Website newsletter sign ups give us the perfect opportunity to keep in touch with any potential prospects at initial interest stages.

E-mail marketing is not just a way of increasing conversions as part of an organised campaign strategy but is also a continuing reminder of your company’s presence.

Using our web capture tool on your website allows you to capture your prospects’ contact information when they sign up to your newsletter. Upon submission of their form, the contact details can be fed back into CommuniGator and subsequently used in your future email marketing campaigns. Web capture forms can be build and fields selected based on the information that you would like to know about your customers, usually an individual’s e-mail address being the most valuable form of data.

Just think, without any form of web capture on your site you are unaware of your individual web visitors, with the majority either leaving to sign up with competitors or putting the idea to rest completely. If you are thinking, I already know who is visiting my website through the use of my web analytics tool, to an extent this is true, however, without utilising a web capture function you are not allowing the prospect a chance to make the first move themselves into the sales cycle.

Email styling is just as important as the content of the email to ensure that it looks appealing to be read by your client. Designers can style and organise your email to the most appropriate layout to achieve the best results for you but a few helpful hints and tips can also help you to make your emails stand out from the crowd.

The first thing is to ensure that you don’t overload your email, think about what is important to be seen initially but without putting too much in.  You want to encourage the reader to be captured by the headings so that they then want to read more by using landing pages.  The same rule applies to picture’s so don’t have large images keep them small on the initial email as you can also link them to go to a larger image.  Ensure that the layout is balanced and remember that the images you use will not always be initially displayed so ensure that your text tells the client what you want them to know rather than relying on the image.

Spacing in also important to make your subjects stand out and separated. Use the sizing and the colouring of your fonts appropriately within your design so that the colours complement each other using things like bold to get attention, colours for headings and italics for quotations.  Don’t try to use too many different font styles, two are ample but use a standard font rather than a special corporate font as these may not be received on different email platforms when sending external mail. Examples of some web friendly email fonts are Times New Roman, Arial, Courier, Verdana, Georgia, Impact and Tahoma.

It is not uncommon for small businesses to send emails out as infrequent as monthly newsletters or with seasonal special offers as ‘Black Friday’ or ‘Spring Sales’.

By reaching out to their audience more via social media platforms such as Facebook updates, Twitter tweets or Linkedin posts you can help fill these gaps keeping your brand image in the forefront of your customers thoughts.

A great way to keep an eye on what to tweet and post is by using a social media hub such as Hootsuite, this allows you to put keywords on watch and when your words are mentioned you get visibility in an updated stream. This allows you to either respond with your services if business driven, or create an article in your next newsletter or social post that is the ‘‘HOT TOPIC’’ at the moment. This will increase your click through rate on email and ensure your online presence will be better received via social platforms.

I stress the importance to keep in mind that social media doesn’t just complement your email marketing efforts, it should also enhance all your marketing efforts from optimizing your SEO keywords and campaign messaging to identifying keep topics and trends your clients and prospects are talking about.

The CommuniGator platform allow users to place a social sharing option in your emails to allow your audience to engage in the social options such as ‘liking your Linkedin comments or ‘retweeting’ what you are saying. This is great for those with a complete 360 degree strategy for marketing.

Targeted marketing can be as effective as improve conversions by 20% than mass blanket messaging.

Delivering content tailored to your customers and prospects is a sure fire way to be successful.  This is where marketing automation comes in. You can connect with more people in a more personal fashion. There are various things you can do to improve your marketing strategy:

 Firstly, it doesn't make sense to send your customers and prospects irrelevant information that doesn't match their Web browsing habits. If you use a Web analytics tool which is integrated with your marketing platform to monitor which pages they are interested in, you can then use triggered emails to send them relevant information.

Secondly, if you have downloads to white papers and PDF’s your customers are likely to be interested in learning more.  For example, if you're offering a related Webinar, it's a no-brainer for you to invite those who downloaded the paper to attend the Webinar. You could do this automatically; if someone downloaded a white paper you could use a trigger to automatically send them the invite!  They would receive these 5 minutes after they downloaded the document!!!

