The Tour Series is a unique, team based cycling challenge that travels to 11 counties each year. The Sign-Up.to team has always had a soft spot for the event, as the track wraps right around our Surrey office. The Tour Series began this week and arrives in Woking on Tuesday 11th June 2013 for its 9th stage.

It’s a great event for the local community, giving people the opportunity to see some first-class professional cyclists competing right in the centre of a busy town. We’re thrilled to be in the list of local sponsors and are sure to be peering out of our windows to see the cyclists as they go by.

You’ll be able to catch coverage of the Woking event (and spot a glimpse of our office!) on Wednesday 12th June at 8pm on ITV4. Also keep an eye on our Twitter feed for photos from the day.

Marketing, particularly email marketing, is ultimately a case of proposing a bargain to the right people in the right way to get as many transactions as possible. We’ve talked about targeting the right people in a few other posts, so I wanted to take some time to talk about framing your product or service offering in the right way to get the maximum impact and generate the most return on investment from your communications. The part of your message where you’re telling the reader what to do (or call-to-action) is the key to success.

What does a call-to-action involve?

There are essentially three elements involved in creating a call-to-action, which can be broken down like this:

A. What do you want the reader to do? For example, ‘Sign up for our email newsletter’.

B. How do they go about doing it? For example, ‘Click here’.

C. What’s in it for them? For example, ‘Get 20% off your next order and first dibs on our latest offers and updates’.

It’s all about making the perceived benefit to them greater than the cost of taking the action. For a successful call-to-action, the formula should look like this:

(A + B) < C

It’s a case of making the cost for the reader taking the action (points A and B) as simple, cheap and easy as possible. This sets the groundwork for making the benefit to the reader (point C) seem great in comparison. Value can present itself in a variety of forms, and some key examples include:

• Monetary value. Offering people things like purchase discounts, cash-back on purchases, coupons for free subsidiary products or free upgrades on existing purchases.

• Time saving. If you can present people with a way of shifting the day-to-day balance of work and play by making laborious tasks quicker and easier, you’re likely to find yourself rather popular.

• Providing expertise or information. This is of value to a reader because being given tips or advice in easily digestible formats is quicker, easier and cheaper than sourcing the same information without the content you’re providing.

The thing to remember with creating valuable offers is that it’s all about what you’re saving the prospect, not necessarily what the cost is to you. To make sure your offers are perceived as valuable you need to know what drives the decision making process for your customers.

Once you’ve decided on your offer, consider how you’re going to phrase it to maximise the value available; the copy you use to describe the action and the offer will have a significant impact on its success. There’s plenty of research on call-to-action copy, one of my favourite examples is this article as it includes some great case study examples.

Finally, you need to decide how to display your call-to-action visually on your design, be it email, web or print. For some great tips on the visual element of creating great calls to action, take a look at this post.

Have you seen some great examples of valuable offers? Let us know in the comments below!

SolarAid are a British charity that promotes the use of solar energy to help reduce global poverty and climate change. The results SolarAid have seen are testament to the attractive layout of their email, familiar branding and tone, and their clear calls to action. They’ve recognised email marketing as a useful way of keeping relevant parties informed of their cause and developments, and they really focus their emails on this goal. It also doesn’t hurt that they’re managing their database carefully to ensure they send to people who really want to hear from them.

If we look at the design itself, what first caught my eye about this campaign is the bright orange that we see throughout the email; as a background to the social media links, in their logo and as a header to each email article. The colour and style of the email campaign really makes it stand out and carefully pulls the reader’s eye through the email in a structured way. That colour isn’t just used in their emails, it’s featured throughout their website too. Having that consistency is hugely important when building a brand that people will recognise and engage with over time.

Best practice suggests having a good balance of images and text in your email campaign for both delivery and ease of interpretation for the reader, yet this email is fairly text heavy. It’s safe to say that the results speak for themselves; with triple the industry average for clicks, their ‘formula’ works. SolarAid have used email as their key communication channel for informing people of their cause. They’ve also linked through to other sources as much as possible, so could this be why their click through rate is so high?

