plümo objectives

• Create a refreshed and modern approach for their customers online shopping experience.
• Streamline order fulfilment processes, allowing for back orders, multiple warehouse setups and direct delivery integration.
• Increase brand awareness and build on existing customer base.
• Migrate from current payment provider to Sage Pay
• Use social marketing techniques to connect with the target audience effectively.

How we helped

• plümo wanted a design that extends their catalogue and brand message online. Having a clear view on design plümo provided a creative brief to which we added our own flair and experience to.
• Using our ecommerce solution Emporium we have developed a Multiple warehouse, order fulfilments and order processing system which removes any need for 3rd party stock systems. This is one our most powerful builds and has future proofed plümo’s back office systems for years to come.
• Emporium connects directly to social channels, delivering news and product information on Facebook and Twitter, this gives a layer of unattend product promotion.
• We are a Sage pay approved partner and with this comes a long standing knowledge of how sage pay solutions can help business. plümo will be one of a few online brands in the uk using brand new services from Sage pay in order to offer 100% PCI compliant solutions and a fast checkout process.
• SEO & PPC strategies have been designed ready for the new site launch.
• We continue to communicate with Plumo’s existing customer base though our CRM solution Diversify.

The new plümo site is due to launch mid September

Surf IPTV Objectives

• Stream video of live surfing events to paying viewers.
• Create an informative, high profile surfing community website.
• Maintain surfing events listing.
• Subscription based system to allow viewers to subscribe to the Surf IPTV series.
• Ensure the site design is SEO & Mobile Device friendly.
• Merchandise and sponsor product online store facility.

How we have helped

• Using our CMS software Enamel we developed a site for Surf IPTV which is completely scalable. With direct links into face book we have created a bespoke social platform whilst harness the power and scale face book has to offer.
• Online pay per view is a key element for Surf IPTV our design ensures viewers can access video streams and archived media on any device.
• We have developed a forum, surfing hot spot area, events listing, blog and gallery all driven by user generated content which includes video, photo’s and written entries from SurfIPTV’s users.
• The merchendise shopping area is handled by Emporium, our ecommerce solution.

The feature list for this site is extensive, we’ve very excited and proud to be be launching mid September.

No problem! all you need to do is harness the power of RSS and a third party application called RSS Graffiti. Add this to you page and then following these steps -

1. Under your Facebook fan page view go to “edit page”

2. Locate the RSS Graffiti application

3. You now need to allow RSS Graffiti special privileges to your fan page, click “click here to allow publishing” by agreeing to this you are allowing RSS Graffiti to post content to your fan page wall.

4. With your fan page status showing configured click the  “+ Add feed” button.

5. Open another window or tab and go to your twitter page i.e http://www.twitter.com/bingproductions when you’re there you’ll see the RSS icon and a link like saying: RSS feed of bingproductions’s tweets click the link and copy and paste the information from your address bar i.e http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/17680944.rss. This is your twitter RSS feed.

6. Go back to the facebook tab/window and paste your rss feed into the Feed URL box. now hit “generate a preview”

7. After a few seconds you will see a preview of your feed and the information below the preview box will have been populated. Configure these fields as you see fit. You can change the style of your fan page posts and enable or disable the changing of your fan page status too.

8. Hit Save

Twitter is now talking to facebook and updating your fan page status.

We would recommend setting up a bit.ly account and adding into the Fan page Settings Tab within RSS Graffiti so that you can monitor your clicks through your various social outlets.

Do you need help setting up your own Social Network Strategy?  We’ve helped national brands like no added sugar & Plumo create an online social presence. We can help you too.

Email hello@bingproductions.co.uk or call 0208 24 26 028 for a no obligation chat on where you would like to go with social.

Many email marketers believe that is the ultimate call to action: It’s clear, concise, universally understood and specific in telling the email reader what to do. Just what you want, right?

