Poor Eddie the e-marketer has been plagued by errors in judgment 
all his life. From always picking the longest line at the toll 
booth to buying lots of dot com stocks right before the bubble 
burst, he constantly struggles with making the right choices. 
From disagreeing that a car really needs oil changes every three 
thousand miles to insisting that the eight-track is going to 
make a comeback, Eddie bumbles through life perplexed. One area 
that particularly suffers is his e-marketing efforts.

You see, Eddie recently got himself a new website for his 
business. Unfortunately, he's been trying in vain to turn it 
into a vehicle for getting leads and making sales. He's 
confused. He's dazed. He thrashes about lost in a maze. 
Although he at least understands the importance of e-marketing 
for driving traffic to his site, he's like a hamster running on 
a wheel, wasting energy and getting nowhere. Let's take a look 
at a few of the more typical e-marketing errors Eddie regularly 
makes.


Treat the Web as a different medium

The other day his business partner, Betty, showed Eddie a recent 
half-page ad they ran in one of their industry's magazines. 
Eddie, excited at how pretty the pictures were, wanted it up on 
their website pronto. Did he alter it in any way before they 
posted it to the site? Did he add a specific call to action 
hyperlink in it? Did he optimize the large print graphics so 
they would download fast in people's browsers? Nope. He just 
took the ad, as is, and posted it. Eddie has never been able to 
grasp the idea that traditional marketing and e-marketing, while 
related, are not the same thing. What works in print doesn't 
always work online. Why? Different mediums require different 
approaches. Look for Eddie's static magazine ad in his first 
TV commercial, just the motionless ad on the screen for thirty 
seconds. Riveting.

The Web is interactive. Site visitors can click buttons, fill 
out forms, or post immediate comments in forums or blogs. When 
Eddie was having his site built, he really just wanted to have a 
way to talk about his business. He wanted to tell the world how 
great his company was and the exciting history of its formation. 
This is called brochure-ware. It's just taking a company 
brochure, posting it online and adding a few links. To say that 
Eddie is underutilizing the Web is like saying the ocean is 
mildly wet. The Web is extremely powerful and businesses have a 
choice of taking advantage of its power, or just scratching the 
surface with simple brochure-ware. It's similar to buying a 
tank, climbing in and lifting the hatch only to shoot spit 
balls at the enemy. If you have that kind of power, use it.


Ask your customers what they want 

Since Eddie doesn't really grasp the interactive nature of the 
Web he guesses what his potential customers want and need. One 
day in a meeting Eddie was scratching his head, staring up at 
the ceiling and saying, "Gee, if there was only a way to figure 
out what our customers want, a way we could get in their heads, 
and a way to reach enough of them to get a really clear picture, 
hmm . . . ?" Thankfully, a timid but sharp junior associate 
raised her hand and suggested that they just ask their customers 
their opinions and needs directly, and do it online where they 
could ask a whole bunch of them. 

Eddie jumped at the idea. Finally he was going make the right 
choice, albeit aided by a junior associate, but the right 
e-marketing choice nonetheless. They created an html form with 
forty of the most important questions he could think of and 
posted a link on their homepage called "Customer Survey".


Offer incentives

Only three people ever filled the survey out, and that was 
it. Eddie was dumfounded. What went wrong? He was hoping for 
hundreds. The problem was that Web users are not patient and 
generally don't like to fill out forms, especially long ones. 
Even more importantly, they don't like to do something for 
nothing. 

If you were jostling your way through a crowded store in a big 
rush and a bored teenage clerk asked you to fill out a survey 
of forty questions but wasn't offering anything in return, how 
likely would it be that you'd do it? A more effective approach 
for Eddie would have been to narrow down his list of questions 
to four instead of forty, and offer a coupon for 10% off any 
online purchase in return for filling it out. If you want to 
create leads using your website, offer something for free and 
require your visitors to give you a bit of information first. 
They'll be much more likely to respond if they get something 
they perceive as valuable in return. Give the people what they 
want, an incentive.


Regularly study your website statistics

Another area that Eddie seems to miss the e-marketing boat is 
in analysis. He doesn't have time for looking at all those pesky 
Web statistics. He can't be bothered with analyzing the number 
of visitors who come to his site, or how they got there, or 
where they go once they're there. He's rendered blind to his 
e-marketing campaigns' successes and failures. It's like always 
ignoring your checking account balance and then despairingly 
wondering where all your money went each week. What's worse, 
because he ignores the numbers, he has no useful information 
to help plan his next campaign. Numbers help in life.

A jumbo jet is off course 90% of time. It reaches its 
destination successfully by constantly checking the data on 
its exact position and continuously making the appropriate 
adjustments until it lands on target.

Likewise, an e-marketing objective can be best reached by 
analyzing the data and making the necessary modifications. For 
example, if your target is a thousand visitors a week, then look 
at your website statistics and learn where the majority of your 
visitors are coming from. Discover what type of site, link or 
search engine is doing a lot of the referring. Then adjust your 
time and budget accordingly. 

It's been rumored around the office that Eddie sometimes locks 
himself in his office and counts his new website's hit counter, 
prancing around in jubilation each time the counter goes up by 
one. Yet he hates to hunker down and look at all the numbers, all
the visitors, all the referrals, and then conduct a meaningful 
analysis to help understand the past and better plan for the 
future. 

Since Eddie hates looking at his site statistics, he has no idea 
how well his last email marketing campaign went. He sent out 
five thousand emails to a rented list and then asked his sales 
people if they got any more phone calls that day.  It'd be like 
a television network executive asking his employees if they 
happened to see their neighbors' TV sets on the night before to 
determine if the new show did well. Hey Eddie, I have an idea, 
check your Web stats for page views and you'll know exactly how 
successful your email was! 


Poor Eddie the erroneous e-marketer, is he condemned to sub-par 
performances in life and business? If he tries to learn from his 
mistakes, if he starts to treat the Web differently than print 
or any other medium, he'll start to see results. If he uses more 
of the Web's power and potential, tapping into its interactivity 
and offering easy ways for his site visitors to communicate with 
him, and if he offers incentives to motivate his visitors to 
take action, then maybe, just maybe, he may not be doomed after 
all. 

Unfortunately, after choosing the longest line at the toll 
booth again, his car's engine seized from idling and poor oil 
maintenance. So to pass the time waiting for the tow truck, he 
popped in an eight-track cassette, flipped open his cell phone 
and purchased some more Enron stocks.