When time and money are in short supply, efficiency is the name of the game, and nothing has done more to increase marketing efficiency than the internet. These are the top 3 technologies that I have found most effective in getting more bangs out of the marketing budget – and why.

1)     Web Analytics

With some investment in the initial setup, it’s amazing what you can learn from web analytics – and how much wastage you can eliminate. The best free service is Google Analytics. It can tell you how much interest you get from each marketing campaign, how many sales, and how much revenue. With Google Analytics I managed to halve our spend on pay per click advertising, and improve results from other types of marketing as well.

2)     Email

Using email, it is as quick and almost as cheap to reach 10,000 prospects as 100. Email is highly scalable; and because the call to action can be as simple as clicking a link, response rates are significantly higher than with direct mail or print advertising, and more immediate. It’s also very easy to incentivise a response by using a special offer that is triggered simply by clicking a link in the email.

3)     XML Feeds

Publishing data in XML (or ‘RSS’) format enables you to multiply the delivery at no extra cost. You can display the same information automatically on your web site, on social networking sites like Facebook, and even on Twitter. You can submit it to Google Base, ensuring that it gets spidered by Google and any links in it get indexed. And you can publish it using services like AddThis and Feedburner, so that clients and prospects can follow it via their news readers or personal home pages.

What are your top efficiency-inducing technologies?

 

Bruce Townsend, online marketing expert at ecommerce & EPOS supplier, Actinic