As a command, “click here” is beautiful in its simplicity, but it falls far short as a call to action – the trigger to launch the customer on the complicated path to conversion – because it doesn’t tell your email readers what you really want them to do.

Nor does it answer that universal question all readers have that drives so many actions: “What’s in it for me?”

If your email marketing program is not delivering the results you need to see, even after you conquer the physical challenges of deliverability and list-building, the problem may lie instead in your call to action, particularly if you rely on “click here.”

In email marketing, the call to action has three elements: the action you want the reader to take, the words you use to issue the call, and its physical appearance (text, image, location).

Here’s 6 Steps to make sure calls to actions work for you

1. Separate the Click from the Call

In the standard email message, you don’t have a lot of space to tell people why they should click a link. So, the call to action – or CTA, the phrase that will compel the reader to click the link and start down the conversion path – must deliver as much information as possible in just a few words.

That’s where “click here” fails to deliver.

We can understand how “click here” got promoted from simple command to lofty CTA. The click is something we all understand. It’s easy for the reader to visualise the physical action you want them to take, because it’s simpler than saying “Please click your mouse button on this link so that you will jump from this email to the specially designed landing page we have created for you at our Web site.”

The click also is the basic unit for measuring the click-through rate (CTR), a common measure of success for an email marketing campaign. However, this “one size fits all” command doesn’t serve the needs of the call to action, which requires a custom fit varying with the sender, the recipient and the ultimate result.

For a retailer, the email message tells the customer, “Buy now!” However, the buying process doesn’t necessarily start when the reader clicks through to the Web site.

Instead, the link you provide takes the customer to a product page for more information: product descriptions, pricing, image shots, discount amount, and the like.

So, the email message isn’t necessarily asking the customer to commit to a purchase but merely to learn more about the product. If the customer isn’t ready to seal the deal right from the email message, “click here” might appear to demand a greater commitment than he or she is willing to make. “Learn more” might actually more closely reflect what’s going on in the customer’s head.

An email publisher has a different end result in mind. Newsletters usually contain article abstracts or introductory paragraphs. The action, then, becomes “Read the full story.” Again, “click here” inadequately expresses the action you want readers to take.

Be realistic and clear about what actions you want your email message to inspire. This will help direct you to design an effective call to action.

2. Express the CTA Clearly

Once you know the action your email message should inspire, you must design the call so that it tells the reader what to do and what to expect for doing it.

As with so much else in marketing, a CTA often explains the benefit the reader will get, answering the “what’s in it for me?” question, and should be expressed as an action. Again, this varies with the email’s type and purpose.

Marketers whose email message generates a product or service purchase should match the CTA to the landing page where the email link will send clickers. If it’s a page of images showing different varieties of the same product, the call could invite people this way: “See all 20 colours here.” Or, if you simply must include the word “click:” “Click to see all 20 vibrant colors.”

Informational messages – e-newsletters, bulletins, updates – direct readers to get the full story at the Web site. Again, you need to tell people not only what to do but what to expect by doing it. “Learn more techniques to increase click-through rates” is both information and action-oriented, where “click here” falls flat.

One other shortcoming with using “click here” as your main CTA: It’s repetitive and boring! Vary the wording to reflect where in the sales cycle your customers probably are, what you’re saying in the body copy that leads up to or surrounds the CTA … just don’t repeat it more than once in one message.

3. Sprinkle Links Generously

Obviously, the CTA must be a click-able link. But that cannot be your readers’ only path to the landing page. People will click on domains, product names, etc, within the body copy just as they’ll click on the CTA at the end of the copy. Giving them more options will increase your total CTR.

Examples:

Newsletter readers often click on an article headline as well as the call-to-action link. Make headlines informative and action-oriented, so that they can perform this double duty.

The same is true for commercial email. The product or service name and images should link directly to the landing page. Never strand a shopper on your home page or a general information site.

