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

Email reporting data is generated from you email software tool, or via a partner (such as LexisClick online marketing) that manages your campaigns for you. There’s a lot of information generated so it can be overwhelming ! But it rivals any other marketing analytical data available because it’s available immediately and can give you a historical view of your performance over time .

It’s worth taking time to get familiar with some of the key metrics as these tell you which emails bounced, why they bounced, who opened your emails, what links they clicked on, who has requested unsubscribe from your emails and who forwarded them on.

Open rates

This is one stat that many marketers get excited about – but it can be misleading. Open rates are determined by a snippet of code in HTML emails that tracks when your images show up in someone’s in box but it doesn’t  necessarily mean that someone has ‘read it’. It could have appeared in the preview pane for a moment before being deleted.

In addition the default setting on an increasing number of email programs is to block images until the user clicks to enable them, but readers can scan emails without enabling images at all. Therefore open rates may have little meaning, but open rates over time, or between two versions of the same email can be an indicator of a developing trend and therefore have more meaning.

Clicks

Total clicks refers to the number of times a subscriber clicked on a link, while unique clicks refers to how many of your readers clicked on a link.

Click –through percentage of opens

Of all the opens how many clicked on a link. This can be a useful metric but due to the inaccuracies of open rates not conclusive. However, it’s useful to know how many of those that opened the email, actually were interested enough to click on a link, and comparison with previous campaigns will indicate how effective and interesting your content was.

Bounces

These are split into hard bounces and soft bounces. Hard bounces are permanently undeliverable emails – the email account may be closed, whereas soft bounces indicate temporarily undeliverable emails, which could be due to a full mailbox, or a server being down temporarily.

Unsubscribes

It’s important to view this metric over time as high unsubscribe requests could indicate irrelevant content, too frequent emails, or it could relate to the seasonal nature of your business. It’s important to spot any trends in this area before it becomes a major issue.

These are just a few of the campaign statistics available. We can help you interpret your campaign results and benchmark them, by comparing them with typical email campaigns from a large set of companies. We can measure to see whether you’ve achieved the objectives established at the beginning of the campaign, and compare current results with previous campaigns to check for patterns or trends.

If you’re happy to manage your own email marketing, we offer access to a market leading email marketing platform. Alternatively if you’d like to hand it over to an expert email marketing team there’s a fully managed campaign option for both your emails and e-newsletters with prices starting from £19.00 per month.

Contact us on 01202 788333 or visit www.lexisclick.com/email

B2B Online Marketing, Marketing General

LinkedIn has 152 million users worldwide, with approximately one million new members joining every week. Get up to speed and join in the fun with this jargon buster!

LexisClick LinkedIn Cheat Sheet 2

B2B Online Marketing, Blogging for business, Marketing General, Online Advertising, Online Marketing, Uncategorized

According to a recent study by comScore, you can expect up to 20% of your email list to be reading it on a smartphone, and if the demographic group includes professionals from the business market, that number is even higher. This also means that you stand a better chance of having your email read, as smartphone users typically check their emails more often,  and frequently in down time when they’re travelling or waiting – say for a meeting to start.

So far this is all good news, the fact that customers can now read and follow links in dynamic HTML emails, means that mobile marketing can really drive open rates and click-throughs,.  However, when designing emails, it’s important to keep in mind your smartphone users, so here are some tips from the E-marketing team at LexisClick:
•    As always it’s important to ensure the subject line is relevant and to the point

•    make sure that it’s easy to see calls-to-action without zooming  in

•    include options to add to social media, as readers are most likely to add content to social networks from their mobiles

•    if you haven’t got a mobile friendly version of your website try to ensure that when readers click through to your website it looks good on a small screen

•    Provide view-in-browser options for mobile readers

•    And lastly check on a variety of mobile devices before sending– it’s the best way to succeed

If you’re happy to manage your own email marketing, here at LexisClick we offer access to a market leading email marketing platform. Alternatively if you’d like to hand it over to someone else to look after there’s a fully managed campaign option for both your emails and e-newsletters. Prices start from only £19.00 per month.

Contact us on 01202 788333 for a chat to discuss how we can help you develop and grow your business. Or visit www.lexisclick.com

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

We stumbled across a Google+ cheat sheet on Mashable.com The cheat sheet includes most of the common syntax, hotkeys and tips you need to know to use Google+ Cheat Sheet. Let us know if you find this useful, or if you’ve found any other cheat sheets that you’d like to share…!

Blogging for business, Marketing General, Online Advertising, Online Marketing cheat sheets, Google

If you are responsible for your company’s website you should be aware of the recent changes to EU privacy rules governing websites and information they might save on users’ computers. The most common method used is cookies, that store information that your website can access on your website users’ computers, until they expire or are deleted.  If you have read the guidance from the ICO (Information Commissioners Office) you may well have come away feeling none the wiser about what you should be doing in regards to this new ruling. Well you won’t be alone; the guidance is woolly to say the least. So what do you do? Stick your head in the sand and hope for the best? Or make sure you are doing what you can to comply with the law, whilst making sure you aren’t giving up competitive advantage for your business and its website.

