Most companies use email marketing these days as it’s an extremely cost effective way to communicate with prospects and existing customers – and it’s easy to understand why.

To help you create an outstanding email marketing campaign, here are 5 top tips from the LexisClick E-marketing team:

1. Personalise your emails. By simply starting your email with “Hi [subscriber_name]” instead of the boring “Hi there”, you can increase both your reading and click-thru rates enormously. This way your subscribers feel like they already have a relationship with you as you’ve addressed them by their first name.
2. Include multiple calls to action. What is it you want people to do after reading your email – click on a link, visit your website?  Make sure all roads lead logically to your call to action. Remember, if you confuse them, you lose them.
3. Integrate your email marketing campaign with the rest of your online marketing activities. Include links to your social media sites as well as your blog. Your signature is a great place to do this. The more often you repeat your message the more powerful it becomes.
4. Write about one subject. People’s attention span online is short – about 8 seconds for the average email. Work this to your advantage by only writing about one subject. Put the most important thing first, get to the point and be brief!
5. The Preview pane.  Popular email clients such as MS Outlook show a preview of an email when it’s selected in your inbox. Always have some interesting content at the very top of your email, as this is the part that will show in the preview window of your subscribers’ email program. If it’s interesting enough, then your subscriber will open your email and continue reading.

At LexisClick we offer two levels of service for email marketing.  If you’re happy to manage your own marketing, we offer self service access to a market leading email marketing platform. Alternatively if you’d like to hand it over to someone else to manage we offer a fully managed campaign option for both your emails and e-newsletters.  A 12 month campaign starts from £19 per month, plus send rates.

Call us today on 01202 788333 for a chat to discuss how we can help you grow and develop your business.

B2B Online Marketing, Email marketing, Online Marketing

As it’s the first week in January, it’s crystal ball gazing time and not one to be left out we’ve taken a look at the many predictions around what will be the next big thing in Marketing in 2012. We’ve selected a few of what we think are the hottest trends. So read on to discover why the only place to be seen this year is on screen. And if you’re feeling downcast by tales of economic woe, how brands will be ready to divert your attention through gamification and interactive apps. Find out why your purse could soon become a collector’s item and community focused initiatives are set to capture the hearts of consumers.

Digital wallets
Contactless payment devices such as near-field communication (NFC) and QR codes will enter the mainstream in 2012. When used in smartphones, they encourage customers to merge their wallet with their mobile phones. Surveys suggest consumers are ready to embrace this trend. Two-thirds of UK shoppers say cash is inconvenient , according to 2011 surveys by Barclays and PayPal. According to Juniper Research, 300 million devices will be on offer to allow consumers to “tap and pay” through NFC by 2014. It is estimated the value of contactless payments and ticketing using NFC will reach $113bn (£72.4bn) per year by 2016 around the world. (Source: Stylus.com)

Welcome to the cloud
Businesses will invest large amounts of money in cloud computing and mobile technology next year. According to the report: IDC Predictions 2012: Competing for 2020, 2012 will see more money spent on mobiles and tablets than PCs and 80 per cent of commercial applications are set to be on cloud platforms. “The UK is underinvested in IT –  and with advertising and consumer spending rapidly moving online and kit becoming out of date, some rise there is likely,” points out chief executive of the Centre for Economic and Social Research, Douglas McWilliams. (Source: IDC.com, Insight.com)

Local marketing and partnerships
As the clean-up efforts following the London riots show, community love is on the rise. This year will see a resurgence of local marketing to tap into people’s collective devotion to their local community. While the internet by nature is international, there is a growing market for local websites and scope for businesses to tailor websites to specific localities. Brands are also set to tap into this trend for collective working as partnership marketing becomes more common. This will not just be about tactical value-based promotions but about strategic alliance with other brands. (Source:23red)

Screening
In 2012, if it is not on screen, it’s not worth seeing. Touchscreens and tablets have made it much more convenient for consumers to view online while they are on the move. UK supermarket chain Sainsbury’s has tapped into this trend by partnering with television provider Sky, allowing shoppers to watch sports events while they shop using in-cart iPad docks and speakers. In 2012, video consumption will soar as brands increasingly use this channel to engage with customers. Video brochures, video newsletters, and regular video communications will become standard features on websites. According to Cisco, 80 per cent of all internet traffic will be driven by video by 2015. (Source: Trendwatching.com, Milwardbrown). Running in tandem with this is the prediction that mobile is set to overtake the desktop PC and laptop – which is why it’s more important than ever to ensure that you have responsive web design to allow for the multitude of devices that your potential customers can access your site via.

