Blue Tent Marketing

We’re excited to announce that we’ve officially been designated as the only Google Analytics Authorized Consultant (GAAC) based in Colorado! While we’ve been working with GA since the spring of 2007, this marks an important milestone not only in the development of our web analytics department, but also in the ongoing development of a “culture of optimization” within our clients and within Blue Tent. Since the beginning, our mission has been to help our clients “Win on the Web” and this designation is just another step in that direction.

As you probably already know by now, Google Analytics is a powerful, free, web-based analytics program that enables its users to measure the effectiveness of their online marketing programs. A successful Google Analytics configuration allows the user to see how their site visitors interact with their website, identify where their traffic is coming from, and track the number of those visitors that convert into new leads or sales. Google Analytics allows companies to connect the dots between their website, organic and paid search marketing, online advertising, and email marketing programs to identify which efforts contribute most to their bottom line. It’s all about ROI.

So what’s the big deal about becoming a GAAC? Essentially, we’ve received the “stamp of approval” from the web analytics gurus at Google. The GAAC logo demonstrates that Blue Tent Marketing has gone through the extra steps to prove itself as an expert in Google Analytics configuration, consulting, analysis and training. With a large percentage of GA setups installed incorrectly, it’s important that you choose an agency that can get the job done right. We’re uniquely positioned to help our clients in the real estate, fractional, vacation rental and resort industries maximize the effectiveness of their online marketing efforts.

It’s clear that in today’s economy you simply can’t afford to be guessing about where to direct your precious marketing dollars. So whether you’re looking for greater insight into how your current internet marketing initiatives are performing, or whether you’re ready to take the next step to begin optimizing your web presence with Google Website Optimizer – we’re here to help. 

Contact us today and get ready to take your internet marketing initiatives to new heights!

Until next time,
Josh Lewis
VP Marketing

True story: Client calls BTM World Headquarters first thing Monday morning and states that over the weekend his company’s email and website suddenly went down! He called the company who hosted his website, email and domain name and the company is out of business. What to do?

First, I checked out the domain name for the client, and noticed that the registration was private so all it displayed in the WHOIS was the Go Daddy Private Registration information. Next, I called Go Daddy and for security purposes, they required that I had the Pin number or the last 4 digits of the credit card on file. Needless to say, I didn’t, so I asked him what to do next.

He directed me to the Go Daddy page to fill out a form Request for Change of Account / Email Update Form to begin the process to change ownership back to the true owner. Once the form is filled out Go Daddy requests a 72-hour turn-around because they get so many requests. Go Daddy will notify you through the e-mail address you provided on the form.

The next nightmare is trying to convince the Registrar that you really do own the domain name. Each Registrar is a little different, each have their own set of privacy rules, forms to fill out, proof of ownership, etc. During this time, your website is down, your email has stopped, and your business internet marketing has come to a complete halt!

This of course is a worst case scenario but nonetheless true. Registrars are usually very helpful as they want to retain your business. Here are a few steps you can take to prevent losing or letting your domain name expire.

1. Registrant Information - If you purchased your domain name through a registrar make sure the Registrant information is in your company name, your address and your valid email address.
   Billing Contact – your name, address and a valid email address.
   Technical Contact – should be the company where your domain is hosted or your name, address with a valid email address.
2. Registrar Account – Where did you buy your domain name? Make sure you have your account login ID and password in a safe place. If you do not have your login id call your registrar and retrieve it. By keeping the email address at your registrar valid you can easily retrieve your login ID/username and password through the email address you have listed in the account.
3. Domain name expiration date – If you plan on keeping your domain name active for years to come invest in it and renew it for several years. Registrars usually will give you a better deal if you renew the domain for multi years. Or have auto renew enabled for your domain name with a valid credit card on file.
4. Domain Name Managers – Many hosting companies are also domain name registrars. Managers will make sure your domain does not expire and will probably renew from year to year. With the slowing economy if you feel uncomfortable at all with your current hosting company I would suggest to follow steps 1-3 to ensure you are in control of your domain name.

WHOIS will give you all the information you need to know about your domain name. The Registrant, Contact information, the Registrar Company name where the domain was purchased and the domain name expiration date. Click on the link and see who is in control of your domain name: http://www.networksolutions.com/whois/index.jsp

Blue Tent Marketing is a Registered Domain Name Reseller. We have purchased hundreds of domains for our clients. We can help you transfer, purchase a new domain name, manage and renew your existing domains for you. Blue Tent Marketing has helped many clients who unexpectedly let their domain’s expire or who have experienced a bad registrar to help them retrieve lost login information or renew your domain name. Let us help you in securing you’re existing domain names or next domain name purchase.

