Customers are the life blood of a business. After all there is no point in producing a product or providing a service if no one is going to purchase them. You would quickly find your business bankrupt, which completely defeats the point of a business. However getting customers is no easy task, especially when you are first starting up. In general, people are creatures of habit and it can be difficult to entice them away from their norm. You have to work to convince them that you have something worth buying. There are a multitude of methods for attracting customers, each with it's own pro or cons. Some of these methods are more effective then others. Frankly it would take books to go over every possible method in detail any detail. Which is of course why there are actually a multitude of books based on these exact things, available at your local bookstore. I am going to briefly cover three such commonly used marketing techniques that are good for connect and advertising to customers; Web banner ads, emails and direct mail manager.
Web Ads Lets face it, the internet has become a electronic advertisement board. It's gotten to point that users often ignore ads completely, or view them only as a nuisance, instead of actually click on the web link. Not to mention the competition for attention is fierce, with most web sites showing 3 to 5 ads per a web page now-a-days and many others bearing even more. You need to have a unique ad that stands out if you want to catch any attention. Otherwise you will end up as just one of the bunch. There are a multitude of ways to make your ad stand out, such as bright colors (careful with colors, they can also drive customers away if they are too bright or tasteless), video, flash games and eye grabbing images. Insuring that your keywords are well chosen is also a major part of making any banner or text ad campaign successful. You need to make sure that your banner shows up to customers that are interested or at least potential interested in your services or products. For example, putting an ad for cooking utensils on a gaming site is likely to get you a lot less traffic and clicks then placing it on a site filled with cooking recipes that actually require the items you are trying to sell. The traffic type plays a large role in determining where to place ads. After all certain sites generate certain types of traffic. A Kids Lemonade Stand starter kit is probably not going to do to well in a serious business community even it is technicality considered a business. Generation, income, and other such factors need to considered when creating web bands and ads. Web ads designed to attract the attention of a teenage girl would be a lot different, and probably have a lot more pink, then an ad designed to attract the attention of a upper income business man. The nice part of web abs that you have a variety of options. You often have a choice between a flat rate per a day or to pay for a click, though many sites either offer one or the other. Pay per click is the most common of the two. You can limit how many clicks you pay for, spreading your advertisement out over long periods or sink a bunch a money in to get a lot of attention in a short period of time. On high volume sites paying for a time period is probably your better bet if the site offers it. Your banner only stays up on pay-per-clicks for as long as you have clicks. If you have thousands of clicks its either liable to end up costing more then a day would or you will end up running out and losing your ad spot before the day is over. With lower volume sites, clicks often cost less. With less people clicking on your banner its liable to stay up
longer. One of the biggest problems with web ads is that your competition has the ability to run your clicks out. It is sadly a black hat trick that is considered underhanded but is still practiced quite a bit by companies and groups who aren't concerned with morals. Since anyone can click on the ad it is easy to get a group of people to click on the link or banner, using up your clicks and increasing your sites bounce rate.
Email Connecting with customers through email is a fast and it's easy. Once you have created the actual email intended to be send out, it can be sent your customers in a matter of minutes.Out of the three marketing methods covered, email is the fastest way to reach large amounts of people. It's a great way to sends images and information about new products and events, and once you have a list of emails, you can send out small numbers of emails or thousands. Many businesses use emails to keep in touch with customers over the year, offering things like discounts and promotions. There are some limits on the number of emails that can be sent out at a time, based on the services used, however many professional email providers allow for tens of thousands of emails a day to be sent out a day. However thanks to all the scams and viruses out there less and less customers are opening emails from addresses and people they don't recognize. It easier to just to trash unfamiliar emails then try and figure out if every new advertisement is a link to a real site or a risk to one's computer. This is of course assuming that your email doesn't end up in the spam folder, never to see the light a day again. Something that is more likely for small and new businesses who aren't yet recognized as a legitimate email by many of the more popular email providers. While email remains a good way to continue contact with a current customer, who is expecting emails and can adjust their email settings to allow in regular emails, it is become less and less successful at helping you nab new ones.
Mail Direct Mail is an form of marketing and advertising that had died off quite a bit for awhile and is now starting to once again boom. The internet originally damaged the amount of businesses that used mail to advertise, but the massive amount of competition online has caused many to start returning to this method, using newer, improved options, many of which can now be done online. Out of the three mentioned, Direct Mail is the oldest method of marketing. Mail has been around a lot longer then email and the web after all. Using a mailing list companies can send out postcards and letters to potential customers offering services and products. Mail lists are generally easy to get a hold of as well and you can end up with a multitude of choices based on location, generation, birthdays, income and so on, to help insure that you are sending your postcards to the best suitable audience. Compared to many other forms of marketing, direct mail is more in your face. Customers generally interact
directly with their mail, with little to no distractions and unlike web ads you don't have to compete for their focus with a ton of other businesses or the website their actually visiting. Even if your potential customer receives multiple lets, most open mail one at a time, insuring that for at least a few seconds your advertisement has their complete focus. Roughly 79% of direct mail gets opened. That means most of your potential customers actually do view your advertisement, which is not always the case with emails and web banners. Direct mail also helps insure that your advertisement reaches the person targeted. Direct Marketing is the slowest of the three advertisements mentioned, taking a week or two to send out, verses the ads and email which generally take only a few hours. It does result in the customer having a more tangible ad, which tends to create a bigger impact when it comes to customers remembering the advertisement.
Information and Links In the case of email, most business generally set up their own email with a provider. Too much depends on the requirements of business to determine which providers can fulfill a business needs. Often times it goes hand in with other services.
Direct Mail •
Direct Mail Information and Direct mail services.
Web Ads •
Google Adwords Google is Biggest web ads service online.