Playfulness
In a bid to escape from the grim news about the economy, consumers will become more responsive to entertainment and escapism. Big brands will become more playful, using gamification and other “funware” that use points, puzzles and level progression to attract and engage customers. Social tools and technologies that enable people to interact with TV programmes will explode in 2012. Viewers will be able to interact with TV and producers will draw on this data for creative inspiration. Services such as Bluefin Labs and GetGlue indicate traditional TV ratings may be bolstered by “social ratings” as advertisers start to take into account how a show is travelling beyond the TV audience. (Source: Milward Brown)

LexisClick is a full service digital marketing agency, we specialises in helping businesses grow by using the power of digital marketing, with services such as web design and build, SEO, PPC, email marketing, and social media.

To find out how we can ensure your marketing is on trend in 2012 take a look around our website www.lexisclick.com or give us a call on 01202 788333.

From the LexisClick Marketing Team

(Adapted from Trends for 2012 from The Marketer January 2012)

B2B Online Marketing, Blogging for business, Email marketing, Marketing General, Online Advertising, Online Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Web Design

Peeks have seen a big uplift in conversions from their email marketing campaigns by using themed bespoke templates designed by our in-house design team. If you’d like  a bespoke email template designed to your requirements click here or give us a call on 01202 788333

B2B Online Marketing, Email marketing, Marketing General, Online Advertising, Online Marketing

The following infographic shows some key stats from the Econsultancy report which was published earlier in November. (State of Social Report 2011).

We’d love to hear about what you measure in your social media metrics… drop us a line.  From the Social Media Team at LexisClick.

B2B Online Marketing, Blogging for business, Online Marketing, Social Media Marketing

Doing well in search engine rankings is always a bit of a mystery to an outsider, but here are some simple things that you can take care of yourself which will help your website do better.

1. Make sure the content on your site is original to you
2. Don’t copy content, it’s known as duplicate content , whether this is on a page or across your site or both, as Google will penalise you for it
3. Do ensure that page content, the page heading and the page title tag match the search queries you want the page to do well for
4. Avoid unnatural language on a page, or overuse of a particular word or phrase in an attempt to optimise for SEO – first and foremost you want to appeal to your customers
5. If you’ve got advertisements on your website avoid a high amount of inappropriate adverts, especially high on the page, particularly when they don’t match the search queries a page does well for
6. Avoid a high percentage of boilerplate or standard content – that’s repeat content on every page, again this might be picked up as duplicate content
7. Using free tools from Google called Google Analytics and Google Webmaster tools, you can look for high bounce rates on page or website (this is when a visitor enters the website and leaves without continuing to view other pages) as this can indicate irrelevant content
8. Try to avoid a low click through percentage from Google’s results pages either for page or site
9. Increase visit times to a page or website by regularly updating copy and making sure it’s interesting and relevant
10. A low percentage of users returning to a website can indicate that content isn’t updated regularly or that it’s not original
11. Get quality inbound links to a page or site, as this indicates it’s a good source of information
12. Use social media to promote pages on your site or your website, both Bing and Google have stated in interviews that their search results are positively affected by social media such as Tweets, Facebook and +1s.

Use social media to promote pages on your site or your website, both Bing and Google have stated in interviews that their search results are positively affected by social media such as Tweets, Facebook and +1s.

If you’d like a free SEO and social media audit, and for more information on how you can improve your online marketing give us a call on 01202 788333

B2B Online Marketing, Google Analytics, Marketing General, Online Advertising, Online Marketing, Search Engine Optimisation

If you’re trading in the technology sector the infographic that we came across in The Marketer (November/December 2011), will be of interest to you.

