Stand out, be different, don't be a Mailchump!

Using Aweber, Constant Contact or Mailchimp? Well here's how to do so and not to look like a monkey!

Whichever email system your company uses to send out your email communications, make sure you make it your own.

Ensure that whoever receives the email knows who it has come from. How many times have you opened an email and thought ‘not another generic template I don't recognise’ *delete*? My guess is quite a few.

Avoid this happening to you by having a custom template designed, creating a brand for your communications that is unique to you as well as aesthetically pleasing and in keeping with the rest of your marketing communications.

Don’t hide the company logo away in the bottom corner, display it loud and proud as an integral part of the template. If your customers are familiar with your brand (which I imagine they are) then they will associate it with good service, quality and reliability. So make sure they can see it.

Use company colours for your template, automatically relating it to your brand. Once customers associate these email communications with your brand they will take the time to read the contents and click on the links, driving new and old customers to your site.

If you are already sending email communications; newsletters, e shots, e-zines, whatever you choose to call them, then you will have an established database. This database will have been collated from customers (data collected from purchases), potential customers (data sourced) or almost customers (those who have signed up to receive emails.) More often than not you will be sending different communications to different segments.

But if time and budget only permits one template and one design – KEEP IT SIMPLE.

Nobody wants an overly showy template, your customers want to be able to locate the information they need, they don’t want to be shifting through fancy typography and hidden java games to get to their discount code.

So in a nutshell, keep it branded, make it your own - but don’t show off!

Need some help with a custom branded email template? Want to make sure that ALL of your marketing communications follow your company brand? Drop us a line now for a free brand appraisal at info@whype.co.uk or visit our website at www.whype.co.uk

What does your brand say about you?

What does your brand say about you? Are you sure?

Now, more than ever before, it is oh so important to keep a finger on your online pulse. You need to know what people are saying about you and with the use of the internet it is easier than ever.

The internet gives customers a barrier to hide behind; it allows them to speak their feelings more freely than if they had to do so in a shop, for example. The down side of that is that their feelings could be positive or negative, and you have no control over what they are saying.

Luckily, there are tools that allow you to monitor what is being said about your brand online; Google Alerts and SocialMention being two of the better ones.

Once you have established what people are saying about your brand, the glory of the internet is that you can reply in real time, taking the time to address concerns, thank people for positive comments, and in general interact with your customers and increase the power of your brand.

The internet allows you to speak back to your customers, address the issues that they may be tweeting or blogging about. Reply to their tweets/blog/facebook, ask what the problem had been and how you can help. This interaction will bring the brand a personal touch and hopefully, restore (or increase!) customer faith in your company.

It may be that consumers are responding online to changes that have been made to your products or services; listen and take note. You may have made some brand changes they don't like – but at least you will know! Or they may be talking about how great your brand is – if you're not monitoring then you won't know!

It is a lot easier to collect customer feedback online than anywhere else – after all, who really fills out customer feedback forms?

Monitoring your brand online is free, cheap and easy – are you doing it?

You can set up Google Alerts to email you every time your company or associated key phrases are mentioned online – so you needn’t waste valuable hours searching the web for them.

Similarly SocialMenton does all the searching for you, even creating a positive to negative ratio for all the mentions; searching blogs, twitter, facebook as well as online newspapers and news sites.

http://www.socialmention.com/

http://www.google.com/alerts

Of course there are more complex, expensive online media monitoring tools but if you are a small company and intend to keep your monitoring in house then between Social Mention and Google Alerts, you will have most ground covered.

Do YOU know what's being said about YOUR brand online?

Promoting your website offline – what, no computers?

Believe it or not, it’s not all about the internet. Those business relationships and affiliate networks still matter, so don’t neglect them.

Forming partnerships with other brands has been a favourite marketing method of many who have gone before us. An ideal partner will share your target audience but will not be in competition with you. A good example would be a health club and sports clothes.

You can grow these relationships by, for example, creating joint literature – allow the health club a page advertorial in your monthly brochure and vice versa, exploit it as much as you can.

Get Social
No, not social media again. Actually get out there, meet your peers, meet your customers and go to talks and lectures by those in your field. Continue to learn. While attending events where you may meet potential customers, take your time to talk to them, find out what they know about your brand and what they think of it, they can be as useful to you as your product can be for them.

Although, don’t just attend any old event. They can be expensive, after hours and at times – tedious. Attend networking events for your local area, the Institute of Directors or Chamber of Commerce is a good place to start. If there aren’t any networking groups in your area, create one.

PR
If you are taking control of PR yourselves, then start by creating some case studies. Start with satisfied customers and their stories; include a good quality photograph (journalists and editors love photos!) Get on the telephone to trade magazines as well as business magazines to see if they would be interested in featuring your case studies. Get in touch with your local business magazines and business pages of your local paper, speak to them and see if they have any features coming up that you may be able to comment on or provide a quote for. The more people read your name and your companies name the more likely they are to visit your website and buy from you.

See if you can offer your expertise to a local Uni or college. Their PR teams would then deal with the PR! Not only will you be helping young talent but you will be putting your brand name out there, with both potential employees and customers.

Seminars
Promoting them, sponsoring them, attending them, speaking at them; anything to do with high profile seminars in your field – you should be there. Getting to know your peers and customers on a personal level will provide great word of mouth marketing for your organisation. Industry seminars can often be very insightful. With high profile speakers (this could be you!) attendees can learn from each other, share skills and often help each other out from a business perspective.

Further to speaking at seminars, why not host an online webinar? If you have an exciting product launch or an exciting announcement to make why not do so through a webinar, this is a low cost option and carbon friendly as nobody need travel anywhere. You could look into hosting regular webinars around a series of topics, making a name for yourself as an expert in your field. Webinars also involve those taking part to visit your website and provide contact details – pop those onto your email marketing database!!

As we've said before, having a website is great, but not unless it gets visitors, and at Whype we're dedicated to not only giving you a website that works, but also helping you (with articles like this) to make the most of free and low cost ways to promote it.

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