Support

Why does your business need Local Site Promotion?

Here are the facts.

As a small business owner, you know times have changed and there are more and more ways to advertise your business. Local Site Promotion is a solution that makes your business visible to over 200 million unique users but only requires you to pay for conversions and leads. How many other advertising channels can offer you that?

Fact #1: Today, people search for things using "search engines"

Search engines, like Google and Yahoo!, are the first place people go to begin a hunt for information. Today, search engines represent the greatest source of inbound traffic to websites and research shows that consumers conduct over 3.7 billion Internet searches each month!

So how does it work? When people enter keywords into a search engine, the search engine will generate results and advertisements that closely match those keywords. Local Site Promotion will tie keywords for your business to the geographic location that you specify. Perhaps you can think of 30 keywords for your business, but our keyword optimization tool will generate an additional 5,000 keywords to help drive traffic to your site.

Fact #2: Yellow pages have gone online.

While many of us still hang onto phone books, many consumers no longer use the printed version of the yellow pages. Instead, they're looking for local businesses online. Verizon's SuperPages site alone receives as many as 15 million visits and 9 million unique visitors per month—and that number is only growing.

Like search engines, Internet yellow pages represent a tremendous source of extremely targeted searches for offline and online businesses. Local Site Promotion will put your business at the fingertips of people in your area.

Why are my customer acquisition costs cheaper with Local Site Promotion?

Traditional marketing mediums push you to thousands of people who may neither need nor want your products or services. Internet search engine marketing on the other hand is a “performance based” medium that makes advertisers visible only when people search for their products or services in a particular city, region, or state. Even better, with search engine marketing, you can quantify the results of your advertising whereas using traditional techniques, quantification of results is often a mystery.

How can my site reach people at the exact moment they're looking for products or services?

Your ad only gets displayed to people seeking information related to the keywords associated with your products and services. Your ads will appear on all the major search engines including Google, Yahoo, MSN, SuperPages, Altavista, and AskJeeves. Whether you’re looking to attract thousands of new customers or just a few, Local Site Promotion can help you find new customers on a neighborhood, city, state, or national level.

How does Pay for Performance work?

The main reason Pay-Per Click (PPC) advertising delivers such incredible ROI (return on investment) is that your investment is well controlled. You decide what you’re willing to pay each month on your ad, and Local Site Promotion distributes that amount evenly throughout the month to ensure that your ad has a consistent display rate.

How is tracking provided with Local Site Promotion?

Website Tracking

You can track the number of clicks on your website that come from Local Site Promotion because we create a proxy or a mirror copy of all pages of your existing site, then we add tracking code that allows us to see where leads come from. We will be able to report:

• Information requests from website
• Website and page views

Email Tracking

Dotster will provide you with a unique email address for the mirrored site so that we can track a number of important variables to help you see the success of your campaign. Dotster will automatically forward any mail to your existing or a specified email address. We will be able to report:

• Number of emails received
• Email address of sender
• Date/Time
• Location of Sender

Form Tracking

If you have a form on your site, then our reporting tools will be able to track different variables associated with this form. We will be able to report:

• First Name
• Last Name
• Email Address
• Phone Number
• City
• State

E-Commerce

If you already have ecommerce on your site, we will also be able to create a proxy or mirrored version of your e-store. Actual shopping cart requests and transactions will be forwarded to your existing process, but this format allows us to report actual sales activity as a result of the Local Site Promotion campaign. We will be able to report:

• Shopping Cart Transactions
• Date of Transaction
• Time of Transaction

What is Email Marketing?

Email marketing uses the Internet to communicate information about promotions, company offerings, product updates and more. It is a valuable dialogue between a prospective or current customer and a company. Email marketing is most effective when the recipients are targeted and the information is relevant and timely.

Why would I use Email Marketing?

Email marketing is more cost effective, and achieves results faster than traditional direct mail marketing. Most importantly, email marketing is twice as effective as traditional direct mail in getting a response from the targeted audience. This may be because of its immediate call-to-action, through "buy now" or "sign up now" links that can be directly embedded in the message. It is ideal for anyone looking to increase revenue, boost sales, generate leads, build brand awareness or shorten sale cycles.

Create... Send... Track...

Create
Our Email Marketing platform has a powerful newsletter management features that enables customers to easily manage their brand image. Email Marketing includes a full suite of tools within the template library for on-line content creation and on-line content storage.

