Many small businesses are limited by their location. They are limited to the customers that live or work near them. They are limited by the hours in a business day.

The cost of additional staff and additional operating expenses may make extended hours undesirable. Even their geography can make all night operations unpractical, unprofitable, or unsafe. For many small organizations with finite resources, 24/7 business hours are impossible.

However, with e-commerce sites, many types of businesses can allow customers to shop and learn about their products and services at any time of day. e-commerce enables the company to take orders and send communications, even when the shop is closed. No wonder so many small businesses have started making e-commerce sites part of their strategic plans.

In March of 2020, many small businesses became more interested in e-commerce solutions. The COVID-19 crisis mandated the shut-down of many types of brick and mortar businesses. While many of those enterprises were able to bounce back after all the restrictions were finally lifted, many companies found they had to shut their doors forever. For other organizations, an E-commerce site helped defray or eliminate losses while Americans stayed at home and social distanced.

For many firms, the pandemic accelerated the need for a strong e-commerce site. However, the argument for websites that handled shopping or transactions was already well developed. In fact, the use of e-commerce sites has been growing in importance over the last ten years. And it’s easy to see why.

E-commerce sites have become easy to use. Online transactions have become more secure. Customer shipping options have become more affordable or even free. As a result, online sales increased by nearly 15% in 2019 alone, and that growth is predicted to continue or accelerate over the next five years. That means that for anyone selling products or offering services, e-commerce may become a viable way to increase revenues and expand reach without opening more locations.

On April 24, 2020, Emarketer reported,

“Whether by desire or by necessity, consumers are moving their spending online. And some of these consumers, who rarely or never bought online, may not go back to shopping like they used to. As a result, brands are increasingly pivoting to a direct-to-consumer business model and many e-commerce businesses are experiencing sizable growth. Even before the coronavirus pandemic, e-commerce sales represented the bulk of overall retail sales growth in the US—$600 billion in online sales accounted for 56% of overall retail growth last year. And projections say e-commerce sales may go as high as $6.5 trillion in 2023.”

While online shopping used to be a novelty limited to tech-savvy Millennials, today it’s the norm. From tweens to retirees, all ages have become more enthusiastic about online shopping. With grocery purchases, apparel shopping, and even car sales happening online, e-commerce has become a necessity that shows no signs of slowing down.

It’s easy to see why. e-commerce sites allow consumers to shop when it’s convenient for them. Busy parents can order necessities at any time of night or day. Third-shift employees can buy on their schedule. At the end of a workday, Americans can now relax in an easy chair and take care of shopping needs from the comfort of their living room. Compare that with rushed trips to stores in rainy weather, and the appeal of e-commerce is clear.

While some people avoided online shopping for years, 2020 changed all that. A tsunami of people began learning how to use e-commerce sites out of necessity. This need to get comfortable with online shopping fast, regardless of your aversion to websites in the past, made transactional websites even more popular. Unprecedented world events combined with technology trends to create unexpectedly strong demand.

Retailers who were undecided about adding online shopping to the mix became more motivated to create an online presence with e-commerce functionality. Technological advancements made it easier than ever for all sizes of companies to develop scalable, sustainable revenue streams that expanded a business’s geography beyond a neighborhood or township. In theory, a small shop with one location could now have a worldwide presence in a matter of weeks. But best of all, once an e-commerce site gains traction, it can serve as a buffer from the idiosyncrasies of the market. Businesses with online components and options are better positioned to weather recessions, pandemics, or other world events that can impact face-to-face sales.

But even without factoring in major disruptions, e-commerce makes good business sense. After all, more and more consumers say e-commerce is their preferred way to buy. In a recent UPS study, almost 70 percent of participants reported that they preferred shopping online.

On April 24, 2020, in The Washington Post, Sindya N. Bahnoo reported,

“The coronavirus pandemic has accelerated the die-off of America’s storefront retail at a frightening speed, forcing independent stores to close on short notice and deepening the advantage of online behemoths like Amazon and Walmart. But a few independent retailers have rapidly pivoted toward e-commerce, in some cases using strikingly low-tech analog systems to retaliate against Amazon, which itself went live as a small online retailer of books 25 years ago. These businesses may not beat Amazon at its own game, but with some creativity and customer goodwill, they might survive the crisis and come out with some much-needed upgrades.”

While COVID-19 wreaked havoc, it also created new opportunities for small businesses. While building an e-commerce site can feel like an intimidating undertaking, following LNP Media Group’s step-by-step guide may simplify the process. For many companies, it’s easy to start small and scale up as demand increases. Over time, your e-commerce website may rival your bricks and mortar locations for sales and profitability.

But how to get started? We’ve outlined several e-commerce development steps to help small businesses think through the process and prepare for the world on online commerce.

Step 1: Define Your E-commerce Niche

While Amazon makes money selling everything, most retailers do better by sticking to a specialty or niche. Customers are more likely to choose you over big brands if you’re an expert in your field and offer specialized products and services developed for a narrow audience.

While it’s tempting to be all things to all people, it’s smart to start as a specialized business, with a limited product line. Once your online model is up and running, and profitable, you can expand into other areas with confidence.

Step 2: Research E-commerce Models

Before you get started on your new website, make sure you know what kind of sites are already out there. Start your journey with research. Spend time online. Look at what your competitors are doing. Explore what e-commerce looks like for other industries.

After all, growing any online business is an investment, and will require your time and your treasure. Research will increase your understanding of what works and reduce the chance that you choose a problematic model or one that discourages customer interaction.

It’s also important to remember that no one structure or type of e-commerce works for everyone. A store selling lamps will operate differently than an IT consulting service. Pizza shops have different needs than furniture stores. Pharmacies have specialized transactional requirements, while floral shops may have delivery restrictions.

The good news is that today’s e-commerce platforms provide customizable software that empowers almost any type of enterprise to offer complex online shopping functions. A decade ago, e-commerce solutions were generally costly and required the help of an experienced IT team and maintenance by an in-house development team. The old platforms were hard to scale and difficult to integrate with other marketing platforms like your existing website, your email programs, or your social media.

However, today’s platforms are flexible, intuitive, and comparatively inexpensive. Even the most basic e-commerce platforms allow users to customize products, pricing, inventory management, and promotions. And most come with easy-to-access reporting systems that can enable real-time monitoring of sales and inventory

It’s also wise to think through your customers’ payment preferences. Some platforms exclude payments from third-party vendors such as PayPal, which could slow sales.

Subscriptions provide a steady revenue each week or each month. For example, it may make sense for a lawn service to offer subscription rates, with services delivered in pre-determined intervals. Medical or health care products are also good choices for subscription deliveries.

Step 3: Choose an Online Shopping Program

E-commerce is defined by the inclusion of payments online. There are many online payment and e-commerce platforms out there that can be used to create a new site or to integrate into an existing company website. Some of the most popular names in e-commerce include Shopify, Woo Commerce, Big Commerce, Ecwid, Jimdo, Weebly, and Volusion. CRM programs like Squarespace and Wix also offer e-commerce programs. Even Square, the iPad-based cash register program, offers sleek integrations that allow businesses to create online stores or online ordering for in-store pickup.

Most of these platforms operate on a monthly fee basis. However, just reviewing flat rates can be deceptive. That’s because costs may depend on whether your site is self-hosted vs. hosted, and the estimated traffic and number of transactions. Most of these platforms charge a processing fee that can add up quickly. Conversely, other platforms are too simple and limited to just a few functions. Others may charge for bells and whistles that you won’t need to meet your online shopping goals.

Almost all online shopping platforms offer basic features such as a shopping cart, a search bar, and a customer login. They will allow you to use your company’s logo and brand colors. They will have data encryptions features that ensure your customers’ data is secure and to make hacking very difficult. Most platforms allow you to group products into categories and add images for each product or service. You should also be able to set prices, offer promotions, and manage your email lists within the platform.

Good e-commerce platforms also give you many ways to manage your database, grouping it into pre-selected segments such as regular customers, people who have not purchased for a while, and people who began to order something, but then abandoned their online cart without purchasing.

Most platforms also offer automated email follow up or integrations into email programs such as Constant Contact or MailChimp. That means you can use the programs together to create a robust shopping, purchasing, and follow-up program.

It may sound complicated, but all it takes is time online, investigating how similar businesses operate, and thinking about what you do and don’t want to offer online.

It’s also critical to ensure that the e-commerce platform you choose will integrate with your website. Most online shopping platforms feature a wide range of tools and integrations that allow you to customize the shopping experience.

Other plugins are available to handle accounting need such as sales reporting, estimated taxes, and P&L reports.

Some programs offer robust email marketing tools as well as sophisticated list management features. Others offer shipping add-ons or customer loyalty widgets.

Before you make your decision, make sure you understand all the ways you can use the platform to manage your e-commerce business.

Step 4. Make Sure Your E-commerce Site is SEO Friendly

Traffic from search engines will become your site’s most significant source of new customers. That’s why many e-commerce businesses live and die by how well they manage their Search Engine Optimization or SEO. A site with strong SEO will rank high on search engines against selected keywords. Ranking higher on search engines means that customers can find your business when they’re searching for products or services like yours.

While that sounds simple enough, SEO is actually relatively complex and can take up a lot of time. But because top-ranking sites consistently attract more click-throughs than lower-ranking sites, SEO is well worth the time and effort.

Google’s Free SEO Tools

While SEO should be a long-term business strategy, newcomers to e-commerce can get started by using simple strategies and following best practices. For example, Google offers many free tools to help websites improve their SEO. Setting up Google Analytics and a Google Search Console is relatively simple and free. These tools will help you track traffic to your website and understand how to improve your site so it can rank higher against your chosen keywords.

Google recommends you submit your sitemap to Google through your Search Console account. Most e-commerce platforms, such as Woo Commerce or Shopify, and CRMs like WordPress or Square Space, automatically generate sitemap files. These list your website’s individual pages. These site maps help search engines index all the pages on your site, which is one way to improve SEO.

Google Search Console also reports crawling errors. Search engines like Google index websites using programming bots which “crawl” the website and its pages. When a bot attempts to reach a page or website but fails, it reports a crawling error. Crawling errors hurt your SEO, so it’s smart to fix broken links, missing pages, or other crawling errors immediately.

Follow Google’s official recommended practices to help you avoid the e-commerce and website practices that may end up hurting your site’s SEO.

E-commerce SEO Starts With Keywords

Keywords are the building blocks of any SEO effort. To rank on search engines, you start by choosing the words or phrases you want to rank against. For example, if you’re a salon, you might want to rank for “Best Lancaster Salons” and “Lancaster County Beauty Salons.”

How do you know which words and phrases to use? Google’s Keyword Planner is an excellent place to start. This tool will show you the search volume for any keyword or keyword phrases you submit, so you get an idea of whether the keywords are used regularly, or if they’re too generic and used too frequently for unrelated topics. For example, while “cars” might seem like a good keyword for your business, people searching for cars might be looking for automobiles, Disney movies, or 80’s pop bands. Using terms like “Used Buick in Lancaster” might be a more specific and relevant term for your business.

Spending time with Google’s Keyword Planner helps marketers understand how people search for products and services and will allow you to get more targeted in your keyword choices.

A Word About E-commerce Page Optimizations

Website platforms have many tools that can make it easier for search engines’ bots to find and index your site.  H1 tags are one of these tools. Use one H1 tag on each page to serve as the main headline. Preferably the page’s H1 tag will also contain at least one the site’s main keywords or keyword phrases.

Another way to boost SEO is to keep page titles under 60 characters to prevent them from being truncated or cut off in the search results.

A meta description is the preview text that appears when your site shows up in a search. Having the right meta description in place can increase your click-through rates. While Google has reported that there is no official limit on characters for meta descriptions, most experts say that using 155-160 characters is optimal.

While some sites automatically generate URLs, they can also be customized. To boost your e-commerce site’s SEO, be sure to include some keywords or keyword phrases in each page’s URL.

Google Image searches account for nearly 23% of all web searches. Each time you add an image to your site, you can create alt tags and file names for each image. Make sure each of your file names and alt tags have descriptive names and try to include keywords or keyword phrases.

Step 5: Create Relevant Content

A well-planned content marketing strategy not only helps your site become more visible to search engines, but it also makes the site more relevant and engaging for your customers.

Content can describe your products and services, but it can also show customers how to use your products in new or unusual ways. For example, grocery stores can include recipes and storage tips. An auto repair shop can include tutorials on checking oil or putting air in tires.

Answering Frequently Asked Questions or FAQs is another way to boost SEO while meeting your customers’ needs. And all content should be developed with keywords and SEO in mind.

In G2, Andrej Kovacevic emphasized,

“…a whopping 70% of marketers are currently investing in content strategies, and 72% cite having a good content strategy as a major key to their success. For small businesses, content marketing is arguably even more vital. That’s because smaller companies often don’t have the marketing resources that larger firms do, and content marketing delivers some of the highest overall ROI for every marketing dollar spent. It’s also a long-term strategy that can continue to pay dividends for a long time after it’s put into effect.”

As a rule of thumb, blocks of content and blog posts should aim for 500 words and up. While quality trumps quantity every time, this is not the place for short, snappy prose. Take your time to describe and explain everything thoroughly, so you give search engines and consumers plenty of time to understand who you are and what you sell.

