Direct mail is one of the oldest marketing tools in the book. As soon as the postal service allowed people to send mail back and forth, marketers were utilizing it to send advertising messages. Over time, the quality of direct mail has eroded to the point that it’s been labeled “Junk Mail” by most people. Internet marketing is following the same path, with spam plaguing e-mail in boxes and Twitter feeds. But if you want to have success you need to be targeting the right people, making your offer as personalized as possible, and then optimize your campaign on an ongoing basis. People are bombarded with advertising messages every day, and they have developed powerful blinders to ignore most marketing messages. By looking at some areas where direct mail fails, you can take away some lessons to make sure you don’t become just another ignored message.

Targeting

The first rule of direct mail is target, target, target! The most important factor in a direct mail piece’s success is the proper targeting of prospects. For direct marketers, this means renting the best lists they can get their hands on. Political campaigns have also honed the science of direct mail targeting by getting into granular details like demographics, sometimes even to the individual household level. Unfortunately, over time direct marketing in many cases has been untargeted which has resulted in the term “Junk Mail”. For internet marketers, trying to do the same thing would result in disaster. You and your business don’t want to be labeled SPAM, do you? Targeting potential customers is very different than with direct mail, but offers much better results. Rather than renting lists and hoping people are intrigued by the offer, internet marketers can use services like Google’s AdWords to target prospects as they search for keywords relating to your business.

Here is where targeting for the internet marketer comes into play. Let’s say you sell project management software targeted to small and medium size businesses. You have perfected your landing page, you have a great product, and you’re starting out a new AdWords campaign today. When you go to select keywords, you choose things like “project management”, or “project management software”. After a couple of days you start to realize that your conversion rates are terrible, but you’re getting a lot of people to click on your ads. What’s the problem? Your keywords aren’t targeting the right prospects! While the term “project management” seems to be in your sweet spot, people could be searching for that term for a lot of reasons other than looking for project management software for small or medium sized businesses. You’re getting curiosity clicks, not interest clicks.

Takeaway: Just as direct mail has been labeled “Junk Mail”, your message can deliver bad results if you don’t target prospects well. When you market on the internet, be sure to target “long-tail” keywords that are very specific. You won’t get a lot of people seeing your offer, but they will be infinitely more qualified and people actually want to see your offer.

Personalization

Direct mail is in theory inherently personalized (in most cases). It has your name and address on it, it’s mailed right to your door, and in many cases it’s been targeted well. But we’ve all seen the junk mail directed to “Our Friend at <insert address here>”. Internet marketing is inherently NOT personalized. But in order to find success you should do everything in your power to make it seem personalized.

There’s a lot of ways this can be accomplished. You’ll never have the name and address of new visitors to a landing page, but make sure that when they arrive they are going to the right landing page. If you have a PPC campaign, make sure that visitors are being directed to a specific landing page for that ad and not just to your home page. Another interesting technique that can be used with AdWords is the personalization of your ad depending on what search terms were used. (Learn more about this technique, known as dynamic keyword insertion )

Takeaway: Internet marketing may not be as personalized as direct mail, but in many ways that isn’t a problem. After all, your prospect is coming to you rather than the other way around. But there are many ways that you can make potential customers feel like it has been personalized towards them. Focus the right landing page towards the right prospect and you’ll see success. Your goal should be to give your prospect the feeling that your landing page was exactly what they were looking for.

Optimization and Analysis

The success and failure of a direct mail campaign is easy to quantify. You send mail out, prospects receive it, and if they’re interested in your offer they will respond. And by sending out multiple versions of design and copy, the most effective can be easily determined. Fairly quickly, a direct marketer is able to determine a variety of things like the reliability of the list, and whether or not the design or copy is working effectively.

