SEO & Beyond: Calls to action, data-capture and e-mail marketing.
A little bit of extra work when implementing a website can go a long way to facilitating future marketing activities and getting clients to really engage with your business.
Let’s try a hypothetical case study.
Two restaurants sit next to each other in a busy shopping strip. Objectively, both are of a similar culinary standard, both enjoy a similar number of customers and both (for this example) have a website.
Restaurant A built a basic website to give them a presence on the web; some nice photos, contact details and some extra info about functions and events. Every so often they may change content, for example opening hours. Otherwise, not a lot happens with the website.
Restaurant B chose a different tack. While the website is superficially similar to that of Café A, it contains a major difference: On the front page of the website there is a form where visitors can add their contact details (name and e-mail), sign up for a quarterly newsletter and in doing so go into the draw for a $250 dinner drawn monthly.
As the whether gets warmer, both businesses make a move to change their menus in line with the seasons. They also add to their services, one adding a gelati bar and the other creating a frozen cocktail menu specifically for the summer months.
What happens next? At Restaurant A, their regular clientele continue to attend. They’re surprised at the new changes and enjoy the menu. Over a period of months, word of mouth means that, slowly but surely the word of Restaurant A and their changes gets around. By then, however, it’s almost the end of summer and the menu is due to a change again.
At Restaurant B, they have a secret weapon. Several thousand people have signed up for their newsletter due to a desire to win a dinner, so when they launch their new menu they send out a special edition of their newsletter to the entirety of their mailing list updating them on the changes. Immediately a huge section of their clientele is aware of the changes and the restaurant is booking out several weeks in advance. Due to their proximity to Restaurant A and some obviously-shared clients, they also steal business directly from the neighbouring Restaurant A.
Restaurant B took a lesson in three top tools to turn your website into something more than just another advertisement: A call to action (the newsletter invite, incentivised by the competition), data-capture (the mailing list created by the call to action) and email marketing (the advent of the newsletter itself).
While there is a cost, it’s actually a lot less than it seems – a simple newsletter based on a template might take 15-20 minutes to complete, while the cost of a dinner to a restaurant is significantly less than what it’s perceived worth is to its customers.
Emerge Online has created an in-house mailing list management and email marketing solutions available to our clients. Contact us for more information!
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