3 common email marketing mistakes

by on 17. Dec, 2010 in Business Promotion, Marketing

Email marketing is a tricky thing! To start with most people already get too much email, so you’ve got to contend with the fact that there’s a good chance people will just delete your email without even reading it. The occasional person may skim through the email and check out the highlights, but I’m guessing that most people delete most promotional type email they receive with in 3 seconds of opening or previewing it. Try it the next time you’re checking your inbox, how long do you give email newsletters before you hit that delete button?

Okay, so given that you’re email has a fairly small chance of being read, you know from the outset that you’re gonna have to do some work to make your email interesting enough to get a look in. With that in mind, I thought I’d highlight some of the most common mistakes I see people making when it comes to sending email newsletters.

1.) Send out an email with one big image as the content of the newsletter

Okay, this is a big one and probably my one of my primary pet hates. Firstly, most email engines that check for spam see this is a big sign “I’m a spam email” is what it says to them, so if you do this there’s a better than average chance that you won’t even get to the point where someone looks at your email. It’ll just go straight to their junk mail box.

Secondly, even if you email does get to their inbox, if you’ve just got one big image in the email, there’s a good chance that it won’t fit on a smaller screen. Why? Because there are so many different size monitors out there, each displaying one of a myriad of available resolutions, that you really have no idea what size screen will be used to display your email newsletter (the same goes for your website design by the way). If you just chuck a big image in there, after designing the graphic using the fat ass monitor  on your desk, it doesn’t matter how good it looks, it’s gonna seem kinda stupid to the business user toting his 13″ notebook between meeetings in the city. Or the iPhone user browsing through email on his smart phone. The solution to this (as with web design) is to design for the lowest common denominator. In other words, design for the smaller size screens and then the worst that can generally happen is you have too much unused space when displayed on a larger screen.

2.) Assume that your readers are just dying to get an email from you

Hmm, given the intro spiel I just gave you, we already know that this is quite unlikely. Yes, maybe your favourite customer out there does really look forward to receiving your email newsletter, but even that’s a stretch. Getting an email is nothing like talking to someone on the phone or seeing them in person. It’s purely a business transaction. “What’s in it for me?” is all your reader cares about. If you pack your email with value by providing offers or information that is relevant to your target audience, chances are it might actually get read. If you just waffle on for a couple of paragraphs about how great your new website is and then maybe have a couple of sentences about a shitty 10% discount you’re offering on some product or service, chances are your email is going straight to the bin (in about 2 seconds). In which case you have to wonder, “why did I bother writing it anyway”.

Now, I’m not saying your whole email should be about selling your users a product or service. As a general rule, you should have some free content that is likely to be valuable to your users. Otherwise they may be turned off by the hard sell. But on the other hand if you don’t have at least one or two offers in the email, why did you send it in the first place? Okay, it’s great to remind your customers that you’re around and want their business. But if you’re gonna go to the trouble of designing and sending a newsletter, you’d want to have some sort of offer in there that encourages people to actually pick up the phone or contact you (and pay you some money), right?!

3.) Forget all about how your email newsletter relates to your website

Okay for some of you who don’t have a website this may not seem relevant, but I’m guessing most of you do. If you don’t, replace the word “website” with “business branding”. What I’m talking about here is consistency. When you design or create your email newsletter, make sure the look and feel matches that of your website and business branding materials. In other words, don’t use an entirely different logo, or colour scheme to what you have on your website. It destroys brand recognition and any good work you’ve already done to make your website, business cards, letterhead and signage look the same. Make sure your email newsletters match your brand.

This goes for quality levels too. You probably put a fair bit of work into getting your website right and making sure you have quality content on there. So don’t scrimp and save when it comes to sending out your email newsletter. If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing right!

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Does your business have a Google Places listing?

by on 25. Nov, 2010 in Business Promotion, Marketing, SEO

There’s been some interesting changes recently in the way that Google lists and organises search results. If you haven’t noticed try doing a quick search for a service in your town or city. (i.e. Brisbane photographer for example). I’ve just performed that search from my desk on the Northside of Brisbane. The first listing I see in the results is a photographer that is located about 10kms away. That’s pretty close to where I’m sitting right now. Google has been able to roughly determine where I’m searching from and provide me a listing that is relevant to me based on my location as well as my search query. The next few listings are all Brisbane based photographers as well, some are further away from me than others, but they all service this area and match my search query.

