Email marketing is a key part of the business development strategy for this product and we thought it would be useful to revisit some of the basic principles of using this valuable marketing tool.

Email marketing does sometimes get bad press, but with the correct strategy it can be highly effective. Here are some tips from our recent experiences, to get the maximum result commercially AND to avoid being blacklisted by ISPs.

In the US, unsolicited email is illegal and the majority of large ISPs (Internet Service Providers) because of the international nature of the internet, use very powerful spam protection mechanisms. These filter out unsolicited email before it gets into their customer’s in-boxes.

Spam filters “rank” each email according to a list of criteria, and, when they scan an email that scores rates above a pre-set threshold, it is flagged as spam and deleted. Too many from the same IP address and you will be blacklisted.

You need a list of prospects, ideally a list of email addresses who have opted in at your website, but recognising that everyone has to start somewhere, then you may have to buy this. Make sure you get your list from a reputable supplier and the emails are “opted-in” – in other words the people on the list have agreed that there email can be used for marketing purposes. Also be aware that, email lists go out of date very quickly and that on top of the spam filters, if too many emails bounce (in other words, don’t exist) – your ISP will be flagged.

Your objectives are clear, you need to maximise open rates, click-through, and conversion.

Choosing the right headline

Make sure you use non-spammy headline – avoid “FREE, NOW, $$$, BIG DISCOUNTS, CASHBACK” or indeed little blue pills and body parts. This applies to the content of the email as well.

What works best to get opens is either a non-threatening headline “Latest news from Your Company” or think about customer pain and work your headline around that.

Look at our product positioning guidelines for help with this – but something like “Introducing Your Company – solution to customer pain” – fill in the gaps with your solution, will work well. The more salesy you make it, the less opens you’ll get.

You have about a second to grab someone’s attention before they move onto the next email in their inbox – or even worse, click the spam button.

Email Content

You need to provide very obvious clues and messaging. Less is more and try and avoid lots of competing messages. Inform and then try and get the reader to do one of 2 things max – for example click on a video demo of your new product or to sign up for a 30 day trial.

Work out precisely what actions you want to reader to take and then devise the best copy and supporting graphics to achieve this. Make the copy really efficient and support any claims with shirt punchy customer testimonials.

Never link to your home page as a call to action. To maximise conversion, the pages that the reader land on must relate to where they have come from – the email – and again these ‘landing pages’ must have very specific content and calls to action, again related to the email content.

Your home page, however lovely, will allow the reader to go off on a journey he is in control of. You need to create a series of landing pages where you control the journey. These pages will have specific content that reflects the email content and reflect the calls to action in the email and your intended outcome.

Timing

Timing your emails should coincide with the time that the recipients are most likely to open and read an email that is not crucial to the business.

So avoid times where the reader is likely to be trawling through business-specific emails – like Mondays, mornings and Friday afternoon.

Tuesday and Wednesday are best, according to most online research studies, and we’ve found that between 10 and 11.30 work well. We’ve also found that Wednesdays at about 3.30 has produced high open rates.

Come back next week and I will have part 2 available!

Marketing Brief

Firstly decide what the purpose of the site and for this you need to produce a proper brief.  You want to get want YOU want from your website design agency – Many clients expect us marketing experts to come up with the creative solution, but the reality is that often the client does not have a clear idea of what it is they are trying to achieve before they start.

The poor old marketing agency is left to fill in the gaps and make certain assumptions – and as they say the word assume is made from – ‘ass’ ‘u’ and ‘ me’ – figure it out. What you (and your agency) need is a Marketing Brief.  Here’s a previous blog post outlining 10 top tips to help you develop this.

Professional Website design

Your website is the foundation of all your outbound marketing and your brand and image building campaigns. Your great website design enables potential customers to find, understand and remember your business.

However, this will only happen only if your website is designed professional from the ground up or it will just another bad site that, (if you are lucky no one will find, or take notice of even when they do get there!) will put off more of those hard-earned prospects than it converts.  Here’s a previous blog to give you some pointers on why you need professional website design

Website Design – Content Managed or Bespoke

The website design world has moved on from Dreamweaver and  there are many ways a website can be developed and the plethora of new website technologies can be confusing – asp, php, html – Joomla, Drupal, WordPress – bespoke, content managed.  But great news is that gone are the days of needing the agency to make a change for you at £200 a pop – now you know why those boys were all driving around in 911s!  You want to be able to edit your site and our favourite system for most sites with the possible exception of e-commerce,   is WordPress simply for the friendly interface and the array of plugins available that make it incredibly search engine and social media friendly.

