Event report
Thank you very much to the faithful
This was our last event in
We have had some great feedback from this event so for anyone who missed it, please watch the videos and the slides and don’t forget to download Will's top 20 tips here Top_20_Email_marketing_Tips.pdf
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. 60% of users will open an email because they recognise the sender.
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. Subsequently people then try to work out what was wrong with the third email, even though it was actually the second email at fault.
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!
60% of business never even look at the results of their email campaigns.
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, be specific don’t try to be clever or quirky.
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.
19% of your email content is the most a users will ever read.
The landing page is absolutely key and should never be your home page, always link to a page with strong call-to-action and relevant/specific to the email content (55% of people make the mistake of linking their email to their home page.)
Frequency of sending
It all depends on the topic and your clients, but don’t send it if you haven’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.
Quarterly is about as infrequent as you can get away with.
People typically need to be exposed to your brand 6-7 times before they recognise it.
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.
10-20% CTR (click-through-rate) from “expressed consent” users.
1-2% CTR (Click-through-rate) on “implied consent” users.
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.
20-30% of all emails change every year, due to people moving job, changing names etc.
Spam
90% of all emails sent are classed as spam. Always try to run a spam test on your email before sending it, most email software has a built in spam-checking-feature.
It isn’t only about which words you use in your email, it is about how often you use them and the context they are used in.
Please post any questions about Email Marketing on the forum.
Slides
If you missed the May event in
Thank you to everyone who came along, and especially thank you the good number of new people at this event. Great with all the questions, and apologies for having to stop the session… Gavin will be back at our September event for another Q&A round!
Once Bjorn has convinced the poor pole ladies to give up the room, he moved on to talk about benchmarking your SEO efforts, and together with Gavin Walker from Optillion they did a big Q&A session.
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 as a result of benchmakring
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?
Gavin Walker says DMOZ listings can give you a high number of inbound links as other directories feed from it, so it is still is a factor to look out for in your SEO benchmark.
Is the geographical location of your hosting important?
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.
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.
_ 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.
Slides
"The Conversation - what has everyone been up to"
Written by Dorte Knights-BranchLocation: Cape Bar, Hockley, Nottingham
Date: Thursday 29th April, 2010
Thank you to everyone who came to this event, and thank you to everyone for their great participation in the conversation – we have had some good feedback from this evening and it is excellent that people really got talking! Particularly people have said they like to see examples of other businesses involved, so we will do our best to keep showing these – hence, do keep telling us what you are up to!
This was a “conversation” event and a bit of a “catch up session” showcasing what different businesses on the eBusiness Champion programme have been up to over the past 4 months.
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!
We also touched on how Google Analytics have flagged up that traffic is only coming into the homepage on some sites and visitors are not seeing the (more important) other product pages.
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. We had requests to run a PR copy writing workshop and we will be looking into this.
A couple of businesses are trying out Google Merchant, and Rob Gale was there to tell that he is already seeing sales from this. Rob also made the great suggestion of using a csv feed for your Google Merchant and to ask your suppliers for the details. Your suppliers typically already have all the product details and images in a database and it will save you hours of hard work!
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!
Lots of the people in Nottingham agreed that for smaller service type sites WordPress is proven really easy for them to manage and up-date.
Hall-fast is currently doing quite a big project on transferring their current e-commerce site to Magento and especially the task of structuring the data is taking up a lot of time – not a task to be underestimated, but we look forward to seeing the great outcome!
John Russell from C&R Enterprises is currently having a new bespoke site done and he had the great idea of asking the developer to set up an import retune so instead of typing in each item individually they will be able to import a spreadsheet of hundreds of items in one go – excellent thinking and good way to save time! Anyone else doing new e-commerce type sites should ask for this as well we think!
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….
Jonny Green mentioned that there is currently an opportunity for business in Nottingham to get a graduate for 6 months. It is a scheme running where the graduate will be paid by the scheme in order for them to gain some work experience and become more employable. Infero training (eBusinesss Champion) has already got one of these graduates who is currently doing a new website for them. If you have questions about this scheme please contact Steve Wakeling This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
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! We also had requests (again) for WordPress and Joomla workshops and PR copy writing workshops – we are looking into all options.
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
Location: Cape Bar, Hockley, Nottingham
Date: Thursday 25th March, 2010
The day after our March event in Nottingham, once again thank you everyone who turned up! Good turnout despite “competition” from other events going on at the same time. Some of you even managed to multi task and span two events in one evening, well done!
Following lots of questions from businesses on the programme about CMS, we had Paul Shaw from E2Z and Alistair Kent with Dave Southey from Tineke to help us demystify all the different options.
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.
Discussions
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.