Moira
Director of Technology

As we say goodbye to 2008 and look ahead to the promise of the New Year, we are well aware of the challenges that lie ahead. It’s no secret that the current economic conditions have created a very tough business environment. Just about everyone has been affected by the financial crisis and the melt-down in the real estate market. And when people lose confidence, they tend to stop taking risks and adopt a “back to the basics” mentality. It’s a time to separate wants from needs and boil our lifestyles, our operating budgets and marketing expenses down to the most basic essentials.

This is not such a bad thing. Because surviving through these challenging times is often what makes businesses better and stronger. It makes us take an honest look at ourselves – to identify what’s working and what’s not – and to make those difficult decisions that might otherwise get overlooked. Frugality is in, excess is out.

This reality certainly also applies to our client’s internet marketing programs. For many, now is not the time to take on big, new projects that require significant expenditures of time and money. Rather, now is the time refocus, refine and revitalize your existing internet marketing strategy. Identify what’s working and find ways to do it even better. Determine which programs are faltering and overhaul them or cut them altogether. Following are some simple suggestions of how you can get “back to the basics” with your internet marketing strategy in order to go from good to great in 2009.

The Year-End Review
You’ve got to know where you are before you can possibly know which direction you need to go. Schedule a comprehensive review of all of your internet marketing initiatives from 2008. Are you able to clearly measure your ROI for each online marketing channel? If not, why not? How will you measure your ROI for 2009? Which programs were the most effective and which ones bombed? Where will you spend your coveted marketing dollars?

Affordable Website Enhancements
Take a critical look at your website. Have you worked to improve it over the past year? What enhancements can be made at minimal cost for maximum impact? Analyze your web analytics data to determine where your site needs fixing. Do certain pages have a higher bounce rate than others? Are your visitors abandoning your site at a certain stage of the conversion process? Look for simple design and content enhancements that will improve the user experience.

Evolve Your Email Marketing Programs
Many of our clients have very good email marketing programs. However, there’s always room for improvement. Make sure your email programs is “authenticated” to increase the delivery rate into the inbox. Measure list subscriber growth and attrition. Redesign old templates that may not render nicely on newer email clients such as Outlook 2007. Segment, test and get creative with more advanced email marketing techniques. Encourage participation and feedback. Remember that it’s about building relationships and good communication. 

Refine Your Search Engine Marketing Strategy
Search engine optimization is one of the more convoluted aspects of internet marketing. Schedule a year-end review with your search account manager to get a clear understanding of how your SEO program is performing. How have your rankings, traffic and conversions improved? How does your paid search (PPC) strategy fit into the picture? Can your campaigns be optimized to be more effective? Can you cut spending on unproductive keywords? Should your paid search campaigns focus on one, two or three search engines? What are your most productive keywords? Are there other long tail keyword phrases you could be targeting?

Assess Your Analytics Program
The core function of your web analytics program is to show you what’s working and what’s not. Are you spending the amount of time necessary to decipher this critical information? Is your Google Analytics configuration as comprehensive and customized as it should be? Are you consistently measuring key performance indicators (KPIs) or do you spend most of your time report surfing pretty pie charts? Make a commitment to understand and leverage your web analytics data to improve your overall internet marketing strategy. Hire a part-time account manager to help you identify and measure key metrics. Discover the actionable data and act on it. 

Thanks to everyone for a great year, and may 2009 bring you peace and prosperity!

Happy New Year!

Josh Lewis
VP Marketing

Everyone has a story. What’s your story about your business to prospective and existing clients? Do they believe you and does your story spread? Should they believe you? From a marketing perspective how can you make sure your story resonates with the people that you want to connect with? Do you tell them what we think they want to hear? Is that guessing? Do you expose every nook and cranny of your business operations, both good and bad? Are you really who you say you are, and how do you prove it? Lots of questions, and probably no simple answers, but I’ll submit the following:

From an internet marketing perspective, being genuine, authentic and real is the most effective way to build trust. Your story must be real and gain the trust of your audience. Gaining the trust of clients and prospects demands that you are who you say you are and do what you say you’ll do. Always. A great website that establishes you as the authority in your arena is important. Sending relevant, poignant email marketing messages on the schedule you and your subscribers agreed to is important. Winning at the SEO game through best practices and not trying to short circuit the system is important.

