It’s been a busy start to the year here at Sign-Up.to HQ. During January not only did we launch our 2012 Email Marketing Benchmark report, but we brought you 22 brand new free email templates and even a new office on the other side of the world! For our next trick we’ve got some really exciting feature launches to kick start your February. So allow me to introduce our brand new navigation bar and international time zone support for the application.

Our brand new 2012 navigation bar

We’re pretty excited about this one folks. The new navigation bar brings the look and feel of your account bang up to date, as well as  introducing some serious benefits to the application. It’s sleek and compact, giving you more space to work on your marketing and making it quicker and easier than ever to get to the section you need.  Additional delight can be found in the fact that it’s touch device friendly, more accessible and we’ve even introduced a nifty search functionality (complete with keyboard shortcuts). Oh and should you ever need assistance, our support details and help documentation can be found in plain sight, ready to help you out.

We will be rolling the new navigation bar out to all accounts over the course of the next week or so. Keep your eyes peeled for yours, or actually if you’re really eager then get in touch and we’ll get you upgraded sooner!

International time zone support 

This update ties in very nicely with our ongoing plans for Sign-Up.to world domination! The new time zone support allows any international time zone to be set for your account. From this point you are able to see all dates and times within the application in your chosen time zone, as well as being able to schedule email campaigns and social updates to be sent out at the correct local time. We hope this will make life a little more straightforward for our international users, as well as anyone with subscribers worldwide. Don’t worry though, even if you’re a strictly UK only operation, you’ll still see our improvements to the date and time selectors throughout the application.

Time zone support is available now and can be activated on your account free of charge. Please contact us for more details.

As always, if you have any questions or feedback on the new features we’d love to hear from you. Please drop us an email or leave a comment below.

Today is Australia Day – a couple of years ago we decided to celebrate by having a barbeque outside our offices here in Woking. It was snowing, so it was a little cold to say the least, and those sausages never did quite cook properly. The board shorts were definitely a mistake.

This year we thought we needed to do something more substantial, and what better way to celebrate than by opening a full Sign-Up.to office down under. So we have!

Our new office is located in Brisbane and headed up by Brenden Rawson, who previously worked here in our UK office for several years before his native Australia called him home (or perhaps he got fed up with not being able to wear shorts).

We’re really excited about this first step in our overseas expansion. We already work with clients around the world, including many in Australia and this is going to help us provide even better support and services to everyone.

We’ll be rolling out an updated site with more details of our services soon. Meanwhile if you’re in the region and would like to find out more, please get in touch.

Not content with just Australia, we’re also traveling far and wide this year. In February you’ll find us in New York as part of NYCEDC’s London 2 NYC program, and in March we’re off to SXSWi as part of the UK delegation. If you’d like to meet up when we’re there, we’d love to see you, please get in touch.

p.s. We now offer full timezone support across the entire Sign-Up.to platform, if you’d like this enabled for your account, just let us know.

To aid you in your online marketing efforts this year we’re pleased to announce that 12 brand new, free email marketing templates have just arrived in all Sign-Up.to accounts. The templates are available in the Campaign Designer email editor. You can add as much content as you need to them and easily customise them to your brand.

The templates include a cool retro theme, a set of ‘courgette diner’ emails, perfect for restaurants and the like, and two ‘Uhoo app’ templates, ideal for showcasing apps or smartphone updates.

Courgette diner voucher	Courgette diner news	Courgette diner menu
Retro	Uhoo app 1	Uhoo app 2
Dotshop main	Dotshop products	Showcase
Louder	Page curl	Featured

We rolled out 10 templates in December and a further 10 a couple of weeks ago so we really hope you’ll find the perfect design for your brand. Please drop us an email (or comment below) if there are any template themes you’d like to see in your account.

Doesn’t time fly! Another year is here and so I’m excited to announce the release of our 4th Annual UK Email Marketing Benchmark Report.

For the 2012 report we’ve compiled open, click-through and unsubscribe information from over 900 million permission-based emails* sent through Sign-Up.to last year to produce a comprehensive email performance report for small-medium sized businesses, the only one of its kind for the UK.