B2B Online Marketing, Marketing General

More information about the producer can be found via the following link

http://blog.piajanebijkerk.com/WordPress/2011/03/18/giving-credit/

B2B Online Marketing, Blogging for business, Email marketing, Marketing General, Online Marketing, Uncategorized, Web Design

No email address is permanent. People change jobs, job titles, switch Internet providers, or abandon their accounts in an attempt to avoid spam. You need to stay ahead of these changes by conducting regular data cleansing of your email lists to ensure a low rate of bounce backs and a high rate of email deliverability.

The quality of data in your marketing database can make a big difference to the return on investment (ROI) you get from your sales and marketing campaigns. Without regular cleansing you’ll have a large database of customer email addresses, but many of those emails will be duplicates, invalid, dead, or bogus, and your bounce-rate will be high. By maximising your email deliverability and keeping a clean list you’ll improve your sender reputation and avoid being blacklisted by major ISPs.

There’s a real business case for investing in data cleansing when you consider the following example.
If you cleanse a data base with 50,000 names in it, by improving the quality of that data by 10% you’ll expose your offer to 5,000 additional prospects. With a 5% conversion rate, that translates to 250 more purchases (or downloads, or visits to your site, or whatever other activity you’re promoting).

Best practice tips
1.  Remove duplicates and process incorrect addresses. Duplicate email addresses should be automatically removed and emails with incorrect syntax flagged. Rather than removing incorrect email addresses permanently, store them as inactive records, this will allow you to access and correct them individually in future customer support inquires.

2.  Handle unsubscribe requests as soon as they’re received.

3.  Process soft and hard bounces as they happen. Repeated soft bounces should be treated as hard bounces and removed from your active lists. Hard bounces should be removed as they happen, ignoring them is a quick way to destroy your reputation.

4.   Handle email replies and complaints individually. Regardless of how clear your unsubscribe instructions are, or information on where to contact you is,  your recipients will push the ‘Reply’ button to ask you general questions, make unsubscribe requests that cannot be captured automatically, or request customer support for completely unrelated reasons.

5.   Consider sending out a questionnaire to your subscriber list, asking them to update their details and to let you know what they’d like to receive information on. You can always incentivise the survey in order to increase response rates. This way you’ll have an opted in subscriber list who are really engaged with your company.

Most of the above best practices should be handled by a reputable email provider.  If you’re processing duplicates, incomplete addresses or bounce errors manually, you’re already falling behind and missing out on those additional sales opportunities.

If you’d like help with your email marketing, or you’d just like to have a chat to see what we can do for you, go to www.lexisclick.com/email or call us on 01202 788333.

B2B Online Marketing, Email marketing, LexisClick News, Marketing General, Online Marketing

The following are 5 of our favourite top marketing stories – though there are many more…

Procter & Gamble produced and sponsored the first radio soap operas in the 1930s. When soaps switched to television most of the new serials were sponsored and produced by the company.

Structured reality TV shows are starting to rival traditional soaps and reality TV shows. The most famous UK example, The Only Way is Essex follows the lives and loves of a group of 20-somethings.

From 1968 to 2003 Milk Tray chocolates were advertised with an action man undergoing hair-raising adventures to deliver chocolates to the woman he loved.

The creation of Marlboro man promoted the appeal of American stories about lone cowboys. In the 1950s filtered cigarettes were viewed as feminine, The Marlboro man changed this perception.

And most recently BT’s soap-opera styled advertising campaign following the ups and downs of ‘Adam and Jane’s romance’ is credited with helping to make BT the leading telecommunications brand for broadband and subscription TV in the UK.

If you’ve got a good story to tell about your product or service and you’d like some help to get it out there – give us a call on 01202 788333

(Adapted from Chartered Institute of Marketing – The Marketer September/October 2011)

B2B Online Marketing, Marketing General, Online Advertising, Online Marketing

Fast on the heels of our LinkedIn Cheat Sheet comes one for Twitter. This  includes useful tips and explanations of the most popular terms and icons. Statistics for Twitter are more difficult to track down but Twitter themselves state that they have 175 million users worldwide – though how many of these are active accounts is debateable.

Love it or hate it you shouldn’t be ignoring it!

Twitter Cheat Sheet 2

B2B Online Marketing, Blogging for business, Marketing General, Online Advertising, Online Marketing, Social Media Marketing