online marketing

Make a marketing form in three easy steps

Posted by Mel Jewell

HTML forms are a great way to collect information online and then store it in a database for future use. For the technically minded you can set a form up on a website / webpage and then, through some server-side scripting, e.g. PHP, save the captured information in a database and do with it what you will. At the same time as storing the information you can also trigger events, such as sending a confirmation or welcome email. But what about those that may not have the technical or time resources for such a web development project? Well, our emailing platform has the perfect solution – an in-built Form tool that can implement either a sign-up form or an opt-out…

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email strategy

Email strategy: Do you stick to yours? (what do you mean you don’t have one?!)

Posted by Mike Parry

Email strategy, you have one right? It makes up part of your overall communications strategy, dovetails nicely with social strategy and everyone in your marketing team are aware of what your email strategy is and work towards delivering it with every email decision you make. You don’t? Why isn’t that a surprise? Well I guess it’s not a surprise because I have worked with hundreds of companies over my fifteen years in email and the number of companies that had an evolved email marketing strategy and devised it based on the numbers could be counted on one hand. So what to look for? All clients look at their campaign numbers and try and work out what worked from the successful…

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To Pop Up or Pop Under, That Is The Question!

Posted by Mike Parry

A recent debate on an email list for serious email marketers I hang around on prompted me to think and then assess these two options when trying to capture data from site visitors; whether you are better to serve someone a pop-up on arrival or a pop-under when they leave (or even a downstream pop up), so there is a form sitting in the middle of their screen. The conclusion I came to was none of the above. We talk a lot about brand and the online reputation that your brand has and I can only equate the use of pop-ups, pop-unders or downstream pop-ups to the “do you want fries with that” saying of the fast food outlets. It…

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Gmail changes the game for email (again!)

Posted by Tony Macpherson

Some of you will have spotted a trial of a grid-style (almost Pinterest-like) visual inbox for the Promotions tab in Gmail. The Promotions tab (where all marketing emails now generally end up) now displays thumbnails allowing users to see elements of your marketing emails. As a trial, Google needs to determine its success prior to a full roll-out and this success looks like it will be based around ad revenues as the first image is actually an ad, not an email (as is the existing differently coloured first listing in the current Promotions tab format). The appearance of the ad in the grid format is more subtle than the current listing format and will be contextual based on the emails…

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The Future of Email

Posted by Tony Macpherson

Anytime and anywhere Everywhere you look people are engrossed in smartphones and tablets – public transport, coffee shops, parks and open spaces – even walking down the street. We use them over lunch, we use them to compare prices whilst out shopping, we use them whilst at home watching TV – where a massive 81% of us ‘stack’ (conduct unrelated media tasks while consuming media content) and ‘mesh’ (use multiple devices simultaneously to enhance a media experience) so our attention is constantly divided. We use our smartphones and tablets to consume media, tell friends what we’re up to on social networks and, of course, we use them to check our emails. In fact, the number of mobile e-mail users is…

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Quick Tip Guide: 5 Basic Tips to a good landing page

Posted by Adrian Nabarro

There is an art and a science to making your landing page stand out from the crowd. It is imperative that you do something to capture your audience and ultimately make them follow the call to action that you have established. It is so much more cost effective to capture and engage your target market time and again that it is to buy them with SEO, Banner Ads, PPC or any other paid for advertising. Your brilliantly designed landing page can have all the results that these marketing tactics can do and more. Here are our 5 basic tips to designing a good landing page: Headline It You used to have just two seconds to make a good first impression…

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