4. Use Text to Make CTAs Stand Out

Besides linking the product or service name to your landing page, you should also boldface it to help it catch the eye, especially if you rely on text more than images to tell your story. Boldface makes scanning much easier.

You can also boldface action words, key phrases and anything else that can drive the reader’s eye down to the official call to action. (These can be but don’t necessarily have to be hyperlinked.)

Most importantly, though: Boldface the CTA. (See how that got your attention in this paragraph?)

We often see copy that sprinkles boldface type too liberally through a message, only to camouflage the CTA in plain text and make it look like the least-important part of the copy. CTAs need to stand out, not blend in:

• Increase the font size of the CTA – don’t shrink it. Make it prominent and obvious.
• Use white space to offset or highlight the CTA. If the action at the end of an article abstract is to read the full story, don’t just run the last sentence into the CTA. Use a hard return, indent and make it easy to see exactly where the CTA is.

5. Location, Location, Location

The most obvious place to drop a CTA is at the end of the copy. But readers jump around when they read. That’s another reason to boost the number of links to your landing page. But also drop the CTA higher up in the body copy, where appropriate.

6. Three Ways to Use Images Better

We often see three huge errors in image-based CTAs:

• The missing link: Readers click on logos, product shots and brand names, but often you see them not hyperlinked. If nothing happens when they click, they’ll assume the email is broken, delete it and be done with it and you.
• Image-blocking: It’s a big problem, and one that’s going to get worse as more email programs block images by default as a way to protect users against spam and viruses. If your CTA is enclosed in an image, and if the image is not displayed, neither is your CTA. This is a no-brainier, yet we see it happening all the time.
• Image maps: Image maps highlight a small region that restricts where the user can click. we see the “click here” text in offer-related images mapped so that only those words will drive the action, and not the full image. If you restrict where users can click, you make it more difficult for them to respond to your offer. That will depress your CTR. Use text links for navigation and to get around preview pane and image blocking limits. Make the entire image click able, and include supporting text under the image and in the “alt” tag the reader can click if the image is disabled.

Calls to Action (CTA’s) In a Nutshell:

Adding more CTAs, and using CTAs that are more clear and obvious, will make your email marketing more effective in driving conversions – no matter what that conversion might be.

Make it easy for the recipient to understand not just where but why to click through, and what they can expect on the other side, and you’ll see your CTR increase.

Do you have the right team behind your email marketing campaigns?
For a free review of your current process please email: hello@bingproductions.co.uk
or call : +44 (0) 208 24 26 028

There is no clear cut indication on open rates and how good they should or shouldn’t be. However, there are measures in place to allow you to get the best possible delivery rate which in turn should yield a positive open rate.

When building a new campaign you should follow this structure :

1. Use a consistent “From” field.
2. Personalise the “To” field.
3. Don’t keep mailing to someone if they have unsubscribed.
4. Remove bounces from your list.
5. Don’t use the recipient’s email address in the subject line.
6. Don’t use multiple exclamation marks or currency signs.
7. Ask recipients to add your email address to their “trusted sender” or
“whitelist” list or Address Book.
8. Avoid javascript, embedded forms, and hidden text in HTML emails.

Further to these 8 points we also advise

1. Provide your company’s contact details including the valid physical postal address. For Example: Bing Productions, The Maidstone Studios New Cut Road, Maidstone ME14 5NZ

2. Include a live link to unsubscribe or a return email address that enables the recipient to request that you do not send future email messages to them. For Example: “Click on this link to unsubscribe to our mailing list [live link].” or “To no longer receive these emails, please reply to this email with UNSUBSCRIBE in the subject line.”

3. Include the specific recipient – Mr. [NAME] or Ms. [NAME] For Example: “Hello Mr. Smith” or “Hello Jane”

4. Include a short description as to where you got the email address of the recipient. This will remind them that you are sending information that they voluntarily signed up for. For Example: “You indicated you would like to receive newsletters when you registered on our website. We respect your privacy and will never release data we’ve collected from you to anyone.”

