branding email

The importance of Email Marketing and Digital Marketing Strategy for your brand

Posted by Sarah O'Donovan

Have you ever opened a marketing email and not immediately recognised what company it’s from or the purpose of the email? It has no sales pitch or story or maybe it doesn’t even match their website? Sometimes it’s not their fault, they test their emails on desktops but don’t realise their emails don’t render correctly on mobile, the device that the majority of people now open emails on. Believe it or not, some companies don’t even use email marketing and have no idea of the opportunity they are missing out on. Fundamentals of Email Marketing and Digital Marketing Strategy include an optimised website and great emails, even mobile-friendly ones. Said to have the biggest ROI and be the most cost-effective…

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Making emails more useful part 2 – content marketing

Posted by Tony Macpherson

Previously I looked at making emails more useful for your subscribers in order to improve engagement through relevance and targeting. But you can become even more useful through content marketing. Sending helpful, informative, or entertaining information can help retain customers and increase customer lifetime value, which helps your bottom line. B2B companies have been using content marketing in emails for a while, this blog is an example as a summary will end up in our email newsletter. B2C emails have some catching up to do and should look to move away from the common layout of blocks of products available to buy. Paradoxically, despite a plethora of tracking tools and modelling algorithms, customer lifetime value is increasingly difficult to nail…

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How Purple Parking went from good email marketing to great email marketing

Posted by Mike Parry

Purple Parking, the UK’s best airport parking service, used to do pretty good email marketing. They segmented their data; they sent appropriate, targeted messages with on brand crisp creatives; their emails got opened; they got clicked, and parking got booked. All in all it was a pretty effective programme and they sell parking services so that was that, what else could they do to improve things, they had everything seemingly covered. In essence, they did good email marketing but not great email marketing. Well, the Purple Parking management team had different ideas, they wanted more, so in conjunction with Spike Marketing and display block they came up with a great email marketing programme. Not excellent, just great. Excellent is still…

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Here comes the sun

Posted by Tony Macpherson

It’s fair to say that we are all used to receiving many marketing emails every day. None of us are sat there desperately waiting for marketing emails but we do care about some more than others – we open and read emails based on the sender, subject line, whether we have free time and our mood in general. On the marketing side of the fence, we’re looking for any angle that will inspire more user interaction with our emails – targeted content, irresistible offers, inspired design… Something else to consider is seasonality but it needs to be thought through, be relevant to your products or brand and stand out from what can often be a deluge of similar emails, many…

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Email Conversion and UX Correlation infographic

Posted by Mike Parry

Graphic design is a visual language of communication and, like any language has its rules. Emails have become part of the graphic world so need to abide by these rules. UX (user experience) is also critical and respecting the principles of UX will improve the engagement of your audience. So welcome to our Email Conversion and UX Correlation infographic, where we look at how design and UX can work seamlessly together.

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Gimmicks in email

Posted by Mike Parry

So, did you arrive at this blog because of the gimmicky link in our email? Or because you searched for gimmicks in email and google sent you here? Let us know in the comments section below. The question going round the display block offices every time a new gimmick comes out or someone uses some kind of obfuscation in their email to get you to click is “Do these things really work, do they just offer a short term uplift and does that hurt the brand in the long run”. The truth is we didn’t have the data to support what is pretty much a universal gut reaction. Gimmicks in email are just that gimmicks and ultimately have no real…

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Set the tone

Posted by Tony Macpherson

Many businesses are still creating online marketing collateral that comes across as rigid and impersonal. It often mirrors more traditional offline advertisements and brochure formats. Whether the excuse is ‘we’ve always done it this way’, fear of brand perception or just plain lack of imagination, adopting a so called ‘professional’ approach and conforming to old school thinking no longer fits with the new user of the Web. Of course, certain business sectors allow for more flexibility than others but, generally, there is scope to increase the appeal of marketing messages using a more conversational approach. TV advertising has been doing this for years. Why? Because you can see people in situations where anything other than interaction and behaviour we can…

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