Free Offline Marketing (CRM)

Posted by arlene

Just because you are setting up an online business you should not neglect other more established marketing tools. As well as branding all your marketing materials with your new e-business references, you should consider more traditional PR techniques to get your Web site noticed.

For a small business that does not have the luxury of a specific PR budget, there is a lot you can do yourself to spread the word about your e-business. Trade and hobby magazines are often ‘copy light’ if they produce regular issues, so they are almost certain to print details of your new e-business provided it can be presented as relevant to the readership. You might even suggest a short article on the main issues you faced in setting up your e-business and an update on how things are going now.

There is a growing number of computer and e-business magazines that are widely read by just the type of site visitor you are hoping to attract. You could do worse than submit your site to them for a Web site review, but do ensure it works properly before you take the plunge.

Local newspapers are often keen to print details of local businesses doing something different, particularly in weekly business supplements or special reports. Case histories always go down well, but remember to feature the name of your Web site several times and ask to check that they have got it right before they go to press. Good coverage with the wrong Web address is not much use to you from a marketing perspective.

The integrated approach

No single marketing technique will deliver thousands of visitors to your site on a consistently regular basis. If there was a sure-fire way to do that it would probably be a money-spinning Web site in its own right.

The experience of successful new e-businesses has been that the most effective plans involve using all of the free services, with a judicious spend on more traditional techniques and banner advertising, if you have any promotional budget left. Direct mail has a specific role to play as your potential visitors may be clearly defined in a niche market and their names and addresses probably already exist on a commercial list. One example is British Airways, which combined traditional direct mail to the 1 million members of its frequent flyer club with follow-up reminders by e-mail. Twenty per cent of the recipients subsequently logged on to the Web site to check out the deals being offered, in a direct mail market where a 2 or 3 per cent response rate is the norm.

The large ISPs have tended to use brand advertising on television to get awareness, then followed it up with giveaway CD ROMs in local newspapers or national magazines, depending on their target market. So it is worth considering a two-stage approach to gathering new names, starting with more traditional marketing activities to get broad awareness, followed up by targeted, direct action.

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Turning visitors into a database

The final word on marketing techniques must be about the whole question of why you are trying to drive all those visitors to your site in the first place. This is not simply to get sales. The overriding objective of an e-business is to build a database of visitors and customers to whom you can sell and sell again for many years to come. Large companies call this process Customer Relationship Management or CRM.

Realising that all your marketing should be driven by the need to create a long-term relationship with your customers allows you to make the right decisions on expenditure in the early days and the level of investment you will need as the years go by. The likelihood is that you will get many more ‘hits’ than you originally expected but many fewer sales. But your online customers will be intensely loyal if you treat them well and will produce much higher profits than an average customer buying from you in the traditional, non-e way.

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