Instagram & Facebook – Why?


A few hours ago I read that Facebook had acquired Instagram for $1bn… aptly enough, this news came to me via my Facebook feed. There’s also an official release here from Mark Zuckerberg My first thought once I checked the legitimacy Read more

Return On Influence: The New ROI


There is not a single activity in business which is exempted from a query regarding return on investment.  Focused strategic planning and expenditure to optimise your e-commerce mix is known to be an investment worth making for product and Read more

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Email Marketing

Email Marketing – It’s in the detail

Posted on November 14, 2011 by Mike in Digital Marketing, Email Marketing, Internet Marketing, Online Reputation | Leave a comment

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Excerpt: In our business sector, there are lots of opportunities to go to events, present, host a stand, network etc, it’s a great way to increase knowledge and meet with people. One of the consequences of this is that it does mean one should expect a lot of follow up sales calls and email. We’re in the sales and marketing business, so I welcome that and indeed find it interesting to see different approaches and ideas for following up. None of us have all of the answers, so it is always good to sit back sometimes and see what has caught your eye, or why you have opened a particular email over the hundreds of others landing in your inbox. Obviously the good emails you learn and take inspiration from, however there are also lessons to be learned from the not so good emails. In fact, it could be argued that these lessons are more important due to the potential negative impact on your brand and reputation if sent. I don’t think I am doing too much wrong by publishing the email below as the sender’s details remain confidential, the reason for doing it is because I thought it would be useful to post to show where there are opportunities to improve the email lie. Dear Michael, I hope you are well. We are working with clients to help boost performance, productivity, and profit, by bring out the best in themselves and their teams and especially in light of the current economic climate. Our coaching…


10 top tips for improving the effectiveness of your email marketing

Posted on October 6, 2011 by Mike in Digital Marketing, Email Marketing | Leave a comment

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Excerpt: Email marketing is still one of the most effective forms of online marketing… if done correctly. We’re seeing people dismiss email marketing due to lack of results, however when we look at what they’re sending, it’s not really surprising they’re experiencing poor click throughs and open rates. For us it is all about the objective… why are you sending an email in the first place? Is it to send a message, increase your brand awareness, sell something, and encourage a click through or other action? There’s a multitude of different reasons for sending an email, it’ therefore important that it is considered. Likewise, who the email is being sent to is of importance… will the message be of interest  to them? Have they indicated a preference for your email? Sending the wrong email the wrong person is a great way to erode your hard won email marketing lists. Here are a few more tips to help you to create and deliver great email marketing campaigns: 1. Target your list – This is very important and time spent segmenting your data will increase the effectiveness of your campaigns. Think of your list as one of the most important assets of your business and treat it as so. 2. Keep on top of regulations – It’s worth knowing and keeping abreast of email marketing rules and regulations as this will ensure you have the best chance of avoiding being black listed  or your email being dumped by the spam filter. 3. Subject line is King! – Often…


Case Study: Truck Auction World – Email Marketing Delivers Nearly 3000 Visits a Month

Posted on April 13, 2011 by Fayaaz in Customers, Email Marketing | 1 Comment

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Excerpt: For the past few months Generate UK have been working with Truck Auction World to increase awareness about their bi-weekly online commercial vehicle auctions using email marketing. Truck Auction World are a specialist used truck and plant equipment auction website that allows companies to quickly and easily sell their ex-commercial fleets. When Truck Auction World first came to Generate they were looking for a way to increase bidder registrations and keep these bidders up to date with the latest auction offerings. Bearing this in mind Generate UK designed a bespoke, Truck Auction World branded email template. In order to do this the email template had to be visually appealing to get recipients to click through to the website. The template features: Images of featured lot Key specification/details of lots Links to the individual lots The campaigns are sent out to several mailing lists a few days before the auction and have managed to seriously increase traffic to the site. Between February 2nd and March 4th, 19% of all traffic to the website came from people clicking on links within the email newsletter. That is a total of 2998 visits, making it the second highest medium of traffic to the website. Generate UK also developed a second newsletter template that was designed to include more lots using text based links instead of images. We ran a split test to determine which template was more effective using Google Analytics & the Generate UK Email Statistics tool to measure click through rates and traffic. From this process we were able to…