You can also schedule social posts to coincide with email sends. When sending email containing information about an upcoming Webinar you should "tweet" simultaneously.  With new marketing technology you can automatically post relevant content across a range of social network accounts at the same time the email goes out and of course track the results.

Lastly, buying cycles are becoming longer and more complex, and sometimes passing leads from marketing to sales can be difficult with salespeople cherry-picking them. Incorporating a lead-scoring system with automated sales alerts can help your sales team by providing the right leads at the right time.

Using automation to make content more relevant and personalized is definitely the future of successful marketing.  Automation will help you to deliver the right message at the right and therefore make your marketing strategy efficient!

 

 

 

 

 

 

You are the person at the company responsible for managing the e-mail marketing campaigns and you are under pressure...your time is valuable!

Due to the dramatic growth of the e-mail marketing industry, e-mail service providers (ESP’s) have had to keep up with the demands of the intelligent marketing employee, who is always looking at ways in which to save time whilst keeping within budget restraints. Article Manager is an inclusive tool allowing e-mail marketers from the most basic level the opportunity to browse and upload text onto an existing company branded e-mail template.

Instead of choosing to spend company time and money on sophisticated html design (often unlikely to be received, let alone viewed!), why not spend a little of this time viewing article results from past campaigns, if you were to know that the majority of your audience had shown a strong interest in a particular subject in the past, why are you not sending them more of what they want now!?

An educated decision based on past campaign results is much more likely to be effective than a decision based upon one individuals personal preference or simply gut feel.

 

 

Emails are not websites, and while the design should be appealing, it should be kept somewhat simple.  This is because emails are opened on a wide variety of browsers and email clients, and therefore it makes sense to keep the design basic so that there will be less chance of irregularities or errors occurring.

Firstly, can you use CSS? No no no.  Email design needs to be trundled back to the good old days of tables and inline styles.  This is due to the majority of email clients stripping out any CSS reference you make and therefore breaking your design.  It may be ‘old school’ but it is the best way forward when it comes to creating emails that work.

Also, worth noting... try not to nest your tables, stacking tables instead creates an email that is easily editable and updateable, which going forward will save you a lot of time.  And while we’re talking about tables, do not split or merge table cells.  You may do this to align some elements in one section of your email, while unwittingly distorting other content somewhere else.  It isn’t a reliable source of formatting so try to avoid it where possible.

 

 

 

The return of dark and cold nights can only mean one thing; another busy Christmas period is once again upon us.

Whilst there is still over a month to go until Christmas day, we should already be deep in thought regarding our Christmas marketing strategies. I’m going to provide you with a number of things to consider in preparation for your Christmas campaigns.

Forget deadlines – Potential customers will still be potential customers right up until Christmas Eve. There are a lot of us (myself included) that tend to leave our Christmas shopping until the very last minute. By keeping your campaigns going right up until the end of the Christmas period you provide yourself with the very best potential returns.

Previous Results – If you implemented marketing campaigns last Christmas have you thought to go back and look at how they performed? The open/ click through rates and subject line succession from last year’s campaigns will provide you with a great wealth of data on whether your marketing strategies are successful or need altering at this time of year.

Customer acquisition – This is a time of year that websites are likely to see a massive increase in incoming traffic. Don’t miss out on potential subscriptions by ensuring that you have a web capture form setup to populate those marketing lists for future campaigns.

Audience Segmentation – Once again it helps to look back at last year’s results. What were particular contacts interested in? Did they provide you with a return? With this information in hand you can tailor your campaign content to each individual contact in order to provide them with exactly what they want.

Whilst implementing your Christmas campaigns it is also worthwhile thinking about how you are going to retain these customers in the future. January can be a hard time of year for a lot of us and we want to encourage our audience members to remember us rather than forget.

