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5 Email Marketing Tips for Christmas
Give Your Website a Health Check
Using Video to Increase Conversions
Search Optimisation Tips for New Websites
Power Up Your Website Images
5 Email Marketing Tips for Christmas
As we enter into the busy Christmas season, online retailers are looking for ways to attract the millions of shoppers who are looking for good deals on gifts and holiday goodies. If you are looking for an effective advertising method this holiday season, then email marketing, which leads both search engine and direct mail campaigns in return on investment, is a powerful tool in your marketing arsenal. Here are some tips on how to create an effective email marketing campaign this Christmas.
Make the Most of Email Marketing During the Christmas Marketing Season
1. Create a Design that Stands Out from the Crowd
The holiday season is a time to be creative with your email marketing design. People are in a good mood, and they're looking to have some fun with your emails. This gives you the opportunity to show how your business is different from all of your competitors. Just be sure that your final design is focused on your promotion and that it doesn't set off spam filters. If you're uncertain about your final design, it's worth the extra costs to call in professional assistance.
2. Spread the Christmas Cheer with Holiday Deals
One of the reasons why people do their holiday shopping online is that they want to find the best deals possible. Help your readers feel like they are saving a lot of money by offering seasonal specials like free shipping or a rebate with a large purchase.
3. Consider a Microsite
Email marketing campaigns perform best when the look and feel of the email match those of the page where the reader lands after clicking a link. To do this in a fun and creative way, consider making a special Christmas subsection of your website where your holiday deals are emphasised. You could also include other holiday specials such as Christmas games, gift lists, and more.
4. Use Clever Copy
The Christmas season is especially competitive, so use punchy, evocative ad copy to help set your company apart from the other businesses out there. Make sure you really emphasise the holiday mood that you have created with your design and your microsite.
5. Try Viral Pass-Along Activities
If you can convince your readers to tell their friends about your offers, you can multiply the reach of your email marketing campaign. Urge your readers to spread the word by offering incentives like discounts if a referred friend makes a purchase, Christmas greeting cards (with links back to your specials), or simply by offering such a great deal that they won't be able to wait to tell their friends about it.
Combining the most effective marketing method available with the busiest shopping time of the year can result in sky-high profits for your business, if your marketing campaigns are well designed. Even if you need to hire professional help to create the emails and the holiday microsite, the returns can make the extra time and money well worth the investment. For a no-obligation consultation, call 01491 614121.
Give Your Website a Health Check
With a forecast of £14 billion being spent in online shopping on the run up to Christmas (Webuser), it’s more important than ever to ensure that there are no weaknesses that could cause you to lose sales. Here are some tips on how to review your site and ensure that it is still tuned-up and delivering peak performance.
How to Ensure You Maximise Your Christmas Profits
Re-evaluate Your Website Goals
Your company created your website for a reason. Perhaps you wanted to leverage your website to drive more leads or to increase brand awareness. However, businesses change over time, and perhaps your goals have as well. This is the perfect time to evaluate how well your website is achieving your goals, and whether it needs a change of focus.
- Make Use of Your Analysis Tools
In order to tell how your website is performing and where it needs to improve, you need to be able to see how people are interacting with it by tracking your visitor statistics and analysing the results. If you are not doing this, or if you are not getting useful information from your statistics, then you should implement new analysis tools before the holiday rush.
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- Test, Tweak, and Repeat
No matter how great your website is, there is room for improvement. However, change can be risky – even a small change can irritate visitors. To make sure your website is ready to convert visitors to sales, measure how many of your site visitors are fulfilling your website goals, make a few changes, measure again, and compare the results. By doing this now and throughout the year, you will be sure that you're primed and ready for your Christmas shoppers.
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- Put Your Navigation to the Test
Driving visitors to your website won't have an effect on your business unless you keep them moving until they finally end up where you want them – buying a product, subscribing to your newsletter, etc. Do you have paths defined for your visitors to follow? Do you make it easy to find information? If your site isn't simple to navigate, you'll lose a huge number of potential customers.
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- Build Relationships, Build Ranking
Once you have your website ready to convert visitors to customers, it's time to focus on bringing the visitors to your door. A great way to do this is through an ongoing effort to build inbound links from related websites. Links not only drive traffic directly, but they also increase your visibility with the search engines, making them doubly worth the time. Contacting sites directly and creating a large amount of link-worthy content are two ways to attract high-quality inbound links.
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By following these five steps you can ensure that your website is primed and ready to bring in the maximum profits during the busy Christmas season and onwards. If you would like a no-obligation consultation to give your website a health check, please call 01491 614121.
Using Video to Increase Conversions
Until recently, television ad prices were prohibitively expensive, which meant that most small-to-medium enterprises had no ability to tap into the persuasive power of video advertising.
Today, however, online videos are not only affordable but also extremely popular, with 9 billion video streams viewed online in July 2007 -- a number continues to grow. Here are five tips on how to design an effective video campaign so that you can put the power of video to work for you.
How to Create a Video Campaign that Sets Your Company Apart
1. Define Your Goals
Before you invest in a video advertising campaign, you should take the time to clearly define your goals and the metrics that you’ll use to know when you’ve achieved them. Are you looking to drive more traffic to your website, to increase brand-name recognition, or to drive sales for a particular product? Setting measurable goals is a vital step of a successful ad campaign.
2. Create a Tagline
In order to get the most out of your video advertisement, you need to create a short, catchy phrase that your viewers will come to associate with your company. Think of Nike’s “Just Do It” or American Express’ “Don’t Leave Home Without It.” Your tagline should be easy to remember and should encapsulate an important point about your business. If you can combine your tagline with music to create a memorable jingle, it will work even better.
