digital marketing

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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Do you even know me? Watch out for these email personalisation pitfalls

Posted by Adrian Young

It’s ready. Your beautifully designed, flawlessly coded email is one click away from being fired off to thousands of customers. There’s just one problem: everyone is about to receive the same message. No, the forename which has been shoehorned into the subject line doesn’t count. It’s spray-and-pray dressed up as one-to-one. Email marketing deserves to be more sophisticated than that. And it can be. We live in an age of dynamic content, data science and machine learning. To the benefit of customer and business alike, it’s possible to send expertly tailored content based on a person’s purchasing and browsing activities. But even a richly personalised email programme can sometimes trip up. Read on for a list of personalisation perils –…

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Predictions for 2017 email marketing

Posted by Mike Parry

Well, it only took 2 years, at this time in 2014 I wrote that 2014 was going to be the year when mobile responsive email just became email, became the common place, was what all the hip kids were doing. That finally happened in 2016, so the market was a little behind the curve but, boy, did email marketing catch up quickly! Responsive and Spongey coded emails abound, as do gif animation emails. Open the door and when you marketers come through it you do it with vision and a vengeance. So what will 2017 bring us? is it finally the year of video in email? Is it the year when automation crosses the chasm and is no longer the…

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How retail should use email marketing

Posted by Josh Green

Email marketing can be the most effective sales support for retail companies. It is undisputed that it is by far the best value for money form of advertising. For every £1 spent, email marketing generates a £38 ROI. Email has been claimed to be more than 40 times more effective than Facebook or Twitter. This is easy to imagine as people have absolute control over their inbox in choosing to receive emails from their favourite brand it is reasonable to assume a retailer will be sending emails to people who want their emails. People have very little control over the type of content they receive via social media and most retailer brand messaging gets lost, not least because people don’t…

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How to recover from an email disaster

Posted by Josh Green

Anyone who has ever had to send an email marketing campaign will know “The Fear” – the sense of dread you get when you personally are about to hit the go button on an email that is going to be received by potentially thousands and thousands of people. This fear also never leaves you. I have been sending email for 11 years now and I’m still very nervous when I send out emails. I always say, “there is ALWAYS time for another preview!”. Sometimes even to clients. I often test and retest to myself just to make sure I have got every last mistake fixed before the final send. But mistakes do happen to everyone at some point. It’s how…

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Writing link text in emails

Posted by Josh Green

Email design and coding has always been about the ever important call to action. While button styles have changed over the years on thing that has always remained present is the need to have text links through out the copy. Email designers, coders and the people sending the email are often putting the words “Click here” on their links. While the mistake of adding the words “Click here” into an email might be an innocent or seemingly a minor one it really is a big problem for a few reasons. Firstly it doesn’t tell anyone anything, it is a instructional command and does not give the user any information about where that click might take them. Secondly on the web…

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