 

On average office workers spend around nearly 1 hour a day managing their emails.  They will receive and send in the region of 200 emails each day.  This can only mean one thing, we spend less time reading emails that are not specific to us due to the sheer volume of traffic hitting our inboxes.
 
The more we know about our potential customers the more we can capture their interest.  Once the initial acquisition email has been sent we have the opportunity to group contacts who have the same interest and then send a more targeted email.
 
First impressions really do count in the world of email marketing.  The tips I would use to drive people though to your website are as follows:
 
1. Catchy subject line
2. Name on email matches of the recipient
3. Best content in the preview pane
4. Open rates are at their optimum around Tuesday and Thursday at 10am.

Use these basic tips the next time you go to send an email and  we can ensure your results will increase.

Ok, I’m not just about to make a marriage proposal but I will make a proposal on how to engage with targeted prospects via email marketing best practice. Just like a marriage proposal, I need to make this email engagement special, I need my targeted audience to be wooed because I’m after a ‘yes’ and that yes being a positive outcome to my email campaign.

So here I am, with the task of trying to find something interesting to say to my prospects, I need them to open my email, click on the links I need them to and by doing so this will drive traffic to my website so I can convert new sales and increase my revenue. So here’s a few basic reminders of best practice engagement.

Step 1: The all important Subject Line, as always this needs to be simple, inviting, short and to the point, in fact I’d use 2 subject lines that fit that criteria and will test them both against a small % of my targeted audience, find out which one of the subject lines had more open rates & run with that for the rest of my campaign this offers me the ability to improve my results and overall outcome.

Step 2: The Message, what am I going to say and how? I want to really drive them to my website and show interest in our services but at this stage I’m not sure what they are interested in, so I need to find out. The message will be based on 3 levels of content, perhaps content on useful information on us as a business or industry news, content on products and content on services.

Step 3: The design, don’t get bogged down too much on how pretty your design looks with images, large fonts and colours, the design needs to flow with the content of your message but in a simple manor. If your design is too busy, it’s makes it difficult for the human eye to focus on crucial parts of the email, It’s also important to keep it clean and simple to help avoid all those spam filters that block most of these pretty designs

Step 4: Segmentation,  It’s very important to get the subject line, message and design  right but even more important you analyse the performance of a campaign, their response & then start building groups to segment the prospects based on their behaviour towards your products and services and understand what interests them and then start using dynamic content to help you target them more accurately in the future.

Step 5: Nurturing, in the beginning you need to start a process to nurture your prospects, giving  points to certain parts of your website that prospects visits via your email campaign, the more they click the more points they get. The frequency of the ongoing visit to your website after they have left your email can also be tracked via post click tracking, this also allocates more points to them.

At some stage your prospect will be nurture enough for contact from your sales department leading towards converted revenue from your email campaign.

Once you have been dating your prospects for a while with applying best practice for your email marketing, you will learn more and more about them, what makes them happy, what they like and don’t like, how often they like to be told stuff and how often they like to hear from you.

All that’s left is for you to pop the question and take this relationship from a prospect to a customer!

 

 

 

 

 

The structure and layout of your design plays an important part in how and if your email is read, but excessive styling can waste lots of time.

A well structured email will always include images on the right hand side of the page, with clear precise articles, a top preview panel to include the main promotional message and call to action and a footer section at the bottom of the design.

Graduated fonts are also essential for emphasising different elements of the design. For the top preview panel text use a large heading font up to 22px in size. Any larger can increase your spam score. The introduction text should be around 18px and of a contrasting colour and the click through link at 16px can reflect the colour of the main heading.

For articles, start with a larger font for the heading, usually 14px, with the main content text slightly smaller at 12px. Link text should be kept the same size as the content but made bold and underlined to push the recipient to click through.

Images should be kept small and of a consistent size, perhaps 100 x 100px, with any large banner image placed at the bottom of the design near the footer. This ensures the text content will be visible for all recipients, even if images are not displayed.