Online vs. Offline Advertising
Let's face it. Email marketing and publishing have becamevery popular tool for promoting your business, especially in theUSA. Many people use email in everyday communication. Email isfast and cheap. What would you like more? Many people subscribeto ezines about Internet, Jokes, Tips, Recipes, Horoscopes...Majority of these emails are free and very quality.
Advertising and marketing online and offline has at least onething in common - you have to know your target audience. Marketsegmentation is very important because you don't want to looseyour money sending your ads to someone who has no interest init. Email advertising and online advertising in general is moreeffective because there are many state-of-the-art techniqueswhich enable that you track every advertising.
Some good services for tracking are:
Web Site Tracking
Stat Counter http://www.statcounter.com
Web Trends http://www.webtrends.com
Email Tracking
Group Metrics http://www.group-metrics.com
In onlineadvertising you can get information where your visitors arecoming from, what do they read on your web site, how much isyour email newsletter open-ratio, how much is click/thru ratiofor every link in your newsletter, also you can get demographicreports about your visitors/subscribers and many other things.Because of that, in online presence you have great options for1-1 marketing. You can adjust your web site design and contentaccording to your visitor needs.
If you advertise on TV or magazines you can't know exactly howmany people actually saw your ad. There are some predictionsbut not that precise, of course.
One of the main advantages of offline advertising over onlineis that people still believe more in what they see on TV thanon the Internet.
Online promotion has one very big advantage over offlinepromotion and that is interactivity. In online promotion youcan have interactive ads that behave differently based onvisitor's behavior. Popular thing in online advertising ismaking ads like mini home pages. Yahoo! use that technique foradvertising their services.
Dejan Bizinger is a Contributing Editor for Infacta. Infacta is email messaging services company providing powerful, yet easy-to-use award-winning Group Mail, software for sending highly-personalized email messages and Group Metrics, software for email tracking. For more information visit: http://www.infacta.com.