How to destroy your e-marketing presence in 5 steps

These days everyone has advice on how to improve your online presence for your business and generate leads through e-marketing strategies. What if you are having a bad week or day and are fed up with the ridiculous time involved in maintaining your website, low web traffic, rising costs of AdWords and failed conversion rates from your email campaigns? If you've had enough of e-marketing, here is what I recommend:

• Simplify your website. You can simply take down your website but that would be too easy. I recommend just having one page as your home page with the following picture and a caption "Pick up the f%#^&@ phone and call us at 1-800-555-5555". At the bottom of the page (below the fold), make sure that you have a few paragraphs as to what your company does. You will need this for some of the search strategies below.
  
  
• Send one last email blast. Email your entire database (including those that have unsubscribed) as well as any random email addresses that you find with the same picture above and the text "You have been unsubscribed from [YOUR COMPANY]. For more details, please go to www.yourcompany.com. You have been warned." Notice how we have used consistent branding between email and your website. Hey, if you're going to tank your e-marketing channels, make sure you use some best practices!
  
  As another best practice, you should test different subject lines to a subset of your list before sending out the complete email blast. For example, try these subject lines "Please confirm your unsubscription" or "This is the final email we are sending you". The "from" name of your email should always include the name of your company.
  
  As an added tip - don't really unsubscribe these people, you may need to send a follow up email. :) However, ensure that you allow people to really unsubscribe (we don't want to violate CAN-SPAM too much).
  
  
• Paid search and ads blow out. If you have already setup Yahoo and Google paid search ads, change the caption so that instead of the typical text that would entice people to click on the ad, it reads "Why go to this website? It's not like you have in the past". Make sure that all links go to your home page. If you don't have any paid search ads, buy some and make sure that you have keywords that are related to the text on our home page (see above). Use the same caption.
  
  You can also purchase ads on industry related websites. If you have the chance to create a banner ad, use the same picture above and use the same caption.
  
  
• The business blog to end all business blogs. If you were smart and started a business blog you can use this to help bring down your e-marketing strategy. Add one last post that says "Stop reading this blog and go to www.yourcompany.com". That was why we created this blog in the first place". If you don't have a business blog, don't bother starting one as it's not worth it if you don't plan on spending any more time or resources on your e-marketing strategy.
  
  
• Monitor and adjust. While this strategy may do the job, you may need to tweak a few things to seal the deal. This may include sending out a follow up email that warns those that did open your last email that their houses will be bombed if they open any more emails from your company. Paid search ads may need to be changed to "Thanks for not clicking on this ad".
  

Do you think this will work? Did I miss anything?

Chad H.

PS - Besides having a product or service that people actually use and a good receptionist or sales team to answer the phone, this post assumes that your company has a good brand recognition and offline marketing presence so that people know who your company is and what they do. If this isn't the case, please refrain from the above. If you're e-marketing strategy isn't working, you may need to take a step back and either get some help, get some new tools or do both.

Technorati tags: e-marketing, emarketing, online marketing, business blog, paid search, email marketing