Thank you very much to the
This was our last event at DMU in
We have had some great feedback from this event so for anyone who missed it, please watch the videos and the slides are also available.
Top things we took away from this event
Delivering trust it the most important element of successful email marketing.
People need to trust the sender, so consider if it will be more trustworthy coming from your name of from your company.
Deliver good relevant data so the receiver will start to trust that your emails are worth opening.
Newsletter email campaigns are often killed within 3 emails. Lots of effort goes into the first so and every likes it, nothing new to tell in the second email so the reader is disappointed. By the third email no one will open it and you will have a hard time turning this back around again.
Cost per lead
Typically the “cost per lead” is lower with email marketing compared to other print/off line marketing (about the same as the cost of search marketing), but this isn’t an excuse for “shooting” emails out blindly. Make sure you carefully segment your customers and ever only send them carefully targeted content.
Use email marketing to keep the cost of other activities down. In stead of doing a phone campaign to all your customers, first send out an email campaign and then only call up those who opened the email. Or only send those “hot leads” your printed brochure instead of spending £ on sending it to everyone.
Measuring the results
It is strongly recommended to use some kind of dedicated email software and not force feed your outlook account. A proper software solution will allow you to measure the results and help you build good templates.
There is no end of choice when it comes to packages, from the free MailChimp to £10.000 worth of Sage/Communigator solutions. Even big companies are using MailChimp and Campaign Monitor so email marketing is definitely accessible to everyone!
Look at what content got the most attention/click troughs. This is the content your customers are most interested in so focus on this content going forward and also use it on your website, in your printed materials, on blogs etc.
Look at who opened the emails, who clicked through, compared to previous campaign, what works what doesn’t – learn from your “mistakes”.
The content
Typically use shot “grabbing” text in the email to encourage people to click through. Long text won’t convert as well as short.
Make sure you have strong call to action in the email.
Split test on both the subject line and landing pages if you can. People only read the first 4 word of the subject line.
Don’t use images only, people just won’t see them as most email clients have image download turn off.
The first time a recipient opens your email it the time they are most likely to click on anything – so the content must grab they instantly when they first open it.
Frequency of sending
It all depends on the topic and your clients, but don’t send it if you havne;t got something good to go in it.
One a month is typical for a newsletter, but if you haven’t got anything new to say, then don’t send one.
If you are a motivational life coach sending out a “motivational word of the day” every morning might work.
Expressed consent vs. Implied consent
Expressed consent means a person ticked your box to say “yes, please send me your emails”. Implied consent might mean they gave you a business card at a networking event or perhaps they have bought from you previously but not actually knowingly signed up to your newsletters.
Consider the different mindset the two groups will be in when seeing your email. If they have requested it, they might be looking forward to it as they are already interested in what you do. If they don’t remember who you are or recognise why you are contacting them chances are they will hit delete, or even worse unsubscribe. 76% of “implied consent” recipients are annoyed by the emails – watch out.
Buying lists and cleansing data
Approach purchased lists with care. A big proportion of the emails are likely to no longer work, and they will all be “implied consent” and hence not eagerly expecting your email.
If you do buy lists, chose a reputable supplier with good quality data.
Keep in mind that
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type emails might not always be read by the same person.
Good idea to always give the recipient the option to update their details, someone else could now be doing the job and they may have very different interested and preferences.
Slides
Once again thank you to the
And we had food this time, bonus :o)
Bjorn Le Roux was our guest speaker talking about SEO benchmarking and he is of course one of the excellent trainers from the Axis Centre in
The point of SEO
Bjorn started out by explaining that the point of benchmarking your SEO efforts against your competition is to get a clear picture of why some sites are ranking better than yours. Based on this knowledge you know what to change in order to improve your position.
We looked at two sites from eBusiness Champions on the programme and compared with their competition.
The first thing is try to establish how fierce the competition is overall for the phrase you are looking at and then look at how well optimised the competing sites really are. You need some tools for this…
The tools available
There are a range of free tools available for benchmarking SEO and Bjorn showed some of the most popular ones:
Google operators and moderators (some of them)
allinanchor:search phrase inanchor:search phrase
allintitle:search phrase intitle:search phrase
allinurl:search phrase inurl:search phrase
Domain tools
- Look at the site age, when was it registered
- Look for any DMOZ, Yahoo listings etc
- Look at where the site is hosted, is it in the
- Shows some of the key search phrases used for your/the competitors sites.
- Will give you a bit of demographic info about your visitors (sex, age, time of visits)
Google External Keyword tool
Look for other long tail search phrases that you might be better off competing for.
The important factors to look for
We suggest you use a table similar to the one we used in the presentation which has some of the most important areas to look at. It is a good idea to create a table for each of your key phrases and compare against a couple of competitors.
