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4 Email marketing tactics for effective campaigns

01/31/202209/15/2020 by scmarketing

With 3.9 billion daily email users and 59% saying marketing emails influence their purchase decisions, email marketing is a digital marketing tactic not to be dismissed. So, we thought we’d give you a snapshot of four key points to consider when embarking on an email marketing strategy to help make it truly effective.

Personalise emails

Analysing your insights from email marketing campaigns can really help you to customise your emails to answer the needs or your potential customers. Learn when the best time of day to send emails to your target audience is. Know when they open their emails.

Make sure your tone of voice resonates with your target audience. And, understand what articles are proving most popular with your audience by looking at the click through rate.

We appreciate that this may take a little time to hone, especially if you are starting out, but if you have a GDPR compliant list of email addresses that have subscribed to hear from you then use your contacts.

Subject lines

This is what is really going to entice a subscriber to open your email. What keywords will encourage an open rate? Don’t be clever, sometimes keeping it simple and factual will be more beneficial. Emojis have also proven popular for open rates.

Remember that you have a warm lead as people will have subscribed to your email list. So, make sure that the title is something that your audience will want to learn more about, people are less likely to open something that they are unsure about.

Be insightful

We often talk about the importance of content marketing as part of your inbound marketing strategy to position you as a thought leader in your field.

Use email as your news feed. Bring the latest industry insights to your email subscribers. It’s not just about sharing posts on social media, repurpose your content for emails too. Therefore, add snippets of your blogs with bold call to actions in your email with links back to your articles on your website. Remember an email campaign forms part of your overall lead generation strategy to drive people back to your website.

Create an email template when you start out as this will help you to easily populate it with future content. The format will become familiar to your avid readers which helps with retention.

AVB testing

Conducting a split test of your email campaign will allow you to get your messaging spot on for your target audience. Experiment with topics, types of downloads or offers so you can understand what works and what doesn’t.

Email marketing agency resources

Email marketing Croydon

As a digital marketing agency in Croydon, we’re able to offer businesses across London with inbound marketing support for improved lead generation. Using a suite of tactics including web design and development, email marketing, SEO, Pay Per Click (PPC), social media management through to CRM and marketing automation we provide digital marketing for accountants, professional services firms and local businesses.

Inbound marketing writing content on laptop

Why more businesses are turning to inbound marketing

06/14/202109/07/2020 by scmarketing

Inbound marketing is a marketing strategy that more and more businesses are turning to for qualified leads. Here we look at why and how inbound marketing can help your business become a lead generation magnet.

Inbound marketing is targeted

Using inbound marketing as part of a business growth strategy ensures a much more targeted campaign which hits prospects and qualified leads at the right time. Whether that’s through your email inbox, social media feed or search engines. As such inbound marketing is about engaging and growing brand awareness and trust with qualified leads – a person who could become a customer.

Inbound marketing is less intrusive than the traditional marketing approach or outbound marketing which is based more around activities such as cold calling, telemarketing or perhaps taking an exhibition stand at a trade show. As technology gets superior, so to do the methods of how we can shield ourselves from receiving unwanted calls or emails.

Inspire and engage your target audience

Inbound marketing is all about creating inspirational content that will attract customers to your business. It’s about creating solutions to problems that your target audience is facing and providing relevant information that will be of interest. This gives you the opportunity to engage further.

That’s why we’re seeing a shift to inbound marketing tactics as businesses see the benefits of this more sensitive and tailored approach.

People sign up to newsletters and follow businesses on social media therefore they are already saying that they want to hear more. This is why it’s vital to keep content relevant so that you can continue to engage.

Why spend an exhaustive amount of time speaking to people who are uninterested in your products or services, when you could spend time building on awareness of your brand through blog content, social media and targeted email marketing campaigns.

Ongoing engagement with your audience in a way that they want to hear from you shows you are interested in them. This constant drip feed of relevant content helps position you as a thought leader and makes for a personalised experience. It shows that you understand their business needs and in turns helps you to generate more qualified leads.

Lead nurturing and lead conversion

Creating regular, quality content for your target audience is part of lead nurturing which is essential as a sales journey is very rarely a one-stop shop. These potential clients and your existing customers will all be aware of your competition, researched your services and looked at online reviews long before they start speaking to you. Therefore, your continuous content marketing with targeted, tailored messaging will place you as an authority in your field placing you in front of your ideal clients and so helping towards lead conversion.

Inbound marketing agency Croydon

Talk to us about becoming a lead generation magnet and using an inbound marketing strategy to gain qualified leads. As an inbound marketing agency in Surrey, we work with a wide range of local companies including professional services firms including accountancy firms providing inbound marketing for accountants.

Book a free consultation to chat with our digital marketing team and we can create a tailored plan in line with your business development needs.

Lead generation strategies for your business

06/21/202108/25/2020 by scmarketing

The main purpose of your online lead generation strategy is to get people to visit your website.

Online lead generation encompasses a wide range of tactics and digital marketing campaigns depending on platform you choose to capture leads. So, we thought we’d take a closer look at some of the tools and the strategies you can employ to help increase website traffic and increase your chance of quality leads.

PPC lead generation

Pay Per Click or PPC is a way of advertising on Search Engine Results pages (SERPs). Google ads are generally the most popular. With Google getting 3.5 billion searches a day, you can see why. PPC is a great option for lead generation but it’s important to get the content of your ad right to entice a click in the first instance.

