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How to use email as part of your marketing strategy

08/16/202008/13/2020 by scmarketing

With a flurry of marketing activity and communication with existing clients when lockdown started, you could be forgiven for thinking that you can start to ease up on your communication. However, now is not the time to stop your marketing.

It’s so important to keep up the informative messages of support that you shared with clients and prospect at early lockdown stages. If your last email or social message was about closing your business or working remotely, you really need to start thinking about sharing up to date news to encourage client retention and new business.

This is where email marketing can be so effective. With so many people working remotely, email acts as advertising for your virtual shop window. Rather than strolling down the street looking at a shop or business window, the billboard is coming to your email inbox.

Here’s three tips when considering email marketing as part of your communications strategy.

1. Targeted email marketing content

When you write your emails always write to your target audience. It’s always a good idea to think that you are sending your email to one person so you can make content really personal. With relevant content it will help with open rate for a more successful email marketing campaign.

Our blog on creating an online persona for your business can help you with getting your content really 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. Cleanse your email lists

With huge changes to businesses due to COVID, cleansing your email distribution list should be high on your agenda.

If you’ve distributed emails during this time then you’ll be aware of 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 make changes accordingly. It’s better to have a smaller mailing list of qualified and quality contacts than a large list of emails that don’t reach their recipient.

All the while you must make sure that your emails are GDPR compliant. Ensure that you have a visible and clear unsubscribe option in the footer when you distribute your email.

If you have a pop-up box on your website to gather email addresses then ensure that you are transparent in that you are using their email for your e-newsletter updates and nothing else.

We can help you with adding this pop-up call-to-action function to your website to encourage potential customers to sign up to receive your e-shots.

3. Keep in regular contact

As part of you content marketing plan factor in a weekly or monthly e-newsletter. However regular is up to you. It’s about what you think you can manage to ensure that you remain consistent. If you send a monthly round up of news, then make sure you send this on the first working day of every month.

As part of this consistency ensure you have a branded email template that you can update each time, this helps with brand awareness, a professional look and recipients become more familiar with you.

A great time saver for content is to repurpose blogs that you write throughout the month. You can edit content down for your e-newsletter. Then add a link with a click through back to the full article to read more.

Email marketing agency London

We’re a digital marketing company with offices in London and Croydon. We offer a range of inbound marketing tactics for businesses including email marketing for accountants, professional services firms and SMEs.

Book a free consultation with us to chat about your next email campaign, growing your email distribution list and using email as a lead generator.

The secret of a successful inbound marketing strategy

07/31/2020 by scmarketing

At the centre of any successful inbound marketing strategy will be a true understanding of your target audience. Knowing what your prospects challenges and needs are will help you steer communication to them. Tailored content provides your target customer with the knowledge they need to improve their business or their daily lives. So, how do you go about ensuring that your marketing communications are targeted to your audience?

Understand your customer

Understanding your target audience is crucial to increasing opportunities to attract, engage and convert your leads. How can you write content for your inbound marketing campaign if you are unsure who you are writing too? It’s important to remember that when you write content you need to make it personal. A great way to do this is to think that you are writing to an individual. It’s not just a blog on a page to fill space, it’s about formulating a way of approaching your content that will enhance the user experience and build brand awareness

To help tailor your content to your target customer, create an online persona. This is vital to run a successful inbound digital marketing campaign.

Creating an online persona of your target audience and using it as a reference for when you write content. Whether that’s for your website, social media, email marketing, or any online marketing communication, it provides you with a guide so that content is relevant, language consistent and it will aid your search engine optimisation (SEO) strategy.

How to create a profile of your target audience

Create an imaginary profile of your target audience. So, think of your ideal customer and start to build information around them.

Do a little research to get a feel for the demographics of your prospects including their job roles. You can do this with the communications tools already at your disposal such as looking at your social network insights pages – Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn all have very interesting data-driven statistics at your disposal.

Then look at creating a profile. We usually opt for a one-page design with short and punchy detail. So, here’s some key steps to bring your persona to life.

Create a profile description of your target audience – start off with a name, age.
What are your persona’s key identifiers?
Consider your character’s goals.
Imagine what challenges they face and create solutions around these. All the time thinking how your product or service will help them.
Add in a line highlighting common objections that you may hear from your target persona. This will also help you write content that resolves their problems.

At this stage you will already start to see a character form. In our personas we always like to include a quote from the person to bring the character to life.

How do you help your target audience?

The final aspect of your persona is adding in your key marketing message, this should be something you want to get across in all communication. Then add a few points on how you will help your potential customer. This helps you really focus your marketing messages as these are key points that your customer wants to hear about as you will be helping solve their problems.

Increase leads for your business

A persona is one of the first things to create as part of your marketing strategy. If you think it’s time to revisit your marketing plan so that it supports your business in becoming a magnet to good qualified leads, we can help build that inbound marketing strategy for you.

Where an inbound marketing agency in London and Croydon, if you need help with your inbound digital marketing planning, book a free consultation with us.

Are you embracing digital marketing?

07/16/202007/13/2020 by scmarketing

Your business model will have had to evolve beyond comprehension, but evolve you have! You’ve shown resilience, flexibility and the ability to adapt to change, swiftly.

