Improving ROI - hyperlinking secrets and more

Article from November, 26th, 2003.

Getting better ROI values - this is frequently the mantra for online marketers. In order to make more money, one needs to drive more qualified traffic to a website and/or improve conversion ratio. How can one achieve these goals? Well, hyperlinks in your e-mails may help you. How? Historically, almost all of online marketing tricks and tools were invented by the owners and webmasters of sites that contain adult content. Pop-up windows, thumbnail galleries and much more - yep, these are their inventions. One of the last inventions is the rules for constructing hyperlinks.

Which one do you think is more effective - www.somesleazysite.com/galeryNov1.php or www.somelseazysite.com/young-amateur-coulpe-having-sex.php?

You guessed it right - the second type of hyperlink consistently performs better, drawing on average 50% more people.

Now, you can use the same tactics for your e-mail campaign. Here is an example from e-mail marketing campaign of one company that produces color correction software for digital images. The old link included in e-mail looked something like this www.companysite.com/productname.php. They experimented and tried several links. They looked almost exactly like these:

www.companysite.com/color-correction-software.php
www.companysite.com/color-correction-tips.php
www.companysite.com/digital-color-correction.php
www.companysite.com/color-correction-program.php
www.companysite.com/easy-color-correction.php
www.companysite.com/cheap-color-correction-tool.php

(The content for all pages was the same)

The first thing the company marketer noticed was there were consistently more visitors to these pages, when compared to www.companysite.com/productname.php This was partly due to the fact that search engine ranking rose, because key words were now included in the links. The second fact was quite surprising. www.companysite.com/color-correction-tips.php drew most visitors, while www.companysite.com/color-correction-software.php offered the best conversion ratio. After thinking about this - that's the reasoning we both came up with. When a person saw the first hyperlink - he or she would click it in order to learn about color correction, while not necessary having any desire to purchase a product (before and after). In the second case, any person not willing to at least download color correction software would probably restrain himself from clicking it. Hence, the first link drew more visitors. The higher conversion ratio for the second link is explained by the fact that only people interested in color correction software clicked it.

This topic is definitely worth more attention; meanwhile, if any of you tries this out - tell us your results.

Relevant links:

    • Mass mailer with hyperlinking support
    • Extract more e-mail addresses from the Web

Next week: Pay Per Click and your online marketing campaign
Prev week: Niche Marketing

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