5. Send to opt in addresses only.

If you are using our email marketing solution Diversify you are half way there with the above points as our system will guide you through each step to ensure your email is a) delivered and b) opened.

Getting the best open rate is 60% in campaign preparation and 40% design & content. Subject lines play a massive part in grabbing your recipients attention and these have to be both eye catching and related to the promotion, offer or news contained in the body of your email.

the CAN-SPAM act offer a good resource to make sure your emails comply to their guidelines. You can find out more here

CRM

Using our email marketing solution we are able to ensure deliverability and engagement to their existing customers. We send compelling campaigns to ensure high click through rates which turn into sales and repeat business for no added sugar.

1. Wrong list.

The right audience is paramount. It seems quite obvious, but also presupposes knowledge of your target reader. If you have slowly developed your own list through a double opt in subscription on your Web site, congratulations. You should have this list issue pretty well dialed. It’s when you start renting lists that this becomes a major issue. You can use magazines’ list rentals and the information they provide on their audience as your barometer for all list procurement. Based on direct mail metrics, the list is said to account for 40% of your success rate. That’s pretty significant. If you’re out list shopping, be cautious, metrics driven, demand more information, and test the waters. We can help your with finding the best list for your business, just contact us here for more information.

2. Irrelevant content.

Once you’re pretty sure you have the right audience, it makes sense that you need the right content. Relevancy takes into account content, creative, audience, timing. This doesn’t require higher calculus to figure out, but does support of lot of marketing strategy development. It is said to account for another 40% of your success rate. Readers will only respond to information that is important to them and engaging enough to consider. Of course, this is always easier said than it is to actually accomplish.

3. Poor creative execution.

Even with the correct list and great content, your message will be lost without reasonably professional creative development. This includes “from” and subject lines, graphic treatments, artwork, photos, logos, colors, fonts, formatting, as well as spelling, grammar, and the amount of information. Traditionally, creative is said to account for the last part of the 40-40-20 percent rule of your success rate, though I tend to believe it’s far more important, intricate and subtle. With all the sales drumming and information bombardment nowadays, how are you going to attract your audience? Is your email engaging? Is the offer and its layout intriguing? Do you offer a reason to learn more?

4. No call to action nor landing page.

Now that I’ve opened your email and I’m reading it because the artwork and offer are quite interesting, you need to give me a reason to click, a purpose to learn more, a sense of urgency to act, a hook to take the plunge. Any combination of: “call today,” “act now,” “learn more,” “sale ends Friday,” will usually do the trick, depending on your sales style and needs. Once I do click on the link, I want the landing page on your Web site to be just as relevant. It should continue with stellar content and creative to bring me closer to browsing, shopping, finalising the sale, or sharing information.

5. Ill timed frequency and delivery.

Readers can only tolerate receiving so many marketing emails from you each month. It’s necessary to know where you must draw the line before you cross it. Readers who feel badgered will unsubscribe from your list. Be cautious and nurture your list. Make each email matter. When you do hit the send button, do it on Tuesdays or Wednesdays, sometimes Thursdays. Statistics show these are the best times of the week. The good news here is that timing and frequency are completely flexible, testable, and easy to change. Start tracking when you send your emails and how often, then watch to see how these affect your success rate.

6. Dearth of strategy and campaign.

Successful email marketing requires forethought, planning and a budget to continue with a campaign. The same holds true for advertising in any medium. A single insertion ad in the local newspaper, for instance, is nearly a complete waste of money. However, an ongoing media buy in several local and regional publications along with radio, Web and outdoor is a powerful combination. The trick is to hit your audience with the right message more than once, without violating email frequency expectations. For example, if you have a yearly event, you can email pre-show to elicit excitement, during the show with news, and post-show with pictures and commentary. To do it well requires some thoughts around a campaign that ties into the event.

