There’s no point in having a web presence if your customers don’t know you exist. GrowthBusiness  reveals how you can grow your online business rapidly with an innovative e-marketing campaign.

When you are selling flights for £9, direct mail and advertising soon swallow the costs of a seat. So last year, Flybe chose e-marketing as its lead channel for communicating with its customers. For the low-cost operator based in Exeter with regional hubs across the UK, it was the chance to be aggressive and front-of-mind without waving goodbye to all its ticket receipts.

Its aim was to attract both business executives who want to travel round the UK and impulsive holiday-makers who want to jump on a plane to France or Spain. Like any other low-cost airline it was also looking to exploit every opportunity for revenue with offers on hotels and rental cars.

Now number three in the low-cost sector, Flybe’s customer database has doubled in the last year to 500,000 and the airline is looking to accelerate this growth with more competitions and incentives.

As well as e-mail promotions, it places its banner adverts on affiliated sites, paying only for leads, not for the space. Run through Commission Junction, Flybe’s banners can appear on anything up to 10,000 other sites. It is also experimenting with text messaging.

Rates of return on these activities have been exceptional at £40 for every £1 spent. Depending on your objectives, you would normally be happy with £5 for every £1 spent.

E-marketing has also had positive side effects on Flybe’s conventional advertising. Because it knows where its high-value and low-value customers live, it knows on which roads to put posters and in which local newspaper to run adverts.

The time is right
Talk of a boom in e-marketing is more rational now than it was five years ago, argues Sean Hanneberry, head of CMW Interactive, the integrated digital agency that runs Flybe’s e-marketing campaign. ‘There is less hyperbole and more accountability. You can really see your return on investment and you only pay on the basis of a lead or transaction. Costs are driven by actions.’

According to Danny Meadows-Klue, chief executive of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, growth in online advertising is currently 76 per cent year-on-year. ‘These trends are just as applicable in the B2B markets as they are in B2C. And even the smallest of firms are now tapping into online advertising by buying links from Google and Overture which drive traffic to their websites and for which they only pay when a viewer clicks.

‘This is changing the way direct marketing works and represents the start of a massive shift in the focus of marketing budgets designed for customer acquisition. When it comes to the best in online advertising, we are seeing consistently ground-breaking work with marketing messages delivered as powerfully as you could ever find in television, radio or press,’ says Meadows-Klue.

Compete with the big boys
Riverford Organic Vegetables in Devon, for instance, is one smaller company where web marketing has completely changed the way it works with its customers. In the last 18 months it has nearly tripled its direct deliveries of fresh produce to homes in south-west England and is learning to compete head to head with the supermarkets.

‘We had an old-fashioned system and were finding it hard to cope,’ says Tienaka Drew, the farm’s marketing manager. ‘We put all the databases onto one system so everyone can work on it live. We have streamlined everything. The impact on our sales team has been amazing and customers can now manage their own account online.’

Through its 35 franchises, Riverford is currently delivering 14,000 boxes of organic vegetables a week and next year it is expecting sales of £6 million. Predicting future growth has become easier, says Drew, because data from the franchise’s business models can easily be combined and displayed at the click of a button.

The next step for the 800-acre farm in south Devon is to start building speciality sections on the site, featuring a product of the week.

The power of search engines
Vegetable lovers looking for juicy pumpkins or tasty parsnips on the web will mainly reach suppliers like Riverford through one of the world’s 15 main search engines, according to Phil Robinson, director of ClickThrough Marketing.

‘A well optimised website can provide huge volumes of traffic and resulting sales leads. Your competitors who are doing well are winning business by being listed high in the search engines for relevant search phrases. You can set up a pay-per-click account within minutes with a credit card and some idea of what search phrases you want to appear under. The main pay-per-click search engines are Adwords and Overture, so these are a good place to start.’

He adds that achieving good positions on natural free listings will require Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

‘This is much more difficult and requires skill, experience and several months of hard work. Many people still think that it is about adding meta-tags [words placed in the HTML of a web page which provide information but which are not seen by site visitors] and making their pages keyword-rich. These days they have little impact. Google in particular uses over a hundred different factors to determine the position of any given website.

‘Most people know that having a nice website will not result in your site getting found by the search engines. Each search engine has its own listing rules, so if you don’t play by them you will never get listed. Alternatively, you will be ranked so low that you are invisible to your target market.’

Simply put, SEO is designing, writing, coding and maintaining your website so that there is a good chance your web pages will appear at the top of search engine queries for your selected keywords and key phrases.

Well-groomed returns
Improving his position on search lists was the most difficult part of e-marketing for Jason Shankey and his site, which sells grooming products. It has been worth the effort.

