I’ve recently been asked to carry out some e-mail marketing by a client, but it seems that the e-mail marketing market is a circle of contradictions!

My client is a small business & cannot afford the exorbitant charges that Google Adwords now runs up in order to attract business to their website. They are in a particular sector of the market & only want to target the construction sector. After some research into data lists I chose to purchase 3000 B2B e-mail addresses for construction sector companies in just three local counties. The company I purchased from claims to be a member of the Direct Marketing Association as well as several other bodies & assured me that all the addresses were opt in.

Because most web hosts restrict the amount of recipients you can send an e-mail to, to between 30 & 50, it’s necessary to use an e-mail marketing company in order to send the e-mails. However, most of them will not let you use purchased data or 3rd party lists! Their answer is:

“We will design a form for your website, which people can then go to in order to sign up for your emails”. But hang on; isn’t this absolutely useless if people are not aware of your company?! If they’ve been to your website to sign up for a newsletter, then they already know about your company & what service you provide! Yes, I can certainly tell them about the latest offers if they sign up for a newsletter, but it’s useless when the main purpose of this marketing is to make other businesses aware that this company exists & what it does!

I’m bombarded by spam all day, every day, but whilst I’m constantly filtering out Viagra ads & web design offers from India, it appears that legitimate UK businesses are prevented from e-mailing relevant, targeted companies. Surely e-mailing companies to make them aware of your service is surely no different to sending out a postal mailshot, or cold calling by phone. It simply makes another company aware of what you do & that you exist, when you can’t afford to pay thousands for Google Adwords!

Whilst I hate SPAM as much as the next person, if the marketing is targeted & relevant, I don’t mind the 10 seconds it takes me to decide if it’s something I require. I’ve found out about a number of things that I’ve then purchased, or services I’ve used, because I received the e-mail equivalent of a cold call. These are products/services I would never have been aware of if they hadn’t told me about them & I certainly wouldn’t have gone looking for them, because I didn’t know they existed!!!! In fact, I’m much more likely to take up an offer sent via e-mail than if someone phones me, because I like  the opportunity for further research & the chance to decide in my own time, rather than being pressured on the phone!

However, it appears that we’ve become so obsessed about SPAM in the UK, that you are prevented from e-mail marketing companies unless they have already visited your site & signed up to receive marketing from you………..surely this defeats the main point of e-mail marketing…………getting NEW customers.

These restrictions for UK businesses don’t  stop the REAL SPAM – the endless “enlarge your penis” & “buy from this Chinese wholesaler” botnet type junk mail that is the real bane of my life………oh yes, because they don’t follow the UK rules!

Aaaaagh!

I’m currently running a PPC (Pay Per Click) campaign on Yahoo (can’t afford Google!) for my new cheap theatre ticket site, which is themed from the main Cheap Event Tickets site.

September is apparently peak booking time for theatre tickets in the UK, so I decided to go for a big push on some of the most popular & well known London shows.

I’ve set up targeted ad groups – for these shows, containing well researched long tail keywords (which all have a decent KEI) and have carefully worded the ads, drawing on existing ads by well established companies in this sector. Most of the ads are displaying ticket prices, so the “clicker” knows what to expect & won’t click just to see what the price is.

Most of the ads are displaying in position 1 on Yahoo (these bids are around £1, on Google you are looking at around £3 for these keywords!!!) & the click through rates are currently between 3.5% & 14%, which I believe is not bad.

So, following all the rules & strategies I’ve read over the last couple of years for successful PPC advertising & marketing, how are the ads doing?

Well, I’ve had ONE SALE, from 44 clicks! Admittedly it was a decent sale & my commission will be £12 from it, but it has cost me £25 to get it!!!! On Google, I’d have paid triple that, without any guarantee of more sales. The companies that advertise theatre tickets on Google presumably make more money per sale than I do, but I still don’t see how they can make a profit when they’re paying such huge amounts for clicks!

It doesn’t seem possible to make a profit from affiliate marketing using Google (or even Yahoo), unless you’re using such obscure terms, that you then really should be able to obtain natural search engine positions for if they’re THAT obscure.

So, once again I’ll be grateful to break even on PPC & would love to know if any other affiliate marketers makes a profit from Google Adwords/Yahoo Search Marketing?!

I received an e-mail from Google, telling me about their new search-based keyword tool!

They state “the Search-based Keyword Tool compares the content of your website against actual Google search queries to provide a list of relevant keywords which you don’t currently have in your AdWords campaigns. This new tool can help your business to grow and innovate on your keyword choices by taking the guesswork out of the process. Rather than adding keywords to an ad campaign based on what one thinks a user might search on, this tool enables you to manage your keywords based on what you know users are searching on.”

I visited the tool & was presented with a list of over 800 keyphrases, which Google says have been searched for & appear on relevant pages in my site. I decided to pick all the phrases that had a suggested cost per click up to and including £1.00 (246 of them).

I’ve spent the last 4 hours adding the phrases to my AdWords campaign, targeting the landing pages to the ones indicated by the Tool & using the suggested bids. However, as soon as I checked the keywords, all bar one are not displaying due to the bid amount being too low (even though it was the one suggested!). The quality score of the landing pages are also deemed poor, despite them being the ones that sparked off the whole process!

So, thanks Google; for suggesting I use your new tool; only to find that despite following all your suggestions, you STILL don’t display any of my ads unless I bid some ridiculous amount per click! I’ve just basically wasted an entire afternoon on this nonsense & on top of it, the new interface is rubbish! It’s slow, jerky & very frustrating to use.

What on earth is the point in giving me this information, which appears to be totally useless? Their e-mail ended:

“The Search-based Keyword tool actually found 2954 recently-searched keywords related to your site. For each suggested keyword, the tool will also show you:

• The average number of searches per month
• The competitive bidding level for each term
• The estimated bid to appear in the top three ad positions
• The suggested landing page for each keyword

To see all 2954 new keywords and decide which ones to add to your campaigns, go to www.google.com/sktool, sign in to your AdWords account, and enter your website URL. We hope that you find the Search-based Keyword Tool useful in driving even more business to your website through Google AdWords!”

Errrrrr! No it isn’t useful, has wasted my time & has not given me any new (& reasonably priced), keyphrases that I can bid on!

I will definitely not be returning to AdWords any time soon!