Category Archives: Internet Marketing

Internet marketing tips. We cover E-commerce, e-mail marketing, and web marketing information for small business entrepreneurs, researchers, non-profits, and all merchants interested in the Internet.

Search Trends & The Stock Market

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Here is a different type of Google search tool that combines business insights with search data. It is geared toward stock investors but there is probably insight for us too.  It shows how different verticals trend relative to the S&P500. What verticals do you think would correspond closest to search traffic?

s&p500 and google search

Here is an interesting graph using Google’s financial tools and search query results. The blue line shows searches for phrases like “financial planning advisers”, “fidelity” “smith barney”. The red line shows the trend line of the S&P 500. Note how clearly they correspond to each other! As the S&P500 does well fewer people look for a financial planner.  This seems to be the most closely corresponding vertical.* But negatively.Why?

Imagine a middle class person has a little extra cash and wants to invest it. If the S&P500 is doing well, they can just buy a couple companies they recognize and watch their worth increase. In more difficult financial times people start to look for financial help. I would guess the correlation coefficient is -.8: Strong negative correlation.

You can do this for any vertical you are in or thinking about getting in. So we saw that financial advisers has a strong positive correlation. What vertical do you think has a positive correlation? My guess was luxury but I was wrong. Here’s luxury:

searches and stock market correlation

 

If I had to guess a correlation coefficient for luxury it would probably be .35. Small correlation but nothing I’d bet the house on. So what has the best correlation? It’s Automotive! I would guess the correlation coefficient as .55: Medium positive correlation.

automotive and search stock

Durable goods and house buying are about the same. So people perform fewer searches in these verticals as the stock market fluctuates. How can you use this to your advantage? Well, if you are a financial adviser I suppose you should be rooting for the S&P500 to go down. 🙁 Or if you are a financial adviser and you suspect the stock market to go down you can start increasing hiring advisers.  Or for my readers who are search marketing consultants- if/when the stock market goes down expect belt-tightening from your car and housing clients but seek out financial advisers!**

 

Notes

*Google doesn’t mention which search terms it uses to define a vertical. It just gives examples. I’ll assume they put a little thought into this. It also does not mention every vertical. For example, I don’t see aerospace.

Also, google does not provide exact numbers so we can’t find true correlation we can only use “eye-ball analysis”. I think that is fine.

** One other thing to note that while I implied a cause and effect relationship—or a causal relationship of some sort—I think it is stock prices that are doing the causing not vice versa. I have made this assumption in all commentary.

Scrub Your Email List For Better Conversion

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Instantly Improve Your Email Marketing Performance By Scrubbing Your List
When I started out in internet marketing, I read a lot of advice about “cleaning up your list”. The advice was vague. It is not as though there is a button called “cleanup” in excel. I’ll give you some step-by-step advice that is guaranteed to make you money.

Email Marketing

The Fundamentals of Email Newsletters
The primary function of email newsletters is to get customers to buy. Simple, right? Well, there are so many places where things can go wrong, it is a miracle anyone converts. Here is the flow of an email:
1) Send email out (hopefully to the right address).
2) Mail goes through filters and arrives in their Inbox.
3) The customer likes our brand and the subject enough to open the email and check it out.
4) The customer is interested in the product and offer enough to click-through to the website.
5) Once on the website, then they can start shopping.
6) About 1-2% of people who made it to step 5 will buy.
7) Hopefully they will like the product enough not to return it.

Every step of the way, customers will stop shopping. Our goal is to carry as many people from step 1 to 2, and from 2 to 3, etc. Every time a customer advances to the next step, we think of this as a micro-conversion. We can’t make a sale if the customer doesn’t make it to the website.

Email marketing involves optimizing each of these steps. Improvements in any of these areas will lead to improvement in performance. Often we’ll spend a lot of time on step 4, the design of the email. I think this is because it is the most fun. Creating promos, looking at pictures, merchandising, & selecting models is much more interesting than staring at spreadsheets. But somebody has to do it!

A Real-life Example of Optimizing Step One: List Scrubbing
I just went through an email list with about two hundred thousand entries. Seven and a half percent of the addresses were formatted wrong. These are people who want to hear from you, but they typed their email wrong. 7.5% actually doesn’t sound like a lot of loss, right? Wrong. That is 15,000 people per email. Let’s examine how much money we are losing by doing some quick math.

We send a newsletter 2x a month. Open rate is 30%. CTR is 30%. Conversion rate is 1%. Avg Order $100.
{[(15,000) (2) (.3)] (.3) (.01) (100)}= $2700/month lost.

Ugh! That is money we threw away due to people typing their addresses wrong. But there is good news. This is a relatively easy thing to fix. You can buy software to do this, or get a programmer to help you, or fix this yourself in Excel.

Scrub Yourself
First, export all your addresses to Excel. The “trick” is to replace common bad addresses with good addresses. We know that every email address has the same format: name@domain.com. Here are some of the most common errors.
@yahoo.comm
Yahoo.com
@Yaho.com
@Yahoo.con
@yahoo,con

Find and replace (Ctrl-F) each of these variations with “@yahoo.com”. Do the same procedure for gmail, aol, msn, hotmail. Congrats. You just fixed half of the errors. I just made you $1300/month in a half hour.

Kind of. 🙂

To recoup the rest of the address, you will have to send the list to an intern and tell them to fix all the unique domain addresses. You’ll probably have people using their school or work addresses, and the replace function will not save you time on these. Also, remember to import your new email addresses to your email provider.

Conclusion
The good news is that there is an easy way to fix this problem going forward. Make your customer type their address twice when they subscribe. This way there will not be any formatting errors in your email list. Making these changes will have a large impact on any email campaign. This is just one step of the email optimization process.