Newsletter Landing Page SEO Question

[Fairyglass]

Sorry in advance if this sounds confusing...
We have five sites, all selling different ranges, and each with different design/presentation. Because many of our customers shop on specific sites, they do not realise/remember we have other sites.

We want to produce a general newsletter, cross promoting products to customers from our other sites, alongside product news for the sites they purchased from. As this newsletter will be sent to customers of more than one site, we cannot brand it a site-specific brand, so we want to set up a "brand page" where all the sites are listed and described and of course where one can click through to them. This page will be used as a link from the header of the newsletter so any confused customers can quickly understand why they're receiving the newsletter!

As the newsletter will be branded the company name rather than a site name, it makes sense to have the landing page set up under the company name also. The company name (Fairyglass) is also one of our sites, but we own the .co.uk and the .com suffixes. Currently the .com points to the live site at .co.uk but I'm thinking perhaps that this is where the landing page should be.

So to get to my question, finally... if we set up a page on our Fairyglass website as a landing page, and point the .com address to this page, does anyone foresee any issues with possible duplicate content, as the search engines will enter the site at what is essentially a hidden page using the .com address?

[fergusw]

Ben,
If you're linking from the email directly to a page then why use the .com at all? Why not simply point them straight to the brand page e.g. fairyglass.co.uk/brandpage/ directly from the emails HTML? You can keep your .com pointing as normal.

Also, are you able to identify which customer shops where, as well? We use email marketing software that allows you to send one email newsletter which can dynamically change elements of the content depending on data associated with the customer which can be very powerful and save on sending many different emails.

e.g. the intro text could be:
"Hi {name}, as a regular, valued shopper at {dynamic shop name} I'd like to introduce our other stores you may not be aware of......."

just a thought.

[Mike Hughes]

So to get to my question, finally... if we set up a page on our Fairyglass website as a landing page, and point the .com address to this page, does anyone foresee any issues with possible duplicate content, as the search engines will enter the site at what is essentially a hidden page using the .com address?

Why not just create a blog style website on the .com domain to host the newletters and other content? It seems a much simpler and more effective way to do it.

Mike

[leehack]

I don't like the idea of a landing page, i'd favour marketing all the sites as per something Sharkey recommends, i'd then cross promote each of the sites on each of the other sites, somewhere in the header area or towards the top.

For an ultimate solution, i'd in fact have a master site that held all products from all sites, have a TLS per site and create one overall site that when a certain shop was selected, the design, logo, colours etc reacted to that click, so it was a bit like a department store, with stores all within one big store. This idea gives you a unified checkout process across all 5 stores and thus maintenance and downloading orders etc. are all done within one site, which is much quicker on the admin/maintenance side.

[Fairyglass]

Fergus, Mike, Lee,

Thanks for the quick replies. I'm sure I'm over-complicating things- it's a trait I have

I started to write a detailed reply, but only succeeded in confusing myself further. We've taken on a PR person who's great, but we now have a blog, Farcebook and Twitter feeds to deal with so my head's spinning.

I think the blog as a central resource is probably the way forward for the moment. The only issue I have is customer's confusion over the brands- for example a customer shopping on our Makeitnow site will not expect a newsletter branded Fairyglass, containing information on cake decorations from a site called edible-glitter- the issue is how best to present the information so the customer can quickly understand its relevance.

Lee- your idea of a TLS is definitely the ultimate solution in many ways, but for various reasons we want to keep the sites separate.

That newsletter software sounds very good Fergus, I'll take a look. I've left the creation of the newsletters to our PR lady and will point her in your direction also.

Thanks all again for your time.

[leehack]

Lee- your idea of a TLS is definitely the ultimate solution in many ways, but for various reasons we want to keep the sites separate.

Do both, maximum exposure then and best of both worlds?

[Fairyglass]

For an ultimate solution, i'd in fact have a master site that held all products from all sites, have a TLS per site and create one overall site that when a certain shop was selected, the design, logo, colours etc reacted to that click, so it was a bit like a department store, with stores all within one big store. This idea gives you a unified checkout process across all 5 stores and thus maintenance and downloading orders etc. are all done within one site, which is much quicker on the admin/maintenance side.

Can this actually be done in Actinic? Well beyond my skills, sad to say, but it's anattractive idea.

[leehack]

Can this actually be done in Actinic? Well beyond my skills, sad to say, but it's anattractive idea.

Yes it can be done, quite involved technically, particularly on the css and html side, well within the design possibilities of actinic though.

[Fairyglass]

OK, thanks- that's worth considering for future planning. Not this year though- too much going on already!
Thanks,