Send
The Email Marketing platform offers one of the most advanced deliverability platforms available today. Marketers who want to ensure that their email campaigns reach the inboxes of their recipients use Email Marketing to achieve some of the highest deliverability rates in the industry.

Track
The Email Marketing platform includes tools designed to help our customers determine the exact demographics of their customers. Through real-time web based reports and analytics they'll get a high level view of their campaign results

What is Dotster EmailBrain used for?

The Dotster EmailBrain tool is mostly used by corporations, associations, clubs, small businesses and private individuals. The uses are endless, but most people use Dotster EmailBrain to communicate with clients, staff, members, colleagues and relatives or friends. Private use would include invites, announcements, travelogues and family albums. Small businesses might use Dotster EmailBrain for press releases, newsletters, product launches, quotes, letters, proposals and more. Corporations, on the other hand, might have an in house communications department that wants to send out internal newsletters, reports, memos and directives to other offices, as well as a range of opt in or other marketing functions.

How do subscribers unsubscribe?

Each email you send using Dotster EmailBrain has an unsubscribe link appended to it. If you have only one general subscriber list it will say 'Unsubscribe from this mailing list'. If you have several categories of subscriptions active on your subscribe form, the link will be 'Manage my subscription'.

Why have open rates of my emails dropped?

As of November 16, 2003, we changed the way we track opens. Prior to this, if someone opened an email twice, it was counted twice. If half of the recipients opened their emails twice, stats showed a 100% open rate. This anomaly has been rectified. We now track individual email addresses as "UNIQUE". An individual is counted once even if they opened many times. Open rates of newsletters may seem smaller, but they are more accurate.

How do I know if emails that I sent out were actually opened?

Dotster EmailBrain provides statistics of sent newsletters and reports the percentage of emails opened per mailshot, how many were sent, how many website click throughs were generated, and who clicked on what links and who actually opened the email. We even enable you to generate or export these addresses as a separate list so that you can target your users based on their click behavior.

Can I do scheduled sends with Dotster EmailBrain, choosing the time I wish my newsletter to be sent out?

Yes, scheduled sends are part of Dotster EmailBrain's functionality. They can be sent by hours and days, up to one month ahead.

Can I send out personalized emails?

Yes, Dotster EmailBrain allows you to personalize your emails and set up subscribe forms where your users fill in their details to populate sets of data that you can set up, with a choice in the type of information you wish to get from them. Go to Manage Subscriber Info and Create New (dataset). Full instructions are available in the help files. A small icon next to the subject line in the SEND area enables you to personalize the subject line.

Does Dotster EmailBrain automatically send the correct version (HTML or text) to recipients?

Yes, Dotster EmailBrain is reverse MIME compliant and will automatically determine whether an email client can read HTML. If it cannot, Dotster EmailBrain will deliver the text version (a setting that can be turned on or off in your Emailbrain account).

What is Dotster Connect?

Dotster Connect is a Social Networking product. An online community is a social structure made of nodes which are generally individuals or organizations. Nodes indicate the ways in which they are connected through various social familiarities ranging from casual acquaintance to close familial bonds. Social networking also refers to a category of Internet applications to help connect friends, business partners, or other individuals together using a variety of tools.

Who would use Dotster Connect?

Dotster Connect can be used by small to medium businesses that anticipate up to 5000 social networking participants. The feature set that is used by these customers is limited. Dotster Connect can also be used by larger businesses and will be offered rich, customized features.

What are the available features of Dotster Connect for the Enterprise package?

With Dotster Connect Enterprise Package you will see a list of robust features that are offered to make your Social Network easy for you and your customers to use.

Features of the Gold package:

• Up to 5000 Community Members
• Up to 5 User Levels (Admin, Moderator, User, Super User etc.)
• Choice of 10 Templates
• Number of web pages included depends on template choice
• Optional Advertising
• Galleries
• Albums
• Articles
• Groups
• Invitations
• User Awards
• Search
• Privacy Settings
• Images
• Podcasts
• Blogs
• Moderation Tool
• Member Portraits and Avatars
• Events
• Admin Tool
• Drag and Drop Member Profile Page
• Friending
• User Home Pages
• User Profiles
• Submission Comments
• Commenting
• RSS Feed
• Ad Network
• Video Albums for Admin