On the right hand side of the listings there’s a map that shows the place holders for each of the results that Google has given me and they’re all marked by a little red place holder with a letter corresponding to the order in which the results were presented. This allows me to see quite quickly, how close any of the businesses are to me and choose one based, not only on the text and images that I see in the results, but based on their location.

If you look at the results you’ll notice that each includes an address and a telephone number, which makes it very easy for me to pick up the phone and call one if I like what I see. That’s great you say, but where is all this information coming from? Well, it’s coming from the Google Places listing that each of these businesses have set up. And the good news is that you can do this too, for free once you’ve set up a Google account.

“But wait a minute”, I hear you ask, “I’ve already got this information on my website, isn’t that enough?”. Well, not anymore I’m afraid. Google now wants you to have a Google Places listing and they are using this information (matched against the information on your website – if you have one) to verify your business and match your location to the location of people searching for your goods or services.

What does that mean for you. Well, it means that you should definitely have a Google Places listing and you should make sure you invest a bit of time and energy into getting your listing right. By right, I mean, making sure that it’s completely populated with your details, what it is you do, even things like images and videos as well. Why do you need to add images and videos? Well, because Google’s ranking algorithm appears to boost the ranking of those with more complete listings.

Another critical part of finalising your Google Places listing is getting reviews on your listing. You’ll notice that in some searches, businesses will be listed with star ratings (4 out of 5 stars for example). The ratings are given to the business by their customers. Google then displays the rating for others to see and use in the process of making a decision about whether or not to contact you.

At present Google are saying that they’re not going to factor user reviews/ratings into their search algorithm, but you can be fairly certain it will affect the way people make decisions about who to call, when they need a service, so this makes it crucially important that you encourage your customers to provide a review on your Google Places listing.

“Okay, so what if I’m too busy to do it myself?” Well, that’s where we come in. We will happily help you setup your Google Places listing for a flat fee of $195. This includes writing your business description for you, with some input from you of course. Why not contact us today to make sure that you’re not missing out on Google Traffic by not having a complete Google Places listing.

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How to capitalise on web traffic

by on 22. Nov, 2010 in Marketing, Sales conversion

The other day a client of mine called me to discuss their web stats. An email report had come through showing that they were getting a large number of visitors to their website. They’d be doing heaps of work on the lead generation side of things and had built up an impressive email list which was helping to drive a ton of traffic to their website. The question was “If we’re really getting all these visitors, how do we turn them into paying clients?”.

I spent a bit of time putting together an email discussing some of the key points that I felt we should work on to help them turn the traffic they’re getting into dollars and I thought I’d share some of that info for others that might find it useful:

In web marketing speak, the first page that your visitors see when they come to your site, after following a link from your newsletter or clicking on a Google Ad (when using Pay Per Click advertising for example) is called the landing page. Optimising the landing page is the process of re-working that first page, to ensure that you have a.) clearly stated offer designed to capture the user’s attention and ultimately dollars and b.) give the user a sales pitch that will ensure they follow through and do something about your offer. While there’s a lot more that can be said about the landing page, the main reason I bring it up, is I think it’s important to i.) identify the landing page for any particular email or campaign and ii.) make sure the landing page is doing what you want it to do (ideally focusing on one or two particular offers for the people you are targeting in your campaign). Ultimately if you consider that about half of your traffic (this will vary from customer to customer) are getting to your website by typing in your URL directly, this means that your homepage will be a landing page a lot of the time and as such it should be optimised for one or two particular offers.

Okay, there’s another principle that has been drilled in to me through a series of marketing gurus and that is the idea that to get people to spend money with you (particularly the first time), you have to build up a level of trust in the value that you will provide for their money. To build up that trust, aim to provide a significant amount of free, highly valuable information in the form of short courses, email newsletters (packed with useful information on focusing on a specific area/niche, etc…), videos, etc… The idea is that if people find that you are willing to give them high quality information (in considerable quantities) free of charge, when you do ask them to part with their hard earned for a course or product (particularly an informational one), they figure “Wow, if I got so much good value out of the free course, there’s got to be heaps more value in this one that I’m going to pay x dollars for”.