The figures are broken down into 23 different industry sectors to help you gauge your success and gain some insight into how others in your field are performing.

The 2012 Email Marketing Benchmark Report is available free now.

The figures show that email marketing is still performing brilliantly for UK businesses and average open rates across all industries are over 18%, with many sectors considerably outperforming this.

We put together this benchmark each year because we think it’s important that UK small-medium business marketers have a relevant set of averages to work from – other reports we’ve found are either focused on blue-chip brands or non-UK audiences.

*Yep, 900 million emails is quite a lot. It works out at just over 28 emails a second, every second of every day, across a whole year.

We’re off to a flying start this year, and I’d like to outline a few improvements you’ll soon see in your Sign-Up.to accounts as a part of our continual effort to provide you with the ultimate integrated marketing tools for your business.

Improved import and profile management

Our bulk import tool, the key to keeping your Sign-Up.to account synchronised with any CRM or other marketing tools, will be upgraded next week to make it even easier to upload your subscriber data. You’ll get more control over the way the system updates existing information, the ability to add custom profile data on the fly, and we’ll be far more forgiving about the column headers in your CSV.

All new navigation

We are currently putting the finishing touches to an all new, touch compatible, more compact and powerful navigation. It’ll give you more screen space to work on your marketing, quicker access to sub sections, our support and documentation, along with keyboard shortcuts and live searching for those power users among you.

Time zone support

For those with subscribers beyond UK shores we will soon offer full location based time zone support, allowing you to be confident that your marketing message will be seen by the right people, in the right place, at the right time. Even if you only operate in the UK you’ll still benefit from all new, easy to use, time and date selectors in the Send and Share sections.

If you’d like to know more about any of these features, or would like the opportunity to trial a beta version of our new navigation, please email support@sign-up.to or use the comment box below – we’d love to hear from you!

To kick start the new year we’re very pleased to showcase 10 brand new free email marketing templates, available in all Sign-Up.to accounts now! The templates include a snazzy thank you template (perfect for post-Christmas niceties), two gallery themes and a couple of rustic ‘Teabreak’ templates (my personal favourites!).

As always, all of the templates are available in the Campaign Designer email editor and are customisable and suitable for any amount of content you might need to add.

Letter	Burger geeks	Burger geeks promo
Quickshot	Teabreak news	Teabreak triple
Template noir	Cup of Joe	Gallery
Gallery small

Watch out for even more templates arriving in your account very soon. We hope you like these, and look forward to seeing you use them. Please get in touch with us if there are any template themes you’d like to see!

According to a study from the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council and Lithium, published on eConsultancy’s blog recently, when consumers follow your brand on social media what they’re expecting to see are incentives and rewards.

67% expected to be eligible for exclusive offers
65% expected to gain access to games or contests

Apparently though, this isn’t what a lot of CMO’s expected, but we’ve definitely seen strong evidence of this. Offers and promotions run on Facebook and Twitter using our Share tools have led to massive increases in fans and followers for the brands involved, even when using very simple mechanisms like fan-gating (showing different content, like a discount code, to followers).

In fact, using competitions on social media can be a very cost-effective way to build a fan base,  far more so than using Facebook advertising for example, even when offering a high value contest prize.

Interestingly, 60% of consumers also expected to be able to interact with other brand fans – not just the brand itself. It’s therefore well worth looking at promotions and competitions which can leverage this element as well and also keeping this in mind generally when posting – get a conversation going amongst fans, not just between your brand and the fans.

What do you think? Have you found particular success with social offers and contests?

Following on from my post last week looking at what’s happened in 2011, it felt only right to think forward and look at what we might expect to see in the next 12 months. As always with posts like this, there are a massive number of topics that could be covered. However to keep things manageable here are the main things that have come to our minds.

