If you do nothing – nothing will happen
This old chestnut certainly holds true for e-marketing or e-commerce. Much more than standard or traditional marketing, e marketing is fluid, fast moving and fast changing. But that is the best thing about e-marketing – because it it so easy to react to. You can start a campaign and usually, within a very short time, you will know if it is working or not. In other words – there are no failed e-marketing campaigns, they are merely TEST campaigns.
But the worst thing to do is ‘Nothing.’ You cannot simply lie back and wait for your campaign to click in. You need to constantly keep track of it. Tracking and testing is not as hard as you think. The beauty of any type of direct marketing, especially online marketing, is your ability to track results…so do it.
A great example of someone pushing the GO button and then simply waiting for things to happen is Newsday (a daily American newspaper that primarily serves Nassau and Suffolk counties and the New York City borough of Queens on Long Island).
As of 2011, its weekday circulation of 377,500 was the 11th-highest in the United States, and the highest among suburban newspapers.
Now about 3 months ago Newsday made their online news site NewsDay.com a paid subscription. So if you wanted access to Newsdays articles online you have to pay 5 bucks a week.
Now this may not seem like a lot but Newsday is one of the first non-business newspapers to charge for their content online. And how successful was it? It was and is a CATASTROPHIC failure. 35 people subscribed to their service. So – instead of pulling back and checking on what was going wrong they simply kept throwing money at the same business model. Until they had spent over $4 000 000 and were getting over 1 500 000 hits a month…by this stage they had 55 paying customers!
It can be very easy to become bogged down focusing all your time on generating traffic and tweaking your website and that’s all well and good but if you don’t understand and interact with your audience, know what they want & develop a relationship with them, no matter how much you spend on a fancy website & traffic you’re not going to succeed online.