The new frontier: online marketing

Online marketing is not only assuming greater importance every day, it’s also becoming more integrated with other marketing. For example, a television campaign can direct people to a promotional web site, and a web site may provide special offers to its members via email or by letter.

Businesses are using online marketing to cut the costs of communicating with their customers, and provide more one-to-one tailored messages for them. By tracking customer movements on their web sites via browser ‘cookie’ files and membership signups, they’re also learning more about what appeals to them and what doesn’t.

Apart from being a biscuit, a cookie is also a small text file that is stored on your computer by the browser at the request of a web site. Its purpose is to keep track of who you are (profile information such as your name) and what you do (your activities at that site such as which products you look at). Cookies are not usually evil, and the cookies of one web site can’t be accessed by another, so ensuring a level of privacy.

Using the web well

If you decide to set up a web site for your business, here’s a few tips:

1. Recognise that a web site doesn’t promote itself. Google currently indexes over 4 billion pages. How will they find yours?

2. Take advantage of free links and ad banner exchange programs.

3. Submit your pages to the search engines like Google, Yahoo, and AskJeeves. They should index them anyway, but it never hurts to cover all your bases.

Use W3C’s HTML validator to check your code for any mistakes.

You can’t spam

Everyone is familiar with the annoyance of unsolicited junk advertising email, or spam. Fortunately, governments are finally cracking down on it. Australia has a tough Spam Act that became effective in April 2004. If you run a business and use email to communicate with your customers, it’s important you’re aware of its key points as the penalties for breaking them are steep.

1. You need to obtain express or inferred consent from recipients. Express consent occurs when a person subscribes to a newsletter, mailing list or otherwise provides their email address or mobile number and agrees to receive messages from you. Inferred consent is a little more complex and generally means consent based on a previous business relationship with you.

2. You must provide accurate information about yourself (as sender) which will be valid for at least 30 days after the message is sent. That will usually include contact information.

3. You must include an unsubscribe link in your message and honour any unsubscribe request within 5 days.

4. Address harvesting software or harvested address lists are not to be used when sending electronic messages.