Archives – June, 2009
Email marketing is one of the most cost effective tools out there for small businesses.
Why use Email Marketing?
Well, it works. Actually, works is an understatement. Based on research conducted by the Direct Marketing Association, email marketing is predicted to return an incredible £25 for every pound spent in 2007. To put this in perspective, that’s more than double the average return for other forms of online marketing and more than 6 times the return from print catalogs.
Why does email marketing work?
- It’s cost effective – While the cost of actually designing your email creative can be comparable to direct mail, the big savings start when you consider there are no printing costs and you can get your message delivered for around 2p per recipient.
- It’s immediate – Email generates an immediate response, instead of waiting for a subscriber to visit your site you can get your message to them when it counts. The majority of your recipients will see your message in the first 24-48 hours.
- It’s relevant – Email makes it easy to segment your subscribers using a variety of criteria like demographics and past campaign behaviour (such as clicking a certain link). This way you can ensure your message goes to the individuals most likely to be interested in your offer.
- It’s completely measureable – More than any other form of marketing, email can provide actionable data on the results it generates. Keep track of who opened your email and when, what topics they were interested in, who forwarded it on to a friend, how many sales were generated and much more.
With the SMEketing Email Marketing Tool, we make the process of email marketing very simple while giving you the most advanced features available from any email marketing system.
The SMEketing Email Marketing tool has these features and benefits:
- Personalization: Make it personal by inserting your subscribers name or the last product they purchased.
- Forward to a friend: Let your recipients spread the word virally and track the results.
- Only pay when you send: Simple pricing that means you only pay when you send, no monthly or hidden fees.
- Send at any time: Full control over when your recipients will receive your campaigns.
- Free campaign archive: Add a line of code to your website for a full archive that automatically updates.
- Powerful reports: Track the opens, clicks, forwards, unsubscribes, bounces and more.
- No ugly logos or links: We never insert our own logo or links.
- Top notch deliverability: Authentication, relationships with ISP’s and more ensure your emails are delivered.
Get in touch if you want your business to start reaping the benefits of high quality email marketing campaigns!
June 26, 2009
I’ve been very busy this week – visiting clients and prospects throught the South of England. I’ve been to Guildford, Portsmouth, Southampton and Eastleigh! So I’ve not had a chance to write a proper blog post. The aim of this blog is to provide educational content, to help small businesses understand the various marketing strategies they can use to help make their small business a success.
During my visits to clients and prospects this week, the importance of educating oneself has being hugely reinforced. Unfortunately, more than one person I’ve spoken to this week has told me about an unfortunate experience when outsourcing a marketing function to an marketing agency or consultant (not SMEketing though!!!). This is why it’s so important to educate yourself in the basics of what you want to outsource. If you want to employ a marketing agency or a marketing consultant to manage your search engine optimisation (SEO), Google Adword (PPC), or design a website, you must educate yourself on the foundation prinicples of these marketing activities. Only then are you in a position where you can question the marketing agency; for example, if you don’t know what is involved in creating and managing a small business website, how do you know if you’re being spun a yarn?
Another example is SEO; just type “SEO basics” into Google and millions of entries come up. Even 30 minutes spent browsing these articles is time well spent. That way, when you talk to your marketing agency, you will understand the jargon (although a good agency will not try to confuse you by using terms and jargon that you won’t understand). You’ll also know if the agency or marketing consultant is implementing unethical tactics – something which is vitally important, especially when dealing with SEO.
So this is the lesson for the week – educate, educate, educate. I’m not suggesting you go out and buy loads of books on various marketing strategies or spend hours crawling the internet for information. But by arming yourself with a basic level of knowledge, when you’re talking to an ‘expert’, you’ll be in a better position to decide if they are really an ‘expert’ at all. Outsourcing marketing activies can can be a vital part of your small business strategy, but it can become very expensive if you’re dealing with an agency or consultant who is willing to take your money and run because you don’t know better!
June 19, 2009
This week’s blog topic is all about O2 and the new iPhone 3G S (current model is iPhone 3G, new model 3G S).
Apple unveiled the new iPhone 3G S at yesterday’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in San Francisco. Rumors of a new iPhone have been whirling around for months and months, so this came as no surprise. As detailed on the Apple website, the new features of the handset are:
- 2x Faster: The fastest iPhone ever. Load web pages, launch apps and more – faster
- Built in video camera: Shoot video, then edit it right on your phone
- Voice control: Use your voice to place a call or play music
- Compass: Let iPhone 3G S point you in the right direction
- Spotlight Search: Search across your iPhone from one place
- Messages: Send text, photos, videos and more
For those of us in the UK, the Carphone Warehouse and O2 will be supplying the phone to consumers from the 19th June 2009. However – anyone who already has an iPhone 3G (like myself) will face a huge charge if we want to upgrade.
There is limited information on the new iPhone 3G S on O2’s homepage; all current communication on the deployment of the new iPhone 3G S has come from their official O2 Twitter feed. From this, they announced that existing customers will have to buy themselves out of their existing contract, then purchase the new iPhone 3G S on a new contract. This is unlike the time of the previous iPhone 3G launch, where in order to make up for the disappointing performance of the first-generation iPhone, O2 allowed customers to break from their existing contract and upgrade for free.
For anyone who has a current iPhone 3G, the minimum their contract can have left is 6 months (for those who bought the iPhone 3G on the day of release, anyone else will have even longer). On a mid-sized contract of £35 a month, this equates to more than a £200 charge. Now many of you may think that this is pretty fair – why should people on an iPhone 3G contract get out of it, just because a new phone has been launched. And in a way you’re right – if I had a Nokia and Nokia released a new phone (which they do often), I would be laughed out of O2 if I demanded to be released from my contract just because I wanted the new version of my existing Nokia phone.