Google penalizes you for plagiarism or duplicate text among websites or webpages, so make sure your text, product descriptions, and blogs are your own. If the text lives anywhere else online, even on your company’s other websites, social media, or other websites or social media, consider rewriting it. Google and other search engines won’t index duplicate copy, which means repeated descriptions could hurt your SEO.

If a page on your e-commerce site becomes inactive or products are removed, it’s smart to add a redirect that page, which will send users to a different but still relevant page. Not only are inactive pages frustrating for consumers, but they also make your site look uncared for, and hurt your SEO.

Step 7: Make Sure Your E-commerce Site is Mobile Friendly

Almost 60% of searches are completed on smartphones. Much of e-commerce also happens on a mobile device. Because mobile is becoming the dominant tool for accessing the internet, it’s more important than ever to make your site completely accessible on mobile devices. Many e-commerce programs and CRMs such as WordPress offer responsive or adaptive templates that automatically reconfigure to meet the needs of the device.

As you create your e-commerce site, remember that many of your images will be seen in smaller dimensions on a smartphone, so keeping images simple makes sense.

Your site should also download quickly. Site download speed is a significant ranking factor, for both desktop and mobile searches. Google offers PageSpeed Insights to measure your site’s download speed and can provide advice on improving speed.

Step 8: Think Through Customer Service

While many business owners understand how customer service works face-to-face, online customer service can be more complicated.

E-commerce offers a new set of customer service challenges, including service issues, software glitches, and other things that are often out of your control.  E-commerce platforms with 24/7 service reps are worth the extra cost when you need answers immediately (and not three days from now.) Make sure you understand what kind of customer service is offered with any e-commerce platform you’re considering.

You may also want to consider amping up your own online customer service with pop-up chat options, chat agents, and other ways to contact your team (or outsourced customer service reps) with questions or concerns.

Step 9: Don’t Skimp on E-commerce Site Security

Online security and data security is one of the hottest issues in online commerce today. As a result, most e-commerce platforms and CRM programs include robust security standards. However, it’s also essential to make sure that any site that allows consumers to input any type of data, whether it’s an email or a credit card, uses HTTPS encryption to ensure a safe and secure checkout experience.

According to Google,

“HTTPS helps keep your browsing safe by securely connecting your browser or app with the websites you visit. HTTPS relies on encryption technology—SSL or TLS—to secure these connections… HTTPS web connections protect against eavesdroppers, man-in-the-middle attacks, and hijackers who attempt to spoof a trusted website. In other words, encryption thwarts interception of your information and ensures the integrity of information that you send and receive. Because older hardware and software often don’t support modern encryption technologies, users of these devices may be more vulnerable to security threats.”

It’s also important to make sure that any e-commerce platform you choose is PCI (Payment Card Industry) compliant. The PCI Security Standards Council recently updated standards, as noted in this June 2020 press release,

“Established to protect PINs (Personal Identification Numbers) and the cardholder data stored on the card (on magnetic stripe or the chip of an EMV card) or used in conjunction with a mobile device, PTS POI Version 6.0 reorganizes the requirements and introduces changes that include:

• Restructuring modules into Physical and Logical, Integration, Communications and Interfaces, and Life Cycle to reflect the diversity of devices supported under the standard and the application of requirements based upon their individual characteristics and functionalities.
• Limiting firmware approval timeframes to three years to help ensure ongoing protection against evolving vulnerabilities.
• Requiring devices that accept EMV enabled cards to support Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) to help facilitate the EMV migration to a more robust level of cryptography.
• Enhancing support for the acceptance of magnetic stripe cards in mobile payments using solutions that follow the Software-Based PIN Entry on COTS (SPoC) Standard.”

Step 10: Get Ready to Ship

For e-commerce sites that ship their products, this step is critical. Your ability to sell or get repeat business may hinge on the decisions you make about shipping.

Free Shipping Pros and Cons

Free shipping has become standard on many e-commerce sites. That’s because free shipping is one of the most effective ways to drive purchases and reduce shopping cart abandonment. However, while you may offer free shipping, as any online merchant will tell you, shipping is not free for the merchant. If you want to offer free shipping, you’ll need to factor those costs into your e-commerce pricing strategy. How do you do that?

• Increase product prices to cover costs for shipping to keep healthy margins.
• Cover the full price of shipping, thereby reducing your margins.
• Bump up the product price enough to partially cover shipping costs which means the customer will pay for a part of it, and you will pay for part of shipping.
• Offer free shipping based on a minimum order amount. Not only is it easier to cover the cost of shipping for larger orders, but this strategy can also help you increase your average order size.

Flat Rate Shipping

Some e-commerce sites charge one rate per order, regardless of order size. This makes sense when your product line is made up of items of similar sizes and weights.

Real-Time Carrier Rates

Many e-commerce platforms, such as Woo Commerce, offer real-time integrations with carriers like UPS and the USPS to automatically calculate shipping based on their order. Small, light packages cost less. Big, bulky packages cost more.

Local Delivery

When your customer base is local, and your products are expensive to ship, local delivery is a smart option. Many e-commerce retailers use their own delivery trucks and employees to offer free local delivery for larger orders such as mattresses, appliances, boxes of office paper, or other heavy, hard-to-ship items.

Step 11: ABC…E (Always be Collecting Emails)

Opt-in forms and email database management is at the heart of any successful e-commerce site. Collecting emails and sending out proactive messages via email is one of the most effective ways to gain new customers, nurture existing clients, and find new prospects.

The best way to grow your email list is to include opt-in forms throughout your e-commerce site. Why not ask them to sign up for your news, deals, and information at a time when they’re already engaged on your e-commerce site?

Opt-in forms don’t need to be pushy or unattractive. With a little effort, you should be able to create forms that look great, support your brand, and drive opt-ins. Here are a few hints for creating hard-working opt-in forms.

• Place them in the site’s header, footer, and in the navigation bar. While these locations may have lower conversion rates compared to a dedicated landing page, consistent placement on every page is a good long-term strategy. Over time, the number of subscribers these locations generate adds up.
• Create an opt-in pop-up form. When you set pop-ups to trigger based on exit cues, you can catch your visitor before they leave, without slowing down the purchasing process. These are called exit-intent pop-ups and are usually triggered when a visitor moves their cursor off your website to a search bar or back button. Most e-commerce platforms have simple plugins and add-ons that can help you find the best way to create effective pop-up opt-in programs.
• Include opt-ins on blogs.While your content may have been developed to educate your customers, it’s also a common place for newbies to enter your e-commerce site. Why not capture their emails and try to convert them into customers in the future?
• Offer high-value lead magnets. Instead of promising “news and deals,” why not create a special piece of content designed to attract new customers? If you’re a florist, create a video about how to select flowers for weddings. Bike shops can create pdfs with maintenance checklists. Grocery stores can send out mini cookbooks with valuable coupons included. The idea is to offer specific, high-value information designed to appeal to your best customers and prospects.

Step 12: Leverage Email

Once the visitor has left the site, email is one of the best ways to reach out to them to continue the conversation. If you have captured their information via opt-in forms or received their email as part of an order, now is the time to ramp up your email marketing efforts.

Make the Most of Emailed Order Confirmations and Receipts

Order confirmation emails or emailed receipts have some of the highest open rates. The open rates can be as high as 90 percent, depending on the industry. Why not take advantage of this high attention rate to start making your next sale?

Of course, the content your email receipts must tick all the usual boxes; what was ordered, cost, shipping address, and expected delivery time, but after these are taken care of, try suggestive selling.

• Upsell related or companion products.
• Send out an offer to get a second item at a discount.
• Offer an ongoing discount if they establish a subscription purchase.
• Give them a discount code or coupon to use toward a future purchase, preferably to be redeemed within a limited time frame. Bounce-back offers are proven ways to build customer loyalty.
• Offer them the chance to send the same item as a gift purchase, at a discount.

Improve Your Shipping Confirmation Emails

Shipping confirmation emails also have high open rates, so make sure you’re setting them up to work as hard as possible.

• Make it easy for your customers to track their orders. Include the expected delivery date and tracking number linked to the shipping company so people can click once to see exactly where their order is in the delivery process.
• Suggest the customer refer a friend by forwarding a link to the product they purchased. Incentivize word-of-mouth marketing by implementing a referral program with rewards.
• Include product suggestions that match a customer’s purchase. Make sure you’re asking shoppers to purchase something they’ll actually be interested in.

Email Marketing Boosts E-commerce Sales

While email receipts and shipping orders are valuable communication opportunities, email marketing can address your consumer in every part of the marketing funnel. Developing an email list, setting up a cart abandonment campaign, developing bounce back offers, and sending nurture emails will help you drive consistent, qualified traffic to your site that will boost sales.

Digital Marketing to Promote Your E-commerce Site

In addition to SEO and email, today’s e-commerce website has a wide range of marketing tools from which to choose. Google ads and Google display ads are an effective way to identify your site traffic and send ads to them based on their viewing habits. Known as retargeting, this marketing strategy uses automation and pre-programmed logic chains to send the right information to the right person at the right time.

Social media ads on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat, Pinterest, and LinkedIn are also cost-effective strategies to help you find customers and increase online sales.

Paid search engine listings are another way to ensure your site shows up in front of people who are searching for products and services like yours.

Video marketing is another way to get people excited about your products. Once you create product and service videos, you can place them on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat, Pinterest, and LinkedIn as posts or as paid advertising.

And don’t forget to promote your e-commerce site in all of your traditional marketing programs. Promote it in-store signage, in print and broadcast ads, on your business cards, and even on your delivery trucks. Make sure all your existing customers know they now have a new way to order.

The Takeaway

Starting any business is challenging. Keeping an existing company profitable can also be a real challenge.  E-commerce is intimidating to many business owners because it has many hidden problems that can be hard to identify. While e-commerce can be scary, it’s a smart move if your firm teams up with an experienced online shopping expert that can help you avoid the pitfalls and take advantage of opportunities as they arise.

If you’re considering moving away from the traditional storefront model, or diversifying your business with an e-commerce site, or want to offer your customers more ways to buy, choose a digital marketing partner and an e-commerce platform that makes sense with your products, service, goals, and budget. LNP Media Group is an experienced e-commerce marketing partner. We’re here to help you map out your path to online success. Contact us today for more details.

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Agency-to-Agency Digital Services & B2B Digital Marketing

There are hundreds of advertising and marketing consulting agencies in Central PA. If you’re one of them, you know that it’s hard to stand out, challenging to find qualified staff, and difficult to convince clients to let you handle their digital marketing project.

While most clients are comfortable with one agency doing their media buys, event planning, and public relations, when it comes to digital marketing, clients want in-depth technical knowledge. That can be a challenging need for small or mid-sized agencies.

Digital marketing works best when it’s shepherded with top-level marketing strategy, but digital efforts fall apart if key team members don’t understand how to make the tools work. Now, more than ever before, successful marketing and advertising clients must pair seasoned strategic direction with the ability to execute on a tactical level.

Easier said than done. After all, digital tasks and tactics take time, experience, and flexibility. They require both extraordinary skill and relatively low overhead. Team members who can manage one part of the digital universe may not have expertise in other areas. That means that robust digital marketing programs need large teams to succeed. And keeping a large staff on hand for inconsistent project work is always a challenge.

However, smart advertising agencies in Central PA understand that LNP Media Group’s digital team is a trustworthy, affordable digital resource. Advertising and marketing agencies can use LNP Media Group’s digital resources to go from zero to hero in a short time period.

Why Hire LNP Media Group as Your Digital Marketing Resource?

LNP Media Group continues to be one of the largest and most experienced communication companies in Pennsylvania. With hundreds of employees and deep digital resources, we’re able to attract top digital experts with a variety of specialties, including search marketing, SEO, social media marketing, email marketing, and video marketing.

Unlike many digital agencies, LNP Media Group can provide a corporate environment including the kinds of benefits packages that attract the best of the best. As a result, LNP Media Group has compiled a top-notch team of experienced veterans to complement our more junior, tactical account teams. Each month senior and junior teams work side by side to help agencies and clients develop and grow. We execute digital marketing campaigns in ways that support strategic growth goals and enhance their key performance indicators.

Our on-site video studio is another benefit that few other digital agencies can offer. Our exceptional video team works with network affiliates, news teams, local businesses, and large corporations. Our sophisticated editing studio and state-of-the-art audio and sound equipment are paired with talented videographers, writers, and editors who all work together to create top-level video at affordable price points.

Central PA Ad Agencies Need Flexible Partners They can Trust

While it’s tough for growing agencies to staff up to meet fluctuating demand, it’s also disheartening to reduce staff when clients cut budgets or switch agencies. Hiring and firing quickly seem to be part of agency life. However, ad agencies that bring LNP Media Group in as a digital partner can achieve immediate scale while keeping expenses in check. Our digital team understands how agencies work, and we’re willing to create relationships that work with your business model.

Our digital teams can work behind the scenes with your strategists to help your agency keep up with the ever-changing tech world. Our experienced team works with a wide variety of industries using a range of tools. We help agencies take on big digital projects without the risks of steep learning curves or laddering up staff.

