You send out email marketing bulletin to your audience. But do they open up your piece? If so, when? How often? Tracking is necessary.

Email marketing remains one of the cheapest marketing medium any businesses can rely on. The best part of all, your promotions can reach into the person’s inbox which is as good as getting into the person’s premises and be able to introduce your product. However, you must agree that no matter how cheap it is, it doesn’t mean you can throw your money anyhow and not care about the outcome. It may not turn out as cheap after all.

But why is most businesses still reports of poor response to their emailers? And what can be done to address this issue?
There are several guidelines one need to observe. And when you deploy tracking mechanism, poor responses will be just history.

1. Match your products or services to the audience
2. Avoid “junk mail” label
3. Provide more info

1. Match your products or services to the audience
Suppose you’re interested in promoting your die-cut tool making machine, certainly reaching out to the people in the beauty industry is definitely out of the question.
But that also doesn’t mean you can promote to any manufacturing companies. Be specific. Shortlist the industries or companies that will be served best by your product.
Give them a call to find out.

2. Avoid “junk mail” label
The other advantage of finding out about your target audience is that you’ll be directed to the appropriate personnel. He may not be interested in your product but may do so in the future, so seek his permission to keep him updated of your promotions. Obtain his full name and email address.

Any emailer that is directed to a general inbox will receive less attention. And worst still, your email address and emailers might be labelled as junk mail and have no access to their inbox for future promotional emailers. So the next time you send an emailer, avoid the following:

To: admin@abc.com
Dear Sir/ Madam, we have a product you might be interested in.

Do this instead:

To: david@abc.com
Hi David, I have a great product that will serve you well in the future.

Tracking
Deploy an open-rate tracking in your emailer. Chances for David to open your emailer rate is very high. However if it’s otherwise, most likely he might not be interested in your offerings and as such should be omitted from your database. But before you do so, it’ll be better if you can call to ask David if there’s anyone else you can reach out to. That’s better than a junk emailer that will register a ZERO opening rate.

3. Provide more info
Considering the little time David has everyday, make sure your emailer is concise and sharp. Don’t overload with heavy graphics and contents. Avoid attachments. Place all your messages on html. Have a back-up link in case he can’t view on his inbox.

Give just enough information and benefits. Attract him with “click here to find out more” or ” see what others are saying about our product”.  These links to your website is to give him further endorsement on your product.

Tracking
Deploy tracking on such buttons will give you an indication that David has some interest in your product. You may alert your sales team to give him a follow-up call.

Conclusion
Tracking results does not provide any indication that a buying process will take place. But you will gain insights if David is the right person to reach out to and have some interest in your product. With such capability the rate of closure is will be higher than ever imagined.

Case Study:
View our recent success with email marketing for a client.

Further readings:
1. Best Practises For Bulletproof E-Mail delivery
2. Stop E-Mail Marketing from Resembling Spam

DezignQuest (DQ), a creative design agency in Singapore that assist clients in all their marketing effort on print and online. The agency also supports all email marketing effort from consultation to planning, creative development to email blast and tracking reports. Visit www.dezignq.com for more info.

You send out email marketing bulletin to your audience. But do they open up your piece? If so, how when? How often? Tracking is necessary. We’ll share with you in our next post.

How many times have we been reminded to look good when going for an interview. First impression counts, they say. How true, isn’t it. Is the same as your business.

Like any set-up, we work with partners big and small. And before we decided to embark on the partnership, it’s usual for us to study our potential partner’s website. If it’s appealing be it in terms of content or design, it will gain an easy approval from us. Otherwise, it’ll be a big no, no.

We take pride in our business. Visually appealing and well structured website equate to a well focus and highly driven business.

After a successful rebranding process for a local catering company, we took on the task of revamping their website. Much can be learned about their previous version. But we’ll cover that in detail on another post.

What we hope to share here is how an aesthetically pleasing website can play a part in drumming up your business. In the revamped site, we took great care in making sure that navigating around the site is simple and accessibility to related features is quick. For instance since our client caters for corporate events, it’ll be impressive to feature photo gallery in the same section as the main information.

Every website especially B2Bs, must take advantage of the ability of the platform to display their brand, the very existence of their business. And so, we emphasised on our client’s logo and tagline with complimentary palette of colours.

Now that we have addressed the aesthetics, we take a step further to make sure the platform is good for business. Imagine that you have a visitor walking around in your shop unassisted, what would you do to encourage that visitor to walk off with a purchase? Share with them your offerings including those on promotions, provides them with lots of assurance eg. testimonials, relevant photos and let them express any concerns they may have through feedback form, email contact.

All the above factors cannot function in isolation. But together, if assembled correctly, would have significant impact on any website. Our clients have reported an increase in enquiries online. In fact, many of the sales have been closed at a quicker rate than usual.

Good design do have an impact on your bottomline. Think about it.

“I am writing to give Mr. M. Zaki from DezignQuest Pte Ltd my highest
recommendation. He is diligent, responsive, and yet very patient with his clients.
He is very professional and personable. He clearly takes pride in doing a good
job. In my particular case as DezignQuest Pte Ltd was my web designer.

It would be hard to envision someone doing a better job than Zaki or being
anything but happy in choosing to work with him.”

John Lim
Managing Director,
Royal Catering Services Pte Ltd

Whenever we crafted our visual ideas, we always wander how our target audience will respond to it. Like ourselves, our clients can only guess. And since clients are our paymaster, much of the guide will come from them. We will put up our concerns if there are any. But ultimately, it falls upon our clients to give us the go-ahead.

Do we get the attention of the elusive customers? Do we understand what they think? Will they commit to a buy-in and make our clients smile?

And since this next project was quite an investment to our clients and which happens to be their first, these questions become very crucial.

Our client, a sports association, wanted to carry out an outdoor advertisement; on a bus, that will accompany the marketing collaterals that we helped to develop. Basically, the entire campaign was to encourage participations as a competitor or spectator in the tournaments that were lined-up.

The idea of putting on the bus gained approval only after the roll-out of the other items so as to perk-up the dwindling participation numbers.

The single advertisement was displayed on 4-5 buses that ply the roads all over the island. This was launched some 3 weeks before the final tournament.

We were nervous as to the reaction of the general public.

Our client ran a survey among the spectators. None was carried out among the players though it was understood that there was a surge in the number of participation. No idea why. The main objective of the survey among the spectators was to measure their awareness of the advertisement.

Out of a sample of 283, 28% was aware of the advertisement. Out of which 18% identified the buses numbers correctly.

Since this was a first exercise, there wasn’t any standard to measure up to. We all agreed that this campaign have indeed left some impressions to the public which eventually lead to a buy-in judging by the good turnout.

Initial campaigns are like shooting in the dark. We can only gain some insights after the execution. Take heart if the results were a disappointment. Over the years, we have come to recognize that this could be due to so many factors eg. bad copy, bad service etc.

Marketers should remain steadfast in their pursuit. They must study results of each campaign and tweak them overtime. You’ll bound to gain sweet success eventually.