Finally, to help SolarAid organise their content, they’ve neatly created articles with digestible amounts of copy. It’s fair to say that while some readers may not read the main body of text, they may be drawn to the smaller articles. If you’re finding it difficult to organise your content, our Campaign Designer editor makes it really easy to divide and move articles at the drop of a hat!

What do you think of this design? Does it get the balance of eye catching and informative just right? The results would suggest so, but we’d love to know what you think.

If you’re looking to give a bit of life to your email marketing why not browse our range of free email marketing templates? Our Support team are also on hand if you need them!

Before the show

Once you’ve decided to exhibit at a trade show, plan ahead and organise meetings with clients and prospects that you know are planning on attending. Shows usually have an extensive website including details of the other exhibitors and some even list the visitors. Don’t leave your meetings to chance; make sure you have the prospect’s mobile number and agree ahead of time on a central networking area in which to meet.

If you’re a social media user, it’s a good idea to follow the exhibition on Twitter and any other social networks on which there is a strong, active presence. This allows you to see who else is going, which in turn helps with pre-exhibition meeting scheduling and makes for a good source of leads ahead of time. Any social engagement you can do as a brand will also help generate awareness to other exhibitors and visitors, helping generate interest in your business from prospects before you even arrive.

It’s vital to get your exhibition stand right. Your booth is your shop window, so it should clearly explain in a few sentences or at a moment’s glance exactly who you are and what you do. Pay attention to the small details. For example, an untidy booth could suggest that you’re a disorganised firm, which might put prospects off. Getting this part right will help pull foot traffic to your booth area.

Finally, a few practical considerations when you’re exhibiting:

• Take lots of business cards. You’ll need them!
• Take bottles of water with you. It gets warm in these places and staying hydrated can become expensive.
• Wear comfortable shoes. You’ll be on your feet all day, so avoid anything that might distract you from the task at hand.
• Take a four-way power adapter so you can charge your phone and other devices from the single plug usually provided with your booth. Of course you’ll therefore also need to remember your phone charger!
• Use your mobile phone to photograph business cards if you can. I do this in case I lose a card during the event.
• If your booth does not have any seating, take a small camping chair to use during the quiet times.
• Do not rely on the free or even the paid-for Internet. Hundreds of other exhibitors and visitors may also be using it, and this can have a notable impact on the speed and overall access.

During the show

So, you’ve got your booth ready, meetings scheduled, you’re hydrated, comfortably dressed and the doors to the unexpected are open. When engaging with visitors it’s important to concentrate your efforts on the most promising prospects, but remember to always be professional and courteous to everyone. We’ve broken down the key types of visitors below along with some tips to help ensure you’re spending your time and energy on the most promising prospects.

Non-buying visitors:

• Education seekers. They want to know about what you do but they are not in buying mode. These visitors can take up a lot of your time if you’re not careful, so be courteous and professional but keep yourself available for serious prospects.
• Competition/freebie seekers. These visitors are always keen to drop a business card in your fishbowl for any kind of draw, or get hold of any good sweets or branded freebies you might be giving away. To eliminate this type of prospect, entering into competitions and giveaways should require more engagement than just a business card drop. This will deter these types of contacts from finding their way on to your follow-up list and wasting your time after the event.
• Reinforcement seekers. These are typically existing customers who want reassurance that they made the right decision to buy your product or service. Set aside an area for reinforcement assurance and when possible introduce them to other happy customers at the exhibition.
• Job seekers. Like education seekers, be courteous and professional but keep yourself available for serious prospects. However set aside time for them to come back and network with you at unproductive times like lunch time and the last 30 minutes of the show. Asking them to return at another time is a good test of their real interest in your business over the others at the show.
• Competitors. These should be an easy spot once you’re in a conversation with them; they tend to ask too many precise questions. The solution here is to ask more open-ended questions back at them to avoid the chances of giving away valuable information.
• Sellers. These visitors will come to your stand with the sole purpose of selling their products and services to you, and are very unlikely to be a worthwhile prospect. Invite these back to network with you at unproductive times like lunch time and the last half an hour of the show.
• The disinterested. You can tell these visitors apart from their body language and avoiding eye contact. Trying to engage with these visitors will simply waste your time and could upset the visitor.

