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How To Create Effective Email Marketing Campaigns
Published on March 18, 2013
Tags:
Internet Communication
Some businesses are moving away from using email campaigns to promote themselves and their products, however, it is still one of the quickest, easiest, and cheapest ways to communicate with potential clients from all over the world, and as long as you carefully plan your campaign and target it specifically to your customers, email can still be extremely effective when it comes to converting visitors into buyers:
1. Plan Your Objectives
What is your main objective? Do you want to attract new customers? Build on your relationships with existing clients? Or get useful feedback that will help you to strengthen your brand? Knowing what your targets are will help you with planning your email strategy – when and how often you will email the customers, what the content of the email will be, and which calls to action you’ll include in the body of the message. Smart-targeting your campaigns to your visitors’ demographics is also very effective; organise your subscribers into subsets and write tailored emails for each category by looking at their age, gender, background, purchase history etc.
2. Opt-In And Opt-Out
Permission is an important part of email campaigns – with so many people worried about spam, it is vital that you get people’s permission before you start sending them messages. This can be done simply with an ‘opt-in’ choice, and if you really want to gain the trust of your subscriber, go for a ‘double opt-in’ option. This involves sending the subscriber a confirmation email with a link that they then have to click on to verify their wish to be included in the mailing list. Just as important is including an ‘opt-out’ link at the bottom of every email you send, and make it obvious; people want to know that they can unsubscribe at any time.
3. Include Topical News And Entertainment Items
If you want to add something extra to your emails, alluding to topical news items in your messages will help to grab people’s attention. If you target the types of popular culture references to your audience, they’ll be more likely to read the entire email and remember your brand in the future. Plan ahead for upcoming events, and use social media such as the trending topics on Twitter to see what people are talking about at the moment.
4. Be Mobile Friendly
An important point to consider is the rise of smartphones and tablets. Mobile devices are getting more and more popular and you need to ensure that your emails will be readable on a small screen. This means avoiding bombarding people with huge blocks of text, and remember that the first line of an email is especially important as it is often displayed as the preview on smartphones, so make sure it’s engaging and informative.
5. Test Everything
Lastly, test each email before you send it – make sure it’s readable, that the links work, and that the logos and other images are placed properly. Keeping track of open rates, click rates, and sales will help you to improve your campaign in the future, so make sure you make use of reporting tools with regards to your emails.
Points To Consider When Linking Your Online and Offline Marketing
Published on March 18, 2013
Tags:
SEO
These days, businesses need a carefully planned digital marketing strategy if they are to keep up with their competitors online, but it is just as important to focus on the more traditional methods of offline marketing. If, however, you are looking at strengthening your brand in as many mediums as possible, you’ll need to consider how you can integrate these two different types of promotion methods. After all, if a potential visitor reads about you in a printed publication but finds it difficult to locate you online, you risk losing a huge amount of business.
Here are a few tips on how to integrate these marketing methods smoothly:
1. Match The Design Of Your Online and Offline Promotion
You will already have created your brand, including your logo, your slogan, and your website. No doubt they match in style and colour (and if they don’t, they should). But some businesses still fail to match their online and offline marketing in terms of design. Keep the same colour scheme, the same fonts, and the same logo. If customers don’t immediately recognise your brand, they could get confused and think your website belongs to a different business to the one they read about in the paper or saw on the TV. This is the same with any catchphrases or text you’ve used to promote your business or a particular product; keep your campaign messages consistent.
2. Use The Same Keywords
Similar to point 1, make sure that any popular keywords that you use in your offline marketing are placed on your website. This will help people to find you when using search engines (if they decide to look for a product rather than going straight to your business website, for example), and it will also help increase your traffic generally. If you don’t want to inundate your site with lots of keywords, think about writing a company blog and including some of the words in your posts (as long as your blog frequently links back to your corporate site).
3. Make It Easy For People To Find You
If you’re promoting yourself offline through direct mail, magazine advertisements, TV ads or any other method, make sure that you include your website address on everything – this works particularly well if your URL is short and catchy. If you’re worried that your address may be too long or that it could get confused with another brand, think about including a QR code on printed publications. This way, people with smartphones (and computers) can just scan the code and get taken to your landing page. Anything that will increase your website traffic should have time spent on ensuring it’s done properly.
The more effort you put into integrating your online and offline marketing campaigns, the more traffic your site will get, leading to a higher ROI. As long as you keep both parts of your marketing consistent and accessible, potential customers will continue to find you – both from online promotion and from the more traditional non-digital methods of marketing.