Improving your position
When you have completed your benchmark table consider the following:
- Be realistic about what you can achieve against large established sites. It will all come down to time and £.
Would you rather have 0% of 60,000 searches or 40% of 2,000 searches? - Do you keyword research, make sure you aren’t missing good long tail opportunities. Target specific phrases.
- Try to get listed in the same industry relevant directories that the competitors are in. Ensure you get good deep-links, not just to your home page.
Commenting on forums and blogs and be a good way to build up in-bound links and raise your brand awareness. - Match your title, h1 and opening paragraph to the competition - are yours equally strong?
- Be on top of your stats, use both Google analytics and webmaster tools for gaining insight.
- Create a schedule for measuring your SEO efforts. Don’t make too many changes in one go or you won’t know exactly what caused the change in ranking position.
Other points and conclusions
We looked at two different examples and came to two very different conclusions.
www.dentaldesktop.co.uk vs. www.tabdental.co.uk
Yes, dentaldesktop has some work to do, but they are chasing an achievable goal and a couple of quite easy changes to make were identified. Their title, h1 and opening paragraph isn’t as strong as the competition. They need to try and get a good amount of more inbound links. And the are some coding issues worth addressing. But, with a bit of tweaking and a bit of time, this is a battle worth pursuing without having to spend lots of £.
www.giftwrappedandgorgeous.co.uk vs. www.notonthehighstreet.co.uk
unfortunately the conclusion wasn’t quite as straight forward for our second example. While we love the look and feel of the giftwrappedandgourgeous site it is facing so much competition from old established sites that have big resources behind them. We suggested they go and have a good look at the Google External keyword tool and identify some more specific and longer tail phrases to chase. The more generic “Gift ideas” phrases are possibly not really realistic for this business at this stage. This is a great example of how a “small fish” needs to be a bit more clever and think out-side the box in order to beat the “big fish”.
Is DMOZ important or not?
Bjorn suggested there is less importance to DMOZ these days. We had Gavin Walker attend our
Is the geographical location of your hosting important?
Bjorn advised that if you have a country specific domain name, for example .co.uk it will automatically be index by the
It you have a .com, .eu or similar you should set your geographic targeting in your web masters tools.
_ vs - (for example page_name.html vs. page-name.html)
We use to say that Google ignored _ in file names but they have changed this a couple of years ago, so today it doesn’t really matter what you use. It is more important to keep your file name keyword rich and to the point.
A couple of questions that came up in
How about all the new fancy domains like.tv, .co, .travel etc?
Gavin advises that once upon a time there was a rush to secure your domain in all available variations, but this is no longer the case. Also, don’t rush into buying the new ones until they are a bit more “tried and tested”.
Laura from Magnetic north has recently set up a .travel site and she actually feels it confuses some users as they as not use to this extension yet.
Another word on this topic, make sure your form validation will accept the new extensions, for example it typically won’t allow .travel as a website and email format.
Should you spend your £ on buying links or improving on-page?
Gavin suggest if budgets are limited you should first and foremost focus on getting your on-page stuff right first and go for the free inbound links. Don’t rely on buying cheap inbound links.
Is it a good idea to buy additional key word rich domains and redirect/link them to your main site.
Gavins advise is “no”, not worth it unless you plan on putting genuinely good and unique content on each site. He also added to watch out for putting too any sites of the same server and interlinking them too fiercely as it can start to look dodgy.
Slides
"The Conversation - what has everyone been up to"
Written by Dorte Knights-BranchLocation: DMU, Leicester
Date: Tuesday 30th March, 2010
Thank you to everyone who came to this event, once again a good turnout of
This was the first “conversation” event in
Particularly people say they liked seeing examples of real sites instead of just “talking theory” so we will do our best to keep showing the sites off as and when changes are made.
Ares covered were:
Traffic and conversion
We looked at some sites that have recently been re-launched, sites that are currently being re-developed and sites that are making some smaller changes to improve their search rankings and conversion rates.
Google Analytics
Lots of businesses have installed Google Analytics, and 29 businesses are currently sharing their data for benchmarking in monthly reports.
We looked at how a couple of sites have used Google Analytics to spot issues with people actually searching for perfect phrases and landing on the sites but then bouncing at 80-100% - how to respond to this!
Optimising for universal search
We showed a great success story of a business sending out a press release (after the Susan Hallam event) and getting 1000 visitors in a day as a result.
A couple of businesses are trying out Google Merchant, so we await the results.
Comment were made about optimising for images… Susan Hallam recommended this and we do think it is a great idea. However the feedback from business so far is that they are optimising their new images going forward but don’t feel they have the time to go back and try to change all their current images.
CMS
A good handful of business are in the process of having new sites done, some bespoke and others using Open Source, so if you are contemplating a new site there are lots of people to talk to!