So why are O2 not repeating this offer of getting out of your contract for free – it’s because they know that they’ve got money coming in regardless. By forcing people with the current iPhone 3G to sit out their existing contract, they get a steady £35 (or whatever) a month from them. They can they can then provide new customers with the new iPhone 3G S, so their new stock of iPhone 3G S go on new customers, rather than existing ones. The iPhone is exclusive to O2 so we don’t have a choice. O2 know that even if they make current customers really, really angry – it’s tough. We can’t exactly take our business elsewhere.
But the problem here is that the majority of iPhone users are (or were) fiercely loyal to the iPhone – these are the people you saw on the news queuing up overnight to make sure they got their mitts on a new iPhone 3G on the day of release. And why did they do that?? Because O2 had allowed them to get out of their existing contract with the first-generation iPhone and just pay the money for the new phone alone. These people made the iPhone 3G (and in turn O2) a huge success. These are the people who blog about it, tweet about it and convince their friends that they can’t possibly live without one! But do you think these same people will be queuing round the block in the rain if they have to pay £200+ to get out of their contract, plus the £274.23 to buy the new phone?? We’re in a recession, and even the most avid of iPhone fans are unlikely to be willing to drop that amount of cash just for the prestige of having the latest iPhone (the new features really aren’t worth that much money, and anyone on with an iPhone 3G can get a software upgrade free anyway). And anyone who doesn’t already have an iPhone is unlikely to be mad enough about them to queue like that.
Another problem for O2 is that as well as the rumours of a new iPhone launch, there have also been rumours that other networks will soon be allowed to sell the iPhone. If this happens, O2 will soon find that all these unhappy iPhone 3G customer may well up sticks and leave to a provider that will be more competitive and who treat their customer with a bit more love and care. So by angering their existing iPhone 3G customers, O2 are taking a big risk.
So, watch the news on 19th June – will people be queuing outside (hopefully not in the rain – come on British summer!!) all night long to get their hands on the latest release? I doubt it – and if they are they’re probably actors/O2 employees etc, who’ve been paid to do it! I can just see the new launch being a flop – because O2 are alienating the people they need to make it a success.
The moral of this story? Just because you may have your customers held over a barrel, it doesn’t excuse you treating them badly. This is a lesson that can be applied to all businesses – large and small. If you’re a small business providing a service that no-one else does, or if you’ve got customers locked into a contract – it shouldn’t affect the way you treat them. Never assume that you can ignore them or give them a second rate service just because they have no choice. Customers are king as far as small businesses are concerned and you should treat every single one like gold-dust!
June 9, 2009
SEO (or Search Engine Optimisation) is defined by Wikipedia as: “the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” (”organic” or “algorithmic”) search results”.
SEO is something that can be done by yourself – up to a point. The major search engines are constantly changing and updating, and as a result the methods employed to boost website rank in those search engines also change and update. At SMEketing we can offer the majority of small business owners the SEO service they need to boost their website rankings.
However, if SEO is something you choose to manage in-house, here are a few of the most common mistakes that are made which can be easily fixed or avoided altogether.
- Making your site uncrawalable – The most common mistake is developing a website that is completelyFlash based. Search engines need to be able to read text on your site to know what it is you do. Other ways to make it difficult for the engines to index your site’s pages include building an all-AJAX site, having an incorrect robots.txt file or having session IDs.
- Poor design & usability – This can make it much more difficult to get inbound links from other sites. It may also reduce your conversion rates and if your site architecture is full of broken links it makes it very difficult for users and search engines to read.
- Poor URL structure – Dynamic URLs in a database driven site are not very search-engine friendly and are confusing for users. By manually changing your URL structure you make it easier for the search engines to index deep pages and you may get more quality long tail traffic from searchers.
- Submitting your site’s URL to the search engines – This is a waste of time. Do not ever pay anyone for a search engine submission service. The search engines will find your site, either without assistance.
- 302 redirect rather than 301 – A 302 tells the search engine robot that the page has been moved temporarilyto a new location, while a 301 redirect indicates a permanent move. With a 302 redirect, you will lose all the value from the links directed to the old page.
- Duplicate content – Only post original content on your site! Rewrite pages if they sound too similar. It does not pay to be lazy on this point!!!
- Same meta description on each page – If you are using the same words to describe each page, you are both misrepresenting your web pages and duplicating content on your site. Each meta description should be unique and relevant to the content on that page.
- Overstuffing keywords into content / meta tags / image alt tags – Do not spam your own website by overstuffing keywords, especially into your web copy as it becomes unreadable and it is not user friendly. This is a very ‘black hat’ SEO technique, and you may find your site banned from Google if you employ this strategy.
- Mismanaging links – Ensure that keywords are allocated in a logical manner across your site when developing your link building strategy.
- Do not target overambitious general keywords – ‘finance’, ‘lawyer’ etc – these types of phrases are too general for most websites to ever rank for on the first page of the search engines. There are only 10 positions; please be realistic! There are a lot of big players in the marketplace – don’t try to compete with B&Q for the search term DIY – you will waste a lot of time and money, and you will never win! Instead focus on the long tail searches.
So I hope this has given you an indication of some of the strategies and techniques you should avoid. Google and the other search engines are very clever beasts – don’t try to outsmart them. If you think that the SEO strategy you’ve been advised to employ sounds a little bit like cheating, then it’s probably something you should avoid!
If you have any questions regarding SEO - leave a comment, or send us an email at info@SMEketing.com, one of our SMEketers will be gladly you help you out!
June 2, 2009