The Importance of Offering a Mobile Website
Published on March 15, 2013
Tags:
Web Design London
Having an easy-to-navigate glossy website which includes all of your company information is essential for any business; everyone knows this and it’s certainly nothing new. And yet it’s amazing how many firms effectively throw away frequent business because they don’t pay as much attention to offering a mobile version of their site.
With smartphone users on the rise – as well as the popularity of other phones and mobile devices such as tablets – it is vital to offer people a quick, easy-to-use mobile website that they can look at while on the go. Depending on your type of business, a good mobile site could drastically improve your profits: for example, if you run a café and someone in the vicinity searches on their phone for somewhere to eat. If you don’t have a mobile site or have a very slow one, you could miss out on their custom. With many people using their mobile devices to shop online, having a simple but effective ecommerce mobile site will also help increase your sales.
So what are the most important things to consider when it comes to mobile platforms?
1. Make It Easy To Load
No one is going to give your site a second look on their phones if it hasn’t loaded in the browser within ten seconds, so make your site as simple as you can. Get rid of any videos or large graphics: you don’t need them. When users are looking on their phones, they generally want useful information, not a beautifully-designed website with hundreds of images.
2. Make It Easy To Find The Important Information
Ensure that all your important business information – name and type of company, phone number, address, email address, hours of business if needed – is displayed in clear text at the top of your page. Text is better than an image not only for the load time but also because on mobiles, clicking on a phone number will let the user phone the company, and the same for email addresses. You want to make it as easy as possible for your site visitor to contact you.
3. Go Responsive
Responsive layouts are website designs that work on all devices – from laptops to netbooks and tablets to phones – without losing any of the integrity of the site. It isn’t just about scaling down your existing website; this will result in mobile users having to pinch and zoom the browser, which they won’t put up with for long before closing the window. Responsive design often starts with the minimum required for a mobile site and then builds its way up to a full-sized monitor version. Mobile sites will include less images and just the important information, with more elements being added for bigger devices with bigger screens. It also means you don’t have to pay for two separate website designs.
Whatever you do to improve the mobile version of your site, test how it looks and works on a variety of different devices and networks to ensure maximum potential custom.
Online Marketing Tips for 2013
Published on March 8, 2013
Tags:
Web Design London
The area of online marketing is constantly growing and changing, and businesses need to keep on top of the most effective marketing tools in order to keep attracting visitors to their websites and, in turn, convert them into buyers or users of their services.
But with so many options out there, how do you know which ones to focus on? Here are some of the main marketing tips that businesses will be looking at this year.
1. Create Engaging, Useful Online Content
The need for online content is nothing new, but there are still so many businesses out there who have websites that offer nothing new or interesting to potential customers. While it’s vital to have a clear, easy-to-navigate site which includes all of your company’s information, you should be offering more: this can be in the form of a frequently updated blog based around your chosen industry which will attract users in your target market. The more original, thought-provoking content you can offer them, the more time they’re likely to spend on your site; build a relationship with your readers, and they will be more likely to stay loyal to your company.
2. Keep Up With SEO Developments
SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) has always been important when marketing your site, but make sure you’re up to date with the best way to implement keywords into your content and other SEO techniques. Download an SEO plugin for your blog or hire a company that specialises in search engine optimisation to help you out.
3. Go Responsive For Mobile Platforms
Smartphones are more popular than ever before, and with more and more people relying on their mobiles to surf the net and shop online, it is imperative that your website is formatted to be able to work on any sized device, including laptops, netbooks, and tablets, as well as phones. The easiest way to do this is to choose a responsive layout for your website. This is a single design theme that works on screens of all sizes and dimensions, and actually adds more to the site when a bigger screen is in use. There’s no need to pay for two separate designs, and offering a quick and easy mobile version of your website will encourage custom from people using all kinds of devices and platforms.
4. Make The Most Of Social Media Marketing
The popularity of websites such as Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest shouldn’t be underestimated, especially if your business site includes a blog. Whereas in the past, blog posts relied heavily on SEO to attract readers, social network websites are now helping in this area due to their sharing abilities. It’s quick and easy to add social media buttons onto the beginning or end of every blog post, and this encourages readers to share their favourite articles with their online friends. It is word of mouth for the internet generation, and every blog should take advantage of it.
There are many more marketing tips for increasing your website visitors, but following just a few of these should result in a more prosperous 2013.
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Reproduction: These articles are © Copyright Ampheon. All rights are reserved by the copyright owners. Permission is granted to freely reproduce the articles provided that a hyperlink with a do follow is included linking back to this article page.
Reproduction: These articles are © Copyright Ampheon. All rights are reserved by the copyright owners. Permission is granted to freely reproduce the articles provided that a hyperlink with a do follow is included linking back to this article page.