Four years ago, Shankey was running a male-grooming salon in Belfast with sales of £80,000 a year. Out of hours he wrote and produced his own website, www.jasonshankey.co.uk, to sell hair, health and skincare products. ‘We have really grown and sales are currently running at £1.5 million a year. I was hoping it would happen, but never expected it,’ he explains.

As well as optimising his search criteria on Google and Yahoo, Shankey has arranged affiliate marketing with 650 other websites. He pays commission of five per cent on any resulting sales or seven per cent if orders are more than £1,000 a month, which is often the case.

He also has a presence on Kelkoo, the shopping website. ‘It is expensive, but a great platform. It is a highly targeted group and we are paying out commission of £4,000 or £5,000 a month.’

Get your expectations right
For Nik Margolis, managing director of Squeeze, a digital marketing agency, e-marketing is coming of age. ‘What started off as a cheap and quick way to reach a mass audience is now permission-based on a one-to-one basis.

‘The power of e-mail is that it gives you direct dialogue – you can accurately track and measure how people are responding. Even so, the quality of many e-mail promotions is awful. However, smaller companies will find that the impact of adding video clips and pre-recorded audio is disproportionately high.’

In widening your circle and talking to more people, there has been a legal requirement since last December [Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations] that people should choose whether they want to hear from you or not. For Margolis, this is no restriction. ’What is the point of talking to someone with no interest? You have to build a creative link with potential customers. To capture their details, you should work across the organisation to create an interface. Just make sure that you set the right expectations.’

Keeping track
Use of advertising on the web is picking up exponentially, says Mark Mason, managing director of Mason Zimbler, a specialist IT advertising agency in Bristol. ‘Most campaigns now have online content. It has become easy to track and goes straight to the desktop. You have standard sizes for banner and skyscraper ads, with the potential to be extremely creative.’

With your web banner, you are looking to catch people unawares and draw them in. It is worth remembering, he says, that the web is a faster medium than print. ‘People read magazines and know that they are going to see ads, so they have time to read them, if they are relevant. When you go on the web, you are looking for information. With your banner, you are looking to catch them unawares and draw them in.

‘The ideal is to be present on sites relevant to your product. Generic adverts are not great and affiliate marketing can be hit and miss. Your creative has to be simple and direct. Use your ad as a stepping stone to your website via a landing pad, a page relevant to the campaign with the same creative.’

Viral campaigns
The web still has the capacity to spring surprises. So when Trojan, the leading US brand for condoms, wanted to challenge the dominance of Durex and Mates in the UK last year, it chose to run a viral campaign, instead of using conventional TV or press advertising.

‘They had a relatively low budget, but wanted a big splash,’ says Ed Robinson, creative director of The Viral Factory. He came up with the idea for The Trojan Games, an Olympic spoof set in Bucharest. Filmed on video with real Romanian gymnasts, it is designed to be fun and pleasurable. ‘It’s tongue in cheek. The message is “sex is a bit of laugh” rather than “go forth and protect yourself”.’

So far the site has had 38 million views and has received multiple marketing awards. ‘If Trojan had made a TV advert on the same budget, it would have been broadcast once or twice and disappeared in the blink of an eye,’ says Robinson.

For viral campaigns to work and for people to forward them as attachments to e-mails, he argues, your creative has to be pitched right. ‘Viral activity started in back rooms and appeals to anyone media savvy enough to know their eyeballs are for sale.’

The attraction of viral marketing for brands is that it is a new advertising space. ‘Most people watch viral clips at work, normally a marketing-free area. And as soon as people send on an attachment to their friends or colleague, they become a brand advocate. That is a valuable relationship.’

Campaigns might burn bright for a short amount of time, but spending on viral marketing has doubled for each of the last four years. ‘For Trojan, it worked. It has become a young, fresh, forward-thinking brand and at the same time we have given everyone a bit of a laugh,’ says Robinson.

Need to know - Texting takes over

In the last four years, e-mail has become the key communications channel for direct marketing, says Darren Whitehead, Exhibition Director of the International Direct Marketing Fair, although response rates are not as spectacular as they once were.

‘E-marketing is becoming more sophisticated, though results are harder to achieve than when it was a relatively new and fresh channel. Consumers are becoming more discerning. This is where SMS [short messaging service] now comes in,’ believes Whitehead.

He adds that, as another channel of choice within the e-marketing framework, it is fast-moving and vibrant, though the industry has been plagued by a lot of false preconceptions.

‘You might think text messaging is great if you just want to hit teenagers. Actually that’s not true. The affluent “early grey” market of 45-55 year-olds is starting to become very receptive. So it is not just a matter of switching to e-marketing at the expense of direct marketing, but how best to integrate e-channels with a standard direct approach.’