Email Marketing

Posted on May 24, 2010 by Joe in Email Marketing | Leave a comment

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Excerpt: Recently Generate UK were tasked with helping deliver a series of email marketing campaigns on behalf of Speed Networking Berkshire to help promote a number of their recent events. In particular an event  which was held at Donnington Grove Country Club in Newbury during March and one of their upcoming events to be held on 16th June in Maidenhead. Interestingly the Speed Networking Group has recently adopted a new approach to email marketing and analytics play a big part. John Halladay, Director of Speed Networking Events Ltd ‘We are getting smarter and faster in the way we are sending our email communications and we are in the process of investing into a new intuitive email marketing system with an analytics suite to help us measure response, allowing us to be more targeted in the way we deliver our future communications’. Ultimately the overall aim of the communication was to ‘get bums on seats’ and email marketing is a fantastic tool to enable this process. People are becoming far more wary of email communications, so standing out from the crowd through flashy graphics often rings alarm bells for most people. Strong, relevant titles and quality content is massively important to achieving a successful campaign. One of the hardest tasks is to make people open the communication and we often find short, sharp titles works well and often using shorten acronyms i.e. RE: Event 16th June often work well. If you’re lucky enough that people do open your email, asking them to read and digest…


Unorthodox e-mail marketing ideas. Only shooting stars break the mould.

Posted on April 27, 2010 by John King in Email Marketing, Internet Marketing | 3 Comments

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Excerpt: Sometimes it pays to take a break from conventional e-mail marketing wisdom. In a business environment where fancy HTML ‘one-to-many’ e-mails is the norm, there are a few people out there trying a range of clever, different and sometimes downright unorthodox approaches to get their e-mails noticed above everybody else. In this post I shall include and discuss a few interesting notions I’ve come across recently. “You’ve got lower open rates? Well… It could be a good thing!” As those e-mail savvy among you already know, many of the most popular e-mail hosts block images by default. Many of those businesses that go to the trouble of creating fantastic, artistic e-mail pieces may not be getting the message across. As a result there are a number of e-mail marketers out there that have instead decided to optimise their e-mails for image blocking, making sure that all their Calls to Action and key selling points are still clear despite the lack of imagery by using plain text and image ‘alt’ tags. The advantage of this of course is that the recipient is more likely to have read and digested the e-mail despite the images being blocked. The fancy e-mails on the other hand, may well be displaying as tables full of the dreaded little red crosses and will likely be ignored. So how does this relate to open rates? Well, if your image blocking optimised e-mail was able to get the message across with text alone… The recipient will have had no need to…


An introduction to email marketing

Posted on December 18, 2009 by Mike in Email Marketing | 1 Comment

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Excerpt: Marketing your products or services by email is one of the easiest ways you can let people know about your company. It is an affordable and effective way of making your products known and sold. Email marketing is one of the most common online marketing tactics producing the intended result. It lets you build a relationship with your customers, members, and your prospects through personalised and relevant email communication. Well drafted personalised emails, which are relevant to your products or services, increase your sales. You can improve on your investment much more when you grow your opt-in email list. Email marketing is affordable, and it is the best way to attract the attention of the people, build desire, which helps to generate sales to a great extent. The technology today provides you to combine the best industry practices in email marketing, allowing you to personalise your emails and include relevant information on the body of the email or as an attachment and send the right type of message to the right person, at the right time. Email marketing develops business between real people encouraged by relationships based on value, trust and faith. You can start to market your products or services by sending off emails anytime you want. All you need to know is that, your email has to convey the right type of message to the right person, and should be able to convey the right intention which would help in building loyalty and trust with your prospective customers. This way you…


Top 20 Digital Marketing Ideas – Number 15 – Email Marketing

Posted on September 16, 2009 by Mike in Business Development, Digital Marketing Tips, Email Marketing | 5 Comments

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Excerpt: You’re currently reading Generate UK’s Top 20 Digital Marketing ideas. Over the course of the next month, we’ll be sharing our experience to help you marketed your business on the Internet. Email marketing is now one of the most cost effective ways to market to your potential customers; as a result, it is no surprise that the UK market grew from a value of £221m in 2007 to an estimated £274m in 2008. Despite the economic doom and gloom, this growth is expected to rise further in 2009. There are a number of reasons which are contributing to this continued rise: The economic climate is putting pressure on everyone’s marketing budgets, however at the same time there is a need for an increase in retention marketing, which email marketing is perfect for. There is an increased number of email service providers, which is bringing down the cost and adding value to the marketing department (in most cases anyway). We’re all beginning to see the benefit of email marketing from a return on investment perspective. This is certainly the case when measuring the cost of the campaign, however it’s fair to say that many businesses need to go one step further in terms of measuring their campaigns with the amount of business it produces. Most businesses recognise that they have to work harder for their slice of the cake and as a result there is a greater focus on building email lists and encouraging email sign ups from webmasters and marketing managers. Email marketing offers businesses the opportunity…