The Affordable Way to Scale Staff

LNP Media Group is a deeply-staffed digital resource that can handle large and small projects on an as-needed basis. Agencies often use our resources for big one-time projects that require instant expertise. We’re also an excellent choice for seasonal needs that require periods of intense activity followed by bursts of inactivity.

We report to your staff and allow your digital and strategic teams to lead the way. We remain in the background, invisible to your clients, and let you and your team shine. We have the resources you need to take your advertising agency to the next level.

Whether you’re a small agency that finds it hard to hire or retain strong SEO and digital professionals or your team need to focus on your strengths, we’re here to help. LNP Media Group allows Lancaster County and Central PA advertising agencies to assign the behind-the-scenes work to specialists while they focus on building client relationships.

It’s Time to Partner with LNP Media Group for Digital Marketing Services

LNP Media Group has over 200 years of experience working with advertisers and marketing experts. Our entire business model was created to work with advertising agencies. After our legacy print organization developed digital marketing for internal use, we also began offering it to our partners.

As LancasterOnline grew into the premier news and advertising site in Lancaster County, our digital skills expanded beyond on-site ad sales into other digital marketing areas, including SEO, SEM, email marketing, video development and production, website development, social media marketing, and more. These skills grew to meet in-house needs and morphed into a best-in-class area resource for digital marketing.

Because of economies of scale, LNP Media Group has been able to create a digital dream team. Our staff are experienced pros who love what they do, have a strong history of outstanding success, and are passionate about watching our agency partners succeed online.

We Take Care of Digital. You Focus on Clients.

As a digital marketing resource that caters to a wide variety of clients, LNP Media Group understands the need for digital reinforcement. That’s why your agency can count on our digital team to boost your business when you need it. Our talented digital teams can be a seamless solution. We offer a range of internet, web, and digital services that can help you serve your clients without losing time hiring and training.

Our digital experts offer precision targeting to help your clients reach potential customers by geography, demographics, job title, and interests. LNP Media Group offers complete campaign reports for every campaign that detail engagement and results, so you’ll know the ROI of your expenditure.

No wonder LNP Media Group has earned the reputation as a reliable and trustworthy partner for Central PA agencies and businesses.

PPC Experts

As Google Premier Partners, we’ve achieved the highest level of Google Partnerships. Not only have we passed Google’s certification exams, but our Premier status is a result of attaining substantial revenue and growth for our PPC and SEM clients.SEO and Local SEO

Our team understands how to optimize your website, create content, and build links in ways that increase your client’s sites search rankings. We also know that “near me” and local searches are critical for many local businesses and retail clients. LNP Media Group has a comprehensive set of tools to help increase local SEO and drive local foot traffic through your clients’ doors.

Email Marketing

Our experienced email marketing team started as an internal resource. With the help of marketing staff recruited from some of the most successful email marketing companies in the country, LNP Media Group has been able to develop a team of top-notch professionals who can help develop, create, launch, and optimize even the most ambitious email marketing programs.

LNP Media Group can offer access to 200 million people in the U.S. who are ready to engage with your offer. We have access to 100% CAN-SPAM compliant email lists. Not only do we offer highly targeted audiences, but we also offer interactive email formats, and results-driven emails with proven results.

Video Development Production

With roots in the news industry, LNP Media has embraced video marketing online. As video facilities grew to meet the needs of the editorial staff, our video marketing expertise developed.

Video has become the core of many types of digital marketing, and our video team knows how to create videos that stand out.

According to Ryan Flanagan at CTV News,

“The report released Thursday by Waterloo, Ont.-based network management company Sandvine found that overall internet traffic grew by more than 40 percent between February 1 and April 19, with almost all of that increase occurring in March and April. According to the report, video streaming is now responsible for 58 percent of all internet traffic Sandvine monitors, while social networking (11 percent) has displaced general web browsing (eight percent) as the second-most-popular online activity.”

Because video has become such an essential part of online activity, LNP Media Group invested in world-class video studios with top-notch audio custom-designed by the Clair Brothers. We employ sophisticated video, drone, and editing capabilities. And we offer seasoned staff to write, shoot, and edit.

But unlike many video production companies, we’re committed to a lean, affordable process. We combine practical approaches with high-end production values. That means that your ad agency will get the best video quality at price points that work within your clients’ budgets.

Web Development and Optimization

Whether you need to create an entirely new website or optimize an existing site, LNP Media Group can help. Our programmers and web designers can work with a wide variety of web layouts and formats from WordPress to Wix. We also optimize sites for SEO and create vibrant content marketing programs that will increase online visibility and website relevance.

Our team also creates high-converting landing pages that help agencies track clicks and leads.

Social Media Marketing

Whether you like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, LinkedIn, Twitter, or another platform, social media is one of the most versatile and effective platforms for targeted digital marketing.

While social media growth was already snowballing, the COVID-19 pandemic spike usage to all-time highs. According to Miles Park in a May 25, 2020, NPR article,

“For the first time ever, Zuckerberg announced, more than 3 billion people used Facebook, Messenger, Instagram or WhatsApp in a single month. Twitter announced last month as well that it saw a first-quarter 24% year-over-year increase in the number of daily users who saw ads.

In addition to scale, social media offers razor-sharp targeting tools. Social platforms have advanced audience targeting devices that allow us to send messages based on interests, job titles, and demographic data. LNP Media Group’s experts have designed hundreds of successful social media campaigns and want to help your agency make social media a part of your clients’ marketing plans.

The ABC’s of Digital Marketing with LNP Media Group

The world is full of digital terms. These are the “ABCs” that our digital team leans on to ensure that our internet and digital marketing moves your clients forward. We offer all of these services or tools to our digital clients.

Advanced Audience Targeting

LNP Media Group offers access to a wide range of extraordinarily targeted and well-defined audiences for email marketing, digital display advertising, paid search, and social media advertising. When you work with our digital marketing teams, you’ll get advanced audience targeting options that will make your campaigns work even harder.

A/B Testing

Our A/B testing process compares two takes on a single variable to determine which performs best in order to help improve marketing efforts. We work with our ad agency partners in Lancaster County and Central PA to continually optimize their clients’ communications and advertising.

Anchor

When creating scrolling website formats, some navigation elements will link to an area on another part of the page. In order to link the navigation to the correct page section, HTML anchors are created to “anchor” the link to the relevant text.

Backlinks

These incoming hyperlinks are on another website, linking to your site. Not only do they lead more people to your website, they’re also a signal to web crawlers that your site deserves to be ranked higher. This is a critical factor in SEO that needs to be done the right way or it could end up hurting you more than helping.

Bounce Rates

A bounce rate is the percentage of website visitors who navigate away from the site after viewing only one page. We take bounce rates seriously. We measure and analyze them on a monthly basis to determine which instances are normal and which ones are a sign of poor website performance.

Broken Links

Broken links can hurt your website in terms of SEO health. One of the ways search engines gather the information needed to rank websites is to send code, called crawlers, through the site’s code, using links to go from page to page. If the crawler encounters broken links on your website, the code can’t move forward and index the rest of your site. These are also red flags to your site users.

Call to Action

LNP Media Group encourages its agency partners to include specific, compelling calls to action in each digital media campaign. Even awareness campaigns should include tools that enable teams to measure and optimize engagement.

Campaign Reports

We report on all campaigns and projects in ways that make it easy to understand what happened, how much happened, and how that activity affects clients’ goals. We can customize our reporting to meet your agency’s needs.

Content Strategy

LNP Media Group has deep roots in content development. Our digital marketers are committed to creating compelling, consistent content. Not only do our experts develop and execute ad campaigns with targeted messaging, but we also use content to engage potential customers. Our team will create content plans based on your clients’ goals. Whether we send customers to websites, social media pages, or customized landing pages, LNP Media Group will create hard-working content that moves the needle.

Conversion Funnel

All our marketing efforts work to bring potential customers to your website and guide them through the conversion funnel, turning them from internet browsers to relevant leads. For agency partners involved in e-commerce, we help create or refine the purchase journey in ways that enhance and increase conversion rates and, in turn, revenue.

Email Marketing

LNP Media Group offers exceptional experience in email marketing. Using advanced audience targeting techniques, we can send emails to lists that are not only 100 percent CAN-SPAM compliant, but also extremely effective. LNP Media Group can offer access to 200 million highly targeted, specific “intenders” in the U.S. who are ready to engage with your offer.

Flat Design

There are many types of web design. Flat design is a term for a clean, simple approach to website navigation to allow users to reach any page within one or two clicks. This can be key for UX and SEO results.

Engagement Rate

When it comes to digital marketing, engagement matters. The engagement rate is a social media metric that reports on the amount of interaction, such as likes, comments, or shares, that any post or piece of content receives. High engagement rates signal successful targeting and relevant content. Engagement rate is also a way to measure website performance in terms of goals and calls-to-action.

Geofencing

Geofenced ads use global positioning (GPS) or radio frequency identification (RFID) to define a geographic boundary with extreme precision and accuracy. When the “virtual barrier” is established, LNP Media Group can set up triggers that deliver ads to users at a certain street address, attending a concert, or shopping at certain mall.

Google Premier Partner

LNP Media Group is a Google Premier Partner. Google explains what “Partner” and “Premier Partner” certification means,

“Achieving Partner status means that your company has demonstrated Google Ads skill and expertise, met Google ad spend requirements, delivered company agency and client revenue growth, and sustained and grown its client base. Partner status gives your company access to a number of benefits, including the Google Partner badge that can be shown on your website and marketing materials.”

Premier Partner requirements include,

“Meet the performance requirement by delivering solid overall ad revenue and growth, and maintaining and growing your customer base.”

Google Display ads

LNP Media Group’s Google Certified team can help ad agencies find effective ways to help clients promote their businesses when people are browsing online, watching YouTube videos, checking Gmail, or using mobile devices and apps. Using Google tools, our digital experts can create and program display ads to reach certain people across the Google Display Network. This network reaches 90 percent of all internet users worldwide, and includes millions of websites, news pages, and blogs.

HTTP and HTTPS

HyperText Transfer Protocol, or HTTP is simply a way to transfer information on the internet and precedes the “description” of the URL or resource being accessed. However, in the past few years, Google has shown SEO preference to websites that are HyperText Transfer Protocol Secure, or HTTPS, because on these sites, information transactions are handled over a secure, encrypted connection. Changing a website from HTTP to HTTPS is usually fairly simply and affordable.

Interlinking or Internal Links

Websites are indexed by search engines, such as Google, because web crawling code (also called crawlers, spiders, or bots) moves around a website and evaluates the information. Crawlers will look for paths to other pages and their relevance to each other. If a crawler finds a webpage without internal links to other pages it may leave the site and stop indexing that site. To keep crawlers moving through websites (and therefore indexing more code,) smart programmers create internal links on each page. An internal link will lead to another page on the site. Including one or more internal links on each page makes it easier for crawlers to move through your site, and index it correctly, resulting in improved authority and visibility over time.

Indexability

Indexability is a term used to describe how easy or difficult it is for a search engine to analyze and add a page to its index. Making a site or page easier for search engines to analyze is called increasing indexability.

Keywords

Keywords is the term used to describe words or phrases people enter into search engines to find information. When creating websites, improving SEO, developing content, or placing PPC ads, LNP Media Group researches keywords to find which words or terms people use to find the information, product, or services the clients offer, and to evaluate the best keywords or set of keywords to use based on popularity, localization, and relevancy. When creating websites or improving SEO, we include the keywords in your site’s code and content in ways that will best optimize your website for search. When developing content, we make sure the subject and context maximizes keyword relevance. When placing PPC ads, we evaluate keyword popularity against cost per click, and competitive use of keywords.

Landing Page

A dedicated landing page is a separate or stand-alone web page designed to capture information in a certain way, usually for a limited time. For example, an ad promoting a sweepstakes might lead to a landing page with an online entry form. A video promoting a new pizza might lead to an online order for that pizza, with a special trial price. Custom landing pages work best when they enhance conversion-driven campaigns. With the right elements in place, they can also help capture leads and user data. While the average landing page conversion is about 2 percent, well-designed landing pages can have a conversion rate of 11 percent or more.

Local Optimization

For ad agencies that cater to local businesses, showing up in “near me” searches and within Google’s “Local Pack” is vital. Local optimization is focused on increasing local search engine traffic. Strategies for local optimization can include increasing organic search, paid search, and “near me” searches. When looking for local business, 82 percent of smartphone users enter a “near me” search. LNP Media Group can help sites optimize their content, structure, and business listings in ways that enable them to rank higher in local searches.

Mobile Friendliness

Some web developers still design sites on desktops, without considering how they will look and work on mobile. However, mobile friendly sites are a critical component to digital success. How critical? According to Google, a mere one-second delay in mobile load times decreases conversion rates by 2 percent. So, the margin for error is slim. Additionally, Google has made it clear that if a site isn’t mobile-friendly, it will rank lower. It’s always important to consider your users and currently, most industries are facing mobile-first audiences.

Navigation

Website navigation tools allow users to move around a website. Primary navigation links or icons are usually a part of the top menu, but navigation links can occur in multiple places on a page, and on any page on the site.