Whilst many budgets have been slashed, marketing is a key area noted by many of you as an area that needs continued input and work on to keep your business seen, especially with an online presence.

What we’ve noticed in general is the major shift to embrace digital marketing as advertisers have moved away from the traditional marketing over the last few months. Digital marketing activity such as social media, SEO, website updates, blogs, videos and webinars have certainly come to the fore.

Incorporating digital into your marketing strategy is crucial now. This is how you get your voice heard without the footfall walking past print advertising. There’s an immediacy with digital marketing as your social media posts speak directly to your target audience and encourage engagement or your email marketing is personalised to the recipient.

Digital marketing Croydon resources

If you’re an SME business and find digital marketing a daunting prospect or you’re realising that you need to now pick up the pace with your online marketing, we’ve listed some of the key tactics that you can draw on, experiment with and work out which is right for your business.

Not all digital marketing campaigns suit all businesses, but a mix and match approach can help.

Key digital marketing services to create a great inbound marketing strategy that can help generate leads to your website and grow your business. Click each link to discover more.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Social Media Marketing

PPC / Pay Per Click

Remarketing / Banner advertising

Email Marketing

Content Marketing

Marketing Automation

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

When COVID-19 social distancing and ‘stay at home’ messaging came into action, while many brands expected less ad spend in 2020, research shows that many expected to increase their spend across digital channels, including social media (56%), podcasts (52%), digital audio (45%) and paid search (40%) in the second half of 2020.

We’re a web design and digital marketing agency in Croydon.

Book a consultation with us so we can tailor a digital marketing solution that’s right for you.

What to check before you send your next email marketing campaign

06/14/202107/03/2020 by scmarketing

An email marketing campaign can be an incredibly effective way of reaching your target audience. Whether you’ve captured data from an email newsletter sign up box on your website or because a visitor downloaded a document, by showing this engagement your email subscribers are interested to learn more about your products and services. So, a regular email marketing campaign is a great way of keeping your potential clients informed.

However, email marketing can be daunting. There’s pressure to get your content right and with so much to review little things can be missed which could affect click through rate, engagement and worse – lead to unsubscribed. So, here’s our tips on what you should check before you hit send so you have a great email campaign.

Proof-read

Even though you will have automatically done a spell check, you still need to take time to thoroughly proof-read the content of the email. Check for spelling, grammar and the overall flow.

Try and read it as if for the first time and check whether your message is getting across clearly. If you can get a colleague to look at it too, even better. If someone who hasn’t been close to the content up to this point looks at it, they can usually spot things quickly that you may have overlooked.

But, don’t just read the body of the email. Always double check the titles and footer too. We’ll cover these in a little more detail.

What’s the subject of your email?

You want people to open your email so remember to check the subject line for typos. Also check it not only makes sense but will it entice people to open it? A good benchmark is to work to 50 characters. Succinct and to the point. Remember that 47% of people open an email based on the subject line.

[FIRSTNAME]

If you’re adding in the recipient’s name using dynamic tags then you need to check that these are working correctly. You want their first name showing not another field from your database! Generally, you’d only be using the dynamic tag for a first name so make sure that this is working correctly.

Check all links

When you send yourself a test email, check that all links work including social media handles and that they lead to the correct page. Fix any that are broken.

This means checking the links in your footer too, especially that the unsubscribe link works. While you don’t want people to unsubscribe, it is inevitable. For someone wanting to unsubscribe they will find it rather annoying to then not be able to complete this function all because it wasn’t on your round of checks before distribution. This could then lead to bad reviews.

Call to action

You’re sending an email for people to engage with and ultimately take action. Whether that’s to read more, book a consultation or watch this video. Having a bold call to action button will entice people to click, this makes this a crucial button to ensure that the link is not broken.

We’ve already mentioned that you need to check these links work but this is also a note that if you have icons in your email that they need to be clickable. It’s just natural that we want to click them. So, don’t just think you can have an icon and assume people will go to Twitter and try and search for your business. You need to make it really simple. Cut out unnecessary steps to keep your prospects engaged for longer.

How’s the formatting?

Check that the layout of your email is not affected on the test and fix any issues. Look out for call to action buttons or bullet points – are they positioned correctly? Is font colour and size consistent and easy to read?

Responsive

Check your test email on all devices. Does it look OK? Are the images replicated well on each device? It’s worth doing that last check on your mobile. Let’s face it 81% of us open our emails on a smartphone – so make sure it looks good as that’s a lot of potential clients you could lose.

Unsubscribe

If you’ve previously sent emails to customers in the past, then you’ll know all about GDPR compliance. Ensuring you have a clearly visible unsubscribe link is essential. It needs to be very simple for people to stop receiving your emails. It’s usual to include this in your footer of the email but just because it forms part of the template does not mean you shouldn’t check it each time. This is a definite to do on our email marketing checklist of actions before you click send. That’s why we’ve mentioned in twice!

Email marketing agency Croydon

Email marketing offers a great Return on Investment – 42% of B2B organisations say email is one of their most effective lead generators.

Or email marketing service forms part of our inbound marketing services in our suite of digital marketing tools to help businesses grow through online lead generation.

Depending on your business goals, we can provide email marketing strategies as a standalone service or as part of a digital marketing package as email marketing consultants in Croydon. Why not get in touch for a free consultation and we can discuss the best approach for your business.