Suddenly the roads are empty, the Chelsea tractors have almost disappeared and the peace in households with children has evaporated into the hot English Summer air.

Yes, the schools are closed and kids have invaded every shopping mall in the country – you leave the office to grab a sandwich at your peril!

Well, it’s not that bad – not at least from a business point of view. Parents’ struggle to keep their children occupied over the holiday period is an opportunity for businesses to play their role.

If you have any products / services aimed at school-age children, now is best time to increase your marketing efforts.

Start with your website – fill it with useful offers. Think about partnerships with other similar businesses. Run regular email promotional offers. Either buy in or build your own email database – talk to your web hosting company to help you capture customer emails.

Your web hosting company may also be able to help you run Google adwords and search engine optimisation campaigns.

While some companies lament the onset of Summer holidays, there are others that relish the opportunity to up their game. Which one are you?

Email Marketing · UK web hosting · Web Hosting

According to a survey by eMarketer.com, 37% of online shoppers prefer receiving promotional offers by email. This is significantly greater than the more established direct mail channel (23%). And despite the near-universal use of texting, only 18% of online shoppers prefer this option.

Clearly, email should be the channel of choice for you to send promotional offers to your customers. If you are not exploiting it, you are losing out.

So, here are some tips for getting your email marketing started today.

Set up a regular promotional offer email

You can either set up a regular promotional email or send it out on an ad hoc basic – it all depends on the nature of your business. However, you don’t have to spend too much time on ‘designing’ the email – it’s more important to get the offer right. You could test different offers to a subset of your customers and then rollout the most effective one to the rest of your customer base.

Talk to your web hosting company

Before sending out any bulk emails, it is worth talking to your web hosting company first. Not only will it avoid any potential spamming issues, your web hosting company may also have the tools that allow you to manage the whole process.

Send out your promotional email today

Perhaps the most important advice we can offer is to test a promotional email – in fact, try it today. What do you have to lose?

Email Marketing · UK web hosting · Web Hosting

On the eve of the emergency Budget, the chancellor of the exchequer and his aides have been busy jumping from one news studio to another trying to prepare us for the ‘age of austerity’.

Speaking on the Andrew Marr Show, George Osborne was careful not to give away too much details but it was clear that our breakfast next Sunday would need to be a lot less lavish than it might have been in the past.

The list of tax rises and spending is long and is likely to include increases in capital gains tax, VAT and NIC and a freeze in public sector pay and recruitment. Some independent observers estimate the cuts to amount to some £85bn. What’s more, if these cuts don’t do the trick, the chancellor hinted at more to follow.

Given that we have borrowed £1 for every £4 we spend and that our budget deficit is the highest of the G20 leading economies, there is universal consensus that action is needed. However, there is considerable concern too amongst the small business sector that it is likely to suffer disproportionately.

Consequently, small businesses expect to cut their investment and marketing budgets to pay for some of the tax rises. However, while you may have to cut costs, you don’t want to damage your revenue. Making the right choice about where you spend your money is critical.

In fact, in challenging times, it is even more important that you choose your marketing channels carefully. Focus on the simple metric – return on investment (ROI).

And that means a focus on digital channels – your website, email marketing and social media. Talk to your web hosting company to discuss how you might get more out of your web presence and how you might exploit email marketing and social media.

In fact, not only does digital marketing cost less, it is much more effective – when managed well, you can expect significantly better ROI than many traditional channels.

So while the chancellor delivers the emergency Budget tomorrow, make sure you put in to place your digital strategy today.

Email Marketing · Social Media · Web Hosting

Email marketing is powerful. According to the Direct Marketing Association’s Digital Tracking survey around 85% of email recipients take some sort of positive action such as clicking through to the sender’s website.

In fact, given the success of email marketing, top retailers are now sending out, on average, 2.7 promotional emails per week – that’s a 13% increase on 2009. However, almost two-thirds of the people surveyed said that they find less than 10% of the emails they receive of any interest – that means a staggering 90% are not of interest. This is a lot of waste of effort on the part of the sender.

In previous blogs, we discussed some of the key factors to help you create compelling emails. Today, I want to look at the key elements to focus on in order to measure the success of your email marketing activity.

