Thinking carefully about the content of your email marketing

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If you are looking to send out a marketing email then you need to take the time to think carefully about what you put in the email. You need to ensure that your email gives readers a reason to want to read it but also doesn’t contain spammy content that may cause it to get blocked by spam filters.

You need to take the time to think of a good subject heading. It needs to capture their attention and make them want to open it. If it just looks like any other marketing email then you may find that your open rate is poor. Emails that are addresses personally to the individual tend to have a better response rate than those that are generic. If you do have your contact sin an excel or .csv list then you can usually upload these into your email marketing software and pull through their name so that email that is sent out is personalised to that specific contact.

Emails that contain certain words or too many references of these words can also be marked as spam. They will often end up in peoples junk email and half of them will never even be seen. If you keep sending out emails that are classed as spam then you may find that your IP becomes blacklisted.

What should you do if your website goes offline?

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Many businesses rely a lot on their websites. It may be that your website is the only way of selling goods or products to the public, especially at the moment with restrictions still in place. IF your website goes offline, this can have a very detrimental effect on your business and you need to ensure that you get it back up and running as soon as possible.

The first thing to check is that your internet is working. This may sound obvious, but often people think their website is down as it will not load but haven’t realised that their internet is actually down.

If you host your own website then you need to get in touch with your hosting company. If you have your website through an agency then you should log the issue with them. It is important to say that the issue is urgent and that you are potentially losing sales or enquiries. The hosting company will usually be able to do some basic checks to see if they issue is something their end. It may be that the server in which your site is hosted has crashed or has been taken offline for maintenance. If this is the case, a simple reboot could fix the issue. If you have recently had some updates done or changes on your website or to the content management system, then this may be what is causing the site not to load. Try and reinstate an earlier version of the site using a previous back up and see if that fixes the problem. If it does then you can go through the changes / updates you made one by to see which one it is that is causing it to crash.

Linking your social media profiles to your blog or website

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If you use social media for marketing your business then you should try and link it in with your website. Having a profile on sites such as Facebook and Twitter can give your customers another way to stay in contact with you and another means of communication. It allows you to share information with them instantly and get quick responses in terms of clicks through to your website.

The first thing to do is to ensure that you have your website address listed on your social media profile pages.

When adding content to your social media sites you will want to make the posts quick and to the point. Some sites only give you a limited number of characters you can use.  You can then use snippets of information from your main site from the news, product pages or blog posts and paste them into your social media sites. You can then put a link in the post back to the full article on your site. Getting traffic to your site is essential as a number of those visitors will then often covert in to sales or enquiries.  You can usually monitor what visitors do that arrive to your site via a social media site using a stats package such as Google Analytics.

Adding new and relevant content to your website

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Adding fresh and relevant content to your site is a very important part of marketing. It is not only useful to the viewers who will want to see that you are constantly updating the site but it also helps massively with SEO. Google and the other search engines favour sites that are constantly adding information to them. This information can’t be low quality or spammy, so must be relevant to the rest of the site and unique. It shouldn’t just be copied and pasted from another site; it needs to add its own value.

You may struggle to know how to get relevant content on to your site every week, as you may not want it cluttering up the main pages. One way to do this is to add a blog or an inspiration section to the website. This will allow you to add new articles when needed. You can then pull extracts of the three most recent ones through on to the home page for your viewers to see. This will also help get them indexed quicker on the search engines. If you are stuck for ideas then you may want to have a lot at other sites in your industry that are performing well and see what they do.

Trust your marketing agency to help build your business

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Times are hard for a lot of businesses at the moment. It may be that you have had to shut all of your physical premises and have to go to trading purely online. If this is the case then your online marketing is now more important than ever.

You may have already been doing a good amount of online marketing but if not, it can be quite daunting knowing exactly where to invest your time and money. This is where a web marketing agency will come in. They can use their knowledge and expertise to advise you as to what you should do. They may tell you to invest a big chunk of your budget in to your website for example. This could include building up the search engine optimisation, pay per click campaigns or updating your site to add in a shopping facility. Used correctly, your marketing budget should bring in more revenue than it costs you although this may not be instant. It is vital that you keep your marketing company informed of any changes within your business so they can reflect this in the marketing plan they create for and ensure they are using the latest information.