*10 Tips to Keep Your Site Relevant: It's a good idea to re-launch your Web site every two or three years to make sure your structure, layout, content and technologies
are up-to-date and follow the latest best practices. Hot Banana's General Manager Krista LaRiviere offers these tips to consider when giving your site an overhaul:
1. Strategy: Keep in mind what you need your site to do for your business and how you will measure success, then design your site accordingly.
2. Web site ownership: Think about which department should manage the site. It generally makes sense to put marketing in charge.
3. Phases & funding: You can't do everything at once, so choose priorities based on business goals, and create a budget that takes into account the ongoing process
of site maintenance.
4. A Web partner: Unless you have in-house specialists, seek outside technical experts with proven success, ideally ones who specialize in you sector.
5. Content management: Determine who, when, and how to manage content. Establish a content management system (CMS) that will allow non-tech people to make changes in 30
seconds.
6. Content creation: Keep Web writing clear and concise, and include keywords in content, meta data, outbound links, header tags and URLs.
7. Usability and accessibility: Use focus groups to test how visitors will navigate your site, and make sure your site renders on various devices and formats.
8. Technology infrastructure: Make sure you have at least 99.9% uptime and data backups, and check your Service Level Agreement.
9. Landing pages: Don't link everyone to your home page - send marketing-generated leads to pages that encourage them to take the action you want.
10. Measure: Use Web analytics to track visitors, where they come from, which pages they visit, and how many convert to customers.
Source: iMediaConnection.com
*E-mail Marketing Superpowers: Wendy Roth, Strategic Account Manager at Lyris, describes the five powers e-mail marketers need to avoid marketers' kryptonite.
1. Understand the difference between e-mail and direct marketing: E-mail is much more personal than TV, print or paper mail. This should affect how you compile names
for your list, what you send, and how often. A complaint about an unwanted e-mail could badly hurt your results.
2. Guard your data: Your email database is your most valuable tool, so keep track of who has access, both inside your company and outside, and be careful about handing
your data to rental bidders.
3. Write a privacy policy and stick to it: A good, clear privacy policy (not one written by your legal dept.) is your internal guide for handling data. Let your
customers know you have one by linking to it at every touchpoint.
4. Honor recipient preferences: Send your customers what they want, and nothing else. Give them opportunities to tell you what, how often, and in what form to email
them, and whether you can share their information.
5. If they want out, let them out: Under CAN-SPAM, unsubscribes must be honored. Besides, not every unsubscribe means a permanent good-bye.
Source: iMediaConnection.com
*Accountability Anguish: While marketing accountability programs have become an accepted business practice, a new study from the Association of National Advertisers
shows rampant dissatisfaction with marketing measurement and internal accountability processes. Also, while 92% of companies surveyed have some form of accountability
program, there is little consistency in who manages these and how:
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Of companies with formal accountability efforts, 31% are managed by the marketing dept. exclusively.
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42% of marketing execs indicated dissatisfaction with marketing ROI definitions.
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48% indicated poor organizational response to ROI data.
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61% indicated some cooperation between marketing and finance when establishing metrics for measuring marketing ROI, while only 22% indicated full cooperation.
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About half of respondents said marketing and finance don't speak with one voice or share common metrics.
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Only 55% said their marketing ROI goals were closely aligned with their company's overall corporate goals.
Source: MarketingCharts.com