We also recommend creating a specific landing page so that your web page reflects what people have clicked to see. This will help you avoid bounce rate as those clicks will be from warm leads.

You then need to make sure you have good keywords targeted to your audience as well as negative keywords to help extend your budget further.

Our blog what is PPC has further background detail on this lead generation tactic.

LinkedIn lead generation

LinkedIn is a great B2B social media networking platform. When attending events, even virtually, there’s always the networking opportunities to add contacts to your network post event. By messaging either prior to an event or post event, you have a great hook to personalise your message of introduction which is likely to get a connection made.

With more remote working, LinkedIn has really come to the fore for networking and lead generation. The LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a great asset to grow your network by being truly targeted to find the right prospects for your business. Learn more about how LinkedIn can help you grow you discover prospects.

Facebook lead generation

If you think of Facebook as a search engine, having your business present on this social media platform at the very least offers a place for you to be found with contact details, business hours and your latest updates. But most importantly it offers reassurance and brand awareness about your business services and products.

For some businesses it may not necessarily be the primary social network platform but it’s always useful to post updates to help drive traffic organically back to your website. If anything, it’s important for increasing brand awareness and improving SEO (search engine optimisation).

Facebook Ads was launched in 2007. Facebook Lead Ads are all about lead generation and the process is simplified to attract prospects. Pre-populated forms make it easy for people to fill out forms on their mobile. You can customise forms to improve the quality of the leads you attract.

Your website and lead generation tools

Eye-catching call to action buttons are essential on a website. It helps guide the visitor – your potential clients – and helps them navigate the web page. Also create pop-up boxes for email sign up forms to your website. This can be achieved with a lead generation tool such as Hubspot.

A virtual tool such as Hotjar has a heatmap which represents how visitors to your website are navigating their way around your site. You can see where site visitors spend time and where they don’t.

Tips for campaigns

It’s important to organise leads so that you can make it a successful lead generation campaign. This is where lead generation tools and software can help. They can help you understand more about the people visiting your website and what pages they are interested in so that you can tailor information accordingly. It can help you capture email addresses simply. Or understand what they looked at on your website before completing a form.

As a Hubspot partner, we can help you with marketing automation and CRM for your business to help make a really effective lead generation campaign.

What’s important about any lead generation campaign is to continue to be insightful with your communication, providing answers to challenges that you know your customers face. Your ongoing content marketing plan should factor in where prospects are on their buyer’s journey. Someone at the beginning of the buyer’s journey might be interested in insight like an ebook, whilst someone who’s now familiar with your company might be more interested in a free trial or demo.

Inbound marketing agency in Surrey

If you’re looking for qualified leads become a lead generation magnet with the help of Smart Cow. Take a closer look at our marketing services or book a consultation and we can discuss a digital marketing strategy that’s best for your business.

We specialise in digital marketing for accountants as well as providing digital marketing services and web design for local businesses within Croydon.

Why investment in organic search can help in a crisis period

06/21/202108/16/2020 by scmarketing

Increasing your online presence in organic search should be the top of any business inbound marketing strategy. If it wasn’t prior to 2020, then now more than ever it should be. As more people are relying on online search to shop, search for services and communicate, a Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) strategy is vital, especially to small businesses and start-ups, to help your website be seen in the noise.

With marketing budgets for print advertising taking a hit due to COVID, many marketers shifted to organic search.

The reason businesses opted for SEO is that it helps a business be seen online and helped maintain presence during the crisis. As many companies had to change business model, such as restaurants turning to takeaway services, if the online world wasn’t already important it became essential compared to a poster in an establishments window. The footfall had moved online therefore SEO provided the capability of helping businesses stand out.

Local search rankings

With three in five (59%) consumers saying they have used more local services during lockdown, the importance of visibility online is crucial. The Deloitte report goes on to say one in three (32%) used new brands, products or services that they hadn’t heard of during the lockdown.

Therefore, it’s clear that having presence online opens up new opportunities with prospects and increased brand awareness. By ensuring content on your website includes relevant local information ensures that you are targeted and can help you improve in local search engine rankings.

Organic search and your website

When people search Google, SEO or local search is a way for businesses being seen by local potential customers. This is where companies that invested in organic search at early lockdown reaped the benefits as an SEO strategy is long-term as you need to keep up refreshing your site with mew, original content and keywords to maintain and increase your rankings in search engine results.

This is because search engines look for triggers such as content on a website that is tailored for the area you’re targeting.

Backlinks from referring domains including your Google My Business listing and your social media networks, help to identify your business as quality and trustworthy for the search engines to return in results pages.

Search Engine Optimisation for increased online presence

The crisis period may have subsided for the moment as businesses are opening and services resuming for most sectors, but now is not the time to draw back from your online presence.

Continued investment in organic search is a cost-effective digital marketing tactic ideal for SME’s to continue to grow their online market share even in these unprecedented times.

Digital marketing and SEO company in Croydon

As an inbound marketing agency, we provide digital and inbound marketing for accountants and local businesses.

Marketing is all about building awareness of your products and services. With approximately 7 touch points needed for a sale or sign up to a service, it’s important to constantly get your message out there to increase brand awareness. That’s where digital marketing can help. From local SEO to blog page and social media engagement, there’s a mix of tactics to get your business out there – you just need to be targeted.

We work closely with local businesses in Croydon providing SEO services. Get in touch for a free consultation to see what digital marketing services are best for your business and how an SEO campaign could prove beneficial for your business.