Keep People Clicking

Email marketing has been a major source of activity for the company, but Druce says this involves considerable trial-and-error. "It depends on the actual call to action. If we included a promotion or a bargain, people were much more likely to click through. Just saying 'we're a new company' isn't enough. We have to keep doing things to bring them back to the site. It's important to keep in contact with your existing customers and ask for suggestions."

Knowing your audience is important. "We've experimented with traditional advertising as well on radio and TV, but we found that because our target market's online we can get a much better return online," Druce says. "We also found that if we target a 25 to 45-year-old demographic we get a much better result than with 18 to 25- year-olds."

OZtion's experience demonstrates the potential value of using an email marketing system, but this requires careful planning at every stage. Standard desktop email clients can't handle sending out messages to thousands of people, and attempting to do so may result in your company being blacklisted by spam blocking software. A better option is to either install specific mailing software or hire a third party to send out marketing emails.

Even when you have convinced customers to sign up for an email newsletter, careful planning is required. Evan Fortune, executive director of email marketing company Vision 6, points out that quite different design strategies are needed for different customers. Business-to-business customers need a call to action visible at the very beginning of the email, while consumers are more willing to read through content.

Timing is critical. While the majority of marketing messages are sent on a Thursday, fewer messages sent on that day are opened than at any other time, he says. Sending messages on a weekend increases the chance of a response.

Even with careful planning, businesses remain at the mercy of spam filters and other email protection systems. "About 20 percent of legitimate emails are blocked by spam filters," Fortune says.

Search Engine Optimisation

Banner advertising—paying to place graphic advertisements on popular sites—remains a popular strategy for businesses. However, the biggest area in development for online marketing has centred around search engines.

For many internet users, search engines such as Google and Yahoo! remain a key navigation tool, so becoming visible on those sites is critical. Most search engine marketing falls into two broad categories: search engine optimisation (SEO), which involves ensuring your site is easily located by search engines, and keyword advertising, where businesses purchase advertisements that appear when users search for specific keywords, and pay a fee if a user clicks on that advertisement.

"Initially we did all our SEO in-house," OZtion's Druce says. "We looked at the basic techniques: every page would have a relevant title, content, and description keywords that all matched. We read different articles and tried to optimise our pages. Eventually, we decided to use an external company to go through our site and fully optimise it." While that was a costly and slow process, the company has seen greatly improved traffic as a result.