In this area, internet marketing is a vast improvement over direct mail. While direct marketers can infer that a particular piece was effective based on response rate, they aren’t there as the prospect reads it. But online, there are a variety of tools like Google Analytics or Clicktale that allow the internet marketer to see exactly how prospects are interacting with their marketing materials. As I discussed in my last article you can even record how visitors use specific pages, where they are clicking on the page, and where they tend to click most often. And using tools like Google’s Web Master Tools, you can conduct multivariate A/B testing to try out different copy, forms, and anything else you can think of.

Takeaway: Direct mail is inherently accountable, but the marketer isn’t there as people see their message. But with internet marketing you can see EXACTLY how people interact with your marketing messages. Tools like Google Analytics, Web Master Tools, Clicktale, and many others give internet marketers a powerful arsenal to analyze and optimize content.

Many of the concepts of direct marketing are similar with internet marketing, but there are key differences with how they are implemented. Despite these differences, there is a lot that can be learned from the experience of direct marketers. When you start a new campaign for your business, be sure that you’re thinking of these best practices that have been developed for more than 100 years.

You’ve spent lots of money and countless hours perfecting your web presence. You’re certain that you’ll be immediately deluged with qualified leads. But when you flip the switch and it goes live, it’s not quite working how you expected it. This happens more often than not, and can be discouraging. While there are best practices that you can follow, online marketing and lead generation isn’t quite an exact science. Of course you can use Google’s Web Master Tools to conduct A/B testing on your content, but how can you know what parts of a page are working and what parts are not? Now you can find out by using specialized analytics software that records, monitors, and analyzes how your visitors interact with your website. Continue reading and I’ll tell you about two different tools that you can use to find out EXACTLY how users interact with your site and landing pages.

Clicktale – 4 levels of users starting at Free and going up to $790/month.

Clicktale is a very full featured web analytics package that gets into some of the granular details that are left out of Google Analytics. Some of the key things that Clicktale can help you do is optimize landing pages, optimize shopping cart experiences, conduct usability tests, with the overall goal of maximizing your conversions. Using javascript code that you place on your page, you can get a variety of reports back like form conversion statistics, blank field reports, user click heatmaps, and link analytics. One key differentiator of Clicktale is that you can actually record user’s interaction with your website. By looking at these recordings, you can actually see HOW your visitors are using your site. It totally eliminates any guesswork that might be involved. A very well known software company, 37 Signals, utilized Clicktale to help them redesign their signup conversion pages. You can see what 37 Signals had to say about their results here: http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1867-design-decisions-new-signup-form

CrazyEgg – 4 levels of users starting at $9/month and going up to $99/month.

Crazy Egg offers some of the functionality that Clicktale offers, but not quite the whole package. Where CrazyEgg shines is in the user click heatmap, where you can visually see how visitors are interacting with forms. A key difference in CrazyEgg’s software is what they call “Confetti” mode. When you’re in this mode of heatmap, you can track clicks by referral URL. This allows you to see the different ways visitors from an AdWords campaign interact with your site, as opposed to people who came in from Twitter. Another advantage of CrazyEgg is their simplified price structure. Rather than taking away options to offer a Basic service for $9/month, they offer you the full package. The only restriction is the number of pages that you can have your testing on at any one time.

The Verdict: This niche of web analytics is definitely under-served by Google Analytics (their overlay functionality is horrible), and both of these solutions pick up where Google left off. If money is no object, Clicktale is by far the superior product. Their user experience recordings literally remove all of the guesswork from the process. But as you get away from the premium versions, important features start to disappear. If you have a limited budget or a small website, CrazyEgg is for you. I personally have used CrazyEgg with success in the past, and can vouch for its usefulness. Either way you can’t go wrong, because the more knowledge you have about your users the more powerful your site can be for lead generation.

Google Analytics is a very powerful tool that can help you understand and optimize your web presence. Whether you have a blog, e-commerce store, or just a general site for your business, Google Analytics is an essential tool that you need to be using. Best of all, it’s free! But even though it’s free it doesn’t have a shortage of features. In fact, it can be pretty overwhelming when you first start. Below I’ve compiled some great resources that start off at beginner resources and take you all through way through to advanced techniques.

