How To Design A Successful Email Newsletter

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Email newsletters are a large part of many business’ online marketing strategies – and so they should be! They’re a great way to  reach your current customers and potential ones whilst providing you with the opportunity to add a personal touch to communication. However – what makes an engaging and successful email newsletter? Well, we believe that there are alot of different elements that when combined make the perfect email but we like to think that design has alot to do with it too. That’s why we’re dedicating this entire post to show you how to design a successful email newsletter. 

Eye-catching CTAs

No matter what your email newsletter is about you need to have stand-out CTAs (calls-to-action). When thinking about what kind of CTA you want to include in your email you need to think about what you want your subscribers to do next. For example if you’re running an ecommerce business then you would want your subscribers to place an order. So, your CTA would be something like a grid of products with a “buy now” button under each one. However having a CTA isn’t enough – you need to make it stand out too. Opt for making the button a contrasting colour to the email background and perhaps make the button text bold. This will ensure that even if subscribers just skim your email, they’ll at least lay eyes on it. 

Captivating copy

Whilst your content does need to be good it’s equally as important for your copy to be laid out in an enticing way. Text that is clumped together in long paragraphs spanning the width of the email are an instant turn off. Instead try splitting your text up into smaller paragraphs and break them up with images, CTAs and dividers. You could even try splitting your email into columns and add your copy in a more appealing pattern. 

Creative compositions

Similarly to ensuring your copy is laid out in an aesthetic way, you also need to make sure all of the other elements look good together too. If you’re not sure where to start with compositions take a look at templates produced by email campaign providers such as Mailchimp or Hubspot for inspiration. You could also take a look at the emails in your inbox – we bet a fair amount of them are marketing emails anyway. Take note of how they use layers, shapes and texts in order to create beautiful designs. 

Consistent branding 

Branding is everything when it comes to any form of marketing and email marketing is no exception. Whenever you send out a newsletter make sure it’s consistent with your logo and brand colours. Nothing looks more pleasing to the eye than a well thought out colour palette and complimentary fonts. Make sure you carry these colour palettes and fonts throughout all of your newsletters. This will give your subscribers a sense of familiarity when they open your emails and makes your brand more memorable.  

We hope you enjoyed these quick and easy tips about how to design a successful email newsletter. If you need any further assistance any website or online marketing projects then please don’t hesitate to contact us right here on our website. Until then, happy marketing!

How To Come Up With Blog Article Ideas

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We all embark on a blogging journey with good intentions, endless ideas and dreams of boosting our SEO dramatically. However if you’ve been in the blogging game for a while you’ll probably already know that sometimes it’s just not easy coming up with ideas anymore. You start to feel like you’ve exhausted your niche, weeded out all of the interesting topics and you don’t want to end up doing the same old blog post again with some variations here and there. Well, instead of waiting for that lighting strike idea to materialise out of thin air, try a few of our tips instead. 

Scope out the competition

Now, we’re not saying to completely copy your competition word for word but it’s always a good idea to see what content they’re producing. Do they have an interesting angle on a common topic that you’ve not thought about before? Have they perhaps produced a useful infographic, started a podcast or created a new video? Then why not have a go at doing something similar? Like we said – you shouldn’t copy their content but you can at least take some format inspiration. 

Stay on top of current affairs

Writing topical content around the current affairs of the world is a sure way to get some extra traffic. So make sure you keep tabs on big news stories that are making waves across the web. For example, during the current global pandemic we wrote an article about the tools that all remote teams should have. However, it doesn’t always have to be so serious. You could also create content around annual holidays like international donut day or popular weekly threads like motivational Monday or fun Friday.

Do some audience research

If you have a reasonably sized audience already as well as a mailing list of subscribers why not reach out to them and ask them what they want? Send out a email explaining that you want to provide them with content that they’ll be excited to read. You’ll probably find that a few people will happily give you their feedback and let you know what they want to see from you and your blog. Once you’ve received a decent amount of feedback you can compile it all together and have a bank full of new ideas for blog posts that your readers will be thrilled to read. 

Take a break

It’s always important to take breaks and not force yourself out of writers block if you feel like you’re getting nowhere. Get up and away from the computer and seek inspiration else where. Sometimes you can find ideas in the most unlikely of places – spend some time in nature, chat to friends and family or even take a spontaneous trip somewhere. 

We hope you enjoyed these writers block ideas and now feeling motivated to come up with some blog article ideas of your own. If you need any further assistance any website or online marketing projects then please don’t hesitate to contact us right here on our website. Until then, happy marketing!

Simple Webinar Ideas For Your SME

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With a large amount of the UK workforce still working from home, video calls and webinars are now more common place than a phone call. We’re sure you’ve already attended a handful of webinars and got some ideas to try out for  your own but we thought we make it even easier for you. This list of webinar ideas is simple to execute for any business as well as a good building block for expanding your customer base.

