectation towards online search, user engagement and customer experience.
Most independent surveys reveal that one of the greatest of challenges to over half of today’s businesses online is being convinced to develop bespoke web solutions designed to raise lead generation (and conversion potential) while at the same time under pressure to move away from “tried and trusted” methods, such as email marketing. Studies have often found that B2B organisations, in particular, have yet to more fully take social media on board when compared to B2C uptake.
Ideally, businesses should already have integrated search engine optimisation with PPC to feed directly into building a more responsive email marketing base. Once again, it is more likely that B2C companies would show greater leanings towards the “sales ready” lead rather than consider the lead potential that may benefit from an email optimisation set in motion by a subscription conversion process.
While it may be readily observed that there is not necessarily a straight arrow from email subscription to an immediately qualified sales prospect, nevertheless, setting goals coordinated with email acquisition sets the stage for more effective conversion attribution in SEO campaign evaluation.
Despite an understandable concern over the quality of email information entered on a form submission, substantive growth can be obtained in overall email information and quality of email address details, combined with seeing a conversion rate of email acquisition at the page level and by keyword strategies. Integration with landing page keyword optimisation is always a critical component of any search engine marketing strategy, yet still many websites have yet to carry out an initial optimisation process or regular keyword updating, let alone think about optimisation for mobile!
New Nielsen research reveals that nearly 40 per cent of emailing now occurs on mobile. A Google sponsored study in April 2011, found that over 80 per cent of smartphone users check and send email with their device. A separate 2011 survey showed that email opens on mobile / smartphone account for just over a fifth of email opens, a rise of over 50 per cent on 2010.
Multichannel integration across mobile and tablets is set to make traditional platforms and communication channels much less user responsive. Full search optimisation rather than holding on to “one or two eggs in the basket” is now vital for any online business to flourish in their future multichannel emarketing and lead generation endeavours.