Fish Brothers Swindon: More effective email marketing with Generate UK email system

Posted on September 11, 2009 by Mike in Customers, Email Marketing, Web News | Leave a comment

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Excerpt: The Fish Brothers Group is a multi franchise, family owned car dealer group based in Swindon. They offer new and used cars as well as contract hire, servicing and parts. In a competitive market, Fish Brothers were keen to identify new ways to promote their annual sale and at the same time improve their communications with customers and prospects. Fish Brothers Group were looking to promote their inaugural sale, entitled The Big Sale, this is a large scale event aimed at increasing car sales in the run up to the new registration plates. Via previous marketing activities, Fish Brothers already had a well qualified email marketing list, so they decided to embark on an email marketing campaign. Email marketing is a fast and effective way to communicate with your customers. Segmenting your data based upon previous interests means that your emails can be highly targeted, which will increase your click through and conversion rates. Fish Brothers’ list was split into different interest groups based on car manufacturer; it was then split down further based on Fish Brother’s own criteria which determined what type of communication the recipient would receive.  In addition, each email included a unique code and voucher which ensured that each email was unique. The major benefit of email marketing is that it provides the ability to look at the campaign statistics, which enables the marketing department to make more informed decisions and to continuously improve their email communications. Sara Hodkin, Fish Bros Group Marketing Manager stated “We chose Generate UK to help…


Email Marketing helping Newbury firm build a direct response

Posted on August 11, 2009 by Mike in Business Development, Customers, Email Marketing, Internet Marketing | 2 Comments

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Excerpt: Business is tough at the moment and small businesses have to think beyond their next piece of work. It’s interesting to hear directly from businesses about their challenges in terms of creating new business opportunities; which is why we’re pleased to hand over this blog post over to Christopher Eades, director of AA Eades and Son. “We’re a small local building firm based in Newbury and for us having that steady flow of business coming in is vitally important. Over the years we have built a fantastic reputation locally for quality workmanship at competitive pricing.  Whilst business is still okay, with the downturn in economy I felt it was important to look at new ways to seek out new business rather than just rely on word of mouth. I was discussing my situation with a friend who in the past has used email marketing and suggested that I tried it.  I was sceptical at first; could it really help me and directly bring me business?  I thought I would seek out a company to talk to and was recommended by another friend to speak to Generate UK. As you can tell I often go on recommendation! I contacted Generate UK and sat down with them to look at the possible options available. We haven’t got a website, this is something that we are thinking about, and so I thought the online activity was limited in terms of where I could send people to so we opted for a direct response. We decided to trial…


Top 20 Digital Marketing Ideas – Number 20

Posted on July 9, 2009 by Mike in Business Development, Digital Marketing Tips, Email Marketing, Web News | Leave a comment

Whilst data itself isn’t an activity, the collection of it is. Your Data is sacred and should be treated in this way. How you source and store your data is paramount to creating the base for your marketing activities and overall communication strategy. There are many data companies/brokers within the market place offering clean data at exceptionally low prices. Having bought thousands upon thousands of data records from these companies, I would recommend that you: firstly know exactly where the list is sourced from; understand exactly what you are purchasing i.e. single use/multi use; what is the percentage bounce rate that they are offering, i.e. how clean are they stating the data is? And make sure you haggle over the price! Other than buying data directly, we speak to many businesses who struggle to continually acquire new data; however there are many ways to address this.  Make sure your website is capturing data through downloads, newsfeeds, promotions and online forms. Incentivise your staff to find new data by making them aware of its importance.  Ensure that all of your marketing collateral gives the recipient the opportunity to respond with their details. The best form of data is the data you have collected yourself. What do you think of our Digital Marketing Idea Top Tip number 20? Do you agree or disagree? Submit your comments below. What’s the worst that can happen?


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