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.

If you like our articles, please consider Tweeting, Facebooking and sharing them – we'd really
appreciate it!

So you've got a website – now what?

Having a website is all well and good but what are you going to do to help promote it? The days of SEO being the be all and end all of website promotion is well gone, and some would say “Thank goodness!”

Marketing your website is no longer just about creating and keeping your own audience. By creating a buzz online through other websites and social media sites, you are able to access other audiences, who you may not have done previously.

Social Media and the internet has taken off in a big way; 80% of the population work and play online, so it has never been more important to step up and start being social online.

Here are just some of the ways you could promote your website:

• By uploading material to YouTube, contributing to online discussions and creating podcasts – on a variety of topics, you have the ability to connect with audiences and customers who may not have been within your initial ‘target market’
  
• A blog gives your company a voice, pretty much like this one. It allows you (the customer!) to read and experience the ethos of the organisation. By regularly talking and engaging with your customers it allows them to feel part of the brand or organisation.
  
• Social media – become active on Facebook and Twitter. That is where your customers will be ‘hanging out’ so you should be too. Engage with them, don’t just create a profile and update it – use it. Talk to your customers and ensure that you add value, join in with conversations – give your opinion and provide links to your website.
  
• Your LinkedIn profile is essential for those B2B relationships – make sure your profile is up to date and relevant. Link it to your brand’s Twitter profile as well as your personal one. Let people know what you are about as a person – and link them back to the company website (see the theme here?!) LinkedIn is also a great platform to raise awareness around your work experience, by listing how many years’ experience you have in a field or any awards you may have won will allow both your peers and your customers an insight into your professional life.

These are just a few ways in which you can promote your website externally – having a great website is a great start, but if you're not promoting it then what's the point?

At Whype we not only design fantastic websites, we give out free information such as this to help our customers make the most of their new promotional tool.

Need a free website appraisal? Contact us now!

What Do Your Email Communications Say About You?

We send and receive emails every day, some we read and take note of, others we open and delete.

You want your email communications to be the former. There is so much noise and hype in the marketing world; you need to understand how to make your communications worth reading!

Here are our top tips on how to create eye catching, relevant email marketing communications.

Drive site traffic through customer reviews

Remember all those satisfied clients who have given you great feedback? Put it on your website!

These are not only a great way of engaging with your audience but they are great for SEO purposes. You can also drive site traffic through promotion. Create an email communication with a link to a product review – including customer reviews and feedback. After this, step up your game by dividing your audience into segments so that customers receive content that is relevant to their purchasing behaviour.

Engage with social media

There’s that phrase again, social media. There is no getting away from it. Use your email marketing to increase your twitter following, place a link on your emails to your profile encouraging people to follow you. The more people you have engaging with you online, the more you can involve them with your brand – allowing them to feel a part of it. Someone once described it as creating a corporate family, letting the man on the street have a say in your brands decisions, this will have an impact down the line, after all – the customer’s always right, right?!

Increase activity through a targeted and personalised approach

• When a new subscriber signs up to your email communications, send newcomer communications;  welcome emails, introductory offers – this gives them an incentive to return to your site. Highlight key areas of the website that may be of interest – i.e. special offers, customer reviews etc.
  
• Take a note of what email communications are particularly effective. After you send each communication keep a record of who has contacted you and about what. See if sales have increased. Also, the opposite, if you have sent out a communication and sales have dropped and calls have stopped coming in, maybe it’s worth looking into why.
  
• Separate your database into sections, who is going to be interested in what? Personalise the communications you are sending them, will a 65 year old retired gentleman be interested in half price bikinis?! Hopefully not. (Unless of course, that’s the type of market you’re in!)
  
• Have a look through your customer database, reward regular customers with retention deals, % off items, for example. Similarly, through incentives to those who have not purchased in a while. What did they last buy and when. Send them a special offer to entice them to come back. They may be thinking of going elsewhere so it’s important to engage with them and let them know they are still a valued customer even if they haven’t purchased for a period of time.

Refer a friend

Ensure all your communications have a ‘share this’ button, allowing your database of customers share your news with their friends. Similarly, a ‘tweet this’ button or a ‘share this on facebook’. The more platforms you can get FREE publicity on, the better, especially as these recommendations are coming from one of your existing customers, people will take more note.

Eye catching design

Don't just use plain text, or a standard template – make sure that your email communications stand out by having a custom design that matches the rest of your marketing materials. Think about it – would you send out your brochure as a black and white photocopy? Of course not! So don't treat your email communications as if they don't matter – in some cases it could be a person's first impression of your company – make it a good one!