7. Opaque to transparency.

The work necessary to appear transparent is part and parcel in the email marketing gig, especially for a list that you rent. Your audience needs to trust that you’re not hiding online viruses or worse. Interestingly, the same elements that can help alleviate these concerns are also helpful for improving click through rates. Here’s another area where writing superior “from” and subject lines becomes essential to your success. It’s also helpful to include a signature with contact information and make it simple to manage subscription accounts and to unsubscribe.

Seven common mistakes.

We’ll file this under basic, though these bad habits are still rampant among the expert class. Surely there are more, such as harboring the wrong expectations or using home email systems for bulk mail delivery. But these seven will suffice for now. It’s enough to keep any email marketer busy for some time. Good luck! And please let us know how it goes.

Looking for a email marketing solution ? why not sign up for a free 30day trial of Diversify email marketing platform right here

One of the major benefits of email marketing is that email is free, but obviously this is the same reason why spam has become so popular and so frustrating. With spam comes spam filters and with spam filters comes the blocking of legitimate email.

In this article we’ll try and describe the basic steps that can help reduce the number of emails you send out that get blocked by spam filters — hopefully resulting in a more rewarding marketing effort.

Many spam filters work by analyzing the email based on its content and the words used. Many words — such as free, sex and so forth — are very heavy spam trigger keywords. Your priority should be to avoid such words while keeping your newsletter as professional as possible.

Later in this article we will show you a technique that we use to help us detect words that could trigger spam filters that we may have missed.

When formatting your email, keep it simple and professional. Excessive use of different colors, fonts, sizes, images and so forth will result in a higher spam filtering rate. Keep your email as clean as possible, and try to stick to a maximum of 2 or 3 different font types and sizes. Overly large sized fonts will surely add to an email being flagged as spam, as will too many images (or not enough text).

Try and use a short and simple stylesheet rather than using font tags excessively. Most spam filters don’t appreciate a multitude of font tags and inline formatting, and the more primitive filters can’t detect stylesheets so they will not penalize as easily.

Use a template if you plan on sending newsletters consistently. This will make sure that all your newsletters look and feel the same. It will also add a touch of professionalism and branding to your newsletters.

Whilst not directly affecting spam filters, this will enable your readers to distinguish your newsletter instantly, thus not reporting it as spam accidentally. Some spam filters work by querying a spam server, whereas others report individual emails as spam. If your email gets reported as spam, then more than likely multiple spam filters will flag your email.

Being consistent with your timing of the newsletter also helps. For example, if you send a newsletter once per month (we personally don’t recommend you send out any more than this, unless you’ve got something really interesting to say), then aim to send it out at the same time, on the same day each month.

Once again, your potential readers will learn to expect your email, adding professionalism and often improving open rates, also reducing accidental spam flagging as well.

Always make your mailing lists double opt-in. This means that when a user subscribes to your mailing list, they will be sent an email with a link that they must click on to confirm their subscription.

This is very important because many people can accidentally enter an incorrect email address, or even the email address of someone else on purpose. When that person receives a newsletter they did not subscribe to, they will assume they have been spammed, and your newsletter (and possibly your web server) will be reported as spam.

Every newsletter you send out should contain a way for the reader to unsubscribe. Not doing so is illegal in some countries and is an instant sign of spamming. You should also display your contact information (Phone, Fax and Address) clearly, as this greatly increases confidence in your email and your company, as well as conforms to spam laws in the United States. Contact information also allows a potential customer to contact you if need be.

The key to avoiding spam filters is testing. The first method of testing I use is to send the newsletter to multiple email accounts with existing spam filters. For example, we have a Gmail (http://www.gmail.com) account and a Hotmail (http://www.hotmail.com) account that we make sure we send our clients newsletter to. If the newsletter ends up in the junk folder, then we’ve got some work to do.

We also have a couple of email accounts with different web hosts that have spam filters in place. In particular, they mostly use spam assassin — a popular piece of spam filtering software. Spam assassin is useful because every email that it flags as spam is given a report and a list of why that email was considered spam.

