Getting started with Email Marketing for small businesses Part 1.

Posted by Josh Green
January 4, 2019July 12, 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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Make a marketing form in three easy steps

Posted by Mel Jewell
September 30, 2016September 30, 2016

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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Mobile Opens

Posted by Josh Green
March 25, 2015April 24, 2015

Mobile optimised email is now nothing new but the excuse that mobile email is not right for all businesses is now a complete lie. All businesses across all sectors should be sending mobile optimised email. It is the industry standard now. Brands who fail to send out mobile optimised email risk losing subscribers and increasing the chances that their marketing will be less and less effective. The stats don’t lie the time to mobile optimise email campaigns has long since past. It’s not a nice to have anymore but a necessity. Mobile opens across all industries show high numbers of opens on mobile devices many with mobile opens well over 50%.

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If not now, when?

Posted by Tony Macpherson
March 6, 2015April 24, 2015

Welcome to the first in a series of what to test and why with email marketing. It’s said that timing is everything and, given the change in the way we access our emails and the online world generally, it’s now even more important to send the right message at the right time. I’ve read a few posts lately saying 2015 is the year of customer experience, where marketers will put the customer first and create a positive experience from initial contact through to purchase and beyond. The other ‘big thing’ for this year is for marketing to become truly omni-channel. The drivers for these remain unchanged; fear and greed. Fear over rival brands stealing a march and customers, fear over…

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

Posted by Mike Parry
May 21, 2014April 24, 2015

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
April 16, 2014April 28, 2015

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
March 28, 2014April 28, 2015

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
February 24, 2014April 28, 2015

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 Josh Green
February 21, 2014April 28, 2015

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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Size Matters – and 4 Other Ways to Improve Mobile Email Marketing

Posted by Mike Parry
February 19, 2014October 9, 2015

In this day and age all email should be designed with mobile in mind. Over half of all emails are read on a mobile or tablet. 80% of emails are deleted especially if they don’t load. That’s the equivalent of 40% of your whole database and 40% of your potential revenue or white paper downloads, event registrations or survey participants getting lost. Your mobile email marketing design should be instantly recognizable and reflect your brand and consistency is crucial. Having a strong set of Brand Guidelines can really make a difference in creating eye-catching, content rich emails with a purpose and positive results. Here are our 5 quick tips to make sure you are heading in the right direction: SIZE…

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