Compass Designs

One of the most important things for a successful website is traffic. That might sound like an obvious point, but alot of people get lost in the technology and don't see the forest for the trees. Just traffic isn't good enough, it has to be defensible traffic. Something that doesn't dry up overnight just because you lost your top ten spot in Google.

There are four basic strategies to defensible traffic.

1. SEO (Organic)
2. Pay Per Click (Adwords etc)
3. Referral (link building)
4. Email

I have a whole chapter about these four strategies in my book, and number of posts about Joomla SEO here on the site. For this post I want to focus on email.

Offering something of value, and then engaging subscribers in permission marketing is a key part of a modern website marketing strategy. Examples might include:

• Follow up emails from e-commerce purchases
• Sequential lessons for a free online course
• News and tips from a topic niche site

Obviously a key part of an email marketing plan is reliable technology. There are several email extensions for Joomla that I have reviewed, but the solution I use myself and recommend to others is to use a 3rd party hosted solution.

The benefit of a 3rd party solution is significant:

• Your email will have a higher deliverability rate
• Your IP is not being used to send the emails so cannot be blacklisted at the ISP level
• The solution is usually more sophisticated with detailed statistics and autoresponders

Having also reviewed hosted email marketing solutions, for me the clear winner is iContact. We like this email service so much we actually developed an extension to integrate it into Joomla called J!Contact (you can download it for free in the download section).

Regardless of what technological solution you use, email marketing is a key factor in successfully building traffic to the modern website. Ignore it at your peril!