Whatever your marketing initiatives are, make sure that your story is real and trust will follow.

– Andrew Vick
Director of Sales

Many of our top clients in the real estate and vacation rental industries are analyzing and adjusting their internet marketing plans and budgets. In tough economic times, it’s no secret that cuts are expected across the board – and online marketing is no exception.

As we focus on aligning marketing budgets with online marketing strategies for 2009, we are tasked to find efficiencies in our marketing plans in order to cut costs and identify the most productive online marketing channels. It’s our job to advise our clients to spend their marketing dollars where they will generate the greatest ROI.

While we may be biased, we believe that investing in your digital marketing media should be your highest priority today. Not only is online media more affordable and efficient, it is also very trackable and true ROI for each online marketing campaign can be assessed with just a few clicks with the aid of a comprehensive Google Analytics setup.

Here are few new tools we have seen come across our desks that are not only affordable, but also enhance the user experience which in turn develops confidence in your customers and drives new business.

Integrated Online Booking – Booking trips online sometimes takes people outside of their comfort zone. Let them gain confidence in your services by providing seamless online booking. Rather than leaving your site or filling out a property request form, real-time availability and online booking will be key not only for you to promote your units accurately, but also to allow the user to search by dates or unit criteria and then book it online once they’ve found what they’re looking for. Check out the Gulf Shores Plantation booking engine to see it action!

Property Reviews – Positive property reviews are an important piece of the vacation rental industry and online reputation management. People have come to expect them for hotels on sites like Trip Advisor, Orbitz and Expedia but they have not been as readily available for vacation homes and condos. Positive customer reviews for vacation rentals on sites like FlipKey are a critical piece of information to give your prospects that will also give your company the edge over your competition. We’ve devised a number of ways to leverage and grow positive reviews for our vacation rental and lodging clients.

Online Brochures – Save money and trees by passing on the next printing of your real estate or vacation rental brochure and post it online in a rich media format instead. These dynamic brochures can be set to music and can be completely customized so they look even better than your print brochures and are a fraction of the price. Check out the Seven Lakes Ranch Brochure.

For more information on how you can stretch your marketing budget by investing in digital marketing, call Blue Tent today at 970.704.3240 and take advantage of a free one-hour internet marketing consultation.

“The only purpose of advertising is to make sales. It is profitable or unprofitable according to its actual sales.” – Claude Hopkins, “Scientific Advertising”

Would you invest $350 in an email marketing campaign for a $7,595 return on that investment? The answer is obvious! The graph below references a Google Analytics snapshot from one of our client’s recent email campaigns. And this figure only represents online orders, it doesn’t account for any additional orders that were completed by phone!

It’s widely touted that email marketing produces some of the highest R.O.I. of any online marketing channel. One statistic that is frequently referenced is, “Email R.O.I. per $1 spent equals $51.45″ 
(Source: Direct Marketing Association Power of Direct report October 2006). While, that sure sounds nice, it doesn’t mean much when it comes to measuring the effectiveness and value of your email marketing program.

Do you know exactly how many visits, leads, conversions, and sales are generated from your email campaigns? Can you accurately measure your return-on-investment? If your answer to these questions is no, then it’s time to integrate Google Analytics into your email marketing program.

A basic Google Analytics installation into your website and your email campaigns is easy to do. Not only will you have a more complete picture of how your site visitors are interacting with your site, but you’ll also have a clearer understanding of how your email programs compare to your other online marketing initiatives such as your Search Engine Marketing efforts. Establishing revenue goals for leads gained from form completions is easy to do. If your site includes an eCommerce component, then enabling eCommerce tracking within your GA account is a must.

Use the Google Analytics URL Builder to add a custom tag to every link with your email campaign that goes back to your site. Keep the “source” and “medium” consistent, but update the “campaign” variable with each send. In this way, you’ll easily be able to see which campaigns worked and which ones failed.

With every email campaign you should always be testing new ideas to find out what really works with your audience. Taking a scientific approach to your email marketing will not only help you improve each campaign’s effectiveness, but also help you create a road map of what works for future campaigns, and will help you make the case for allocating more of your marketing budget to your most productive marketing channels.

Remember, the ultimate goal is to measure the true R.O.I. for each email campaign, as well as for your email program as a whole. You’ll be able to measure revenue generated, average value per visitor, goals completed, conversion rate, and eCommerce transactions.