In buying mode visitors – target audience:

• The solution seekers. These are prospects that are looking for solutions for a specific need or problem; they will want to spend time with you to get specific questions answered. Talking less and listening more is the key to these prospects.
• Buying teams. These prospects usually represent larger organisations. A large percentage of visitors you speak with have other people involved in the decision making process and many of these will select a supplier they met at a trade show. These are important buyers, so introduce them to senior management where possible.
• Non badge wearers, aka ‘power buyers’. These are typically upper management or key buyers who don’t want to wear a badge as they do not want to attract unnecessary attention. To catch them, be alert and approach them. Introduce yourself and welcome them personally to your booth and ask them what prompted their interest.
• The perfect visitor. This is the type of prospect who realises how great your product is and sees the value of it without much explanation. They will ask the right questions and some may even sign up on the day.

The importance of being polite and professional at all times, even to non-buying prospects, cannot be underestimated. Just because they’re not in buying mode now doesn’t mean they won’t ever have a need for your product or service in the future. They might not remember you if you’re friendly and courteous, but you can be sure they’ll remember you if you’re rude – and they’ll avoid doing business with you in future.

Document conversations

Whatever level of detailed conversation you happen to get in to with prospects who are in buying mode, document the conversation. Rather than on the back of a business card (I see so many people do this), try a notepad or, even better, a tablet device instead. This will eliminate any illegible handwriting and can also be easily exported to a suitable format to later import into your CRM system.

Agree a plan of action

Agreeing a planned course of action with your prospect can help you to avoid getting lost amongst all the after-show email and calls your prospect will receive. Securing this after action during your conversation with them should be your priority. Some examples of follow-up actions include:

• Telephone call
• Meeting
• Colleague introduction
• Onsite or web demonstration
• Quotation

After the show

Follow-up

For any contacts with whom you arrange to follow-up, make sure you meet your promises. Reference the notes you made on the day to continue the relationship after the show and work with the prospect accordingly.

Tracking ROI

Create a lead source in your CRM (we use Salesforce here at Sign-Up.to) to keep track of the prospects you met at the show. Having a lead source enables you to monitor exactly how many leads the show has created, how much revenue you’ve generated from those leads and what the lead life-cycle from creation to close is like by comparison to leads gathered in other ways.

If you can clearly identify how much return you’ve got from attending the show at any point and also show what further potential business you have pending, it should be easy to get approval to attend as an exhibitor again next year.

In summary

Exhibiting at trade shows can be expensive, so it’s important to maximise the return on your investment. Proper preparation gives you the tools to have a productive few days. Make sure your booth looks great, you’ve thought about how you’re going to keep track of promising prospects and you follow-up with each of them promptly and personally when you get back to the office.

Many people (like me) use their inbox as a kind of task list, so if they don’t have time to read an email right now, they’ll leave it to come back to later.

That’s one of the great things about email – but if your campaign is time sensitive it can mean that people don’t go back to it until it’s too late.

That’s why I was really impressed to see what one of our account management team created for a client using our Marketing Automation tool. Here’s a screenshot from the email campaign:

All a reader has to do is click on their preferred option and the campaign is resent to them at their chosen time – reminding them before the time-limited offer expires. It’s as easy as that. The results are impressive too – the open rate on resent campaigns is nearly three times higher than a regular email.

It’s easy to add this to your own emails. Simply add in some links with the time options you’d like to provide (the actual links can go to any web page you like). Then before you send your email head over to Marketing Automation (you’ll find it under ‘Send’) and add in rules for each of the links which trigger a delayed send of the reminder email to the subscriber after they click.

To avoid any confusion, it’s best to create a copy of the original campaign without the reminder links in, to send as the reminder campaign.

Here’s what a sample rule looks like:

If you’re sending time sensitive emails we’d recommend giving this a go! Let us know how you get on and what results you get in the comments box below.

Social media platforms each have their own unique features and the benefits vary greatly; different sites will be better suited to different types of business. In this guide, we’ve highlighted some of the key ways to identify the benefits and applications of the major social platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, to help make selecting the most appropriate ones for your business super easy.

One of the real challenges for social marketers of all levels is finding the right tone of voice for your brand. To put you on the right path, we’ve put together some handy pointers to help strengthen your social presence and maximise return from your social marketing efforts.