3. Come Up with an Angle
Before you start filming, you should brainstorm different angles to use when informing your viewers about your products and services. It helps to start by analysing your target audience. Will you be primarily addressing businesses, kids, older women, men in their twenties? What emotions do you want to evoke in your viewers?
4. Tell a Story
Now that you have a solid idea of what you want to accomplish, it’s time to tie everything together into a moving story. People respond well to stories, remembering the message long after the commercial is over. Your video campaign should use the narrative of the story to speak to your viewers’ interests, address their needs, and persuade them that your company’s products can solve their problems.
5. Hook Your Viewers
If you’re writing a book, the first sentence is the most important of all. If it hooks the reader’s interest, they’re going to be eager to find out what happens next. The same thing holds true with video advertisements – if the first few seconds capture the viewers’ attention, they’re much more likely to pay attention to the entire ad, helping you get your message across.
Harnessing the power of video for your advertising campaigns can leave a lasting impression on your audience while setting your company apart from your competitors. This is an exciting time to take advantage of the low-cost video advertising opportunities that are available online. If you would like a develop a video campaign for your website, call 01491 614121 for a no-obligation consultation.
Search engine traffic can make the difference between earning good money with your website and complete failure. However, new websites face some unique challenges when it comes to ranking well in the search engines. Here are some of the top SEO challenges for new websites, and how to overcome them.
The Top SEO Challenges Facing New Websites – And How to Beat Them
- Getting Indexed in the Search Engines
New websites don't receive any traffic from the search engines until the website content has been added to the search engine indexes. It's important to get indexed as quickly as possible so that searchers can find you and because search engines trust older sites more than newer ones.
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What to Do: Visit the major search engines as soon as possible after your website is online and follow their submission instructions to the letter. Your website does not need to be fully complete, but make sure you have some solid content online to index and that you have no broken links or "under construction" placeholders remaining.
What to Avoid: Don't deluge the search engines with repeat submissions - repeat submissions could get your site banned. Don't pay so-called submission services that offer to submit you thousands of times for a fee, there aren't that many search engines worth submitting to.
- Handling the New Site Penalty
Although it's not official, there is speculation that Google uses a "sandbox" filter to screen new websites. The theory is that the sandbox helps Google avoid having their rankings taken over by fly-by-night spammers. New sites appear more slowly for competitive search terms, sometimes taking a year or more to be ranked.
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What to Do: Be sure that you are following Google best practices carefully (more information about best practices can be found on the Google website). Build your content at a steady pace and concentrate on good SEO practices. Target niche search phrases, since new websites often appear in the results for less competitive terms.
What to Avoid: Don't get desperate. Your site will be removed from the sandbox in time, and following good SEO practices will help to position your information well when the sandbox filter is removed. Plus, you will still be bringing in traffic from other search engines; only Google uses the sandbox filter.
- Attracting Inbound Links with No Reputation
Inbound links are an important part of getting ranked well in the search engines, yet it's difficult to get links you when no one knows you exist yet.
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What to Do: Contact related websites and suggest linking to relevant articles. Promote your site by using signature links in blogs forums, by writing content for article directories, and by using social media to encourage linking to your site.
What to Avoid: Put a heavy emphasis on link quality over quantity. Make sure that your site content is truly relevant and helpful before asking for a link. Don't just purchase links; Google devalues paid links, especially from new websites.
It is a good idea to use an SEO expert as soon as possible when planning a new website. SEO guidance can help you start receiving valuable search engine traffic as quickly as possible after your site goes online, and can help prevent you from making costly mistakes. Call 01491 614121 for a no-obligation consultation.
Power Up Your Website Images
One of the drawbacks of ecommerce is that your customers cannot actually see and feel your products before they buy. One way to give your site visitors an experience that is as close to in-store shopping as possible is to use images effectively. Putting images to good use can lead to conversion rates that are double as high or higher. Here are five tips that can help you use images to close more sales.
How to Use Website Images to Increase Sales and Profits
1. Quality Images Indicate a Quality Website
Your website pictures are not a place to save money, at least not if that means displaying low-quality images. The images you use should be impressive, professional quality shots. Nothing indicates an amateur site more surely than grainy, blurry, outdated, or difficult-to-see pictures.
2. Let Your Images Give a Feel for the Products
The goal of your images should be to help your customers be sure that they are getting the product they want, so really let your visitors see what they will be buying. Let your visitors enlarge the pictures, and see the products from different angles and in different colors. The right angle could be just the thing that closes a sale.
3. Use Images for Illustration, Not Decoration
Don't fall into the common trap of using an image because it looks good – make sure that it closely matches the text that accompanies it. It's better to have no image than to show something that isn't accurate to the specific product that your text discusses.
4. Focus on the Product
It's easy to create a beautiful, compelling image, and yet end up with an illustration that's useless to your shoppers. Your site visitors don't care much about the model or the background, they want to see your product. Make sure that your images focus on what you're trying to sell first, other considerations are secondary.
5. Don't Let Your Images Slow You Down
If your visitors have to wait too long for your site to load, they'll probably make their purchases elsewhere, and one of the main reasons for a slow website is oversized pictures. Make sure you use the smallest images possible by:
- Using thumbnail images that link to larger versions whenever appropriate.
- Using links to show shoppers different colors and angles, instead of displaying them all at once.
- Need a smaller picture? Decrease the image size in a graphics program, not just by changing the display size in your website code or in a WYSIWYG website builder.
- Use the appropriate file format for your images. If you aren't familiar with optimising images, ask a professional for help.
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When it comes to online sales, images can really do the work of a thousand words, at least if you use them appropriately. By following these easy tips, you can persuade more shoppers to buy your product and dramatically increase your website sales. Call 01491 614121 for a no-obligation consultation to review the effectiveness of your use of images.
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