This brings us to the subject of pricing. The biggest challenge you face with a new customer is getting them to spend money the first time. To that end, there’s a fair bit of conjecture about how much to charge for your entry level product. A theory that makes sense to me and seems to fit with my own pattern of purchasing online, is that it’s often best to start by offering a relatively low value product to a new customer initially. By low value, I don’t mean, low in content value, I mean low dollar cost. In terms of an informational product, there seems to be a sort of ceiling at which people are generally comfortable (some reckon this is around the $300USD mark). Personally, I think it’s lower than that, though this may depend on your target audience and may change depending on the financial mood in the country/region or even world (i.e. the GFC may have brought it down some). I would recommend the low value product be something in the $30-$100 range. A figure small enough that it’s kind of a no brainer (i.e. an amount you’d spend on a nice meal without hesitation). Your goal with this low cost product is to pack so much information  (relevant to the target audience you’re focused on) that they think “Wow, that was great value!”. If you can achieve that, next time you ask them to pay for a product, it won’t matter so much that you’re now asking for $250 or even $500. They trust you to provide great value for money and are comfortable spending the dollars to get that value.

This is stuff I’ve picked up from a bunch of useful sources online. Places like the Web Marketing Today email newsletter (from Wilson Web) which you can subscribe to for free. There’s heaps more out there, but sometimes it can be handy to get the condensed version and that’s what I have provided for you above. Feel free to contact me if you have questions on any of this.

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When and how to use social media to promote your business

by on 15. Nov, 2010 in Business Promotion, Marketing

Something you see on a lot of websites these days is a little set of icons that link to Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, etc… It’s become all the rage to put up a link on your website to every different type of social media website that you use to give your visitors a chance to interact with you. While this can be a nice idea, in many cases I think the idea has been taken to the extreme and is becoming a bit of a cliche. Done the wrong way it can even make your business look bad.

Now I’m quite happy to admit that I have and do recommended to some clients that they use social media to promote their businesses. I even use Twitter myself in conjunction with my website. But clearly this doesn’t work for everyone, so when and how you should use social media?

Personally I think certain types of products and services lend themselves to promotion via social media. In particular products which are one of the following:

- Visual (i.e. graphical by nature – photography for example)
- Audible (i.e. a song that you can listen to)
- Viral (i.e. typically new/niche products that people get excited about)

That said, some would argue that you can promote any product or service with social media and I think there’s some truth to that too. It comes down to giving people a reason to connect with you online.

Let’s take a simple example. Say you run a small coffee shop, you’ve just spent a bunch of cash getting a groovy little cafe setup and you want to promote it, but you’re low on dollars to do it with, so you think “I know, I’ll use Facbeook to advertise”. You setup a page/or company profile for your business and you put up a little sign on your front counter saying “Connect with us on Facebook (search for ‘Groovy Little Cafe’)”. Great, you think, let’s see what happens…

I can pretty much tell you what’s going to happen! Nothing, zip, nada. You might get a few likes on your Facebook page from your mom and your 10 year old kid and your best friend, but then all you’re left with is a Facebook page that has 3 likes, a little bit of info and not much else. It actually detracts from your brand because it makes you look like you’re desperate.

So what went wrong here, well firstly why does the Groovy Little Cafe have a Facebook profile? Because they want to attract new customers right?! So I would say, mistake number one is putting the sign in the coffee shop. That’s not your target audience. Those people are already interacting with you. You need to get the message out to new people.

Second mistake is not giving people a reason to interact. The cafe needs a hook or an offer of some sort. Maybe a free coffee. What coffee drinker doesn’t like a free coffee (assuming it’s a good one)? Why not have a one week offer promoted solely through Facebook and Twitter whereby anyone who Likes the business page gets a free coffee. Okay, there will be a little bit of overhead in working out who’s getting a free coffee and you’ve got to make and serve the coffee’s themselves, but chances are if you promote it to people that haven’t used your business/service before that some will keep coming and getting coffee. You’ll also be able to keep track of how many people have liked your page (the number is right there on the page) and right away you have some measurable results on how much exposure you get.

