Just Ask Betsy....The Be Visible BlogWhere there’s no such thing as a stupid question… about the Web!

Getting Email Pitches from Internet Marketers? What to do!

The number of companies that provide Internet marketing services is growing in leaps and bounds and many of them are using email to reach out to their target market: your business! Every day businesses receive unsolicited emails from Internet marketers promising to make your website appear on the first page of Search Engine results for your business category. Even Be Visible gets those emails!

I can’t blame any company for trying to reach new clients by cold emailing. After all, that’s how I got Be Visible started (and I still have most of the first clients I contacted that way!) But, the web is still too new and complicated for a “formula” email sales pitch to be successful.

Here’s an example:

One of my clients owns a commercial cleaning company that specializes in green cleaning solutions. They don’t do homes or apartments, and they have a very specific type of clients such as office buildings, private schools and restaurants. We’ve been running an adwords campaign on Google and working with them on their SEO. It’s tricky because we have to make sure that we are using their budget to reach only the correct decision makers, and that involves consistent analysis of their program, adjusting budgets, making irrelevant keywords negative, and much more. We have worked for two years to lower their cost per click and to get them the best ROI.

My client recently received an email from a company promising to get them better results.

Here’s an excerpt from the email:

“Hi,

My name is xxxxx and I’m with xxxxxxxx.org. I was just searching for Office Cleaning, Green Cleaning and School Cleaning in New York and it turns out that your company is missing some relevant keywords compared to similar businesses. I thought you might want to see this.

You can see your full list of recommended keywords here and explore options for improving your position on search engines.”

So, we clicked on the link and here is their list of recommended keywords and my client’s page rankings:

Here’s what is wrong:

• My client doesn’t work in New Jersey, and we don’t display their ads there.
• My client doesn’t fit into ecological or environmental services (no one looking for office cleaning would search that way),
• My client doesn’t do window washing
• They aren’t a dry cleaner or a commercial laundry

So, what the keyword report really shows that my client’s link is on the first page for their most important services:  commercial cleaning, office cleaning, etc. and that’s a result of two years of refining their program to target their most lucrative market.

So, I commend my competitor in reaching out to offer solutions to businesses, but it’s obvious that they didn’t put in any time to understand the business, which would have taken 2 seconds by going to the website. My competitor is selling the way the Yellow Pages always did: “If you throw enough sxxx at the wall, something will stick!” And we all know how much customer loyalty the Yellow Pages achieved!

So, if you get any unsolicited emails making great promises to help your business achieve visibility on the web, please feel free to forward them to me. I promise, I’ll give you an honest assessment. After all, there are other companies besides Be Visible who can find the right combination of all the Internet marketing options available for your business. But, I assure you, there are not too many that work as hard as we do to understand your business’ needs, goals and market.

Happy Holidays!