We also have a local spam filtering application called No Spam Today! for Workstations, that runs a local copy of spam assassin on our local network. It acts as a very close replica to the same software used on thousands of servers world-wide. By sending  copies of the newsletter to No Spam Today! — using the spam assassin checking techniques — gives us feedback as to why an email may have been flagged. If we’ve used words or formatting that we shouldn’t have, or if we’ve included too many images, etc.

Avoiding spam filters when sending out legitimate newsletters can be a time consuming effort. However, as your mailing list grows, it can also be a very beneficial exercise. we’ve watched open rates of just 2 to 3% soar to a massive 50% and over, simply by applying the techniques described in this article.

Diversify our email marketing solution takes away a lot of the hard work by allowing our clients to have consistency and management over their lists and email creatives. Just as importantly Diversify has been developed to be in complete compliance with all major email service providers such as hotmail, yahoo, google, aol and more. This enables us to ensure high delivery and click through rates of our clients emails. Further more, we try to eductate anyone using our solutions or any other on the steps above to enable them a high return on investment and good knowledge of the procedures they undertake.

The same degree of downturn doesn’t have to affect online shops, and the simple reason for this is that ecommerce shop owners can be rigorous in their advertising spending, offering their consumer targeted promotions without the need for a large scale PR stunt or expenditure to get the message out there. Online overheads are a lot smaller, once the site is specified and built the only ongoing cost is hosting, and site maintenance – there are no large overheads.

We are in a fast paced economical climate with financial changes affecting us as the consumer weekly. Large brands such as Mini have recognised this and started looking at the benefits of changing the way they sell their products. Last year the Mini advertising theme was based around heritage, adventure, fun and exciting times with the product. However, this year they are looking at how the car can benefit the consumer; lower tax, most economical in its class etc; they have essentially made their product financially viable in the current economic climate. By coupling this approach to social media advertisement they have bought their product to the forefront of consumers’ minds that may have been in the market for a new car but needed the extra persuasion.

There are currently few digital agencies in the UK that can offer anything above the standard SEO and PPC campaigns which simply make a key word hit the top spot in the search engines, there is no justification for this method if people aren’t actively looking for that “t-Shirt” or “Christmas gift”. Awareness needs to be created of a brands, services and products to make search marketing effective for businesses. We are living in a society where shoppers need to be wined and dined rather than shaken upside down for their hard earned cash. Online sellers must change the way they sell by going to the consumer rather than waiting for them to click on their site and buy. Any digital agency worth their salt will deploy a strategy to engage the brand as a whole entirety with potential customers on every level. On top of this it has to be actively monitored and changed to suite the brand and the market reaction and trends.

It is crucial to find a digital agency that can manage cost effective channels such as social media, blogging, online picture and video distribution, as well as SEO & PPC techniques which enable messages to be relayed in a non sales focused way but with the end goal of converting to sales. They must also allow consumers to connect with brands on a social level and by doing so generating a buzz for the brand and further word of mouth advertising which can only increase its popularity and sales. All of this must be deployed strategically by a team that understands the core concept of brand engagement.

So how can you determine whether a social media strategy is proving beneficial to your business? How do you know that it is working out for you? And is now really the best time to find out?

Rather than focusing on individual social media campaigns, I’d like to look at social media measurement from the perspective of a business that a) buys into social media, b) commits to it over a period of time, and as such c) has an integrated social media strategy. You people know who you are!

Let it breathe

The key with social media measurement, I think, is to stand back and take a widescreen approach to measurement.

Rather than focusing on the smaller, campaign-specific metrics, such as traffic from Twitter or the number of fans on Facebook, wouldn’t it be better to look at how it helps to shift the most important business KPIs, such as sales, profits, as well as customer retention and satisfaction rates?

To do this effectively, you’ll need to give your social media strategy time. Like a good wine, it needs to breathe. In doing so you will be able to look at your overall business performance, as well as the performance of your social media campaigns over the duration.

