Permission-Based Marketing, Essay Example

Targeted, permission-based marketing has much to commend it: by targeting potential customers who have expressed interest in a given product or service by registering with a vendor, businesses can expect to increase their conversion rate (Turban, King, Lee, Liang, & Turban, 2010, pp. 180-181). Another advantage is that the primary medium, email, is low-cost and effective: with an enclosed URL, an email acts like a banner delivered straight to the user’s inbox (p. 169). Affiliate marketing is another excellent strategy: “an organization refers customers to the selling company’s Web site” in exchange for a small portion of the proceeds (p. 177). Since affiliates are effectively paid on commission, vendors can save advertising costs up-front. Moreover, the fact that “the selling company’s logo is placed on many other Web sites” means that vendors gain free advertising, e.g. Amazon.com, “whose logo can be seen on more than 1 million affiliate sites” (p. 177).

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a sound, effective method for improving e-marketing. As Todaro (2007) explained, SEO “improves the volume or quality of traffic to a Web site from search engines, implementing algorithmic calculations in order to rank in the list of search results” (p. 35). Google, the largest and most popular search engine, “ranks Web sites by their linkage popularity and tends to give weights to links from major companies, trade groups, government organizations, and sites built on the .edu domain” (Turban et al., 2010, p. 171). Once the advertiser knows the “ranking algorithm of the search engine… and best search phrases,” they can “tailor the ads accordingly” (p. 171). Google also offers an advertising program, one that allows vendors to pay for ads based on keywords. The ads appear on “the page that contains Google’s results of a search”, ensuring that the advertiser will get exposure to potential customers (p. 171). SEO is cost-effective, and advertisers can use programs such as Google Analytics to ascertain “which phrases best convert into sales” (p. 171).