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Can Web Copy Writers Learn From Direct Mail Marketing Techniques?
Direct E-Mail Marketing
by Steve Jackson
Would you send a million letters costing tens of thousands to print and mail,
in a direct marketing campaign, without testing the letter content first?
It's what many website owners do when they don't test and measure
their own website copy and content then spend thousands on web marketing
campaigns to drive traffic to their websites.
| Direct E-Mail Marketing |
| Direct e-mail marketing can save you $$$
if you properly test and measure your message copy |
In a direct mail campaign the mailer knows based on test mailouts what to
expect and therefore what his return on investment will be. They basically
write, re-write and re-write until they have the content that gets the desired
response. Many moons ago I used to work full time write for direct mailing
companies and the mailers would ask for 3 or 4 different versions of the same
message and this was the reason. They tested each one with a short mailout
(about 1000 per mailshot) and gauged response to find the best percentage.
So the direct mail marketer has a solid figure to work on. He knows if
he spends figure 'a' on direct mailing he will get figure 'b' response.
Why can't the same apply to website marketing?
| Direct E-Mail Marketing |
| Experiments with direct e-mail marketing involve
testing each variant of copy in short mailouts and collecting data about the response. |
We think it can. We tested this theory for 8 months and for the last 4
months have consistently been hitting the same percentage level (roughly give or take 0.5%)
of conversion.
By defining your website goal and objective, experimenting with copy,
content, persuasion, design, colour and architecture it is possible to predict
what the response of your website conversion will be. In other words you can
confidently predict how many people will do what you want them to do every month.
Month after month. Easy? no, it takes a lot of work but it certainly is possible.
| Direct E-Mail Marketing |
| Principles used in direct e-mail marketing can help you
improve your Web copy as well. |
In a number of tests conducted on a website designed with web services
for sale through a period of 8 months from January 2003 till August 2003,
it was proved beyond doubt that a consistent level of conversion of new
visitors can be achieved. Conversion Chronicles is the result of these tests,
http://www.conversionchronicles.com.
It was found that:
1) Headlines can improve the click through of a page by up to 35%!
Over two months on one page we tested the headline and looked to see how many more
visitors moved onto another page. The first month with the headline "Just On Site,
Improve the way you do business online" only 15% of readers went onto do another
action and stayed on the page (reading presumably) more than 3 minutes.
| Direct E-Mail Marketing |
| In direct e-mail marketing
it's important to have a right headline. |
With the headline "Do you know if your website is a success or a failure?"
50% completed another action and stayed on our website for more than 3 minutes.
A terrific improvement when you consider it was only one line of text we changed.
Ok, we think the content was pretty good anyway but the first headline was poor
and so readers just immediately left rather than read.
| Direct E-Mail Marketing |
| In direct e-mail marketing,
scan-proof means that even careless readers can get the idea. |
2) Scan proofing greatly improves the chances of clickthough in your pages.
By writing for a reader who scans rather than reads and making the key words
appear in bold so that (if feasible) the bold words string together in a rough
kind of sentence we found a similar increase in response to the page. There was
again over a 30% improvement by scan proofing the text. If you want to find out
more about scan proofing subscribe, and get the free e-book. There is a section dedicated to it.
| Direct E-Mail Marketing |
| In direct e-mail marketing,
use active voice writing, addressing the reader directly. |
3) Active voice writing (referring to the reader as you and your) dramatically
improve the rate of readership and conversion. When I say dramatically, it is pretty
dramatic to see 4 times as many people respond to text which says exactly the same
thing but written in a different way. Again there is
a whole chronicle dedicated to active voice copy writing so read it
if you don't understand what I mean.
Of course it depends on the service,
the kind of incentives, the clarity of your content and the overall architecture to the pages. We found all this by using a constant measure in conversion (the percentage of subscribers from visitors rather than the number of subscribers/enquirers)
and a constant control in the email address that was used to subscribe to.
| Direct E-Mail Marketing |
| The principles used in direct e-mail marketing can
be easily applied to Web copy. The keyword to successful e-mail marketing and web
copywriting is "qualified" traffic. |
The implications of this are that if you can do this with your website you
are in an informed enough position to make a descision on what to spend to drive
more traffic to your website. If you get the conversion consistently right then
there is no reason to expect that the conversion rate percentage will change simply because more
qualified traffic arrives. The key word here is qualified. If the visitor isn't
interested he won't stick around so you still need to carefully plan how to
get the traffic (the job of SEO experts).
So if it costs you 'a' to drive 1000 visitors to your site and you know your
average conversion rate is going to be 10% you know that 'b' = 100 of those visitors
will on average be in your database. You then can do the maths and figure out what
the campaign is going to be worth to you. Simple when you think about it.
In other words you have done what the direct mailing marketer does,
tested, experimented and then spent the money rather than blindly
hope that more visitors equals more sales.
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