Optimization

Optimization is a term used for making a site more search-engine friendly and is usually a term that can be used interchangeably with search engine optimization or SEO. Usually these changes are minor and not a complete site rebuild. Because many optimization tasks take place within the website’s code, they can be invisible to users. Reworking the structure of a page, reworking content or adding context and coding, adding images with alt text, adding video, compressing image size, increasing site download speed, improving the mobile experience, and building internal and outbound links are all subtle changes that add up to big differences in search engine visibility.

Optimization can also refer to adjustments made to a website or page to increase the rate of conversion (Conversion Rate Optimization).

Pageview

In website analytics, a page view is the total number of times a single page has been viewed. For example, if a page has 10,000 page views, it may mean that two users have visited the page 5,000 times each. Or it could mean that 10,000 unique users visited the page one time each.  As this example illustrates, page view numbers are not usually meaningful unless used in combination with other data.

Paid Search or PPC

PPC is an abbreviation for Pay Per Click, a form of Internet advertising. Advertisers place text ads that usually appear at the top of a search engine results page. Advertisers pay for each click the ad attracts, not impressions. The cost per click can vary based on the popularity or demand for keywords or search terms involved. High value search terms (ex: insurance) usually have a high cost per click. Unusual or seldom used search terms (ex: North Carolina historic turtle soup recipe) is often very inexpensive. The PPC text ad appears at the top of searches using your keywords. PPC is a very measurable ad format, and allows advertisers to see reports on impressions, clicks, and with the right set up, leads or sales generated. PPC can be the most effective way to find customers that are actively seeking the products and services that you provide.

QA

QA is a common abbreviation for quality assurance. It is used to reference the extensive testing that is done when websites are completed. In the QA process, programmers and web designers usually test a new site’s compatibility with multiple browsers, also testing all links and navigation on each browser. The site should also be viewed on Apple and PC desktop, mobile and tablet applications to test site responsiveness and speed. More recently, some QA includes responsiveness for smart watch and cloud-based voice services like Alexa.

Referral Traffic

Referral traffic is a website traffic source identified within Google Analytics. Referral traffic usually consists of clicks to your website from other websites, listing services, from your paid ads and listings on other sites.

Responsive Design

Responsive design is an important SEO ranking and UX factor. Website and digital information may be viewed on a variety of platforms including desktops, smart phones, tablets, smartwatches, and cloud-based voice services like Alexa. Website designs should be programmed to resize and reformat in ways that allow it to be accessed easily across devices, or “respond” to platform challenges. Responsive design allows for the user to click on and view (or hear) some or all parts of a website on every platform. Non-responsive sites can appear tiny, compressed, unreadable, or even cut off. For devices like smartwatches and cloud-based voice services, some websites edit and reform information to work better with the abbreviated capabilities.

Retargeting

Retargeting (or Remarketing) is the term used when advertisers send ads to people who have already visited a website or engaged with their previous advertising . These retargeting ads follow site visitors as they travel to other websites, with the hope of attracting them back to site, even after they’ve left. Re-engaging website visitors with retargeted ads containing relevant messages is often an effective way to convince potential customers to return to the website and convert.

Session

A website session refers to a single visit to your website. It may consist of one or more pageviews, and any other activities, transactions, views, or submissions. A website session can last up to 30 minutes without activity. After 30 minutes, even if the tab remains open, the browser terminates the timing of that session. However, if after 30 minutes of inactivity the same person returns to the site and is active on it, they will count as an additional session.

Social Media Marketing

People spend a lot of time on Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Twitter, LinkedIn, SnapChat, YouTube and other platforms. Developing relevant content, building followings, encouraging engagement, and running advertising on these platforms can be a targeted and effective way to build awareness, gather leads, or even sell products and services directly, but for businesses, it can take a lot of resources. LNP Media Group helps clients determine which platforms can work best to meet their needs and the most effective way to market on them. We use advanced audience targeting to find well-qualified consumers. Our team of experts can also create and manage organic (unpaid) postings, sweepstakes and contest, video content, and marketing campaigns.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Like optimization, SEO refers to the practice of improving a website and its online visibility to increase the quantity and quality of its traffic without the use of paid ads or PPC. Tactics can include altering the structure of a webpage, editing code, changing content, adding images with keyword-optimized alt text, the use of video, compressing the file sizes, improving download speed, improving responsiveness, and adding internal and outbound links to improve the overall search engine visibility and indexability.

Technical Optimization

Technical optimization is a process that confirms that all indexing files, such as the XML sitemap, are in place and up to date. In this process, LNP Media Group checks the website’s structure, and optimizes it to follow best SEO practices.

Transparency and Trust

When you work with LNP Media Group, we can make you as involved or as hands-off as you wish. Either way you’ll know what we’re doing, when, and why. We compile detailed and transparent monthly reporting, supported with ongoing communication. We share results, failures, tests, and optimizations, every step of the way. You’ll always understand what we’re doing, why we’re doing it, what we hope to achieve, and how well we achieved our goals. Monthly reports can also be customized and formatted to fit into your clients’ preferred format.

Unique Page View

A unique page view reports how many individual, or unique, persons view a page. The key metric in this measurement is the number of people on your pages. Even if a person views a page multiple times within a single session, it will be counted as one unique page view. For example, if an order page gets 10 visits, there may only be one unique page view, because one person went back to that page 10 times. Similarly, if an order page gets 10 unique page views, it means that 10 different people visited the page.

User Experience Design

Some websites are easy to navigate and explore. Others are difficult or confusing. The way a user interacts with a website is call the User eXperience or UX. Skilled web designers spend time considering the way people move through websites, and take into account factors such as text size and readability, established conventions and habits, user needs, site architecture, responsive design considerations, and site speed. Good UX design leads users through the website in ways that meet the clients’ objectives, whether it’s driving them to a key page, spending more time on the site, visiting more pages, gathering e-mail addresses, or motivating purchases.

Video Marketing

Video marketing is an important part of any digital marketing plan. Videos combine the power of people, motion, and stories in ways that attract and influence customers. Maybe that’s why so many people are watching online videos. 85% of the US online audience watches videos, with millennials watching more video than other demographic groups. Video on social media is especially effective. Over 8 billion video views occur on Facebook every day. In fact, social video ads are the most common ways consumers discover a brand from which they later make purchases. The LNP Media Group video team is experienced creating brand videos, TV commercials, short films, social media clips, pre-roll ads, web videos, music videos, or corporate presentations. We have the experience to shoot on location or in our state-of-the-art video studio in the heart of downtown Lancaster. Our certified drone pilots allow LNP Media Group to offer aerial videos and photos in addition to HD, multi-cam, live streaming services for Facebook, YouTube, or your custom RTMP.

Website Design

Whether you are building a new website or rebuilding an existing site, LNP Media Group can help create user-friendly, mobile-friendly, and responsive websites that build brand and meet objectives.  A well-designed website, with thoughtful UX, SEO optimization, and relevant content is one of the best ways organizations can communicate credibility, reliability, and leadership.

XML Sitemap

An XML sitemap is a coding tool that lists all of the pages on your site. XML sitemaps are created to inform search engine crawlers. It lists the pages on a site that can be crawled. This kind of site map is especially helpful if there are webpages that are difficult to locate, hidden from navigation, or lacking internal links.

301 Redirect

A redirect is the term used to describe the process of sending, or redirecting, both users and search engines to a different URL from the URL or page they originally requested, to another page. A 301 Redirect is the term used to describe a method of permanently redirecting a visitor from one web page to another web page.

302 Redirect

A 302 Redirect is used to temporarily redirect a visitor to another web page. It’s similar to 301 redirect but should only be used for short-term situations.

404 Redirect

A 404 error occurs when a visitor goes to a web page that does not exist or is no longer available. A 404 error will automatically be generated when a nonexistent URL is used. However, some websites create custom 404 redirect messages for deleted pages or for non-existent pages within their domain. For example, https://lnpmediagroup.com/case-studies/ is a page on lnpmediagroup.com. But if you go to https://lnpmediagroup.com/elephants, you’ll discover a customized 404 error redirect message from our web team.

Want to Talk About Ways LNP Media Group can Help Your Agency Manage Growth?

When it comes to finding trusted digital partners, it makes sense for your ad agency to choose a company with a history of success. When you work with LNP Media Group’s digital marketing teams, you get access to digital experts, media experts, skilled digital content creators, and cost-effective video solutions in one trusted resource.

Check out our case studies for more examples of our clients’ successes, or contact us today to talk about how we can help your agency succeed.

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As long as there’s been advertising, some form of contextual ad placement has existed. Any businesses or organizations that have run ads in newspapers, in magazines, or on television have been placing ads in ways that ensure they are surrounded by relevant, credible content. Choosing an ad placement based on the surrounding content makes sense, and this concept is pretty easy for most marketers to understand. For instance, it’s no surprise that TV commercials for frying pans are most interesting to viewers of cooking shows. Newspaper ads for movies get more attention when they are placed in the entertainment section. Magazine ads for gym memberships are noticed more when they are placed in fitness magazines.

This simple, easy-to-understand approach holds true when it comes to digital ads and online marketing. Placing ads on pages or videos with related content or similar interests is a smart way to increase an ad’s effectiveness. When advertisers and marketers look for websites full of related, credible content for their digital ads, professionals call it contextual targeting. While this is a relatively recent term, the approach is nothing new. Placing ads and messages next to or within the content (that already appeals to your best customer) increases the power, relevance, and effectiveness of the marketing message.

While this all sounds like common sense, it’s not always easy to implement. That’s because today’s advertising platforms and technologies are developing and changing rapidly. Modern formats and context change daily, even hourly. Also, it’s often tricky for advertisers to evaluate all the different options and approaches available within contextual advertising.

However, with a little help from an experienced marketing partner, finding the right contextual content for your advertising plan can be the turning point for your online marketing messages. Most marketing experts now believe that contextual advertising not only provides more precise targeting tools, but is also able to reach consumers at the moments in their day in which they are most receptive to these messages.

While this marketing strategy might seem like a no-brainer, it’s not always the way digital advertising works. Tracking cookies and data profiling have been the preferred method for many advertisers for the past several years. When using data-driven profiling, digital marketers often use demographics, web behaviors, and purchasing behaviors to determine which people will see their messages. While these advertisers may be reaching the right people, they are also sending ads to audiences in places in which the user sees no related content. For example, a Facebook ad about retirement communities might reach a person chatting with family about a child’s birthday party. An advertisement for an online university might pop up on your smartphone while you are playing solitaire. You may see popups on YouTube for the latest movie while you look for videos about how to fix a broken toaster.

With contextual advertising, ads are sent to content pages, not people. That means that the marketing messages are placed in front of online users consuming related content. People reading about tropical vacations might see ads for swimwear. Smartphone users reading about educational options might see an ad from an online university. Movie ads could be delivered to online users reading about local bands and theatre productions.

To explain it more simply, data profiling or behavioral advertising targets a consumer based on who they are or what they have done. Contextual advertising targets the site or page and reaches the people only when they are reading or viewing that content.

When advertisers target programmatically based on the content, they find the right pages using a Demand Side Platform, or DSP. This allows a media planner or marketer to purchase ad inventory that contains a keyword, a set of keywords, individual sentences, or matches with pre-selected contextual segments.

What are the Advantages of Contextual Targeting?

While data-driven profiling can be an effective way to send out marketing messages, contextual advertising also has many advantages. Almost half of marketers say this is their favorite targeting format. One of the most essential benefits is relevancy. Because they appear within related content, contextual ads make sense to the reader and match their interests. Therefore, they tend to be noticed more and clicked on more often. When marketers employ sophisticated contextual advertising strategies, they can locate sets of ad viewers who will be interested in the company’s messages based on the information on webpages they are visiting.

Why is Contextual Advertising Becoming More Popular now?

Data-driven profiling techniques have come under increasing fire in the past year. This type of profiling combines readily available information, like social media profile stats, and combines it with bits and pieces from other databases. Some varieties of data gathering also track an individual’s browsing history and include data about online purchases or offline credit card purchases. As a result, many consumers and governments have protested these practices and consider many types of data collection and data aggregation as an invasion of privacy. However, contextual targeting doesn’t require user profiling or tracking codes.

More and more countries are passing legislation that protects user data, and user privacy, including the EU’s landmark General Data Protection Regulation  (GDPR), passed on May 25, 2018. The GDPR legislation took away the ability of some online businesses to use or profile some types of information. As a result, many online websites and social media platforms have had to change and simplify the way they create or profile audiences. GDPR also mandated that any website using tracking codes, or cookies, must get user permission before tracking their behavior or sharing it with other sources or entities.

While GDPR was limited to European websites, any website or social media platform that intentionally or incidentally attracted European users had to comply with the new regulations. As a result, for most online sites and platforms, creating audiences based on consumer online behavior and traits slowed down or went away. While many sites still use cookies, they can only do so after a user opts-in or gives permission. The permission requirement has resulted in a dramatic slow-down of data-collection, making this type of advertising less precise and less prevalent.

However, when marketers choose their ad placements based on surrounding content, they do not rely on user profiling. Instead, they market to users on the site, whoever they may be. The qualifier for contextual advertising audiences is created based on their media usage at the moment, instead of basing it on past behavior or recent media usage.

Most experts agree that the practical impact of the GDPR legislation and related efforts in the United States have been the primary reasons advertisers began paying more attention to the benefits of contextual targeting.