If you’re not careful you could spend your entire working week on your social marketing, but it doesn’t have to be that time consuming. From researching the market to posting updates and getting involved in the great social conversations unique to this medium, it’s important to make sure you’re contributing efficiently to your overall marketing goals. Our guide will help ensure you’re making the most of your time in the social media environment.

Check out the Sign-Up.to coffee break guide to social media here. You can even download a PDF version to print and keep for your next coffee break read.

While we love our email marketing, we also love the fact that it isn’t the only way to address your online audience. There are plenty of other platforms which you can use alongside your email marketing to extend your online presence. This makes sure you aren’t bombarding your subscribers with emails, and also ensures that they get the right message from the right place.

Your website

While most of the information here will be static, that doesn’t mean you can’t keep it up to date. Most companies incorporate their blogs directly into the website (like we do), and another popular option is a brief ‘updates’ box on the homepage which you can add snippets of content to every few days. These can include anything from major upcoming events to changes around the website; this can be especially effective for increasing traffic to other parts of the site. In addition, RSS feeds make it easy to automatically pull content onto your website from other sources, like social media platforms.

Twitter

Twitter is a hard platform to ignore with its staggering 250 million estimated monthly visitors and its unique quality of combining informative content with punchy delivery. In terms of marketing, it’s especially useful for when you want to reference other content you’ve recently published, such as links to your email campaigns, updates to your website, new blog posts and so on. It’s also great for staying fresh in your followers’ minds without smothering them. Filling your subscribers’ inboxes with emails will quickly turn them off from your content, but repetition and frequency is expected on Twitter (within reason). This can be used effectively for competitions with looming deadlines or fast-approaching events.

Facebook

You only need to glance at the new upcoming news feed to see that Facebook is becoming more and more visual every day. And that brief glance is what makes Facebook great. In the same way that Twitter has its niche 140 characters, Facebook is ideally suited to sharing images. The EdgeRank algorithm means that the more your followers interact with your page, the more likely they and others are to see the content you post, which makes it an ideal platform for sharing fun and informal content rather than significant updates. Most people go to Facebook to socialise, so you can save the seriousness for the inbox and use it to build a more personal connection with your audience.

And back to the email marketing!

Don’t forget to set aside some content for your email campaign. As you can personally address your subscribers by name, this is a good place to talk about things that might affect them directly – changes to your services, relocations, new products or deals and so on. As your email campaigns could be seen as the most ‘official’ channel between you and the subscribers, you could even use it as a grounding point to sum up your other online presences and help your readers discover it all.

Obviously no single one of these channels is sufficient for a complete and rounded online marketing strategy. That’s why it’s important to utilise them as widely as possible, without spreading yourself too thinly. If you take care to decide which platforms are most appropriate for your content and your business, they will complement each other effectively and help you maintain an effective online presence and nurture great relationships with your subscribers.

How do you decide which channels are right for your content? Do you always distribute content in the same places, or do you shake it up every now and then? Leave us a comment below to let us know – we’d love to hear from you.

Why you need to go beyond your legal obligations

Email is a unique medium; the cost for the sender is tiny in comparison to that of the receiver (reader) and their ISP. For the reader, the cost is the time they invest in reading (or deleting) the email. For the ISP it’s the cost of receipt and storage of the email – that cost may be small, but the volume they deal with is enormous.

With many other marketing communication channels this position is reversed – it’s really expensive to reach a reader and cheap for them to ignore you. As an example, just think how many billboards you pass on your journey to work without a second glance.

While the law protects the privacy of individual readers, it doesn’t address the time and cost aspects. This is why legitimate senders can still get in trouble even if they’re obeying the law.

When I say ‘get in trouble’, what I’m referring to is getting annoyed recipients, spam complaints, your messages filtered or even blocked completely. All things which ultimately stop you being able to communicate with your readers.

The root cause of all of these things is failing to meet your readers’ expectations. Just because they’ve opted in to hear from you doesn’t mean they’ve chosen to accept anything you send to them. Time is precious, you need to be relevant.

ISPs act as a proxy here. Their filters and block lists do their best to prevent email that’s likely to annoy their users from ever reaching them. It’s in ISPs’ interests to do this as it keeps users happy and can lower their operational costs.

