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Your website is the key to your marketing success - it should be the hub of everything you do.
And, like any other piece of marketing collateral, it needs to work well, or you need to change it. So, how do you know it's working?
Key win number one: make sure you have a great analytics package on board, and that it is operating. Many websites use Google Analytics - it's free and it will help you to monitor your digital performance.
Of course, there's no use measuring if no one is visiting - or worse still, if they're visiting and then 'bouncing' - that's to say, leaving without going any further than the landing page. So how do you get them to stay?
Key win number two: great content, great images and an eye-catching headline.
You've around three seconds before they 'bounce' and in those three seconds you have to grab them. It's the same as with postal mail that arrives in your letter box - three seconds decide whether you want it or you junk it. This win also applies to email marketing you send out.
I mentioned 'if no one is visiting' just now - something that many sites suffer from. Why? Because nothing drives people to the site. As the digital hub of your marketing, everything you do should be pointing back to the website: fliers, advertisements, emails (including your business email footer), pay-per-click, word of mouth, social media and so on. However, the biggest reason for visiting will be because people have found your website.
Key win number three: Search Engine Optimisation.
It's the reason people find you - because, largely, your website contains keywords and phrases that your potential customers use when they search for businesses like yours. No keywords? No find. (BTW - it's a bit more complex than that, but that's the essential.)
Of course, some sites do all of the above and more and still don't get much successful traffic - that's to say, traffic that actually leads to sales. Why would that be? One big factor is dull, static content that talks about your company.
Key win number four: lively content that is focused on benefits of your company's products and services to your visitors.
Check through a few websites for local businesses in your area. Their prime real estate - the home page - will often have: "Dawkins and Daughter was set up 1000 years ago by Josiah Dawkins. We are committed to great service and have family values. We are passionate about ..." and so on. Nothing about what they do. Nothing about why YOU need to go there instead of anywhere else. No sense that they understand your pain - and therefore know how to help you.
Of course, there are many ways to direct people to your website and to convince them that you're the one for them. Establishing what search engines term as 'reputation' online is a complex business involving a good site, well constructed; great content; links from other sites of good repute - ah. How do you do that?
Key win number five: social media such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are routes you can use (there are many more, which you may care to investigate).
It's all about sharing content and getting people to visit your site via your social media posts. It also links directly back to your website, building your reputation online.
So how do you connect with people who are in your line of business or who are interested in the background to your products and services. How do you convince them of your value, your expertise and your credentials?
Key win number six: write a blog.
It's a means of showing that you are connected with the world, know your subject and want to share information (rather as ExtraMile Communications does with this blog). It's a key tool in your marketing because people can then syndicate it (copy it into their websites, blogs or social media), rate it and, most importantly, understand that you know what you're talking about!
Nick from ExtraMile Communications Ltd in Eccleshall, Staffordshire.
Need content? You may use this article on your website, or in your newsletter. The only requirement is inclusion of the following sentence: Article by Nick Evans of ExtraMile Communications Ltd - marketing with commitment.
Image idea unashamedly pinched from www.synotac.com/hub
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Catchy headline, huh? This post is short and sweet and to the point. Get email marketing right and it sings. Get it wrong and it will lurch to a halt. If anyone tells you email marketing is dead, take a look at what the big corporates are doing - social media? Sure - with email marketing, blogging, good websites and more creating a virtuous circle.
Here's how to get it completely wrong with your email marketing:
1. Send your emails from your desktop email software such as Outlook
2. Send your eager readers a large PDF document or an embedded image
3. Don't bother with deliverability measures
4. Tell the whole story in your email - with no clickthroughs
5. Make your content 'spammy'
6. Buy in lists from the Internet or mail to an old list
7. Don't test before you send
8. Put in personalisation when you're not sure your data records will support it
9. Don't bother too much with the design and layout of the mailing
10 Don't bother with appropriate landing pages for the links in your mail
There's loads more - just browse our archives.