On TheDrum.com, Julia Nightingale reports that GDPR has changed the way marketers think about contextual advertising,

“Does the fallout from GDPR mean that audience targeting as we know it, will become a thing of the past?…Having access to granular data is of course extremely valuable from both an insight and targeting perspective. Has the legislation change forced companies to take a closer look at their data infrastructure? Will we see a drastic change in the ways companies choose to target their audiences?”

Happily, for many advertisers, contextual usage has always been a preferred method for identifying audiences. Contextual marketing offers exceptional reach and vast audiences. It ensures the users are interested in their content “right now.” For example, an ad for NFL gear on a sports website is surrounded by plenty of sports- and football-related coverage, which means that the users tend to be highly qualified audiences. A robust website may have hundreds of pages of NFL or football content and hundreds of thousands of users. In this example, contextual advertising provides marketers with plenty of content and large audiences for their ads.

Contextual advertising is also a smart strategy for niche products. For instance, companies that sell specialty woks may not be able to use data-driven profiling to identify customers who are “most likely to buy woks.” Still, they can find interested audiences by placing wok ads in articles about woks, ranking woks, or describing the best way to use woks. They can also put their ads on cooking sites that feature recipes using woks, or within videos that show or use woks.

In the Past, Behavioral Targeting and Cookies Ruled

Not so long ago, behavioral marketing, using data-driven tracking, seemed unstoppable. After all, there were few legal limits on the ways digital platforms and websites could profile users. Social media platforms were especially adept at tracking and aggregating data in creative and specific ways. And it wasn’t limited to companies like Facebook. Google, Apple, Twitter, LinkedIn. Many major websites programmed their digital properties in ways that enabled them to gather all kinds of information about individuals including age, gender, political preference, race, buying habits, credit scores, age of children, the brands they used at grocery stores, their net worth, the value of their home, and more.

By using cookies, a type of code that tracks online users’ web behaviors, sites could match emails to online and offline databases. Even credit information and purchasing habits from grocery store loyalty cards could be added to the online profiling systems. By employing a sophisticated set of programmatic ad tools, these tech companies could empower platforms like Facebook to target and retarget users with particular ads that could pinpoint their behavior from the websites they visited recently, to the model of the car they were likely to buy in the next 30 days.

This kind of behavioral targeting did not factor in contextual information, such as the content or articles on a website. Instead, the primary driver was tracking the behavior of users with digital code or cookies. It was the power of the cookies which allowed advertisers to gather personal web usage information and then use that information to create a digital profile.

With so many razor-sharp tools in place, contextual targeting became less popular. Behavioral targeting seemed to offer more in-depth data set to reach people in more specific ways than ever before. However, in recent years, users began to resist such intimately targeted ads. The ads became so specific to the actions of users that consumers started to suspect that computers were “spying” on them, and then selling their information to online companies. While the reality was rarely so sinister, abuses did exist. When the flaws of behavioral targeting became apparent, the United States and other countries required these digital companies to stop using certain types of tools to create audience profiles. Many tech companies voluntarily stopped using more sensitive types of data gathering, most notably political, racial, and financial profiling. As a result, advertisers find that it is now significantly more challenging to send the right ad to the right person at the right time.

Happily, contextual advertising was unaffected by these legislative demands. Because contextual advertising relies on surrounding content to attract users, instead of behavioral profiling to track user characteristics, it has never come under regulatory scrutiny. Contextual marketing does not utilize web tracking or previous behaviors as a way to connect a user with interests. Instead, the content attracts the user. Advertisers that use this strategy are placing ads on digital platforms where the user is reading compatible content, right now.

Is Contextual Advertising the Future of Online Advertising?

In addition to regulation from Europe, some U.S. states have also enacted legislation that restricts web tracking and data profiling. America’s largest state, California, has passed its own online privacy policies, the California Consumer Privacy Act, or CCPA. Other states may soon follow. The California legislation requires compliance by any website that wants to do business in California or send products to California. As a result, tech giants like Google, Apple, and Mozilla have responded in kind with additional, voluntary restrictions. According to Phil Schraeder in the April 12, 2020 issue of AdWeek,

“…the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) went into effect on January 1, leaving brands, ad tech vendors and publishers scrambling to figure out what they need to do to comply. Then, a couple of weeks later, Google announced that its Chrome web browser, following similar moves by Safari and Firefox, would eliminate cookies by January 2022, further complicating how, in the not-too-distant future, digital advertising would reach customers without access to the third-party data that had become the standard for programmatic initiatives.”

While many Americans are not yet fully aware of privacy regulation, that may be changing. On May 7, 2020, an IAS study was released that showed online privacy is paramount. The IAS study reports,

“While 89% of consumers say data privacy is important, more than half (55%) are unaware of any data privacy regulation…when it comes to preferences, consumers are most receptive to contextual targeting (such as an ad for baking supplies on a cooking website) over behavioral, audience, location, or social targeting. As privacy legislation and consumer actions accelerate a shift in targeting strategies, innovative advertising strategies like contextual targeting based on the categories, sentiment, or emotion of the page will be prioritized by marketers. Enabling contextual advertising will allow advertisers to adjust to the evolving landscape while engaging consumers in appropriate environments.”

As more and more governments and online entities get stricter about the use of tracking code, or cookies, some marketers are calling this dramatic increase in regulation the Cookie-pocalypse. In Australia’s Marketing Magazine, reporter Jasmine Giuliani wrote,

“When Google announced the decision to phase out third-party cookies from its Chrome browser by 2022, it caused a considerable stir in the marketing community. Whether digital marketers are rejoicing or panicking, there is no denying the move will change how online targeting, ad tracking and privacy will work on the web.”

As the news articles cited here demonstrate, the restriction of cookies is not the only reason contextual advertising is on the rise. As online browsers like Google, Apple Safari, and Mozilla’s Firefox struggle to gain market share, they are restricting the use of third-party cookies to provide a more secure user experience. These browsers are also allowing users to select more comprehensive privacy preferences, which makes cookies and tracking difficult or even impossible.

Because contextual targeting attracts relevant readers, it does not require the use of third-party cookies. In fact, contextual advertising does not actually target the user in any way – it seeks out content. It seems likely that contextual advertising will play a much more significant role in online advertising going forward.

As the public becomes more aware of data-profiling, more and more companies and governments are mandating data-monitoring restrictions. This means that behavioral advertising is becoming more attractive than ever. As a result, more advertisers will take advantage of the ability of good content to attract qualified consumers.

How is Contextual Advertising Used in Different Industries?

As explained earlier in this article, looking for on-page keywords is one way to help ad placement tools identify the meaning and context of a page. Once that context is defined, it’s used to make ad-serving decisions. This kind of contextual advertising allows all sorts of advertisers to serve up highly-relevant ads on pages with the type of content that identifies the interests of the readers.

How exactly does this work? To help our advertisers understand how to apply contextual advertising strategies, we’ve created these examples.

How to Use Contextual Advertising for Pennsylvania Auto Dealerships

Online buying and selling cars, trucks, and SUVs is more common than ever. But some marketers find that finding the best local customers online can be challenging. For auto dealerships in and around Lancaster County, placing ads on pages with specific make and model descriptions makes perfect sense. Advertising on sites with advice about auto care and maintenance is another smart strategy. To capture shoppers in the research phase, dealerships can advertise on sites with car listings, financing advice, or car shopping tips.

Dealerships who want to take advantage of the benefits of contextual advertising may want to place ads on sites or content that uses keywords that describe car care, auto financing, how to get the best price on a new car, top 10 cars of 2020, car selection, truck repair, how to clean your car, or even news of a new dealership in the area.

Contextual Advertising for Pennsylvania Entertainment, Movies, Theatre, Plays, and Concerts

When you’re a business that offers events and entertainment in Lancaster County and Central PA, it’s smart to look for content that uses keywords indicating interest in your production. While some online users will search for movies, to get even more people out to see the latest film at a theater marketers should serve up advertising on sites filled with the keywords regular moviegoers use, like things to do this weekend, cinema, binge-watching, and of course, movie.

It may also make sense to look for people interested in the titles of the movies that are playing right now. For example, instead of limiting ads to sites talking about film, also include digital platforms that talk about the movies that are running in your local theater. Place children’s movies ads on parents’ sites with “activities to do with kids” articles.

The same marketer might also market to keywords that make sense with the content of the movie. If it’s a movie about the rock group Queen, marketers might look for content about Freddy Mercury, Brian May, or Roger Taylor. Or they may look for articles that mention similar types of 80’s rock, Kiss, ELO, Aerosmith, and Moody Blues.

To sell tickets to the next big concert coming to town, it makes sense to reach people who are reading about entertainment news, celebrity gossip, music events, local concerts, bands, and venues. But if you’re hosting a Martin Short comedy show, you may also want to look for sites that mention Martin Short, comedy clubs, and comedians.

A smart marketer will think hard about the kind of content that will appeal to the target audience. By thinking about the keywords they will be reading, a media planner will be able to identify the best contextual content for your ad placement.

Contextual Ads for Lancaster County Food and Restaurants

Central PA loves good food, and residents of Lancaster County can choose to eat at a wide variety of great restaurants. And they also like reading about the people, food, and chefs that make our area a culinary haven. By serving ads on sites using contextual advertising strategies, restaurants can reach people who are reading pages about specific types of food, cuisines, and dishes. For example, if the advertiser is a Thai restaurant and they want to reach people who love Pad Thai, they can choose delivery by keywords around Pad Thai, the ingredients, Thai cuisine, and similar dishes.

A grocery store might want to target contextual ads based on keywords about products carried, online recipe sites for Lancaster County, articles on food health, food budgeting, shopping tips, couponing, and articles that talk about cleaning, cleaning tips, and housekeeping tips.

For B2B marketers who sell to restaurants, think about serving ads on the sites restaurant owners and decision-makers visit. Consider advertising in the business section, on restaurant health inspection pages, and in news about commercial real estate in the area.

Wedding and Event Venues

Any florist, party planner, linens rental, limousine service, or venue that wants to target bridal and big events can find relevant audiences by choosing the kind of keywords that will show up in content created to appeal to brides and bridal celebrations. For Lancaster County, these kinds of advertisers might want to target keywords or context segments like engagement, bridesmaid, engagement ring, wedding gown, bouquets, catering, and bridesmaid dresses. When a marketer chooses these kinds of keywords, their ads will be served to pages and articles about wedding registries, wedding planning, floral arrangement, bakeries, cake decorators, wedding planners, and more.

How, Exactly, Does Contextual Marketing Work?

While we’ve been talking a lot of about contextual or behavioral marketing, it may help to explain precisely how this type of advertising buy works. A contextual advertising system, such as Google Display Network, scans millions of websites every day using web crawlers or bots. These crawlers are continually indexing the text or words on websites for keywords. This includes the text, subheads, headlines, and other relevant code formats.

The contextual ad system can now send digital ads to a webpage based on the indexed keywords (or phrases, or context categories.) More advanced contextual targeting systems will scan for additional information (such as alt text on images or video content.)

These tools are also able to read the sentiment or tone of the page. They sort the pages into categories of credibility, reliability, and seriousness. This improves relevancy and avoids issues of brand safety. For example, with the proper filters specified, a financial ad can be served on a site full of credible content, like a LancasterOnline article on personal finances, but won’t appear on questionable sites, such as a video spoofing banks or using obscenities.

Often advertisers want to appear on particular websites. The way some publishers help advertisers perform contextual targeting with ad inventory may help. While situations vary, contextual targeting ad programs can often be built around the specific site, channel, page type, keyword, or taxonomy provided by the site owner. Taxonomy is a system classification or the way a site organizes its data into categories and subcategories. The deeper and more specific the site’s taxonomy, the richer the contextual targeting can be.

While costs vary widely based on targeting parameters, the current market dynamics mean that the price of contextual advertising is often lower than the investment needed in other types of online advertising. That’s because there currently is a large inventory of available content online. In other words, the impression inventory available is very high for contextual advertising. More contextual ad spaces are open compared to the number of ad requests. Since cost is created based on supply and demand, a vast supply means that ad buyers have lots of flexibility to decide when, where, and how an ad is delivered and shown.

However, all contextual advertising is not created equal. Targeted advertising on highly credible sites tends to cost more than broadly targeted ads with less stringent parameters on content quality.

Within this marketing strategy, there are a few techniques any marketer can use to reach their best consumers. Always consider the balance among your marketing goals, the information you want to communicate, and ad formats available to you. Remembering the role of these considerations will help your marketer make the decisions that work best for your Lancaster County or Central PA business.

Should You Target Using Off-the-shelf Contextual Segments?

Off-the-Shelf is a term used to describe pre-built audience segments. When advertisers look for pages for contextual targeting, they can select ad placements included in the Google Display Network based on keywords. But what if relevant pages don’t use those keywords? Off-the-shelf contextual segments are pre-built to be relevant to a category instead of a single term.

For example, an ad planner can work with a client to create a core theme or category for a set of ads. When placing ads, the planner chooses from among thousands of Google contextual segments that include sites and pages that have been selected because they contain syntax that shows the pages are about selected topics, even when they lack identified keywords.

For example, if a business wants to reach people looking for retirement communities, they can choose from a variety of contextual segments that are about retirement or similar subjects. While these pages may not contain specific words or phrases, they will still be on-topic and relevant to the category.