Beginners Resources

1. Official Google Analytics Blog

This is Google’s official Analytics blog. They keep this updated with the latest news and resources related to Analytics.

2. How to Use Google Analytics for Beginners

Mahalo’s comprehensive guide can give you a quick overview on how to get started with Google Analytics.

3. Beginner’s Guide to Google Analytics

Flyte’s beginner’s guide takes you through and explains some of the key parts of Google Analytics.

4. Google Analytics Guide (4 Part Series)

The Guide to Blogging’s 4 part Analytics guide takes you through the basics from start to finish.

5. Google Analytics – Google Analytics Interface Tutorial (Video)

Google’s official video walk-through of the Google Analytics interface.

6. Google Analytics – Beginning Analytics: Interpreting and Acting on Your Data (Video)

Google’s official and very useful overview of some key reporting features, and how to interpret them.

7. Google Analytics Video Tutorial: Essential Stats (Video)

Here is Conversation Marketing’s quick video guide to some basic statistics.

Official Google Resources

8. Google Analytics – Non-Ecommerce Sites: Beyond Averages (Video)

This video from Google explains how to look beyond averages to get the most out of your Analytics data.

9. Google Analytics – Context and actionability in web analytics (Video)

In this video, Google’s Avinash Kaushik explains how to put some of your Analytics statistics in the right context.

10. Google Analytics – Advanced Techniques in Google Analytics (Video)

This video is taken from a presentation at Google’s Conversion University program, and goes into some more advanced Analytics topics.

11. Google Analytics – Bounce Rate: The Simply Powerful Metric (Video)

Google’s Avinash Kaushik goes in depth on your Bounce Rate statistics.

12. Google Analytics – Google Analytics – Rules for Revolutionaries (Video)

A run through of how any type of business can benefit from Google Analytics.

13. Google Analytics – Successful Web Analytics Approaches (Video)

Another video from Google’s Conversion University that takes your through some approaches that lead to success with Analytics.

Tips & Tricks

14. 5 Lesser Known Google Analytics Features

A collection of useful features compiles by the Online Marketing Blog.

15. The Huge Collection of Google Analytics Tips

Ann Smarty at the Search Engine Journal has put together a big list of tips on how to get the most out of Analytics.

16. 8 Useful Google Analytics Tips

A collection of visitor tracking tips from Jatex.

17. 7 Advanced Google Analytics Tricks

Some quick tricks from Da Vinci Planet.

18. Tracking social networks with Google Analytics using filters

Great tutorial on how you can track your referrals from social networking sites using filters.

19. Google Analytics tips for SEO

A collection of great tips on how to utilize Google Analytics for SEO.

Advanced Resources

20. Google Analytics Blog: You Cut Quite a Profile

Here’s Google’s official look at using Profiles to gain insights into user behavior.

21. Google Analytics Tagging Demystified

A great guide to using tags from Conversation Marketing.

22. Google Analytics Tip: Learn How They Found That 1 Page

Another great tutorial from Conversation Marketing on how to determine where traffic to your pages is coming from.

23. Use jQuery with Google Analytics to Track Clicks on Outgoing Links From Your Site

This guide is definitely on the advanced side, but explains how to use jQuery to find out where your visitors go after they leave your site.

24. Google Analytics Plugins, Hacks and Tips Collection

A great list of plugins for Google Analytics from Grokdotcom.

25. Google Analytics Blog: A Deeper look at Advanced Segmentation: filtering on the fly

An advanced look at how to use Analytics segmenting features from Google’s official Analytics blog.

So there you have it, 25 great resources that take you from a beginning Anayltics user all the way to an advanced power users. This is definitely not a comprehensive list as there’s so many amazing resources available, but this should definitely get you started! Do you have any great resources that you’ve used to learn about Google Analytics? If you do, please share them in a comment so everyone else can take a look.