Nick from ExtraMile Communications Ltd in Eccleshall, Staffordshire.
Need content? You may use this article on your website, or in your newsletter. The only requirement is inclusion of the following sentence: Article by Nick Evans of ExtraMile Communications Ltd - marketing with commitment.
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Sharing content is a powerful way to get your messages passed around the Twitterverse, LinkedIn, Youtube, Facebook or any other socially-enabled medium.
Are you writing a blog for your business - like I am with this one? What's your purpose in writing it? Mine is first of all to share some of the knowledge that my company has - we're nice like that! If I share our knowledge with you, it tells you a couple of things about ExtraMile Communications: firstly, it says that we know what we are talking about - if the topic is authoritative and and of interest to you, you'll take notice. Secondly, it says that we are confident in our content and are therefore willing to share it.
However, when I share content, such as this article, I am also expecting that some of our readers will share it themselves - check out the social bookmark icons at the bottom of this article. Their purpose is to allow you, the reader, to share this article with your community on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook etc. When you click the Share or Like icon for example, the title and topic of the article is put into a post that will come from you in your chosen social medium. You are sharing my content, because you think your colleagues and friends will find it useful. And, better still, it makes my article available to a wider audience that I would never have normally reached - it's the whole principle of social media.
It's worth noting that it's not just blog posts that people can share - you'll see those little social media icons everywhere you go nowadays. For instance, when ExtraMile sends mails for a client, those bookmarks are in the mails too. When someone clicks an icon, the whole mail is shared with that person's chosen community. Spreading the word - very, very powerful indeed.
So, when you write engaging, powerful, relevant content in an attractive way, people will share it. It's about being relevant, being found (in SEO terms) and being readable.
Nick from ExtraMile Communications Ltd in Eccleshall, Staffordshire.
Need content? You may use this article on your website, or in your newsletter. The only requirement is inclusion of the following sentence: Article by Nick Evans of ExtraMile Communications Ltd - marketing with commitment.
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If you have clients, prospects, distributors or suppliers in other countries, then the chances are that you are currently marketing to them in English. Why? It's simply very hard to do so in languages other than your own – unless you employ experts of course.
What makes it hard?
The first problem is the language barrier, obviously. If you don't speak Chinese, Korean or Hungarian and you don't know anyone who does, then you'll need to find a translator for each language, manage his or her work and then check it is OK.
Once the content is translated, of course, it needs to be matched up with your original marketing message in your html template – and that's where other problems arise. Translated languages are often longer than the original for a number of reasons – the translated text is not as "tight" as the original, well-crafted prose; the content contains some very long, compound words (German or Dutch for example) that break the layout; the language simply takes more words to say your message than the original English. Suddenly, your beautifully designed layout is shattered and has to be redone in each of the languages you have translated.
The more languages you do, the greater are the chances for errors. For example, if you are mailing to ten different countries, the chances are that your product or service availability in each country is not the same, or your promotions differ from one country to another, or your sales channel varies in certain countries. You must therefore take account of this and ensure that each variant mail accommodates those changes correctly and that you check the impact on images, links, content, footnotes and anything else that may be affected. It's almost become a completely separate campaign.
And there's more. Testing of your final mails needs to be detailed and meticulous – you are testing a language you don't understand, with variants you might forget, that targets a culture you don't know. Culture – is that a problem too? Yep. The ways that people say things and address each other, the conventions for currency format (does the Euro sign go before or after the amount?), the 'tone' of the language when it is translated (formal or informal, 'tu' or 'vous' for example), the idioms that English uses everyday but which mean nothing in translation, the differences in holidays (you don't want to send when no one is at work) and simply what people do and don't say (or do) in the target country: all things that you don't know but a local does.
The management, creation, translation, testing and sending of multilingual emails is a job for the experts. The topics above are just a taster of where things are tricky and may trip you up.