How to’s and tutorials

One of the most valuable webinar topics out there. “How to’s” and tutorials usually get alot of interest, mainly because they are solving a problem that people have and educating them at the same time. Also, you may be thinking you need to be a tradesman, artist or hairdresser in order to create a tutorial style webinar but that’s simply not true. You could try hosting webinars about how to be more productive whilst working from home, how to improve business morale or even how to create the ultimate sales pitch. Think outside the box and you’ll be sure to get lots of sign ups. 

Industry expert talks 

If you know of a sought-after personality in your industry then why not recruit them to help your cause? Offer to either interview them or have an informal chat over a webinar about some kind of common industry pain. To ensure both your business and the industry expert get something out of this webinar, suggest promoting the webinar across both of your online platforms, sharing attendee information (just make sure you’re GDPR compliant!) or  offer them some kind of incentive. 

Product or service launches

If you have a new product or service launching, what better way to introduce it to the world than on a webinar? The trick to getting attendees for this webinar is to not give everything away when you’re marketing it. Try and keep a little mystery about your new launch. That way people will get more curious and want to sign-up to see what the fuss is all about. 

Coffee break chats

During these uncertain times sometimes all people need is an informal chat. This works particular well with attendees who are already loyal customers. Get in touch with them and ask them if they want to have a virtual chat over a cup of coffee. Keep it simple and don’t push too hard to talk about business – let it come naturally. Besides, even if you don’t get around to talking about products or services you’ll still be able to get a feel of how your customers are feeling at the moment. 

We hope you enjoyed these simple webinar ideas and now have a few ways to capture some new customers. If you need any further assistance any website or online marketing projects then please don’t hesitate to contact us right here on our website. Until then, happy marketing!

10 Digital Advertising Ideas For SMES

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Whilst most of the world is waiting inside the safety of their homes for the global health crisis to subside, it is still business as usual for many SMEs – just at the home office! If you run a small business, you know better than anyone that even before the pandemic, it was hard to switch off. As lockdown measures persist and we’re finding ourselves not being able to go to that networking lunch, pick up a local newspaper or sponsor a local event. However that doesn’t mean that we can’t find other ways to put our SMEs into the forefront of our potential customers’ minds. That’s why we’ve put together a list of our favourite digital advertising ideas that you can carry out from the comfort of your home office.

Google AdWords

Pay-per-click ads are a great way for you to dip your toe into the online advertising world and a great place to start is Google AdWords. If you have a basic knowledge of how search engines and keywords work then starting your first ad campaign on Google AdWords will be a breeze. However before you even start you should definitely take a look at our beginners guide!

Sponsored Social Posts

If your SME is already on social media – which we’re sure it is, then it is relatively quick and easy to set up some sponsored social posts. In particular Facebook and Instagram make it very simple to use their advertising tools. Sometimes it’s as convenient as clicking “sponsor post” on one of your already published posts. But before you begin spending some of your SMEs marketing budget, you need to determine whether social media is relevant to your business – because it’s not always! To get a better insight, do a little research and try to find out whether or not social media ads are going to be beneficial to your SME.

Online Competitions

A great way to spread the word about your business is to set up some sort of online competition. You can either do this on your own or collaborate with another small business that is complimentary to your own. The idea of teaming up is that you can get exposure to another pool of marketing contacts who perhaps have not heard of your SME before but are perhaps in the market for your product or service. For example if you sell ethically sourced and organic coffee beans you may want to create a competition with a ethically manufactured home coffee machine. Then, for the online competition you could ask people on social media to snap a picture of their at home coffee art.

Banner Ads

You know when you’re having a good read of your favourite blog or listening to your favourite podcasts sometimes those advertising banners pop up or stick to the side of the page? Well, you too could advertise your SME here – sometimes it’s as easy as inquiring and sending over a quick banner idea. However, when pursuing this kind of digital advertisement you want to make sure you’re doing it on a relevant website to your business.

Online Advertorials

Everyone knows what a blog is – but did you know that you can pay to have a article put up on a blog advertising your product or service in a more subtle way? To do this you want to find a well established blog or online publication within your niche that is accepting guest posts and/or advertorials, pitch your article idea, write it and then get it published. It sounds pretty easy on paper, but this is probably one of the most time consuming online advertisement ideas. You need to take the time to find the right publication and write a compelling and well crafted article.

Online Directories

You’ve heard of the yellow pages? Well online directories are basically the same thing – just online. Once you’re listed in one you can see it benefit your domain authority as well as organic search engines. In terms of execution, this is a pretty easy one to get right – however sometimes it can take up quite a bit of time depending what industry you’re in. If you want to get started in the world of local listings then take a look at our blog article all about it, here.

LinkedIn Mail

This is a specific type of social media advertisement. However, we thought it deserved a mention of it’s own just because of how specific you can be with the targeting. If you offer a particular service or product that appeals to a certain type of person – LinkedIn can help you reach them through a personalised LinkedIn Mail. You can even target people right down to their job title.

Webinars

This works particular well if you can physically demonstrate your product or service. Some of the most popular webinars are “how-to” type demonstrations where you can inform potential customers on the benefits you can provide them with. If you’re completely new to webinars – you probably want to check out a few for research purposes first.