Fundamentally, there are five key metrics that your need to consider to help you forecast the likely success or otherwise of your email marketing campaigns:

• Delivered. This is simply an email that reaches its intended destination.
• Bounced. This is an email that does not reach its intended recipient. It may be that the email address is incorrect (hard bounce) or the server issue at the recipient end returns a message (soft bounce) that means that the sender’s server has to re-send the email at a later point in time.
• Opened. This is when the recipient opens an email – of course, this does not necessarily mean that the email is actually read!
• Clicked. This is the key – recipient actually clicking on a link within the email.
• Unsubscribed. This is where a recipient decides not to receive any further emails from you. (Always include this option in your email.)

Put simply, your aim should be to maximise ‘delivered’, ‘opened’ and ‘clicked’ and minimise ‘bounced’ and ‘unsubscribed’. Using an up-to-date and opted-in email list together with a relevant and compelling offer should help with both.

Of course, your standard email client such as Outlook doesn’t provide the tools you need to analyse your email marketing activity. What you need is a dedicated email broadcasting tool. There is a good chance that your web hosting company may be able to provide you a full solution. Failing that, search on Google for ‘email marketing software’ and you’ll be presented with a wide range of choice including free-to-use and paid-for options. Good luck!

Email Marketing · Web Hosting

Having endured one of the worst recessions of recent times, the UK economy sprouted some green shoots of recovery with the last two consecutive quarters registering positive growth, albeit only just at 0.4% and 0.2% respectively.

And now that we are starting to put the election behind us, what is the mood amongst the small business community about UK’s immediate economic prospects.

Well, not very good – it looks like that the small business community is suffering from post election blues.

According to a recent survey of its members by the Federation of Small Businesses, 54% of firms will not move forward with plans to expand. (In fact, 49% want another election in six months.)

It is expected then that marketing budgets will continue to be under considerable strain. As a web hosting company, we have seen more and more small businesses investing time and switching resource into the digital activities including new websites, email marketing and social media.

Most of these cost very little (apart from your time) and can produce disproportionately greater return on investment.

So, now is the time to get your online strategy right – re-vitalise your website, get your web hosting company to explain how you might build your email database and exploit email marketing and how you might go about improving your presence on search engines.

It’s clear that with our fiscal deficit there are going to be challenging times ahead. Your online presence could play a vital part in how your business performs over the next 12-18 months.

Email Marketing · Search engine optimisation · Social Media · Web Hosting

Email has now firmly replaced snail mail both a business communication tool as well as a social communication tool. I mean, when did you last put pen to paper to write a letter to a customer or a client, or auntie Sue for that matter?!

Over the last few years, direct mail too has been dramatically cut to be replaced with email marketing. However, while companies have spent money on securing great domain names and reliable web hosting for their websites, there still seems to be a scatter gun approach to email marketing. And this despite the one-to-one nature of email marketing.

To help you implement best practice in email marketing, here are our top 5 tips:

1. Target your audience with care

Whether you build your own email list or buy it from outside, make sure it’s ‘opted in’.  Anything else is unlikely to produce any results and, in fact, is likely to cause more damage to your business by being perceived as spam

2. Make sure content / offer is relevant

Relevancy is key. Whether it’s a newsletter or an offer led marketing message, ask yourself…is it relevant to my audience? If in doubt, change the content / message.

3. Make your call to action clear

Once you’ve sorted out the target audience and your offer, make sure that your call to action is clear – what do you want your audience to do? Is it to visit your website? Buy or try a product? Whatever the call to action, make it explicit.

4. Don’t bombard your audience

What’s the right frequency of contact with your audience? Daily, weekly, monthly? Build an understanding of your audience – in fact, ask how often they would like to hear from you. Too frequently and you’ll be regarded as spam. Too infrequent and you could lose impact

5. Make sure your email reaches its target

There is no point to a highly targeted email that never actually reaches its destination. If your web hosting company’s servers are black listed, your email would be marked as spam and is unlikely to reach its intended recipient. Ensure your web hosting company is white listed. Ask them about how they maintain their white listed status.

This is really a brief introduction to effective email marketing – we’ll pick this topic up again in the future. In the meantime, contact your web hosting company for more advice and hopefully some simple tools to help you with sending out bulk emails.

Domain · domain name · Email Marketing · Hosting · Web Hosting