Targeting by segments ensures that an advertiser will run ads on the right kinds of sites. For example, if an advertiser targeted using the word “retirement,” they might also land on sites about corporate retirement savings plans and 401ks.  By choosing a segment, they are making sure they don’t end up on the wrong site.

Should you Target Using Custom Keyword Segments?

Just like off-the-shelf segments, custom keyword segments are sets of prebuilt keyword groups to help ad planners create contextual targeting marketing plans for Google Display Ads without using specific keywords. These keyword segments are less granular than a customized keyword approach but less generalized that the off-the-shelf segment option.

To prevent confusion or misplacement, these options also allow you to exclude terms. Using the retirement community example, you may want to exclude keyword segments that include 401ks, IRAs, financial planning, or employer retirement savings plans.

What is Contextual Advertising With Video?

Video has become one of the most popular parts of the online universe, so don’t overlook it in your contextual advertising plan. Both Google Ads and YouTube are good choices for advertisers who want to use contextual advertising to reach people viewing relevant videos about related topics or who are watching videos on specific video URLs. For example, if your business sells parts to repair home appliances, ads on how-to videos about appliance repair would be a perfect contextual fit.

What is HyperLocal Contextual Advertising or GeoFencing?

For many companies, nothing beats local advertising. Keeping content relevant to the places people go offline is at least as important as being relevant to the context in the digital world. That’s why so many advertisers are including offline locations as a part of their contextual advertising plan. Usually a part of a geofencing strategy, hyperlocal contextual advertising uses place as context. For example, if people are online while in a local coffee shop, they are doing certain things – drinking coffee, meeting friends, and relaxing. This might be a good time to send ads about coffee, eating out, or shopping. If the coffee shop is next to a gas station, ads about checking the tank may be relevant. If the coffee shop is next to a movie theater, advertisers can deliver ads promoting the latest films.

Can You Target by Site?

For some advertisers, you won’t need a lot of technology partners to get started. If you’ve done your research, and already know the types of sites that your target consumers go to, you can target by a specific site.

There are two ways to do this. The first strategy is to utilize a narrow industry example. For instance, marketers who want to reach trucking companies can look for sites that are specifically targeting the trucker industry. These may be news sites, listing sites, or industry publications.

The second example is to go directly to the site. If your business wants to start advertising on LancasterOnline, for instance, you can contact the site directly. In this example, the marketer must make a direct deal with the inventory owner (LNP Media Group.) When you work directly with a site that offers advertising, you have the advantage of a direct connection to the content. You will agree on terms, price, and estimated reach, or CPM (Cost Per Thousand.) When you work with well-developed content sites like LancasterOnline, you rely on an account rep to make recommendations about content and frequency. This account rep sends the client proof of performance once the ads have run.

In this example, if you want to send ads to people who are visiting Lancaster on vacation, you may want to advertise on LancasterOnline’s pages about area attractions that show up in searches for “what to do in Lancaster.”

You may want to expand your advertising to other tourism and visitor’s sites as well to reach more people looking for information about Lancaster County. Each website will have special requirements for how and when marketers can advertise.

Advertising on local media properties is one of the most common uses of contextual advertising. Websites like LancasterOnline offer brand-safe environments with broad reach. They also provide a deep set of topics and industry specialties so that you can advertise to very targeted groups of B2C and B2B audiences.

Are you Ready to Get Started?

Contextual advertising allows your company to reach people when they are exploring related content. That content may be about your product or industry, or it may be related to your business in other relevant ways. You can target by keywords, website, or prebuilt segments. You can also use contextual advertising for video ads and location-based advertising.

LNP Media Group is experienced in this kind of marketing and ad placement. Whether you choose to run ads on LancasterOnline or you want to create a contextual campaign to run on other websites and platforms, we can help you develop plans that meet your marketing goals.

Contact us today for a free consultation, and we’ll show you how contextual advertising can work for your Lancaster County or Central PA business.

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LNP Media Group hosted four marketing seminars to help local businesses during the Covid-19 pandemic. The seminars were attended by over 60 local businesses, and were led by Dr. Renee Tacka.

This page contains links to a recording of each seminar, plus the slide deck.

Week 1: Sending a Positive Message & Staying Top-of-Mind

Mon, April 27, 2020

Are you a business owner or marketer who’s looking for guidance on how and what to communicate to customers during the COVID-19 pandemic? During this webinar, you’ll learn:

– How to communicate empathetically with your customer base

– How to appropriately promote your business during COVID-19

– What you can do to stay top-of-mind, whether you’re open or closed

Download Slide Deck: LNP_Strategic Thinking Amid COVID-19_wk 1

Week 2: Creative Ways to Run Your Business Without a Storefront

Mon, May 4, 2020

Is your business storefront currently closed due to COVID-19? If so, we’re here to help! In the second webinar of our four-week series, our speaker, Renee Tacka, shared creative ideas to help you run your business and generate revenue while your storefront is closed!

Download Slide Deck: LNP_Strategic Thinking Amid COVID-19_wk 2

Week 3: How to Expand Your Business’ Reach

Mon, May 11, 2020

Are you looking for ways to drive more sales for your business? If so, expanding your reach is key. During this webinar, Renee Tacka shared tips on how to adjust your marketing strategy to reach more consumers and grow relationships using traditional and not-so-traditional methods.

Download Slide Deck: LNP_Strategic Thinking Amid COVID-19_wk 3

Week 4: Reinforcing Your Connection to the Community

Mon, May 18, 2020

Has COVID-19 impacted your business’s ability to engage with customers? If so, maintaining your connection to the community is more important now than ever before. In this final webinar of our 4-week series, Renee Tacka will talk about how your business can convey its support to the community and reassure customers that your business will be there for them when you reopen.

Download Slide Deck: LNP_Strategic Thinking Amid COVID-19_wk 4

About Renee Tacka

Renee Tacka is a doctoral-level business professional with 23+ years of experience achieving results in the media, research, consumer goods, and retail industries. She is accomplished in business and operational planning, market development, team management, budgeting, and all functional areas of marketing, including sales, advertising, consumer behavior, database marketing, and market research.

Renee is an Assistant Professor of Marketing in the Graham School of Business at York College of Pennsylvania in York, PA. She teaches marketing, digital marketing, advanced advertising, personal selling, sales management, fashion marketing, retailing, and branding. Renee started as an adjunct professor at York College of Pennsylvania in 2008. She is also a well-known educator throughout the media industry, having trained many media clients in sales, advertising, and market research techniques to accomplish both internal and external company goals and objectives.

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If you’ve ever thought about creating a formal marketing plan for your Pennsylvania company, you’ve probably run into the term “marketing funnel” or “marketing sales funnel.” While almost all modern communications plans use some type of marketing funnel, this is not a new term.

In fact, most experts attribute the first use of “marketing funnel” to an ad agency exec in 1898. Over a century ago, Elias St. Elmo mapped out the marketing journey as a tool to get new advertising clients. He was the first advertiser to sort the customer’s journey into distinct stages.

Since then, the marketing funnel has been reimagined and labeled in many different ways. The concept of the marketing funnel, sometimes called a purchasing funnel or a marketing sales funnel, has lasted so long because it is a relatively simple, easy-to-understand visualization of the hypothetical journey a customer takes.

Even though the marketing funnel has become a well-established communications tool over time, many small businesses today don’t take time to develop a marketing funnel strategy. That can be a mistake. This tried and true marketing tool can help almost any Lancaster County business think about ways to convert a person into a lead, a lead into a sale, and a purchase into a repeat customer.  When you visualize the marketing funnel and map out plans for each part of the process, you realize that to get sales, you must begin by building awareness.

Like it or not, every customer starts out as someone who knows nothing about your business. They may not recognize your logo, see where you’re located, understand what you do, or know anything about you or your products or services. However, to be successful, any business or organization must convert people with no knowledge into a repeat customer, and that can be quite a task. Lancaster companies must know how to create relevant and compelling communications, offers, and interactions, and then deliver them at the right time to the right audiences.

Awareness, Preference, Conversion, and Advocacy

Here’s where the marketing funnel can help. The stages of the business funnel are awareness, preference, conversion, and advocacy. When you spend time thinking through your marketing funnel, what your best customers will do at each stage, and how long they will spend at each stage, it will become clearer how to fund each stage appropriately. You’ll also find out which areas you already have covered, and which areas need more work. You’ll understand where you need to spend money to improve a stage, and which stages are already working well.

When you spend time developing and analyzing your marketing sales funnel, you’re actually spending time developing and analyzing your business. You are thinking about what you need to do to get more customers through the door, and how to get them to use you again and again. When used effectively, a well-managed marketing funnel serves as a road map that shows how a business can turn leads into customers and turn a one-time purchaser into a loyal consumer.

While a marketing funnel provides a neat, easy-to-understand graphic guide that illustrates the stages your customer goes through, it’s essential to understand that this journey is rarely linear. Few customers “fall” through the funnel predictably or in perfect order. Every customer does not fully experience every stage or even go through the stages in the desired order.

For example, some Pennsylvania customers go through the funnel in minutes. For some restaurants, the prospect may go through the marketing funnel quickly. One night they may get hungry (where am I going to eat right now?), do a quick “near me” search on Google (awareness), make a decision based on an online menu or website (preference), and call to order a pizza for pick up (conversion.) If they tell their friends how good the restaurant is, they continue to promote the business (advocacy.)

In other situations, it may take months for a customer to consider a purchase. For example, they may think about buying a new car for months and see several ads from many dealerships during that time (awareness and preference) before they visit a dealer’s lot (conversion.) And if they send their friends or family to that dealership in the coming months, that’s advocacy.

In another example, a person may consider joining a gym to get fit. They may become aware of a nearby gym, see the fees, and move on. In the meantime, they may begin a workout routine, and access blogs and information available for free on that gym’s website. They may subscribe to the gym’s free e-newsletter and workout tips emails. They may see ads for the gym on their social media feed. Even though they have not paid for anything yet, they recommend the gym to a few friends, who become members. At last, the person sees ads for joining for one month free with a 12-month membership and decides to join his friends, make the investment, and join the gym.

In the last example, the person experiences awareness, then preference, then advocacy, and lastly, conversion. They don’t move through the funnel predictably. Still, all of the communications they received while in the funnel helped them decide to purchase, and also resulted in two additional memberships.

As you can see in this range of examples, different people spend different amounts of time in each part of the funnel. Various business models must look at the marketing funnel differently. That’s why it’s so important to spend time thinking through the kinds of experiences your prospects may have in each stage. When you spend this time working on the funnel, you are making sure it’s easy for your audiences to find you. You also want to provide enough information for customers to understand why they should choose you over your competitors. Of course, you should make buying as easy as possible. And finally, you must ensure you have tools in place to transform a first-time buyer into a repeat customer and to transform a customer into an advocate for your business. With planning and the right marketing tools, you can help your Lancaster County customer move to the next stage when the time is right.

Make the Most of Every Stage in the Funnel – Online and Offline

No matter how big and famous your business is, every person must have some initial experience with it. For companies like McDonald’s, many people discover the chain as a child and don’t remember the first time they heard about it. For other businesses like a daycare center, people are only receptive to remembering their options once they need those services. For different types of companies with low-risk purchases, like restaurants and taverns, people are open to trying places that are close by, even if they’ve never heard of them. No matter which kind of business or organization you have, you probably know that new customers rarely spend time to find and research your product or services. Most customers will gravitate toward familiar names when they need to choose a business. To make matters more complicated, it’s likely that you have competition. Your company is just one choice of many in your category in Lancaster, or even in Pennsylvania, all competing for your prospects’ attention.

According to Crystal McFerran in Forbes.com,

“The marketing funnel starts with general awareness, and then you foster interest. But how much desire is there at that point? Your prospective lead can be all over the place for this process, so how much are they worth to you? If you know there is desire, it can be worth spending resources. But if they just want to browse, do you break out the samples and the goodwill, or do you wait to see what develops?”

While making decisions on how to handle prospects in each stage of the funnel can be challenging, when you place your messages in the right place at the right time, your prospects begin investigating their options, and you’ll want to stand out, get attention, and ensure they understand your value.

At each stage in the funnel, you want to offer them the right amount of information. For some, that may be as simple as making sure your business and offerings appear at the top of a Google search, especially when people are searching specifically for businesses within Lancaster County. Other types of businesses will need to supply deeply technical information that helps prospects understand the benefits of a substantial investment. However, no matter what you sell or who you sell to, once your customer understands who you are and what you have to offer, they need less and less information to lead them to the conversion, or sales, stage of the funnel.

To increase awareness, it helps to think about context. If you are placing an ad, what kind of editorial content surrounds it? Is this content that people trust and spend time with? Does putting your ad in this format make sense with your product and offerings?

According to Matthew Broughton on ExchangeWire.com,

“If ads are genuinely relevant to content, they are more effective. We know, for instance, that contextual alignment can drive up to 50% higher ad recall, according to Google’s 2017 Market Insights study in EMEA.”

For example, running ads about sports equipment in the sports section of LNP makes more sense than running that ad in a wedding magazine. Online, a Pennsylvania bank may want to avoid placing ads on a gambling website but may wish to allocate more funds to placing digital ads on the financial news section of LancasterOnline. Bakeries may not want ads to run alongside content that bashes carbs.