Email Newsletter Features

Similar to an advertorial but in email form! Do you subscribe to a particular email newsletter specific to your industry? Maybe ask them if you can feature in a future one. Some email newsletters even allow you to link to your own website – in the least they will just mention your product or service.

Influencer Marketing

Collaborating with local influencers is another great way to get your SME in front of potential customers who haven’t heard of you before.  One way of doing this is to send the influencer some products and/or services that they will then try out and promote to their followers on their channel. Whilst it’s a bit harder to measure the success of influencer campaigns, it’s still a viable option if you’re in the right niche.

We hope this has inspired you to do some digital advertising of your own. If you need any further assistance on how to advertise your SME online or with any website or online marketing projects then please don’t hesitate to contact us right here on our website. Until then, happy marketing!

Spring Cleaning: How To Find Broken Links On Your Website And Fix Them

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If you’re looking to rank in the top spot on search engines for your preferred keyword then you need to have a solid SEO strategy. Search engines like Google crawl your website and take into consideration a wide range of factors before ranking it. Some of these factors are meta-data, the actual copy of the page itself and links to and from your website. There are also some factors you want to ensure search engines don’t find like broken links, wordy copy or a non-responsive website. All of these factors can affect your search engine ranking negatively. For the sake of this blog post, we’re going to be talking about cleaning up the bits you don’t want Google to find, in particular – how to fix broken links.

What are broken links?

In short broken links are links you have created on your website that link to another page that has now been removed. The link could be to another page on your website or an external website. When people click on these broken links they will get a 404 “page could not be found” error. These links can make for a frustrating user experience, which is the main reason why search engines penalise your for it.

How do I find broken links?

Broken links are not as hard to find if you think – even if you have a website with countless pages. All you need to do is crawl your website just like the search engines do. Thankfully there are a lot of tools out there that can help you with this. We would recommend you start out with Google’s Search Console. This is a free tool that you can link to your website. After it’s crawled your website it will show you a few recommendations to get your website into top SEO shape. For your broken links it will show you what page the broken link is on, the anchor text (the text you have to click on), and the link itself.

How do I fix broken links?

Now that you’ve seen all of your broken links on Google Search console, you can now fix them. Firstly, go to the page where your broken link is and find the link. Once you’ve found the link you have a few options. You can either just get rid of the link and replace it with some regular text or you can find another piece of appropriate content to link it to. We’d recommend that you do the latter because more relevant, external links can help your website benefit from a higher search engine ranking.

We hope this has inspired you to do some broken link fixing of your own. If you need any further assistance on how to fix broken links or with any website or online marketing projects then please don’t hesitate to contact us right here on our website. Until then, happy marketing!

Evergreen Content Ideas for your SME’s Blog

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Finding content for your SME blog can be difficult. It can be tricky to nail your ideas down and make sure that your next post is going to capture the right audience. The most successful SME blogs combine both seasonal and evergreen content. Seasonal content consists of articles where the topics are “right now”. For example: “digital marketing trends to kick off 2020”. Whereas evergreen content would be articles that would be searched for no matter what the time of year like “are PPC ads really beneficial to SMEs?“. However, for the sake of this blog post we’re just going to be talking about a few different evergreen content ideas that you can publish on your SMEs blog right now! 

FAQs

If you’ve been running your business for a while, you’ve probably got a few questions that keep cropping up. So instead of internally rolling your eyes ever time you hear them why not make them into a blog post? Not only will this be a useful resource for your customers to refer to, it’s also a great way to capture new ones too. 

Listicles

We’re a big fan of listicles. A listicle is basically any article that is broken down into a quick snappy list. We have loads of listicles on our blog ranging from ten quick and easy online marketing ideas to 12 digital marketing lessons learnt in 2019. The possibilities really are endless with listicles.

Tutorials and Guides

How-to styled blog posts are among some of the most popular on the web. Whatever your business, there is definitely a guide or tutorial to go along with it. For instance, if you run a local coffee shop, a blog post entitled “how to create simple yet impressive coffee art” would do the trick.  

Infographics

Some of our favourite pieces of content are infographics. Not only can you get creative with them and how they look – they are also a great way to convey a large amount of information. The key to a great infographic is to display a mix of interesting and statistics and actionable advice. 

Case Studies

You should always place case studies on your website when you can not just because they make for great evergreen content – they also show what impact your business has on your customers. If you have a customer who you have had particular success with, ask them if they’d like to be featured in a case study. Not only does it make your business look good – it makes your customer look good too. 

Glossaries

We have a series called busting buzzwords which is basically a bank of blog posts that make up a digital marketing glossary. Just take a buzzword that has been floating around your industry and dissect it on your blog. Don’t just explain what the word means – also show how it is used in practical terms in your industry. 

We hope this has inspired you to come up with some of your own evergreen content ideas. If you need any further assistance with any website or online marketing projects then please don’t hesitate to contact us right here on our website. Until then, happy marketing