I haven’t tallied the number of holiday shopping promotions I’ve received via email over the past few weeks, but it seems like many more than in past years. Companies know that consumers have a limited amount of funds that they are going to spend somewhere, so they are pulling out all of the stops early to grab as much of the pie as possible.

The connection I want to highlight in this blog post is that in order to be able to market to prospects (very inexpensively) through email marketing, an investment needs to be made to create the database in the first place. SEO, SEM and Social Media can each play a vital role in developing your list.

Obviously it’s preferred to convert a high percentage of your paid search leads into customers, but it’s equally important to build a database of folks that you can remarket to later on.

Begin investing in your database in a methodical way. Figure out the response rates and average order size you realize from your email blasts and then figure out how large the list needs to grow to in order to attain your sales objectives for 2011 and beyond. Next, determine which marketing channels are most cost effective for your business and begin to grow your list. None of this is easy, but it’s the best way to secure your long term success.

We speak with clients and prospects all of the time who are very focused on attaining a particular Cost Per Acquisition “CPA” goal with their search engine marketing campaigns. It’s clearly valuable to put energy into that kind of tracking effort and adjust campaigns accordingly, however I believe that the data can be easily misinterpreted if there is not a process in place to account for sales that occur later when the lead source may be a bit muddier. In other words, it’s essential to be able to properly attribute “leads” that become sales at a later date back to their original lead source, not just the last touch that they received.

With Google Analytics and most of the other tracking / analysis tools, it’s easy to accurately attribute sales on ecommerce websites. It gets trickier when the selling cycle is longer, particularly when companies have a process in place to continue to market to individuals who have visited their sites, but don’t immediately “convert”. Is the sale credited back to the original marketing effort, to a remarketing campaign or to the email campaigns that prospects have been consistently receiving for the past several months?

There is no exact answer to this question, nor is the answer the same in every circumstance. More often than not, the answer is that attribution should likely be shared across multiple sources (contributing factors). That being said, it’s important not to adopt a myopic view when it comes to assessing your lead sources and figuring out where to trim (or add) additional resources to campaigns.

Remember back when everybody shared the same homepage experience, be it on AOL, Yahoo, etc?  There wasn’t any personalization to the information, there was just a one-size-fits-all approach. As this was in the early days of the internet, there was hardly an understanding of what the future would hold for internet users, but it’s evident today that people have embraced the concept of having their online experiences tailored to them.

The first meaningful step in this direction occurred with the launch of iGoogle in April of 2007. iGoogle provided a framework upon which users could select modules to be included on a personalized homepage. More so than MSN or Yahoo, Google encouraged people to develop content that could be fed into the iGoogle platform, in contrast to a more restrictive philosophy adopted by Yahoo and MSN who maintained greater control over the content available.

Now we have Twitter. I’ll save for another post my thoughts on how businesses should best utilize Twitter to engage with their audiences. The point here, however is that Twitter enables people to exponentially personalize their experience online by “following” streams of tweets from individuals they are interested in hearing from and by tracking tweets on topics of interest (with saved searches, #hashtags, lists, etc.), be they pleasure, hobby or work related.

Regardless of whether you ever expect to participate in social media through tweeting, you should take advantage of the opportunity to listen to what’s going on through Twitter in a highly personalized manner.