Okay, so it’s not rocket science and it doesn’t always have to cost you money. You just need to give people a reason to interact with you. And you need to do this regularly, to keep them interacting. Otherwise chances are, you’re wasting your time.

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How to improve your website’s search engine rankings

by on 08. Nov, 2010 in SEO

Lots of people and businesses have websites and most people who have a website wish that their site had more traffic. The primary source of most internet traffic is a search engine, Google in particular, thus it follows that if you can improve your search engine ranking you would get more traffic. Assumably if you have a product or service to sell, this means you get your message in front of more sets of eyes (and assuming that it’s a numbers game), this means you sell more product.

Okay, so we understand why we need our site to have better search engine rankings, that’s the easy part. The million dollar question is, how do we get there. Well, I have some good news and some bad news. The good news is, improving your search engine rankings is really just a matter of following a few simple steps. So what’s the bad news, I hear you ask and if the steps are so simple, why isn’t everyone doing it.

Well, I think I can answer that best in terms of an analogy. Improving your website’s search engine rankings is a lot like losing weight (or staying fit, if you prefer a more positive analogy). It’s quite simple to do if you follow a few steps. We all know that to maintain a healthy body you need to eat right and burn more fuel than you consume. Pretty straightforward, but not always so easy to do in practice it would seem.

Getting your website to rank well in Google, is similar. Generally a site that ranks well in Google has good quality content that people find useful. So the logical way to get better search engine rankings (Google rankings in particular) is to make sure your site has lots of useful content that people are looking for. The content obviously should be related to your product or service, because you want the visitors to your website to be interested in not only your content, but also whatever it is that you want to provide them with. To put it another way, your content should complement your product or service.

Moving back to the “getting fit” analogy, there are shortcuts to improving your search engine rankings, but these are a lot like dieting fads. They often do work in the short term (i.e. they’ll help you lose weight quickly), but don’t necessarily help you to keep the weight off in the long term. Once you stop the diet, you go back to what you were doing before and you just put the weight back on.

Many quick fix solutions for getting better search engine rankings can be much like that. The quick fix solutions may seem rewarding in the short term and you may get a spike in traffic to your website but ultimately it won’t be as useful as having quality material that people will continue to read and benefit from long after you’ve posted it. Quality content may be harder to produce in the short term and it make take longer to see the changes in your website’s rankings but once you have it, it tends to stick around and produce a long term effect. Yes, it’s a good idea to keep adding to it and making sure that your site is fresh, but once you have a good base of content up, this isn’t hard to do. It’s like going into maintenance mode once you have lost a bunch of weight. It’s nowhere near as hard as it was to lose the weight in the first place and it can actually be enjoyable and rewarding.

Now, just as there is plenty more that you can learn about being fit aside from “eat right and exercise”, there’s definitely more to Search Engine Optimisation than adding quality content to your website. But if there was one thing I’d recommend you start working on to improve your site’s rankings, that would be it.

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Defining deliverables and creating a timeline for your web design project

by on 04. Nov, 2010 in Web Design, Web Design Process

Regrettably I’ve totally neglected the blog part of my website and if there’s one thing worse then not having a blog on your website, it’s having a blog that you never post anything too. So I’ve decided to start turning that around, right here, right now.

Rather than just posting about the projects that I’ve been working on, I’ve decided to use the blog on this site as a place to talk about some of the issues that we come across in web design. By “we”, I mean, you and I, client and developer, or more broadly just about anyone who gets involved in the web design process.

Okay, so what I wanted to talk about today was the importance of defining deliverables and creating a timeline for your web design project. While it sounds obvious that you would want to do this at the start of a web design project, I can tell you honestly, that on many projects, it just doesn’t get done, and if it does, it doesn’t go to the level of detail that is required to be meaningful for the project.