Take the Skittles campaign. I called it ‘brave’, ‘amazing’, ‘sensational’ and ‘ballsy’. I still think it is all of those things, and I’ll think that next year even if it fails miserably. It was a big move. But nobody yet knows for sure whether giving over a brand’s entire website to consumer-powered media channels is a smart move. Only time will tell.

Social media vs TV advertising

Here I want to make a small point on accuracy, and attribution. I firmly believe that if you can spend tens of millions on TV ads and make any kind of sense out of that investment, in terms of TV ads helping to boost sales while increasing the key brand metrics, then you can make sense of your (much smaller) investment into social media.

TV campaigns can run for a long time, and the effects on the business are a) not known immediately and b) possibly overstated. Hindsight is a beautiful thing, and advertising executives (and creative agencies) like to take credit for improving sales, when really these sales might have little or nothing to do with TV ads. Attribution is one thing, but knowing that something works is entirely different. Social media appears to be a mixture of the two.

Maybe we can create a model for scoring the performance of social media, or for splitting up attribution by channel, but the truth is that there needs to be some room for manoeuvre when making sense of things. There are few absolutes in measuring advertising campaigns, if you work outside of paid search. You can far more accurately measure social media than you can a TV ad, but like TV advertising, or PR for that matter, there has to be some scope to play around with attribution.

Like TV advertising, social media will play a role in moving brand metrics, and perhaps more so (it is easier to make a noise and to be socially active; there’s an anytime, anywhere factor at work here. And hey, shit sticks around longer when you throw it online). There is a huge viral factor with social media sites (behold ye retweeters). You can really see word of mouth in action on social media sites, and as such there is less guesswork involved when measuring the results – less extrapolation is needed. If 500,000 consumers start saying good things about your brand, with few dissenters, then surely it is fair to say that brand favourability will have improved?

If brand indicators matter, or if you subscribe to the AIDA model, or if you care enough to undertake research to find out your own brand metrics (PDF), then by all means factor in your social media efforts when attributing the success of your overall marketing campaigns.

Take a snapshot

Before you start the clock it is a good idea to benchmark where you’re at…

1. Make a note of the obvious numbers (number of Facebook fans, Twitter followers, Digg links, Delicious bookmarks, and referrals from social media sites, plus existing website traffic).
2. Make a note of the less obvious benchmarks (such as SEO rankings and referrals, customer satisfaction scores and other business data).
3. Make a note of ROI benchmarks. How much are you paying to acquire customers via other marketing channels? How vast is that advertising budget, and how is it being split up? And what proportion is being directed into channels that you cannot accurately measure?

After that make sure you’re doing the right things. There are lots of social media experts handing out lots of advice for free. There are all manner of social media agencies out there that will help you, if you don’t have the appetite to do this in-house. And there are sites devoted to measuring social media. Get some, get some.

Measuring the effects of social media in 10 steps

1. Traffic
This is one of the more obvious ways of measuring social media. Remember that quality often beats quantity, though not always (as many CPM-focused publishers will surely testify).

2. Interaction
Participation is a valuable indicator for many publishers (and brands). It says something about the kind of traffic you are attracting. Remember that an engaged customer is a highly valuable one. Interaction can be anything from leaving comments, to participating in support forums, to leaving customer reviews and ratings. It can happen on your website and on other websites. Keep your eyes and ears open!

3. Sales
We track leads from organic Google referrals and also paid search. It didn’t seem like much of a leap to track other channels, such as Twitter. Try it. Dell did, and discovered that it made $1m from Twitter in 18 months. Blendtec’s ‘Will It Blend?’ campaign on YouTube helped to drive “a five-fold increase in sales”.

