email Marketing

Unlock the potential of email marketing for your SME with expert insights from Croydon’s top web design and digital marketing company. Elevate your business communications in South London and Surrey.

Lead Generation Inbound Marketing

Help with Lead Generation

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At Smart Cow Marketing, we have plenty of free resources which can help you improve your lead generation including our guide; ‘The 30 Greatest Lead Generation Tips, Tricks and Ideas’.

In this blog we sum up a few tips to help you generate more leads!

Download Our Lead Generation Guide

Email marketing

Email marketing is key to being noticed. In our free guide we explore how to keep your email subscribers happy and interested in your content. Sending valuable offers such as enewsletters, discounts, educational content, or business updates, will keep your business front of their mind.

Go a step further by adding in tools for people to share the email you distributed. A simple ‘Forward to a Friend’, or a link to your social media platforms will encourage people to pass on the message!

Pay per click (PPC)

PPC can help promote your business through paying for boosted adverts for example Google ads. These ads pop up when someone types into a search engine and relevant results are returned with ads showing at the top of the results.

These ads target the audience you want and make for an easy way to track your investment. Also, you only pay when someone clicks on the advert link which makes it easy to control your budget.

Make sure to keep your adverts simple, concise, and relevant. Ensure that the landing page gives clear instructions as what the prospective client should do next. This can be anything from; a number to call, a form to fill out, a call to action button, or a bit more information about your business’s products or services. An effective landing page will increase the conversion rate.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Improved SEO will make it easier for your website to be found in web searches by people showing interest in your products. Search engines boost websites with original and consistent content. They analyse keywords on your website and align them to target audiences based on their search behaviour. That’s why it’s important that keyword research is conducted as part of your SEO strategy.

Digital marketing, Croydon

With everything digital marketing out the way, it is important to remember your website is the main focus. It is where all these leads come back to, therefore making sure your website is easy to navigate, engaging, and professional could make the difference between a prospect staying a prospect or becoming a client.

If you are looking to develop your business and gain more cliental, get in touch with our digital marketing team for a free consultation where we review your challenges and help you execute your goals.

CLICK HERE FOR A FREE CONSULTATION
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Email marketing best practice tips

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As part of your ongoing marketing strategy, it’s so important to continually update your target audience with informative messages about your products and services. This helps build brand awareness, encourages prospects to engage and improves customer retention.

This is where email marketing can be so effective. Email communication acts as advertising for your virtual shop window.

To help you make the most of your email communication, here’s three tips when considering email marketing as part of your ongoing digital marketing strategy.

Get in touch about email marketing

1. Talk to your target audience

When you write your emails think about your target audience. Its’s good to think that you are sending your email to one person so you can make content really personal and relevant.

Understanding challenges of your audience and providing solutions to this in the content you email out will help with engagement and position you as a thought leader in your field.

Our blog on creating an online persona can help you create content targeted to your audience.

Remember to offer useful tips and advice, industry insight as well as highlight any relevant offers you are providing that may help their business.

2. Data cleansing

COVID-19 will certainly have impacted your email distribution list. You may have noticed a higher bounce rate then perhaps you have done previously. This will be due to businesses changing staff, furloughed staff and unfortunately companies having to reduce employees.

Monitor the bounce rate and update your list. It’s better to have a smaller, targeted email list with qualified and quality contacts than a large list of emails that don’t reach a recipient.

Make sure that your emails are GDPR compliant. Ensure that you have a clear unsubscribe option. If you have an email sign-up pop-up box on your website to gather data then ensure that you are transparent in that you are using their email address for your e-newsletter updates.

We can help you with adding this call-to-action to your website if you’re interested in growing your email distribution list.

3. Be consistent

As part of you content marketing plan factor in a weekly or monthly e-newsletter. Whatever you think you can manage to ensure that you keep consistency. If you send a monthly round up of news, then send this during the first working day of every month.

People will start to look out for your news round-ups and they will be familiar with your email template design.

For your design make sure that you have clear calls-to-action for people to click to ‘read more’ or ‘download our ebook’. Make sure that you send the recipient to a clear and concise landing page on your website to help reduce bounce rate.

Email marketing Croydon

Get in touch with us at Smart Cow to discuss how you can incorporate email marketing into your overall digital marketing campaign, tailored to your audience.

As an inbound marketing agency in Surrey, we offer digital marketing for accountants and other local businesses.

Book a FREE consultation
Email marketing on laptop

Marketing tips for Croydon businesses

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As we wait with fingers crossed for non-essential shops to open and sectors such as hair & beauty, hospitality and leisure to resume, we thought we’d offer our local Croydon businesses some marketing tips to help increase online presence.  

Google My Business  

First things first, is your company on Google My Business? If not, get one set up – it’s free to do!

If you do have a page already then make sure all details are up to date and add as many ways for people to get in touch with you as they can.

Add any special offers you have running. Remember to add imagery to your business page, this is a great resource for the hospitality sector to showcase popular dishes.

Remind customers to leave a review. Testimonials are a great way to encourage potential and returning customers.

How to set up Google My Business watch our video.

Social media

Start increasing the amount of social posts you share. This will remind people about your offering. Encourage people to follow you for updates on when you will be opening but make sure you always remind people that they can buy virtually. Or for hair & beauty, get your bookings up and running by spreading the word on social media.

For our wonderful Croydon hospitality businesses, we can’t wait for the restaurants, pubs and bars to breathe life into the town again. Remind Croydon folk what they’ve been missing with fantastic images of your amazing dishes.

Instagram and Facebook are great for foodie places. With Instagram it’s all about the look and there’s nothing more appealing than a plate of tasty food. Give details of anything new, your most popular dishes and your specials. Be descriptive within your post though.