The certainty is however, that sending your marketing emails into China in English will have a good deal less impact than sending in Chinese ... but which of the many Chinese languages? Drat – another hurdle.
Nick from ExtraMile Communications Ltd in Eccleshall, Staffordshire.
Need content? You may use this article on your website, or in your newsletter. The only requirement is inclusion of the following sentence: Article by Nick Evans of ExtraMile Communications Ltd - marketing with commitment.
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Resizing images, is it necessary?
I'm going to start by answering the question - Yes. A thousand times, Yes!
I've seen a lot of emails recently with images that have obviously been resized in the HTML editor rather than an image editor. I'm sure it looks great in their editor and it will probably look fine on most email clients too as a size has been defined. However images really should be saved as the size you want them to be in your email and then added to your html.
The reason? Well when you resize a 4096 x 3072 pixel image to 256 x 192 pixels, using your image editing software, it generally reduces the file size (unless you have done something horribly wrong). This is a good thing.
When you take the same 4096 x 3072 image and "resize" it in your HTML editor it does not actually resize the image. It takes the full size image of goodness knows how many megabytes and forces it to fit into the dimensions you specify in the code. This is a bad thing because the full image needs to be downloaded before the recipient's machine can make it fit into the dimensions.
When these huge images are downloaded it increases your server load (or your ESP's server load). I'll use a real-world example for this, the largest image file-size I have seen recently in an email (for a local delicatessen) was 5.6MB - I took that image and resized it to the dimensions required in the email and the file size was 30kb. Therefore the resized image could be downloaded 187 times, compared to 1 download of the original. I made a few more tweaks to the image compression and got the file size to 9kb (without any obvious loss of quality), meaning the file could be downloaded 622 times compared to 1 download of the original.
Can you see why it matters now?
The next issue is that it can take a long time to load on your recipient’s machine. When, what looks like a small image, takes a long time to download it feels as if your email is broken or your servers are slow. It's not a great user experience. Whilst resizing in the HTML editor may make things easier for you it means your customers get a rubbish experience.
Can you see why it's worth the extra time now?
What about people on their smartphone (or mobile internet)? Think about them the next time you want to resize in your html editor. That 5.6MB image mentioned earlier is enough to download a couple of MP3s or stream a youtube video. Very few smartphone contracts now have 'unlimited' data and if they do there is usually a fair usage cap - imagine how annoyed your customers could be when they open up one of your emails and the 4 or 5 images you couldn't be bothered to resize suck up 20-25mb of their allowance.
Can you see why it’s important to resize your images externally now?
Then there is the potential that it may harm your deliverability. Some spam filters will detect that you are using a large image file and decide that you are untrustworthy, because in the past spammers have used large images to avoid spam filters. This means your mail could end up in the spam folder rather than the inbox simply because you didn’t resize your images.
Can you see that resizing your images can destroy a good email campaign now?
So are you still too lazy to resize your images externally rather than in the html editor, knowing it increases your server load, makes your email look broken, offers a dreadful recipient experience and could potentially harm your deliverability?
Don’t have an image editor on your machine? Or worried that it will cost too much to get one? Well there are lots of free downloadable alternatives varying in complexity. I would recommend Aviary which is an online image editor that can resize images amongst many other things.
Obviously at ExtraMile Communications we resize all images using an image editor before using them in an email for any client.
As a final example, today a global company of experts in email deliverability used by global brands - we hesitate to name them as they are much bigger than us! - sent an email with an image that was 2.6mb. We took the image and resized it to the size it was in the email, making it 37kb. We then tweaked the compression slightly and reduced the file size to 8kb with no discernible loss of quality, a reduction in file size of 99.7%
So even the experts get it wrong occasionally.
Rant over!
Ean from ExtraMile Communications Ltd in Eccleshall, Staffordshire.
Need content? You may use this article on your website, or in your newsletter. The only requirement is inclusion of the following sentence: Article by Ean Faragher of ExtraMile Communications Ltd - marketing with commitment.
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