Measure – set up targeted website metrics

If you are going to invest in new website design, then you must put in place some key measurement tools so that you can track how your prospects interact with with it.  Check out my article here on using metrics to optimise your web-marketing.

Great Images

They say a picture is worth a thousand words – but in the ultra competitive world of marketing, where you have an instant to create an impression, your images need to be spot on in terms of resolution.  Good images cost money – whether you buy them in from a library or if you get them shot yourself. So you will need to use them as much as you can to maximise your investment.  Here’s some pointers about using graphics in marketing.

Setting the new website live – avoid killing your search engine rankings

Some clients are aware that there might be SEO issues, but some are blissfully ignorant. Going live with a fresh website design without considering the SEO implications first is like building a beautiful new house with no drive, no front gate and no front door! In other words no one will find it or be able to get in when they do!

With that in mind, here are 5 top SEO killers to avoid before your web designer puts pen to paper or the website developer even lays down a single line of code.

Get Social

Presence on social media is now really important and its impact on inbound  marketing, SEO (search engine optimisation), even  website design and the overall business is significant.  So we thought about this and here’s our top 10 tips for social media.

Written by Matthew Simmons

You can invest in pay per click advertising, and there is no question that this works and will get you instant results, but to have lasting success you need to be at the top of the search engines all the time.

Here are five reasons that you need to consider investing in search engine optimisation (SEO).

• When people are looking for information on the internet, to find out about services or products to buy, more than 80% of users (your potential customers) rely on search engines, not just surfing around at random.
• Research indicates that over 80% of these internet searchers do not click on pay per click ads
• Over 60% of websites that are displayed at the top of the search engine results get clicked on by internet users.  In other words get to the top for something you offer, and you WILL get clicks. And more clicks than those below you.
• If internet users find you naturally at the top (because of search engine optimisation – SEO – as opposed to paid ads) you will get more conversions.  Research indicates that because of the authority you get from being top of the rankings, users have more confidence in your offering and you can expect to increase conversion ratios by up to 33%.
• Over the 12 months, the costs of paid ads (PPC) costs have grown by nearly 40% and they continue to rise.

And as I said before, SEO will keep you at the top.
Written by Matthew Simmons

Snap just got to position number 1 on Google this afternoon for the key search phrase Website Design Reading!

Using the same search engine marketing techniques that we offer our clients, Snap Marketing has now reached number one for this search term as well as Marketing Berkshire.

As us how you can benefit from this expertise for your website we are happy to share the love! Contact us by email or call us on 0118 982 0717  to find out how we can do this for your site too.

Snap Marketing has developed a brand new Website Design to complement the recent re-branding, including Logo Design, of Tutela Medical with a fresh new look and easy to follow architecture.

The new website has been updated with much more detail about the latest wireless temperature monitoring products and web-based services offered by Tutela, and this will provide the support and information needed to answer our customer’s most common questions.

The website adds a news section and blog, together with a resources area which will allow downloads of study day materials and white papers.  Social media buttons and an RSS feed allow customers to keep up to date with the latest news on products and updates as they emerge.

We hope you find the time to check it out – www.tutelamedical.com

If we had a fiver for every prospect who told us that that “they had tried marketing once and it didn’t work”, Matthew and I would be driving around in Porsche Boxsters – or maybe a stretch limo!

But this statement will resonate with lots of businesses, and the trouble is, how can you tell if your marketing’s missing the mark and what can you do to make it effective?

Here are the five key insights that your marketing might need help.

Targeting

Your marketing isn’t targeted at the correct audience. If your marketing is not conceived without a specific audience in mind, it won’t appeal to your customers because it won’t grab them emotionally. Furthermore, it may not communicate in a language they understand or show any understanding of their problems. We try and refocus our clients on the customer pain and less about what they sell. See the product positioning post here.  If you don’t communicate to the audience’s emotions, it’s a waste of your marketing investment and your target audiences will perceive it as a waste of their time too.

On Message

Your Marketing is in Marketing-Speak or Trade BS. If your marketing doesn’t sound like it has any relevance to a real people, you are removing any personality and it will miss the mark by a mile. Take website design or advertising – How often do you see advertising or receive marketing literature telling how wonderful the brand is or exceptional the product is featured – but in a secret language that means nothing to you? By removing any personality or empathy from your marketing messages, it will bore or worse irritate its intended readership. To work, and this means to stimulate some action by the target audience, your marketing message must be lively and understandable. We use the SO WHAT test here. If you underestimate the human aspect of your message, your readers won’t be able to relate to it.

