Getting started with Email Marketing for small businesses Part 1.

Posted by Josh Green
January 4, 2019

Starting out with email marketing for small businesses can seem like an impossible task. You have to make time to create content, you need to update your list of subscribing customers and many other tasks. All these tasks take time out of your work day. Marketing with email can also seem like a legal minefield with GDPR legislation to consider as well as all the laws governing spam email. Email marketing does not need to be difficult, however. It is easily the cheapest and most effective form of Marketing. 73% of marketers rate email as the number one digital channel for ROI (Marketing Week). It is also more often people’s preferred method of receiving marketing communication. Litmus’ 2016 State of…

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A collection of email best practices

Posted by Josh Green
September 18, 2018

Make better use of a Preference Centre Building more complete customer profiles not only helps your business but allows you to send emails to your customers relevant to their needs. By continually adding to each customer’s profile you not only learn about them but you’re better able satisfy their wants. One of the best ways to collect customer data is through a preference centre. It’s important that a preference centre functions (as the name describes) as a preference centre. Customers should be asked what their wants and needs are and they should also be able to come back and amend those preferences at any time. Basic demographic information should really be captured through sign-up forms or new customer profiles created…

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Responsive Email at the end of 2016

Posted by Josh Green
November 10, 2016November 10, 2016

So, during the mid 90s the web standards movement was started and W3C was formed. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the main international standards organisation for the World Wide Web. The web standards movement had a large influence on the internet of today from initially pushing the idea of using CSS to style web pages all the way to adding accessibility to web pages. Creating a widely accepted standard in the various web technologies – CSS, HMTL and JS – allowed the web to accelerate as well as ultimately bring the various available browsers to offer an almost uniform experience across the web. During this period email marketing remained largely unchanged. Email marketing emails were built much like…

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What next for email marketing?

Posted by Tony Macpherson
May 20, 2016May 25, 2016

Messaging channels, both niche and mainstream will come and go and social networks, whilst making improvements with targeted advertising, are places most of us go to interact with friends. Email, on the other hand, is where our attention is more focused and a significant portion of our online time is spent – it’s still the top reason why most of us go online. Online activities ranked by regular usage in the UK (March 2016) Source statista.com The key is permission. When we sign up to receive emails from websites and brands it’s a deliberate choice, whether it be brand affinity, interesting or useful content or deals and offers we don’t want to miss. I can almost hear the sighs of…

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Responsive email design patterns part 2: The exotic navigation

Posted by Jordie van Rijn
October 22, 2015November 4, 2015

Optimising or responsive email for mobile means more than making them mobile friendly. There is a range of possibilities to make your email win big on the small screen. One element that deserves extra attention in any superior mobile email is the navigation bar. In my previous article I went into the popular design patterns for responsive email navigation. Let’s see some more exotic examples, because you don’t want to be standard, do you?   Iconise This is pretty cool. Replacing certain navigational elements with icons allows you to free up space and be more visual. In the Swarovski email ‘gifts’ becomes a gift icon and the ‘shop finder’ a way sign. The rest of the navigation is shifted below the…

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Responsive design options for navigation in emails

Posted by Jordie van Rijn
August 19, 2015December 5, 2016

Making the navigation responsive in mobile emails is a key area in improving usability by offering functional links to a message and guiding recipients to your site, even if they aren’t receptive to the particular message or offer in the message itself. Today, on average, half of all emails are opened on a mobile device so it’s critical to ensure they are easy to read and interact with whichever device they are being viewed on. Thanks to responsive email techniques you can choose different email design patterns when it comes to navigation. Reduce the number of items When you look at the mobile version of an email, the first tactic that comes to mind is to reduce the number of…

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Love at first sight

Posted by Tony Macpherson
May 15, 2015May 18, 2015

We all know how important it is to make a good first impression – especially when we’ve spent time and effort to look good in front of those we want to attract! So how do you do that with emails? Building an email database is about more than building a data capture form on your website as you need to drive traffic – whether it’s SEO, PPC, generating followers through social platforms or more traditional media – getting people to your website is an expensive business. So, when people do find their way to your website, ensure two things are done well; make it quick and easy for them to add their email address to your mailing list and create…

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Keeping up with the mobile Joneses

Posted by Tony Macpherson
November 19, 2014June 8, 2016

As email marketers, it’s easy to become trapped in the focus of what our company is doing and how best to reach people we want to sell our products and services to. But it’s important to hop over the fence now and then and try and understand how people shop now. I read recently that, on average, only 3% of people that visit websites buy. The good news is that leaves a whopping 97% that can be converted into paying customers. So what can you do you bump up the numbers? As always, it’s about making the journey from initial interest to purchase as quick and easy as possible, but taking into account that there are added distractions creating break…

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Tapping potential – email click through rates

Posted by Tony Macpherson
September 11, 2014April 24, 2015

With 60% of emails being opened on mobile devices, we all want as many people as possible to tap links and visit our websites. So, what can you do to encourage people to get tapping? Email design is key and should be all about clear communication. Your message should be both precise and concise in our overloaded and fragmented digital World. Email click through rates can be improved by adopting the following actions; Don’t think, feel Our reactions to most things aren’t driven by thinking, they are driven by emotions with desire and fear usually right at the top of the list. Tapping on an image is easy if we see something we want. Equally, a fear of missing out…

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mobile email marketing

Getting started with Email Marketing for small businesses Part 1.

A collection of email best practices

Responsive Email at the end of 2016

Recommended reading – how to make emails more useful

What next for email marketing?

Responsive email design patterns part 2: The exotic navigation

Responsive design options for navigation in emails

Love at first sight

Keeping up with the mobile Joneses

Tapping potential – email click through rates