Once you decide where your ad should be to gain awareness, you must determine what message you want to convey to achieve preference. In the early stages, it may make sense to use emotion to capture their attention. Can you create messages or offers that make your potential customers feel a certain way? Can you position your product or service as a pathway to belonging to a specific group, such as smart investors, health-conscious eaters, or serious athletes? Can you help them understand how your product will help them avoid undesirable emotions such as anxiety or fear?

Once you get their attention, it’s time to use logic to prove that you’re good at what you do and that your company can deliver on your promises. Websites, social media sites, videos, brochures, testimonials, and guarantees are all tools that help people research and trust your company and your offerings.

Price, placement, and promotion will help you make the sale. If you can provide a positive sales process, at the right price, with the right offer, you may be able to seal the deal. But you’re not done yet. Once you complete the conversion, you want to retain your customers, so they will come back again and again and refer others to your organization.

Of course, your organization must provide exceptional service and deliver on your promises, and make the case that you are better than competing organizations in Lancaster County and Pennsylvania. But it also helps to do things like offer discounts for repeat customers, give preferential treatment to loyal consumers, offer discounts for referrals, create promotional offers, and send out important news and information to your loyal customers to stay top of mind.

In this article, we’ll break down each part of the funnel, and give you practical advice to help you make the most of your customer’s journey.

Early in the Marketing Funnel; Create Awareness

Awareness is at the top of the funnel for a good reason. It represents how familiar your audience is with your product or service.  Like it or not, today’s consumers rely on extensive research and others’ opinions before making a purchase. That means that brand awareness is critical if you want to stand out in a consideration set. Once potential customers recognize your brand, they’re more likely to make purchases and repeat purchases with little or no additional research. High levels of awareness alone actually create trust and loyalty.

According to JJ Tyson in Business2Community.com,

“Research shows that consumers trust brands more that have consistent messaging. Additionally, people like knowing that they’re using products that their peers are using… By increasing brand recognition, you’re also increasing the likelihood that others will want to talk about your product in a natural setting.”

Brand awareness can create trust by creating logical associations that confirm your company’s credibility and proficiency. It’s no coincidence that some of the best-known products or services are also some of the most trusted. When you think of Citizens Bank, Sheetz, Microsoft, and even Snickers, you don’t question their skills or abilities, even if you’re not a current patron.

In Psychology Today, Deborah Ward reports,

“Studies have shown that we are attracted to what is familiar to us, and that repeated exposure to certain people will increase our attraction toward them.”

While this article is focused on personal relationships, humans are hard-wired to be attracted to familiarity, and this is not limited to familiarity with people. Humans are also more likely to trust inanimate objects, businesses, or concepts that they are familiar with, and advertisements are no exception. When we become familiar with a company, product, or service through repeated exposure, our probability of preference skyrockets. And, don’t forget that locality plays a role in our preferences. Ensuring that local consumers also know your business is located locally, in Lancaster County, will also build preference.

While paid ads are one way to increase your target audience’s familiarity with your brand, pleasant experiences, good associations, and positive perceptions will also build familiarity and preference. That means that having articles published that are relevant to your Lancaster County business can boost awareness, but it doesn’t stop there. Ranking high in Google search, showing up on search engines, being referenced on other websites, being a sponsor of events, offering free samples, participating in festivals or community events, using branded company vehicles, ensuring highly-visible street signage, and even investing in company wearables can all increase your business’s visibility and awareness among your audiences.

Of course, paid advertising is an effective way to control the frequency and precision of your marketing messages. With paid advertising, you know who is seeing your message and how often they are viewing it. You will be able to select audiences that are more likely to convert into sales, instead of spending time and money building awareness among people who are unlikely to buy. After all, if you want to create awareness for a retirement community, it makes little sense to place ads in vehicles that are read by high schoolers. Conversely, why run ads for teen acne medication in business publications targeted to senior executives? You’ll get more impact, recognition, and recall if you run ads to relevant audiences.

Frequency is also a powerful tool for building awareness. A Pennsylvania business can’t significantly increase awareness of a travel offer by running one or two advertisements on Facebook. That’s why successful travel companies like Travelocity are continually running campaigns on social media. In another example, just one employment ad from an otherwise unknown company may motivate a few people to apply, but a series of advertisements for a well-known company ensures a larger pool of better-qualified applicants.

How to Increase Awareness

Want more ways to create the kind of real brand awareness that will make a lasting impact with your audience? Try LancasterOnline advertising to find local audiences and compatible content to one of the biggest audiences in Lancaster County. Ad choices include mobile ads, sliding billboards, homepage takeovers, sponsorships, collaborative content, and business directory packages.

Another way to increase awareness is to work towards getting the top rankings for your business’s relevant keywords on search engines like Google. Using Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques and strategies can help your Lancaster County business become more visible, increase click-throughs on your listing, and raise awareness of your organization. Paid search ads ensure that your business shows up at the top of the search page, building awareness and increasing click-through rates (CTR.)

In fact, according to research by Backlinko.com,

“The #1 result in Google gets 31.7% of all clicks … On average, moving up 1 spot in the search results will increase CTR by 30.8%. However, this depends on where you’re moving from and to. Moving from position #3 to position #2 will usually result in a significant CTR boost. However, moving from #10 to #9 doesn’t make a statistically significant difference.”

You can also build awareness with video ads, social media posts, and social media ads on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and YouTube. With digital campaigns, you can even target your audiences based on a location and deliver mobile ads to people within a small radius of any geography, almost anywhere in the world. Called geo-targeting, this technique allows a business to send promotional offers to people in their parking lot, or people the parking lots of their competitors.

Leverage the Middle of the Marketing Funnel; Create Preference

Once you understand how to create awareness, it’s time to explore ways to establish preference. After all, your customers will probably be aware of more than one of your competitors. For example, car shoppers have heard of many major auto brands and may even be familiar with many local dealerships. If a dealership wants to get Lancaster County buyers to their showroom, they’ll have to give their consumers the information they need to make decisions. Dealerships must create messages that build or reinforce credibility and trust.

One way to build preference is to create messages that are relevant and helpful to the consumer. People shopping for a new car face common dilemmas, including price, financing, warranties, style, service, and availability. If a Pennsylvania dealership can address any of these in their communications, the dealership may become more relevant to certain types of people and which means those people will pay more attention to their ads.

A Lancaster County salon that caters to young, funky clients should create different messages and ads than salons that specialize in bridal parties. Some Central PA electricians can deliver service anytime night or day, while others are set up to serve the needs of large commercial clients.

The goal is to think about your audience and spend time considering the things that they want or need from your type of business. What features or benefits are most important to them? You might want to interview some existing customers to find out why they chose your company. Or you can even talk to people who are likely to use your business and see what they want or need from your industry. Spend time talking to non-customers to get different perspectives. Once you have identified their needs, match those needs with the products or services that you can deliver consistently. See how you can take the things your organization does well and pair them to the needs of your potential customers.

One of the tricks to a successful business proposition is focus and selectivity. Choose one thing that you do well and resist the temptation to talk about everything you do. Don’t try to be all things to all people. Instead, be prepared to omit messages about some of the other things you do. It’s hard enough to create awareness about one specialty, so focusing on one thing makes it easier for you to capture the attention of new customers. For example, a pizza shop may brag about offering the best wod-fired margherita pizza in town. Sure, they may also sell calzones, salads, and lots of other kinds of pizza, but they shouldn’t talk about everything in an ad. Which message is most effective?

“We have the best wood-fired margherita pizza in Lancaster.”

or

“We have the best pepperoni pizza, calzones, and salads in Lancaster. And lots of other great pizza too!”

As you can see in this example, if you’re not willing to focus on one really great thing about your business, it will be much harder to stand out. You message will also be harder to remember. And that means your advertising dollars may be less effective.

While this may seem like a scary strategy, it’s not hard to find examples of successful businesses that stick to one message. Some of the biggest companies in the world have built their empires based on one or two attributes. Fed Ex was built on reliable speed; when it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight. Geico makes it easy to apply for insurance; 15 minutes or less can save you 15 percent on car insurance. Wal-Mart delivers low price; save money, live better.

While it seems hard for small businesses to do what these mega-brands have done, remember that it is not easy for mega-brands to stay on topic. After all, even Wal-Mart had to figure out its brand positioning. Their first print ad ever published, way back in 1962, did not look like the first ad for the world’s biggest retailer.

According to Jim Edwards for Business Insider,

“Even though the company is a master marketer, it paid little attention to the design of its logos until 1992—long after other retail chains realized that consumers were both interested and delighted by well-designed shopping environments.”

No matter how big or small your Lancaster County business is, when you know more about your customers, it becomes easier to develop messages that create preference. Whether you want to be known for discount prices, luxury goods, exceptional facilities, white-glove service, location, vast selection, industry expertise, or fast service, focusing on one element of your offerings makes it easier to communicate your point of difference successfully. That means that it’s also easier for customers to understand and retain your message, which increases awareness, and amplifies preference.

When it comes time to create effective, focused messages, video ads are a great place to start. Video ads may become one of the most effective tools in your marketing arsenal. Make sure your videos have high production value, stunning visuals, and smart messaging to capture attention and create preference

LancasterOnline advertising is also an effective place to create preference. Display formats in mobile ads, sliding billboards, and homepage takeovers allow you the visual space you need to communicate your company’s point of difference. Most formats can accommodate video, animation, and still images.

LancasterOnline also offers collaborative content. These advertorial-type articles can dig into your business’s point of differentiation, the products you sell, and even your company’s social values using the same professional writers and photographers that create content for other parts of LancasterOnline. Other types of collaborative content may include sweepstakes, quizzes, and giveaways.

Next in the Funnel: Conversions

Let’s be honest. Everything you’ve done up until now has been for one reason – to get conversions. This is where all your marketing efforts pay off. Whether a conversion is a sale, a contract, a donation, or a membership, it’s the goal of marketing. A conversion is an action you want your customers to make.

Once you have made your audience aware of your offering, and you have gained their trust, it’s time to convert. For some Central PA businesses, this may be a visit to a dealership. Other organizations may want audiences to donate to a cause or vote for a politician. Banks want people to open a checking account. Bakeries need people to buy a doughnut. Still other business models want people to order online, visit a store, enroll a child in sports, make an appointment, adopt a pet, and more.

No matter which type of conversion you’re looking for, you’re more likely to reach your goal if you can keep the prospect engaged, and you can keep the conversation going. One of the most attractive features of online advertising is that it offers many tools you can use to solicit interim commitments. While you may not be willing or able to get a sale online right away, you can take advantage of the moment they see your ad to make sure it’s easy for them to take action in the future. You may also be able to capture their information so you can remind them to take action later in the process.

Online ads are clickable, which means that you can drive people to your website or to a custom landing page with a form to collect information from interested potential customers. If you have an e-commerce business, your digital ad can click right through to an online product page where people can complete the purchase on the spot.

In other examples, a grocery store can offer a coupon for a free item to be redeemed when they buy $20 or more in groceries. A nonprofit could create a landing page that asks people to sign up for the e-newsletter. Once the nonprofit has the email, they can follow up with regular solicitations.

Advocacy: Retaining Customers and Creating Fans

As you can see, creating a new sale is a lot of work. Most Pennsylvania business owners know that getting new customers is one of their most significant expenses. Once you have a new patron, you should have a plan in place that ensures they are happy with your services, intend to use you again, and are likely to recommend you to a friend.

How valuable are repeat customers? According to ConstantContact.com,

“If you’re a small business, you need to save money anywhere you can. It costs five times more to acquire a new customer than it does to keep a current customer. Bringing that new customer to the spending level of your current customers costs 16 times more... By increasing customer retention just five percent, a company’s profitability will increase by an average of 75 percent.”

Any successful business knows they must deliver excellent service and reliable products consistently just to stay in business. Still, it takes a little bit more to create a customer who will be an advocate for your business and reward you with customer loyalty.

One way to build lasting relationships with your Lancaster County customers is to let them know that you share their values. The Corporate Executive Board surveyed 7,000 U.S. consumers. Of those who said they had a brand relationship. “64% cited shared values as the primary reason.”

Chick-fil-A is famous for openly sharing its commitment to Christian lifestyles and closes on Sundays to allow their workers to spend time at church or with their families. But this doesn’t mean that you have to share religious or political values to resonate with your consumers. Starbucks is widely considered to be a large, successful company that supports independent thinkers, alternative lifestyles, and eco-friendly causes. Ben & Jerry’s is a brand that promotes causes with distinctive flavors. Tom’s Shoes successfully broke into a well-established, competitive category by initially pledging to donate a pair of shoes for every pair sold. Over time that has migrated into a pledge to donate $1 for every $3 they make.

How can you increase company loyalty by sharing your company values? Think about your company’s beliefs, the people you market to, and what matters to them and you. Consider plans to integrate your company’s values into your marketing. How can you make positions, causes, or beliefs a part of your business and communications plans?

Another way to build customer loyalty and advocacy in Lancaster County is through sharing relevant information. Creating e-newsletters, emails, and blogs that relay information, tips, and industry information is a great way to create a deeper relationship with your customers. You can promote this information in emails, on social media, on your website, and in your ads.