For eye catching email designs and bespoke newsletter templates, see our main website or drop us a line at info@whype.co.uk.

Tell us how you make your email communications stand out in the comments below!

Using your website as a route to market.

It takes seven seconds for people to form first impressions – so you make sure those seconds count. The same should go for your website. More often than not, your website is the first thing people see. It needs to act as a marketing tool for you but also as a source of information for your customers.

Here are a few items that we believe your website should have:

• A compelling introduction – tell me that I'm in the right place in the first two sentences,because if you don't, I'll be pressing that back button and visiting your competitors instead.

• The ability to collect visitor information – people are much more likely to enquire if you provide some sort of contact form on each page of your site, with a strong call to action encouraging them to get in touch.

• A user friendly interface – if people cannot find what they’re looking for then they’ll leave and go elsewhere. It’s as simple as that. Make sure everything can be accessed within a few clicks.

• A blog – not only does it show visitors that your website is consistently up to date, it provides extra content and brings the search engine spiders in, thus being good for SEO – win win all round we say!

• Compelling, interesting copy. Your website is one of your strongest sales tools – it gives you the opportunity to communicate directly with your consumers. Copy should be based around your core USPs – what do you find yourself telling potential clients at new business meetings? Is that on your website? It should be. Your web copy needs to read well, it needs to set you aside from your competitors and it needs to make your customers want to pick up the phone.

• Easily accessible contact details. The top right-hand corner is a good place to put them, after all – you do want people to call or email don't you? If they can’t find the details then, well, they won’t!

• Links to your social media profiles. You do have social media profiles such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn etc., don't you? Then let people know – give them the chance to follow / friend / contact you in the way that they feel most comfortable.

• Free info. It seems paradoxical but by giving away free information (checklists, tips, hints, reviews, etc.) you actually inspire loyalty and confidence. And where will those loyal visitors think of going when they need your products or services? Guess!

• Link Building. By seeding the downloadable content on other (relevant) sites and linking this back to your site, you automatically gain more traffic to your website – and if you’ve followed all the tips above the phone should be ringing in no time!

Not sure whether your website is up to scratch? Let us give you a honest no technobabble review – for free! Post your website address in the comments box below and we'll be in touch!

Did you know you no longer own your brand?

Your brand no longer belongs to you - really it doesn't. You probably think it does, and consider yourself in full control of your brand, but put bluntly, you're kidding yourself.

In the past, yes, you would have 'owned' your brand and would have been able to influence the way you were seen. Corporate guidelines, careful advertising, strict policies and more would have made sure that the outside world saw exactly what you wanted them to see.

So what if you were losing customers hand over fist because of your inability to deliver on time or your prices were wrong? It didn't matter because your website told everyone that you 'deliver on time and under budget'.

So what if you were only 2 cheques away from bankruptcy? No-one would know because you told everyone how well you were doing when you went to networking events.

So what if you had a high staff turnover because they were dissatisfied with the company? Who would ever find out? You made sure the people who mattered knew your high turnover of staff was because you expected the best and nothing but.

Yes, in the past, people saw what you wanted them to see, and probably believed it.

But that's changed now. In this day and age of Social Media, YOU don't own your brand, everyone else does. Your customers. Your staff. Your suppliers. Even people you probably don't even know right now.

See, in the past there were limited channels to express satisfaction or dissatisfaction with a company. Even if you were seething with anger at some of their claims, you could only really tell your friends and contacts, and maybe write a letter to the local newspaper, hoping that they had the guts to publish it. Similarly if you were ecstatic with a company's services, your chances to express that satisfaction were limited.

Not now. Now there's Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and various online business forums, GetSatisfaction.com and other online review sites, and more. There's email, blogging and easy to set up websites.

You've wronged a customer? Within a few days it can be all around the Internet and almost every potential client of yours will hear about it.

You've provided excellent service? Again you could be reaching potential clients through the power of the Internet.

But the scary thing about all of this is that YOU HAVE NO CONTROL OVER IT. 'They' do.

You can't stop people Tweeting, blogging and writing about you, whether that be positive or negative.

So what to do now you don't own your brand? Well the best thing you can do is be the best that you can - think of every potential contact as someone who could be an advocate or an aggressor towards your company. The saying 'do unto others as you would have others do unto you' is trite, but true.

Don't let your brand suffer at the hands of the people who now control it - think carefully, think Social Media.

==

Michael Storey is the founder of Whype, a firm of branding experts, web designers and graphic designers based in Bristol.