We had a question about how you go about setting up and more details about the different available solutions – this is of course a massive question and the answer is it really needs to be judged on a case-by-case basis. If you have a specific case/question n mind please come and see us and we can help put you in contact with good people to talk to!
Current “buzz words” within the world of websites
We had a little look at what the big companies are current spending lots of money on and two big things are re-targeting and MVT-testing.
SMEs can actually do some MVT testing at home at no budget just by trying out different changes and measuring the effects. Especially if you are doing email marketing it is a good idea to do at least some basis A/B testing on opening rate for different subject lines.
Other comments….
Podcast came up and the general comments were positive and most has good experiences of using them, so could they work for your business?
Another suggestion was made to always release a transcript with any video as it is more likely to be usable for PR activities.
Requests were made for us to do some kind of video workshop and we are looking into the possibilities of this and will hopefully be able to offer this in the near future with help from DMU!
If you have any other requests for topics you would like us to cover, please get in touch This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
Slides from this event
CMS – all the facts you need to know!
Written by Dorte Knights-BranchLocation: DMU, Leicester
Date: Tuesday 30th March, 2010
Great turnout last night at De Montfort University in Leicester, thank you very much to everyone who came, despite the rain. Great to see both lots of familiar faces and some brand new businesses as well.
Following lots of questions from businesses on the programme about CMS, we had Paul Shaw from E2Z and Jonathan Green to help us demystify all the different options available.
Some of the highlights...
Some of the big questions are “What is CMS”, “who needs one?”, “what is the difference between a bespoke solution and Open Source” and “is Open Source really free”?
What is a CMS
It is a web site where you are able to update the content via a user-friendly front end without needing to know anything about html coding or other programming. It means you don’t need to pay a developer every time you need to make a change to you can keep your content and site fresh and up-to-date.
Bespoke solution
This means the site is built to match exactly your needs and you will be able to speck out exactly how you wish the site to function. This is excellent if you have a more specialised product/service or if you are trying to tie the web site into other existing parts of your business, for example into your customer data based, email marketing, feedback system, quote systems etc.
The draw back of these solutions may be cost and you also need to check up front if there are any issues with moving the site to a different supplier later on. In general if you go for a bespoke option, you need to make sure you ask for all the right things up front!
Open Source
This means the code is free for anyone to use and lots of different people develop new modules for it all the time.
The most common solutions are WordPress, Joomla, Drupal and Magento.
Wordpress: Hugely popular. Easy to use. Best for blog or very small brochure type site.
Joomla: Very popular. Perhaps not so easy for everyday people to use, but lots of scope for upscaling with plugins…
Drupal: Similar to Joomla, but perhaps more used in America than over here.
Squiz: New Open Source currently entering the UK. Free small site option with scope for large e-Commerce that is at a cost.
Magento: Example of full e-Commerce solution. Open Source yes, but you pay for certain extensions. Probably not able to implement your self.
Good side of Open Source it that it is either free or low coast if you can do it your self, but of course there will be a cost is you need a developer to implement the site for you.
The downside of Open Source is that is can be less flexible, in the sense that there may not be a module available that does exactly what you are trying to achieve. If you product/solution is quite specialised it can be hard to try and force it to fit a ready made system, and it can also be very difficult to integrate with existing systems.
Another typical comment about Open Source is that it can be more prone to hacking as everyone has access to the code, and there can also be compatibility issues old/new modules.
Typical CMS catches
No matter which CMS option you go for, here are some of the typical catches to look out for. Make sure the system will allow you to do the following (or make sure is it included in your price to the developer that he does them for you):
:: Installing the Google Analytics code
:: Installing Google + Bing Web masters tools code
:: You should be able to set Title tags, meta tags individually on every page. (If you have 4000 products it is great if it can automatically generate them for you, but you still need to be able to tweak them individually.)
:: You should be able to use and create the right semantics, for example have one h1 on each page, followed by h2, h3, use <ul>, <strong> etc
:: You should be able to add new pages and name them sensibly for SEO purposes.
:: You should always ensure that you own your code! Aim to have the ftp details for your site, as chances are you will need them one day.
Points to take away
There were some good questions and good points made at this event. One point is “don’t choose free, just because it is free”, choose something that is in line with your corporate branding and cam deliver what your business needs!
Bespoke is a great solution for anyone with a slightly different product or solution and excellent for tying the site into the rest of your business. Very flexible!
Think long term, a 3 page site might be ok for you today, but will the site still meet your requirements in a year or two? Make sure you know what you need the site to do.
A good way to keep content fresh and up-to-date is to involve more staff, get them to take responsibility and participate with updating. If the sales people are depending on the product specs being correct on the web site put them in charge of updating those pages etc.