It’s important to understand that ISPs are under absolutely no obligation to deliver your email. Filters and blocklists exist to help make email manageable for them and their users, not to serve marketers.

Automated filters don’t always get things right, but they’re heavily influenced by how people respond to your emails. As well as looking for direct feedback like spam complaints, many ISPs look at how readers engage with your emails – are they opening them and clicking on links, or just deleting them?

To keep your emails in the inbox, you need to go beyond your legal obligations and strive to really engage and delight your readers. Find out what appeals to them, identify the key triggers for interacting with them and make sure you build this into your email strategy.

The delivery cost of email is small, but the investment in the relationship with your readers should be substantial.

Find out more about using Sign-Up.to to get excellent delivery rates with your email marketing in our coffee break guide to email delivery.

What is responsive email design?

Responsive email design is the term used to describe HTML email campaigns which fold down beautifully when viewed on smaller screens. Images resize appropriately and text re-wraps to accommodate narrower screen widths, without becoming too small to read. The recipient won’t have to zoom in or scroll horizontally to view the full message.

How can I create responsive emails?

We’ve introduced three brand new responsive templates to our Campaign Designer editor. Simply customise the background colour to match your branding, drag and drop images and articles and create great looking, responsive email campaigns. You can then preview your emails at different screen resolutions using our preview in browser tool.

If you’re experienced with coding HTML for email and are familiar with media queries, you can try your hand at coding your own responsive emails. Simply follow our guide to creating a template.

Is there a downside to responsive email design?

Complicated and long emails don’t work well, especially for the smartphone audience. Responsive design works best with a single column template and the emails should be kept short and sweet. This will ensure your subscribers don’t have to scroll down through miles of content. Instead, include links to ‘read more’ about certain sections, where recipients can click through to view further content in their browser.

It’s also worth noting that some email clients on smartphones don’t like responsive email design. The most infamous of these is the Android Gmail app, which strips out all of the CSS header and so will happily ignore the media queries which make an email responsive. This can be largely overcome by having a simple, single column email design as these usually fare best when it comes to readability and usability, even after an email client has interpreted the HTML.

Top tip

Adding borders or padding to your images will break the responsiveness of your email. When you’re creating images to put into your campaign, be sure to make them the correct size and include any white space you’d like to have around the edges.

In summary

Mobile device optimisation for websites is increasingly important as the prevalence of smartphones and tablets grows, but don’t forget about your email campaigns. The easy-to-use Campaign Designer tool available in all Sign-Up.to accounts makes creating beautiful, responsive emails quick and simple. We hope our new templates inspire you to get started!

If you need any assistance with creating responsive email designs, our friendly Support team is always on hand to answer your questions. Alternatively, pop a comment below and tell us what you’re doing to catch the attention of your subscribers when they’re out and about.

Choosing just one of their email campaigns to talk about was certainly difficult! I chose this email campaign purely because I visited Berlin in October 2012 and I wish I’d known about this hotel! Their website and email campaigns are really appealing to people who enjoy travelling far and wide and they use interesting images to tell a story.

What I like most about this email design is its simplicity. While the style wouldn’t work for all industries, businesses selling travel services have the advantage in that a picture tells a thousand words. The results for this campaign are already in line with industry averages, though I think these could be pushed even higher with some more prominent call-to-actions – perhaps by adding copy to the main email image.

Looking at the template as a whole, the headline and footer images have been saved as a custom template in the account, meaning they simple have to add the central content each time. This helps maintain branding and reduces the time spent creating each campaign, ideal for a busy marketer! Why not speak to our team about getting something similar set-up for your email campaigns?

This creative successfully covers ‘the basics’, with a clear online view link and unsubscribe option. There are also prominent social media links for those wanting to follow those pages. One further suggestion I would make is to include first name personalisation in their campaigns, for that added personal touch. On that note, I really enjoy the images at the bottom, of the owners of Unusual Hotels of the World. It’s informal and adds personality to the email.

Feeling inspired to design your own email masterpiece but need some assistance? We’ve got plenty of free email marketing templates which are sure to help get you started. Have you designed an email campaign you’re particularly proud of? Drop us an email and you could feature on this blog.