Every website must have a reason to live! A purpose to serve both your business and potential visitor search needs. Google wants to see a genuine, high linked traffic resource of content with interest, value and activity. To get PageRank visibility, your website needs to contain essential results generating task pages.
A website that is little more than an online brochure can still be found on the web! Admittedly, the companies concerned may wish to invest a little more in building a better brand identity online and will “get round to it eventually”. Except, website design moves on and those companies not marching in step with the evolving eCommerce terrain will be very confused and bewildered indeed whenever they try to catch up. Read more
Confidence is everything! Every time a potential customer goes online in search of goods, services or information, the hope is they will not be scammed, spammed and their PC dammed to zombie, trojan virus hell! Your website must replace natural distrust with instant confidence that you are not fake, phishing or will waste a visitor’s time.
So you check your website analytics and find visitors are arriving and leaving at certain pages. Having been enticed to click onto a link back from your PPC Ad or email marketing newsletter, something about your site is causing anxiety, hesitation and ultimately, they leave without interaction. Read more
Another in the latest of behaviour studies into today’s social media messaging culture reports that email marketing is still the best sales channel of all. Surprised? The simple truth, as often reasserted, is that far from being killed off by Twitter and Facebook, email marketing is still used as today’s most meaningful online tool!
So, in the age of immediate feedback messaging, instant social media engagement and purpose-search mobile apps, why is email marketing, the, oldest pinger in town, still hitting the right buttons? Read more
Many brand building websites start out with good intentions but sure enough, maintaining site pages with frequent fresh content gets left behind as daily schedules overtake. As traffic slowly drops, Google rankings go down and panic sets in as the mad scramble to update breaks out!
The key to obtaining high PageRank for your niche market SEO keywords is both a combination of paid search using PPC adword campaigns and longterm online marketing. The latter aims to build and visibly position brand identity, which relies on frequent, fresh optimised content via writing content for blogs, articles, email marketing newsletters and utilising social media networking such as Twitter, Facebook and bookmarking sites. In addition, uploading to YouTube videos is a rewarding method to attract the attention of Google and human user traffic. Read more
Recent news that methods of filtering and delivering e-mail by Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, based on engagement behaviour aimed to keep ahead of the spammers, is yet another sign that genuine email marketing campaigns are going to have to sharpen up their act or always fail to get through.
The new engagement metrics used by Microsoft Hotmail will now filter messages based on how actively a subscriber interacts with messages from specific senders, and is essentially the latest method, driven by the mailbox provider’s ongoing battle to reduce the endless numbers of false positives, an important factor in KPI analytics. Read more
Emailing has been our daily business workhorse for a long time now! There’s a feeling that it’s become simply dull and uninteresting compared to using shiny new social networking! With the advent of GoogleWave next year, emailing will be cool again – so it’s time to breathe new life into your emails!
Here are a few quick and easy actions you can take which won’t be traumatic – or cost you anything at all:
Text-only email: standard brand identity wisdom dictates a specific approach to designing an email that may not be appropriate to the medium. Send an all-text email once in a while – a change of pace and approach will at least arouse interest because it’s different!
Crazy headlines: subject lines that sum up the point of the email in short, plain, direct language gives the best email-open response. However, humorous, silly or crazy subject lines, e.g. bad puns, odd turns of phrase – will open up emails! If the right tone is struck, a ‘funny’ from time to time arouses interest.
Inject personality: we all know that the success of social media is because it is instant, friendly and personal. Email has always been a one-to-one experience, but with some companies, it is still left behind in the era of hiding behind the corporate wall of formal jargon. Recipients are used to and expect ‘informal’ communication – they will not be interested either to read or find about your brand if it is not relaxed, open, welcoming and transparent. ‘Personality’- being different – encourages curiosity and gets emails read!
Change email-sending day: email service providers can show open and click rates by day of week! But these only reflect a routine pattern of a regular same day email sending, solely based on a stat showing best open and click day – which then would change again. It’s always best to experiment and monitor to see what works best for you. Monitor changing behaviour and modify yours accordingly.
Finally – break your own rules: most rules come from experience, and most of the time, these rules work. However, it never hurts to break a rule once just to see if the time has come to revise the rule. See what a few tweaks can do to fine tune your marketing model – give it a breath of fresh air from time-to-time and keep your customers interested!
Each year the web gets bigger and as such the competition gets harder, this means it becomes increasingly harder to get listed towards the top of the search engines. Smaller local businesses can get lost or struggle to get listed on the relevant keywords or phrases. Read more
We have been producing and delivering email newsletters for our clients over the past 5 years, here are just a few tips that we have learned: Read more
McAfee have revealed recently the all of these annoying spam emails which keep filling our inboxes contribute to wasting over 33 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity which is massive. With the implementation of some effective spam filtering, and possibly even some spaming laws there would be enough energy saved to run a massive 2.4million average homes for one whole year! Read more
Email marketing is proving very effective with the Cheshire and Manchester area at the moment. Recent studies have shown that despite the recession, businesses are still growing in the area so now is your time to take advatage of that.
