Thursday, 10 December 2009

Personalised email campaigns

Email campaigns are becoming an increasingly essential tool for businesses to promote themselves, but with customers receiving several emails a day it can be easy for your email to get lost in the clutter. Using a personalised email can give your campaign the edge.

An email tailored to individual customers has many advantages over a generic campaign.
Customers are far more likely to open an email directed specifically to them. Your message has added credibility as it shows your company has taken the effort to speak to the customer on a more individual basis. This is further reinforced by tailoring the content to the customer, using products and services that they are more likely to be interested in. Thus increasing the response rate to your email and increasing traffic to your website and sales.

Personalised email campaigns are a cheap and effective and easily adaptable way to increase traffic and sales to your site while creating a more personal relationship.

TWP Agency specialises in personalised email campaigns and has produced them for several high profile clients such as Sky Italia and Carphone Warehouse.


Carphone Warehouse decided to increase its publicity and customer reach by combining digital email campaigns with it’s already successful direct mail welcome pack.

A robust email campaign system needed to be developed by TWP to integrate multiple graphic designs into html templates, send unique emails to a large amount of customers twice a week, provide a platform for campaign reports and measuring delivery.

In a very brief time period a series of custom email templates were developed incorporating various custom fields allowing the customers individual tariff details to be included as well as targeting specific promotions tailored to their tariff and handset.

These templates were then tested across the leading email and desktop clients to ensure consistent quality.

The email campaign was then sent twice a week, allowing Carphone Warehouse to quickly and easily reach their clients and get immediate feedback.

Tuesday, 25 August 2009

Writing creatively for business

Every part of a business needs words. Without words, nobody communicates. “Nobody communicates these days anyway,” people warn. Not true. We just speak differently in the twenty-first century. Today’s world is one of websites, e-mail, text messages, e-mags, e-zines, e-newsletters.

But remember today’s key idea is multimedia – it’s the past, present and future. Consumers still read books, non-e-magazines (aka magazines), brochures, flyers. And business writing needs to appreciate this. A company branded in the past will miss out on today’s commerce. Equally a company branded in the present will miss the opportunities of tomorrow.

So what about the past? Life is a cycle. Things return. Just because the trend today may be for short hair, in five years it will be long. Just because businesses are concentrating on e-communication in 2009, it doesn’t mean we can forget the skills to write for traditional media.

Creative writing across all media is as important to profits as brand image, design, management style, networking, even product and service. Take a book as an example of consumer habit. People will usually buy a book on the basis it has an interesting blurb. Yes, it needs to look nice, but a pretty cover alone won’t sell the book, and the subject itself will have plenty of competition. So why buy this one? Because an easy-to-read paragraph on the back has entertained, intrigued and persuaded us. If it hasn’t, it’s told us to buy the next one.

Businesses should concentrate on placing themselves ahead of competition: that means coming first in consumers’ minds and Google rankings, and being synonymous with quality. And where does all this start? It’s in a company’s first words – its first utterances. It’s those impressions that stay with us as consumers. You want to be trusted, reliable and quirky. If you can do this, you’ll be memorable.

Some words are easy to forget. Don’t let your words fall out of people’s minds.

Wednesday, 29 July 2009

Social Media – a new way to market

What is social media?
Social media allows web users with similar interests to share websites using social networking tools.

How it works
When a website receives interest from a social network community, the article/story/information can go viral. This means your story spreads by the power of social media. Thousands of visitors can land on your site in a few hours and create links to your content. These links can help your SEO.



Facebook
is the world’s leading social networking website – for friends, colleagues, networks, groups. And, from the beginning of the “new media revolution”, it’s become one of the world’s leading marketing tools.

LinkedIn is a worldwide network of professionals and businesses – the Facebook of industry. This social networking community tool exists to connect businesses and employees. LinkedIn is highly optimised for SEO so that sites can appear high on the organic Google chart once established and connected.

Twitter is a social networking status-updating website that allows for quick communication with a worldwide community. Within 140 characters, Twitter users can share messages with the world – often linking to websites and blogs offering industry advice. This is great publicity for any business as it keeps a brand in the mind of the public.

Why it works
Good content spreads. So what is good content? The most popular, viral information on the web is one or more of the following: current, interesting, persuasive, entertaining. Tell people what they want to hear and they will listen to you.

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