Make sure you’re sharing high-value information that your customers can use to make their lives better. Examples of this include Think with Google, an online marketing and advertising information resource that includes countless studies and surveys from Google designed to help you learn more about your market and your customers. Quickbooks has a smart blog full of accounting advice, peppered with information for running a profitable small business. Restaurants often create e-newsletters or emails to announce menu items or special events. Financial planners can send weekly emails on investment news.

Another way to create customer loyalty in Pennsylvania is through loyalty cards or programs. Although they require a fair amount of set up and administration to work, loyalty rewards programs can provide the incentive a new customer needs to return again and again.

As any grocery store can tell you, store coupons are also an effective way to drive repeat purchases. Many businesses also provide incentives for customers to recommend them to a friend. A Lancaster County dentist offered dinner for two at a local restaurant when existing patients referred new people to the practice. Other incentives can include gift cards, vouchers, or free upgrades.

Ready to Map out Your Marketing Sales Funnel?

Whether you’re a new business owner or an experienced veteran, it’s worth the time to map out your marketing sales funnel. Think about the ways you’re increasing targeted awareness, the messages you’re developing to create preference, your conversion process, and your retention strategies.

The marketing funnel is an easy way to recreate the hypothetical journey a customer goes on, from discovering your company to becoming a loyal customer. While you must accept some loss of patrons at each stage, if you can create ways to keep some clients on the path to customer loyalty, you’re well on your way to creating a sustainable business model.

If you’re ready to create or revisit your marketing sales funnel, LNP Media Group is here to help. We are experts at digital marketing, video production, print marketing, and overall advertising strategy. Contact us for a no-commitment, free consultation. We’ll set up a time to discuss your marketing situation and recommend ways to grow your Lancaster County business in every stage of the funnel.

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Why should your company be doing email marketing?

First and foremost, because people are very engaged with their inboxes. According to Pew Research, 90% of Americans use the internet and email. People can check their work and personal email accounts multiple times a day via their phones. Email is easy to use, easy to understand, and can be highly engaging if done correctly. And, for marketers, email has a great ROI with a return of $42 for every $1 spent. Email marketing has better reach than social media marketing; there are 3x more accounts than Facebook and Twitter combined.

Who should you be sending emails to?

There are two fundamental distinctions regarding who to send your emails to:

• Your own list of opted-in customers or prospects
• Someone else’s list of opted-in customers or prospects

Let’s start with a discussion of the basic types of email marketing you can do to your own lists.

Sending emails to your own lists

E-commerce

E-commerce businesses stand to gain the most from email marketing because you can use emails to drive people directly to your site to make a purchase. This is much easier than driving foot traffic to a brick-and-mortar store. Here are two essential types of e-commerce email campaigns:

• Abandoned cart emails – One of the most critical types of email campaigns for an e-commerce business is the abandoned cart email. When customers shop your site, they may get partway through the purchase process and not follow-through to provide payment information. Abandoned cart emails are easy to set up through almost any email service provider (ESP) and are fully automated based on rules you establish. These emails will remind people that they still have items in their cart, and with a few quick clicks they can finish their purchase. If you don’t have abandoned cart emails for your ecommerce business you are leaving a lot of revenue on the table. These emails are effective, with 87% of shoppers saying they would consider returning to their cart to complete a purchase.
• Sales promotions and new product promotions – Additional emails that are essential for ecommerce businesses include sale promotions and new product promotions. These types of emails should communicate their message quickly and succinctly with a clear call to action (CTA) for purchase. Frequency for promotional emails varies by industry type, but overall you should pay attention to your open and click rates and your unsubscribe rates. As long as opens and clicks remain strong, and unsubscribes remain below 1%, you are not over-messaging your list.

Brand loyalty

Any type of business, whether ecommerce or not, should use email marketing to establish and maintain brand loyalty with customers and prospects. Email campaigns to support brand loyalty can take many forms:

• User information – For parts and supply stores, emails can provide information on how to install a product or how to trouble-shoot an installation issue.
• Complimentary tips – A gourmet food store can send recipe ideas or tutorials on how to use the latest kitchen tools.
• Teasers – If your business is a performance space, emails can showcase past or upcoming performances by clicking through to a landing page with video clips.
• Area interest – For hotels and resorts, emails can contain information on activities and sights in the surrounding area.
• Benefits – Retail stores with a loyalty program can send emails with news about how to leverage the loyalty program for maximum savings.
• Lifestyle – Luxury brands can incorporate high-end imagery to associate their products with the desired lifestyle of their customers.

The focus for all of these content ideas is to provide something that is of interest to the recipient. Too often, email marketers only think about their own businesses’ needs: “How can I sell this? How can I drive more people to my store? How can I generate leads?” The thought process needs to shift to: “What does my audience need? What are my audiences’ interests? What does my audience want to know?” by thinking like a customer, email marketers can make their campaigns more engaging.

Business to business

Thus far, we have talked about email marketing that is oriented toward consumers. Email marketing is also an excellent tool in the B2B space. For B2B emails, the focus still needs to be on the recipient, not on the sender. Education is a big component of B2B email marketing. Business is complex, and there are multiple products and services competing for every business persons’ time and attention. You can make your email marketing stand out by using your expertise in your industry to provide user-friendly content on topics such as:

• Products – Pros and cons of different products used in your industry.
• Trends – What are the critical industry trends that your audience should know about?
• Laws – Are there legal changes in your industry that affect your audience?
• Case studies – Explain how other businesses have successfully used your products and services.

Most B2B email marketing is a compliment to a human sales force. So, don’t think of your B2B emails as a channel for instant sales. Think of your B2B emails as a place to nurture your relationship with your clients and prospects. B2B emails can showcase your company as a valued partner who gives out relevant content and doesn’t just ask for money.

E-newsletters

E-newsletters can contain most of the type of information previously mentioned. Your e-newsletters can contain offers, educational content, branding content, event listings, new products, and more. If you are a news media company, your newsletters may contain breaking news, or news related to certain categories (e.g. business, crime, sports).

The difference between e-newsletters and other types of email marketing are simply that e-newsletters are sent on a regular schedule, usually daily, weekly or monthly, so recipients know when they’ll be hearing from you.

Sending emails to someone else’s lists

There are two types of opportunities to send an email marketing message to a list that is not your own.

Permission-based national email databases

National vendors offer access to millions of opt-in email addresses that are collected from a wide array of sites. To gain access to these national email databases you typically need to work through a media company or ad agency. The first step in sending your email campaign through a national database is selecting the right demographic, geographic, and psychographic profile that you want to reach. Selections can also include intent to purchase items like homes, cars, appliances, and more. Some vendors even allow selections based on recipients’ job titles, which means these databases can be a great option for human resources for recruitment campaigns.

Many vendors offer a performance guarantee of a minimum open rate of 8% or a click rate of 1%. If these performance thresholds are not achieved, the campaign will be delivered again at no charge.

E-newsletter Takeovers

Media companies that have e-newsletters often offer advertisers an option for an e-newsletter takeover. Each e-newsletter’s list has subscribers who have different interests (such as crime, food, sports, and weather), so you’ll need to select the e-newsletter list that aligns most closely with your brand and message.

The e-newsletter takeover is a co-branded email design. The email will come from the media company’s sending address and will contain both their logo and your logo. Recipients already trust the media company because they have signed up for the media company’s e-newsletters. Having your brand and message cobranded on the campaign will let recipients know that your marketing message is coming from a trusted local advertiser.

As with the national email databases, e-newsletter takeovers are sent by the media company, so there is no risk to your sending domain.

Key terms

Here are some key terms in the world of email marketing. Being familiar with these terms will help you understand how to engage in email marketing in an effective and legally compliant manner:

CAN-SPAM law – This law governs the use of bulk emailing, which is what email marketing is. CAN-SPAM law does not apply to individual emails you send out of your personal or work email accounts. CAN-SPAM only applies to bulk email campaigns sent out to lists of more than a few people. A few of the key points of CAN-SPAM law are:

• • Business information in footer – You must include full business contact information in your email footer.
  • Clear sender – Your sending email address needs to clearly represent your business identity.
  • Clear subject lines – Your email subject lines cannot be misleading or confusing.
  • Opt-ins – You may only send bulk emails to people who have opted-in to receive bulk emails from you. An existing business relationship, however, is considered a form of opting in, although it is not the best quality opt-in. The best quality opt-in is a confirmed (or double) opt-in. With a confirmed opt-in, the user enters their email address to receive emails from you, and then they are sent an email with a link that they have to click to confirm that they truly do want to opt-in. This is the gold standard of opting in.
  • Unsubscribe link – You must include an unsubscribe link in your emails.

Deliverability – This is a critical and often overlooked part of email marketing. You may have a gorgeous email design with an amazing offer, but if it goes into recipients’ junk or spam folders, they will never see it. A full-service ESP may provide you with deliverability metrics, or you can pay separately for the services of a deliverability vendor such as Glockapps or Return Path. These services will tell you whether your email campaigns are landing in people’s inboxes or in their junk folders. You can also track deliverability directly with some email clients. For example, you can use Google Postmaster to track your Gmail deliverability.

Email client – An email client is what the recipient uses to open and read your email. Common email clients include Gmail, Apple iPhone, Yahoo, and Outlook.

Email service provider (ESP) – An ESP is software you use to send out your emails. There are many, many ESPs. Some common low-cost options include Mail Chimp, My Emma, and Constant Contact. These ESPs can be used free of charge if your list is small. These are generally simple, easy to use ESPs without a lot of bells and whistles. More expensive ESPs have more options for automation, A/B testing, segmentation, deliverability tracking, and data integration.

Engagement – The metrics below are all measures of recipients’ engagement with your email marketing:

• • Open Rate – This is the percentage of email addresses that opened, or read, your email. However, this statistic is inexact. Opens are recorded when the recipient’s inbox downloads a single transparent image tracking pixel. If you have images set to download by default, then every email in your inbox will be ‘opened’, even if you haven’t looked at it. By contrast, an inbox with image downloading turned off will never record an email has having been opened, even if the recipient reads the text of the email.
  • Click Rate – This is the percentage of email addresses that clicked on a link in your email. Click rates can be counted as unique (by person) or aggregate (total clicks, even if some people click more than once).
  • Bounce Rate – This is the percentage of bad email addresses in your list. There are hard bounces (email is no longer in use and will be permanently not mailed to) and soft bounces (inbox is full or out-of-office, thus the ESP may try to email a soft bounce again).
  • Unsubscribe Rate – This is the percentage of email addresses that clicked the unsubscribe link in order to stop receiving emails from you.

From address – This is the email address that your campaigns will be sent from. For example, [email protected] if you are sending from your corporate domain, or [email protected] if you are using a separate mailing domain.

Friendly-from – The friendly-from is the wording in front of the from address that tells the recipient a little more about the sender. So if the sending address is [email protected], the friendly-from might be “Customer Service”. In your inbox, the full information would look like this: “Customer Service <[email protected]>”.

Landing page – The landing page is where your customers will click through to from your email. For an ecommerce business, the landing page may be a product page in your ecommerce system. For other types of campaigns, the landing page may be a stand-alone page that has additional information or that collects lead information from the recipient.

Lists/Segmentation – One of the most important aspects of email marketing is segmentation, which allows you to send the right message to the right person. For example, if you are an ecommerce company who sells products to both businesses and consumers, you would want to segment your list into two ‘buckets’ so that you can message businesses differently from consumers. Different ESPs provide different ways to create segments. Segments can be created based rules you apply, using tags, activity on your site, or based on subscribers self-selecting into a particular segment. While it is tempting to send all of your offers to everyone, you’ll get better deliverability and better engagement if you restrict your messages to the right audience.

Rendering – Your email may look great in the builder tool within your ESP, but how does it look in inboxes? This can vary, because different email clients may read your email code differently. Because of this you need to use an email testing and optimization tool, such as Litmus or Email on Acid, to test how your email design is rendered across multiple email clients.

Responsive – Your email designs need to be responsive, which means that the design needs to automatically resize and adapt depending on where it is being viewed. Your email design may have four horizontal blocks on desktop, but viewed on a phone those blocks will be vertically stacked. Responsive design is a standard for all email marketers because 63% of emails are opened on a mobile device.

Sending domain or mailing domain – Your company’s website address might be ABCCompany.com. This is your corporate domain. Many small businesses will send bulk emails directly from their corporate domain. However, when you use your corporate domain to send bulk email you run the risk of damaging your corporate domain’s reputation if your email campaigns are reported as spam. To avoid this, you may want to set up a separate sending domain, such as mail-ABCCompany.com. Setting up a mailing domain is considered best practice for medium to large businesses.

Final Thoughts on Email Marketing

Email marketing presents a wealth of opportunities for all types of businesses. If you are interested in sending an email to a list that is not your own, LNP Media Group offers effective, affordable solutions. E-newsletters on LancasterOnline are available for sending co-branded offers to a wide variety of opt-in lists, including food, entertainment, crime watch, sports, and business. We also work with national databases of millions of opt-in email addresses which we can target based on interest, intent to purchase, demographics, and more. Our team of digital experts create impactful email marketing designs with a performance guarantee. Contact us today to get started!

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