As a wedding professional you have three major channels for business development and marketing on the web, in addition to your website.
They are
- Paid Search like Google Adwords,
- Display Ads/Banners on placed on wedding directory websites or other sites either directly or with a service like AdSense
- Direct Email.
All three are used to inform people of your goods and services, encourage them to visit your website to learn more and hopefully become your customer. Importantly for your business and profit decisions they also have different success rates and costs.
Fortunately on the internet there are ways and firms that measure the success rates of these different methods. Below is a table complied by Datran Media from DoubleClick, Morgan Stanley and WebSide Story for 2006-2007
Comparative marketing performance for Paid Search, Display Ads and Direct Email
Click-to-Conversion (sale) Rate:
- Paid Search – 3.4%
- Display Ads – <1%
- Direct Email – 13.46%
So what does this mean? In short, display advertising is the worst, search is better and direct email is almost 4 times better than paid search. Out of 100 click throughs an average web marketer could expect over 13 new clients from direct email, over 3 new clients from search and fewer than 1 from a display ad.
Marc’s tip to wedding/bridal professionals:
To be blunt, unless your conversion rate to sales is very high, don’t buy display ads and do the math for paid search and direct email. From the measurements above you could spend 3 times as much for direct email as paid search and still, direct email would be the most profitable choice.
So explore what your Google Adwords are bidding at and what quality leads might cost then make an informed choice for the lowest cost and your highest potential profits.
For more assistance or questions just comment or send me an email.
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Hey Marc, your blog is more than helpful and is fast becoming one of my favs. I have a question for you. Do you know of a good lead resource that sells email lists.