4. Leads
Some companies simply cannot process sales online, because their products or services do not allow for it. For example, the automotive industry, which tends to measure the effects of its online ad campaigns by the amount of brochures requests, or test drives booked in (as opposed to car sales, which is, in marketing terms, an altogether more macro effort). B2B operators are in a similar position. If you are a consultant and spend time interacting on LinkedIn Answers then there’s a way of tracking that activity to enquiries about your services. The same applies across the spectrum of social media sites. Choose your weapon, thought leaders.

5. Search marketing
The SEO factor cannot be understated. Social media can be far more powerful in this regard than you might initially imagine. For example, a well-placed story / video / image on a site like Digg will generate a lot of traffic and a nice link from Digg itself, but the real win here is that it will generate a lot more interest beyond Digg. Bloggers and major publishers are following Digg’s Upcoming channel to unearth new and interesting stories (Sky News now has a Twitter correspondent). One link and 20,000 referrals from Digg might lead on to 40,000 referrals and 100 links from other sites. The long tail, in action. 100 links means that your page might well wind up being placed highly on Google, resulting in lots of ongoing traffic. Remember too that you can use sites like Twitter and YouTube to claim valuable search rankings on your brand search terms (‘social search optimisation’).

6. Brand metrics
Word of mouth and the viral factor (inherent in sites like Twitter, Facebook and Digg) can help shift the key brand metrics, both negatively and positively. These include brand favourability, brand awareness, brand recall, propensity to buy, etc. Expensive TV ads are measured in this way, so if these metrics are good enough for TV then they’re surely good enough for the internet? Positive brand associations via social media campaigns can help drive clicks on paid search ads, and responses to other forms of advertising. We know that TV ads boost activity on search engines, resulting in paid search success stories, so I’d bet that social media can do the same.

7. PR
The nature of public relations has changed, forever. The last five years have been largely about the traditional PR folks not really being able to figure out the blogosphere. But if PRs cannot control the bloggers, then how on earth will they handle consumers? The distinct worlds of PR, customer service, and marketing are fusing. Twitter means everybody has a blog these days, and somewhere to shout about things to their friends (and beyond). Social media sites are the biggest echo chambers in the world! In any event, if you can measure PR (beyond adding up column inches and applying a random multiple to the equivalent size on the rate card!), then you can measure social media.

8. Customer engagement
Given the prevalence of choice, and the ease with which consumers can switch from one brand to another, customer engagement is one of the most important of all metrics in today’s business environment. Engagement can take place offline and online, both on your website and on other sites, particularly social media sites. Customer engagement is key to improving satisfaction and loyalty rates, and revenue. By listening to customers, and letting them know that you are listening, you can improve your business, your products, and your levels of service. The alternative is to ignore customers, which sends out a terrible message. Our research found that an engaged customer will recommend your brand, convert more readily and purchase more often.

9. Retention
A positive side effect of increased customer engagement – assuming certain other factors in play work in your favour – is an increase in customer retention. This is going to be a crucial factor in the success of your business in the years to come. Make no bones about it: we are moving into an age of optimisation and retention. Watch your retention rates as you start participating in social media. Over time, all things remaining equal, they should rise. Zappos, which is a case study in how-to-do-Twitter (and active on MySpace, Facebook and Youtube), is closing in on $1bn of sales this year, and “75% of its orders are from repeat customers”. Go figure, as they say.

10. Profits
If you can reduce customer churn, and engage customers more often, the result will surely be that you’ll generate more business from your existing customer base (who in turn will recommend your business to their network of friends, family, and social media contacts). This reduces your reliance on vast customer acquisition budgets to maintain or grow profits. It makes for a far more profitable and more efficient organisation. I really hope that more businesses will find a better balance between acquisition and retention, sooner rather than later, from a resourcing standpoint. Too many acquisition strategies appear to be ill-conceived, are not joined up (both in terms of marketing and also operations), and as such are ripe for optimisation. Plug the leaky bucket and you won’t need to turn the tap so hard to top it up. And remember that old adage about it being cheaper to keep existing customers than to seek out new ones.