Re-confirm your opening times and update your profile with any new details.

Run teaser campaigns with a countdown to when you will open (although we’re aware that it is all tentative dates right now).

Extend reach of your social post by adding hashtags. Here’s some general Croydon foodie hashtags you might want to consider as well as some standard Croydon ones you should always think about:

#Croydon #EastCroydonCool #Croydonbar #Croydonpub #Shoplocal #Supportlocal #Croydonrestaurants #Croydonfoodies #Croydonfood #Croydonrestaurantquarter #Instafood #lovefood #foodstagram #foodpic #foodie

Don’t forget to utilise the Story function on Instagram and Facebook. This is another way to be seen by your followers as it stands out at the top of the feed.

Encourage customers and prospects to share posts on social media.

When someone shares a post and tags you in, you can use the little arrow function just below the image. This allows you to share this to your stories and you can thank the customer for their visit.

Or a simple way to create a story is once you have added a post to your Instagram feed, just click the arrow below your post and you can share to you story.

Website updates

If you have a website, make sure that all your contact details, products and services are up to date. For hospitality get your menus and booking forms sorted. If your website still says Christmas 2020, get that removed, potential customers will think you are not opening.

If you have a blog, make sure you add content to that and do so regularly. This really helps with search engine optimisation (SEO) and your business being found in search engines. Fresh content is great for ongoing organic rankings.

We’ve recently created a blog on 8 ways to refresh your website, here’s an overview of what you’ll find on that. These are great SEO tactics that you can implement yourself.

  • Check your website navigation, it should be easy
  • Review content, contact details and check links aren’t broken
  • Add new imagery to refresh the look
  • Complete any missing meta descriptions
  • Update and add new calls to action
  • Get a free website review from us!

Email marketing

If you have an email distribution list, then now is a great time to start an email marketing campaign. Remember to be clear in your message, include a call to action and ensure you have your contact details visible.

Look at our checklist in our blog on what to check before you send your next email marketing campaign. You must also ensure you are GDPR compliant.

PPC Croydon

What is PPC and why use it? All you need is in that blog. But, in a nutshell, Pay Per Click or PPC is online paid advertising which gets its name from the fact that advertisers pay when someone clicks on an advert that they have running. It’s a great way of appearing at the top of search results pages to give your website a boost.

Digital marketing Croydon

We’re a digital marketing agency in Croydon providing digital marketing for accountants and other local businesses. Download our eBook with additional marketing resources and ideas for getting your business seen online – The Beginner’s Guide to Inbound Marketing.

Contact us for a free consultation to chat further about the different digital options.

Wooden dice with email symbol for digital marketing communications

5 benefits of email marketing

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Research indicates that 99% of consumers check their email every day with many citing that it is the preferred way to receive brand updates. With this in mind, here’s some of the benefits of incorporating email marketing into your overall digital marketing strategy.

1. Build your own database

Having your own contact list is invaluable for brand awareness and reaching your target audience.

With the stats showing that consumers are continually checking their email all day, every day. This digital marketing tactic provides a great way to spread your brand awareness.

Having a pop-up box on your website means you can ask people to sign up to your email newsletter for updates on promotions. This can help you grow your database which will be GDPR compliant.

Owning your own contact lists is vital for lead generation. Whilst social media is great for awareness and can help with long-term search engine optimisation strategy (SEO), remember that you don’t own the list of followers on that platform.

2. Personalisation

We often talk about personalisation and reaching your target audience at the right time and how they choose. An email marketing campaign can certainly help you achieve this.  

You can segment lists so that tailored communication goes out to the appropriate audience at a time suitable for them.

You can also split test your subject lines to work out which resonate with your target audience the best.

Marketing automation can also help with timely emails when an eBook is downloaded from your website.   

When you are sending emails, make sure your tone of voice resonates with your target audience.

3. Build your brand awareness

An email design that is consistent with your brand colours and messaging will help you build and maintain awareness of your business.

You can repurpose content from your blog posts and place into your email template which saves time and also provides another way for people to read your insight.

Analytics such as Click Through Rate (CTR) will help you understand the type of content that your contacts like to receive so that you can continue to tailor your communications accordingly.

Email platforms such as Hubspot also measure Click To Open Rate (CTOR) which analyses the percentage of unique recipients who clicked a link after opening the email.

This type of analyses helps ensure that you continue to personalise your emails in relation to your target audience needs as you can understand what content or types of Calls to Action (CTA) are engaging best.

Having this insight into understanding what articles are proving most popular with your audience will help you to continually tailor your content marketing whether email, social media or PPC advertising.

4. Cost-effective and timely promotion

Whilst email marketing allows you to run your regular monthly update email it also means you can run timely communication about promotions at short notice.

Unlike a traditional marketing campaign of print advertising, email marketing is very targeted and therefore cost-effective.

5. Increase website traffic

Your website is the centre of your digital world, everything you do should lead back to it. This makes email marketing a perfect way to help drive traffic back to your website and specific landing pages.

With interesting newsworthy content in your email marketing, make sure you have bold call to actions that encourage people to click through to ‘read more’ or ‘download’ via your website.

Once on your website, good navigation will help keep a visitor on your website for longer and ultimately your goal of either purchase or booking a consultation for a service.

This strategy also helps with your ongoing website optimisation. 

Email marketing agency resources 

Email marketing Croydon

As a digital marketing agency in Croydon, we’re able to offer businesses inbound marketing support for improved lead generation including developing an email marketing strategy.

Other digital marketing tactics include web design and development, SEO, Pay Per Click (PPC), social media management through to CRM and marketing automation.

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