Smart Money Is On Web Site Traffic

There may be nothing more frustrating when you are trying to build a strong internet marketing plan than to see your email promotions fall apart because of poor email deliverability. The formula of marketing is one that you should be able to believe in.

. You know you have a good product or service that customers will benefit from and that will bring you repeat business once customer relationships are found.
. You know there is a market niche out there that are highly likely to patronize your business.
. You know that there is a market need for your product or service so once the customers are aware of what you have to offer, sales potential is significant.
. Marketing techniques should work to bring customers on board to get the sales moving and take your business to the next level.

Small wonder that you get frustrated because with all the elements in place, the problem is your marketing emails are not getting to the customers. So you have to spend additional money on email delivery monitoring and management services and additional time establishing relationships with ISPs just to get permission to push your emails through to the customers.

There really is no equivalent blockage in the non internet marketing world. It is as though you put a billboard up on the busiest intersection in town where customers you know can use your services drive every day only to find they closed the freeway and none of the customers will see the billboard. But you have to pay for it anyway.

Maybe it is time to rethink the equation. For one thing, email is one of the oldest forms of internet communications there is. Maybe it is too old. It is old enough that a culture of fear has been built around the whole spam problem and sophisticated tools are in use by customers, ISPs and spammers all at war about whether scam artists should be able to abuse internet customers through email.

But something has changed right under the feet of email scammers that has also altered the formula for internet marketing entirely. And that change may have made email as a less important internet marketing tool. The thing that has changed is WEB 2.0 which has changed the formula for how people use the internet and how people market on it as well. Because WEB 2.0 has changed the approach to the internet to make web site more than just online brochures but living "places" where people interact and the web visitor becomes a vital part of the web site itself, that changes how we might approach marketing to web savvy customers.

As odd as it may seem, email may be too slow as a mode of communication with your customers in this day of instant messaging, message boards and voice over internet communications. It isn't that people don't use email any more because they do. But with the imposition of so many restrictions causing email deliverability to become a nightmare, a shift in focus to direct marketing to a very active internet community on your web site is in order.

This means that instead of throwing good money after bad trying to fix the email deliverability problem, maybe email marketing is no longer where the smart money should go. Instead the smart money might be better used to update your web site, to make your online "presence" a real place and to build and then capitalize on live and active web traffic as a far more dynamic way to conduct your marketing campaign.