Posts Tagged ‘marketing’

An Introduction to Digital Marketing - Part 1: Social Networking

Tuesday, April 20th, 2010

A few weeks ago we were asked to visit the University of Huddersfield Barnsley Campus to give a talk on digital marketing. The group that we presented to were a mix of creatives from a range of backgrounds, but none of whom had much experience in trying to sell themselves online. There were jewellers, potters, fine artists, photographers, graphic designers; basically everyone except web designers / developers.

We had a three hour slot that was split into two halves: ‘Social Media’ and ‘Online Portfolios’ - but we covered far too much to fit into one blog post so we have decided to split it between two articles over the next couple of weeks… Seeing as though we recently wrote a post on Online Portfolios we aren’t going to bother with that, and instead split Social Media in half: ‘Social Networking’ and ‘Blogging’. In these articles we will be showing a selection of the slides that we used for the presentation, along with some expanded slide notes to elaborate on each point.

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Convert Your Non-Purchasers To Purchasers With Great Email Marketing

Thursday, March 11th, 2010

Getting your non-purchasers to buy from your email can sometimes prove to be challenging – you may have a lot less information gathered on them, you may not know who has and hasn’t purchased, or the recipients may simply not be interested in purchasing. To know is to understand, and although you may not have a magic ball to predict your non-purchasers’ behaviour, there are a few tricks to improving your non-purchaser conversion rate.

Great Email Marketing

First, segment your list

Splitting up your purchasers and non-purchasers is one of the easiest list segmentations you can do. By separating your lists, you can begin to monitor how each group behaves like for like.

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Styling HTML Emails with Disabled Images

Wednesday, February 10th, 2010

image

The styling and formating of marketing emails is a fine art, but many people are missing a key factor with their design and build that may make or break the user’s decision to view the email in its entirety…

We are all familiar with an email dropping in our inbox and appearing as blank white space:

ebuyer

The above image is an example of emails not being designed and built to work with images disabled. To help with explaining this process I have built a quick email to illustrate how alt tags can be styled, cells coloured, and text positioned to produce a professional looking email before any images have been downloaded. By using these techniques the user will be given an impression of the message, and an incentive to turn on images and view your email in it’s entirety.

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Create A Faultless HTML Email

Tuesday, December 1st, 2009

In the world of email marketing, I think it’s fair to say, that far too many people fail to take into consideration the importance of good design and perfect cross-compatibility within email clients. I receive emails which ‘break’ in my chosen client, or have missing links much too frequently - a bad email has exactly the same impact as any other bad marketing; it lowers the values of that company in the eyes of the recipient.

A friend of mine started this blog recently titled Email Fail which perfectly illustrates the lack of attention-to-detail in this area.

In this post I’m not going to do a step-by-step guide to creating an email from scratch (it assumes you already have basic knowledge), instead I will give you a few pointers to overcome some of the most common and annoying problems that you face when designing and building for the most popular clients: Hotmail, Gmail, and Outlook 2007.

Hotmail, Gmail, Outlook Logos

Before we get started I’ll quickly outline the problems that each one of these clients cause:

  • Hotmail (or Windows Live as it’s now known) frequently ‘breaks’ the layout of image heavy emails, misaligning table cells and causing big gaps all over the place.
  • Gmail insists on removing all CSS from the <head> and hence you cannot style a:hover or anything similar. (Now as far as I know there isn’t actually a way to stop this, you simply have to cater for it).
  • Finally, Outlook 2007 ignores various styles such as line-height and uses the Microsoft Word rendering engine, rather than IE or any other option that might be considered logical.

So, what do we do to avoid these issues?

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