Niche Marketing

Your offering is too broad. If you want to really get your marketing to cut through, your message needs to be specific. Its very easy, and appealing to believe that if you say you can offer every service in your competitive field, you become known as a jack of all trades and master of none. Far better to be know to be an expert in a niche or two and then up-sell and cross sell.

Be interesting

If your marketing is boring, you can have the most useful information in the world and your target audience won’t give it another look! Your customers are people first and consumers second – people respond to visual stimulus more than any other. Package your marketing in paragraphs of text with no photographs or great graphics won’t get the response you need to convert prospects into customers.

Promote Value

Your marketing is an constant stream of price promotions. This is the fastest way of killing your business ever devised by mankind. Especially if you are email marketing. Your prospect list will go down faster than an Italian politician’s trousers at a bunga-bunga party if you only promote on price – good customers get put off.  And that will be the only type of customer you will recruit.  And they will only be as loyal as your last great deal.

• Social media needs commitment – time for authoring content and time for interacting.  Don’t do it if you are not prepared to make time.  Be totally objective. What do you want to achieve by using social media?
•  Join lots of social media sites, but focus efforts on only on a couple. For business I would suggest Twitter and Linked-In
•  Remember that everything you post is now in the public domain – permanently.  Does your next client need to know how many pints of lager you consumed with your rugby curry boys on saturday?
•  Optimise your website and remember that social media is great for search engine optimization.  This will focus you on the topics to blog/interact on and help you with important keywords.  Google ranks sites now on social media authority – take advantage of this – and many will allow you links back to your website – don’t miss this opportunity and use anchor text if you can.
• Be interesting – try and be an authority on what you do best. That way people will want to engage with you. Reply if people connect or comment on your posts.
•  Interact – ask questions.  Find people with common business interests – engage – help them first.
•  Always keep your profile current and keyword rich – choose a great username that involves keywords if appropriate.
•  Use social media sites that can integrate. For example, FaceBook can link with Twitter so that any status update on FaceBook reflects as a tweet, or vica versa and Twitter can integrate with Linked in so any tweets update automatically on your LinkedIn profile.
•  You cannot manage it all without some automation – use Hootsuite or Tweetdeck to monitor important contacts and their social media activity.  You can also schedule tweets.
•  Watch out for new social media sites. They might be the next Twitter or FaceBook.

Remember the sales funnel?

We have to address each stage and think long term; as well as getting the short term fix that brings in this months mortgage! And that means being totally customer focused.

There are six critical tactics to identify great prospects and to convert them into happy paying customers:

Cease focusing on pushing product – engage a company-wide customer-centric approach – what to they want? – what are their real needs?  Check out my “product positioning for duffers” article here.

Identify the most compelling value proposition in your offering that will satisfy those customer needs – this will resonate with the prospect and assist them in choosing you.

Deliver a totally consistent message in all your outbound communications based on this compelling value proposition – dominate your niche – be known for what you are really good at

Test your efforts – continuously. Analyse, modify and test again.

Adapt your offering to what is right now a constantly changing marketplace – evolve – don’t be a dinosaur - see my previous paper on this.

Sales and Marketing are jointly accountable for sales conversions – the 2 disciplines should be joined at the hip right now.

This are tough times – find out what your customers really want right now, evaluate their response and keep forward momentum on product development – and remember that services are all part of the product – for example terms, warranty, payment credit, support, training etc.

The website was designed from the bottom up by Snap Marketing and we researched some interesting gaps in the market with the keywords we agreed with the client.

We love it when a plan comes together!

So I put up this screen grab of a typical site to show the keyword rich title tag, header tags body copy – we optimise this is all our website designs and re-redesigns. But today, reflecting on what I told the audience about how important the meta description in website design and SEO, it got me thinking.

The meta description of a web page is the text that appears under the title tag in the search engine results and basically describes that page. And I have been looking at it as an key SEO element, which it is.  But hang on, the meta description for an important page on your site an advertisement – and it can and should invite the surfer to take action. For example a click through.
So a compelling meta description is an important part of making your site more visible on the Web but also a marketing tool in its own right.

But hang it – why not make it such a good ad that they don’t need to?
In the image below, we show results from Google for a search on Marketing Consultants Berkshire. The meta description for each web page is the black text below the link in blue. Get those keywords in there for the search engines but also make it strong enough to invoke as call to action – a click through or maybe a phone call.

You’ve got about 150 characters so make them count!