You may not even know whether your website is using cookies. A cookie is a common method used by web developers to temporarily save information from a website that can be accessed by the website as you move between pages, sites, or return to the site at a later date. It is commonly used by website analytics software and is also used by a number of online advertising networks to personalise advertising based on your browsing history. If you don’t know if you’re using cookies, then find out if you are using Google Analytics or Google Adwords conversion tracking. If you are using one of these common tools, then your website will be using cookies.

It might be tempting to wait and see what happens or perhaps hope it washes over, but one thing that the ICO guidance is clear on is that it will take a dim view if a business doesn’t have a clear plan on giving users the option to opt out of information being stored in regards to their use of its website.

To help Bournemouth based businesses understand the implications of this change in the law in regards to their website we have teamed up with Grid Law, a Bournemouth based legal firm, to offer a FREE assessment of your website and guidance on whether your website complies with this latest EU ruling and what you should do if it doesn’t.

For further information on how we can help you ensure that your website is complying with the law contact us on 01202 961336

B2B Online Marketing, Marketing General, Online Marketing, Web Design

You’re looking forward to a long relaxing weekend, but do you dread the return to work and having to deal with all the emails that have dropped into your inbox while you’ve been having some down time. Are you dismayed at the thought of opening your inbox each morning? With two long weekends coming up it’s more important than ever to start managing your inbox.

Trying to keep up with the demands of your inbox can be a challenge, but it shouldn’t be overwhelming. Effectively managing the time you spend on email isn’t about what’s best for everyone, it’s about finding what works for you.

Here are some tips you can try, or modify to fit your demands and preferences:

-1-   Set aside time. Indentify two to three chunks of 10-20 minutes a day when you can focus on checking and responding to emails, preferably not first thing in the   morning, which can derail productivity. This doesn’t mean it’s the only time you can look at email during the day, just that you have allotted time for dealing with it.

-2-  De-clutter daily. Whether it’s during a break, or the end of the day, an uncluttered inbox will make you feel better, so make it a goal to get rid of stuff you don’t need – it’s liberating.

-3-   Deal with it once. We are all guilty of scanning emails and letting them sit in our inbox for far too long. Break yourself of this habit. Once you open an email, deal with it. If you can read and respond in less than two minutes, just get it over with. If you’re not sure how to respond yet – file it.

-4-   File. File. File. Email shouldn’t linger in your inbox. Set up a filing system that works for you and use it. Don’t make the mistake of creating too many folders – it’ll just get confusing. Three to four folders will suffice. Try a variation of “Action,” “Waiting” and “Archive” folder labels.

-5-   Simplify and code. Use the flagging, labelling and/or colour-coding features of your email. Yellow can mean whatever you’d like it to mean, just keep it consistent. If you must keep email in your inbox, make sure you only keep the most recent message with the full thread, not each individual message on the same subject. You can also consider if it’s worth the time to change the subject line of emails you want to file or archive so the email content is clear, without having to skim it.

-6-   Use the search function. If you know you can rely on the search function of your email to retrieve what you’re searching for, you’ll be less likely to over-save stuff that “might” be important in your inbox or overload your “keep just in case” folder. Google Desktop does this well if the search feature within your email doesn’t impress you much.

-7-   Don’t miss important dates. What about an email that needs to be added to your calendar or task list? Move it right away, don’t let it sit in your inbox. It will take you less than 1 minute to do this. Just copy and paste – it doesn’t have to look pretty or have the correct formatting, just move it directly from your inbox into your calendar or task list and you can modify it later. Not sure if it’s important enough to make your calendar? If there’s a chance it might be, don’t think twice, just add it, you can always delete it, or ignore it later.

-8-   Take a deep breath, and hit “unsubscribe.” Unsubscribe yourself from anything that’s no longer relevant to you. That golf club you belonged to 5 years ago still sending you update emails? Click unsubscribe and you’ll eliminate the unwanted mail, time it takes to delete it and the guilt that comes with knowing you’ll never keep up with it anyways.

-9-   Divert the news. Try to get RSS of blogs, newsletters or other material that’s delivered to your inbox so you can subscribe and sort through it with your Reader instead of clogging up your inbox. Change how news comes to you. Or, create a rule that filters all news items directly to a News folder, so it never mingles with your emails (or gets lost in the mix). If you’re using Outlook click here for how to set this up.

-10-  Is it necessary? Before you send that email or respond (again) on the same issue, ask yourself, would a phone call or visit be quicker? Or, can I table the issue and bring it up when we meet face-to-face next week? It’s so easy to just shoot off emails, so think before you hit send – no one likes an overfilled inbox.

If you’ve got some top tips for managing your inbox we’d like to hear from you!

Marketing General

How important is it to have a good careers section on your website? Looking at the vast majority of small and medium sized businesses’ websites, the careers section is usually languishing as an afterthought to all the sales messages and service related information. Considering that for most businesses their people are their most important asset, shouldn’t they be making more of their website to help them attract the right people into their company?

We are in the process of revamping our careers section: we’re certainly guilty of neglecting it. As part of the process we have taken a look at several careers pages from leading employers in the UK. As with the websites in general  the quality of the careers sections vary quite significantly and it is very obvious which businesses are using their websites as an important tool in attracting the best people.

Two careers sections that really stood out for us were Innocent Drinks and McKinsey Consulting. Read more…

Marketing General recruitment, recruitment marketing