So whether you’re new to email marketing or have a current email marketing program in place – contact us today to take it to the next level, and remove the guess-work from your email marketing program!

- Josh Lewis & Ryan Austin

Email marketing is all about building and maintaining strong relationships. The email relationship starts when someone opts-in to receive information from your company or organization. Start simple and build the relationship from there. In the beginning, most people don’t want to give out much personal information. Asking for to much right away decreases your chance of getting that initial sign-up. Even just asking for the email address is a great start.

What happens after you get their email address is where the relationship starts to build, and first impressions are everything to building a good and trusting relationship. It is important that these next steps are done right and not overlooked. There are three key parts to this process that help create a great opt-in experience. First is the opt-in form itself. Second is the subscription confirmation page and the third is the subscription confirmation and welcome messages.

Start by creating a “quick subscribe” opt-in form. A true “quick subscribe” opt-in includes only a text box for email address. This allows you to capture only the most valuable piece of information and allows the subscriber to sign-up in seconds. Make sure to place the opt-in form on your homepage and also include a “subscribe” link on every page of your site. This can link to a slightly more detailed opt-in from that includes other non-mandatory fields such as name, city, state, zip, etc. This main “subscribe” page is also a good place to expand upon your email program – identify what information will be delivered and how often. This is also a good place to include an archive of past mailings so the potential subscriber can see an example of your campaigns. Once the prospect hits the “submit” button, they’re headed toward your subscription confirmation page.

The subscription confirmation page can and should do many things. First, this will give your new subscriber the confirmation that they successfully opted-in to your program. It’s a good idea to include the “reply-to email address” that you use in your campaigns and ask them to add it their address book or safe senders list to ensure deliverability to their inbox. Also, if you’re using a double opt-in process (considered to be best practice), be sure to emphasize that a confirmation email has been sent requiring that they click on the enclosed link to confirm their subscription. Lastly, this page is also a good place to include a link to your privacy policy.

Now that you have the essential piece of starting your email relationship, you can now start to ask for more information. This can be done on the subscription confirmation page or within the welcome message. Either way, the information you ask for here is the starting point to segmenting your campaigns. Whether it’s by state, gender, products or interests, make sure you ask for what pertains to your campaigns and make nothing required. Make sure your subscribers can easily update their profile, as their interests may change over time.

Like the confirmation page, the welcome message can and should do many things. This is where you start to give your subscribers what they asked to receive. If you are promising “special offers,” why not include one in the very first message that you send? This is a sure way to start the relationship off on the right foot. Also, it’s a good idea to again ask your new subscriber to add the “reply-to email” to their address book to ensure delivery to their inbox.

These are very important aspect of an effective opt-in experience. Once these steps are setup in the beginning, it’s all automated from there. Be sure to moderate your opt-ins on a monthly basis to gauge its effectiveness and to look for ways to constantly improve, add value and enhance the user experience.

When the blogosphere was beginning to catch fire, like many of our clients, I was getting very excited about starting a blog. We were installing blogs for our clients and showing them how to use their shiny new blogging tool. What we did not teach is that you must blog often, or not blog at all. This is much more obvious today as blogs are visited, trusted and relied on by millions of users.

No matter the topic, a good blog should always lead to good marketing. Whether you are promoting your company or yourself, blogging should draw in visitors like a trout to a caddis fly. Interesting content will not only put you on Google’s radar, but will also give users a reliable place to learn more about you, your company, your area and your website.

So how do I begin to build a good blog you ask? Well, think about marketing. One of my favorite blogs is on a local ski resort website. The purpose of the website is to sell lodging and activities to people visiting the area. However, the blog does not just discuss “heads in beds,” rather it touches on personal stories of the blogger, cool ski runs, dining experiences and a whole slew of different and interesting topics. It’s personal and authentic. It gives me an “insider’s perspective” on the resort. It makes me want to come back to see what the blogger will be writing about next. And thus the website has evolved as not only a resource for skiing and lodging options, but also for in-depth information on the resort as a whole.

More often than not, new bloggers think they should only write about what they are trying to sell, and that is not true at all. How often can you talk about lodging (boring)? It is important to write about everything and anything that you are experiencing. Tell your story, keep visitors interested in the place, the experiences and all the new and cool things that are happening to either you or your area.

So don’t get caught up in only what you are trying to sell. Good marketing should give people the entire experience – not just the product. Let your blog liberate you to share yourself, your town, your product, your experiences and thoughts. These will in turn captive your users and keep them coming back for more.

Robyn Scherrer
Account Manager