Let me give you an example, say you have an idea for a new website. You find a developer who you give your brief too and you outline for them roughly what you want to create (how many pages, what those pages are called, what the site will do, etc…). The developer gives you a quote that seems reasonable (maybe they’re a bit cheaper than other quotes you’ve had, but that suits you) and you commission them to get started on the project. You discuss with the web designer that you would like to have the site up and running in 4 weeks. You plan to have other aspects of your business (say a premises with new fitout) complete and ready to start at the same time, so you figure that will be perfect you can kick the whole thing off at once. The developer is happy with the timeline and agrees to proceed as soon as they receive some content from you (maybe a logo, some text for the pages of the site, etc..). Great, all seems well and looks to be on track. At this stage however, there’s nothing in place to say, you are going to provide content by X date and the designer is then going to provide a design draft by Y date.

So what happens, you get busy with managing your business and trying to coordinate the fit out of your new premises. Say you have a graphic designer putting together a new logo for you, they take their time getting back to you with the logo and when they do it’s not quite right. At the same time you’re busy juggling family or social commitments, so you don’t get around to sitting down at the computer and putting the content together for a couple of weeks. Your web designer rings you after a couple weeks and asks how you’re going with the content and whether you’ve had a chance to get your logo artwork together. You explain the situation and promise to get something together shortly. A few more weeks go by and you manage to fit in some time on a weekend getting your content together, but at this stage the builders have been delayed on the fitout, so it’s not really bothering you that the website won’t be ready when you thought it would. Eventually though you send the content through to the web designer. It’s now been 5 weeks since you met with the web designer to talk about the project and they’ve taken on 3 new clients. 2 of those clients have already provided content for their new website and one of the projects is much larger then yours, so the web designer is busy working on those projects.

You would probably expect your web designer at this stage to jump back on to your project, because hey, you were there first, but the web designer figures that you’ll understand if it takes them a while to get back to you with a design because it took you so long to provide the content, so another 4 weeks go by before you hear back from them. The draft design is not quite what you wanted so you spend a week trying to muster up the courage to explain that to the web designer, before sending them through your thoughts.

You’re now almost 2 months behind schedule on a project that should’ve taken about a month to complete and you’re wondering how things got out of hand. The designer is frustrated because a project that they expected to have done and dusted (with money in the bank for) is now taking much longer than expected, but they’ve given you a fixed quote and don’t feel they could charge you more for the project. They’ve had 3 mortgage payments to cover during the project, plus all their other bills, so they’re now effectively making less (time = money) while doing more work on the project. Even if the amount of work hasn’t changed significantly the project overheads are greater and they spend mental energy and resources worrying about the project and when it’s going to be completed. Okay, so you get the picture…

What’s the solution then, well at the outset, expect your web designer to give you a clear timeline for the project. With defined dates for both of you to work with. Maybe you’ll also agree in writing that if either of you are more than 1 week late for any deliverable, there’ll be some sort of concession (i.e. a reduction in the quoted price if the designer is late or an increase in the price if you’re late). If you had that from the beginning, you probably would make damn sure that the graphic designer got you the logo on time and that you punched out the text for the website, even if it meant sitting in front of the computer for a couple hours one night when you wish you could be sleeping. At the same time, your web designer, will be much more likely to turn the designs around for you in time. The momentum that is typically generated at the start of the project, will naturally flow through to the rest of the project and you will get a much better outcome (and that means value for money). In the end there’ll be less frustration and more satisfaction for all parties concerned. Who would’ve thought that bit of paper could be worth so much. :)

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Working on a new website for Byrne and Miller

by on 07. Jul, 2010 in News

Among the other projects we have on at the moment, we are working on a website refresh for the firm that does our accounting, Byrne and Miller. They have recently commissioned Ken from Kenny Smith Photography to shoot images for the site and these will be a key focal point of the website. Keep your eyes peeled for updates here.

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Kenny Smith Photography blog migration

by on 06. Jul, 2010 in News

One of the recent projects we’ve been working on is the blog migration of Kenny Smith Photography’s blog from Blogspot to a WordPress blog installed on his primary domain www.kennysmithphotography.com. It turned out to be relatively straightforward thanks to the Import features of WordPress.

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ASWPP (web)

by on 06. Jul, 2010 in Hidden

The Australian School of Portrait and Wedding Photography is an organisation that runs photography courses and seminars for both professional and amatuer photographers around Australia.

This site that we setup for them is run with a content management system called Expression Engine. It allows the site to be easily updated by the client themselves, though we like to get involved from time to time. ;)

Visit site

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