Gadgets and gizmos

The iPad 3 is expected to launch in the early part of 2012 and I’m sure this will be welcome news for Apple fans globally. Looking at the tablet market as a whole Eric Schmidt, chairman of Google, has this week announced the ‘Nexus’ tablet which is set to be released in the next six months. Along with Amazon’s Kindle Fire offering coming to the UK soon, the tablet market could develop substantially in the new year. What about you gamers out there? Well, there’s the Nintendo’s Wii U arriving and also Playstation Vita - which one are you more excited about?

Events in London and beyond

In June the UK will be celebrating the Queen’s Diamond jubilee and in August, The Olympics are taking place in London. In November Nokia announced a free wi-fi trial taking place in London giving the public free Internet access in parts of the city, and it’s thought that this is in preparation for The Olympics. In addition to these events there is also the US Presidential election taking place and it’ll be interesting to see how the candidates use the Internet, and social media specifically, for their campaigns. In October Barack Obama joined Tumblr to kick start his campaign and as Tumblr is a personal favourite of mine, I will be especially interested to see how his team use this newer social platform.

Digital marketing in 2012

In 2011 Facebook grew to 800 million users, Twitter to over 100 million active users and Google + arrived, so social media is likely to continue to grow and become a prominent marketing channel for businesses in 2012. Google+ have confirmed they’ll be adding more features for business pages too, and brand pages on Twitter have already arrived for a select few. Email marketing will most certainly have its place in 2012 and, in actual fact the DMA have predicted that more emails will be sent than ever before. However next year the focus, more than ever before, has to be on combining marketing activities across the board – email, social media and SMS. We can’t ignore the fact that the economy isn’t as strong as it could be and businesses of all sizes need to think smart about how they market their offering online to get the best ROI. In lighter news, Emailblog.eu reported last week that spam emails have fallen to their lowest volume since 2008, let’s hope that trend continues into 2012 and beyond!

Other things to look out for

The usage of HTML 5 is likely to become more prevalent in 2012 and we wonder how much it’ll impact email and website design in the coming year. We’ve already seen Chrome pass Firefox as the most popular browser of choice so it’ll be interesting to see how Chrome continues to grow – especially with the launch of IE10 to keep an eye out for. Netflix is also set to arrive in the UK next year which could change how we view our TV shows and favourite films. Finally, are you looking for a new design/colour scheme in 2012? Pantone have announced Tangerine Tango as their colour of the year for 2012. Are you ready to go orange?

Are there any social or technological changes you’re looking forward to seeing in 2012? Share your thoughts in the comments box below or drop me an email!

As Christmas draws ever closer and our thoughts turn to the new year, we’d like to take a nostalgic moment to think about the year gone by, as it’s been quite a big one really. Here’s our round-up of significant social and technological events from 2011.

All things social

Where do I begin? Social media platforms have again had a triumphant year; from the launch of Google+ at the end of June to the growth of Tumblr, the way we communicate continues to evolve with the growth of the key social players.

Twitter reported that the announcement of Beyonce’s pregnancy hit a new record of tweets per second in August, but for me the biggest news story was the Japanese earthquake in March. It really demonstrated that social media is the first place that I (and a lot of people) hear of those big news stories.

As well as hitting new records Twitter redesigned their platform at the beginning of December and launched promoted tweets in the UK. Let’s not forget Facebook either; in September Mark Zuckerburg announced both the launch of Timeline and that the platform now has 800 million users. There is also talk that Facebook will float on the stock market in 2012, so the next 12 months could be interesting. LinkedIn also hit an important milestone this year, 100 million users.

The growth of the smartphone

The war between Android and iOS continues, with Gartner reporting that 52.5% of smartphones sold worldwide in the third part of the year were Android. Second was the Nokia Symbian at 16.9% followed by the iOS at 15%. While Apple may have sadly lost Steve Jobs in October this year, they also launched the iPad 2,  iPhone 4S (Siri in hand) and iOS 5. The iPhone 4 is also the most popular device for taking photos - beating all other smartphones and cameras, quite a statistic! Android launched their latest operating system, Ice Cream Sandwich and Google purchased Motorola Mobility for £7.7 billion in August. Apple also listed Instagram as the best iOS app of the year, no surprise really when you consider they have grown to 50 million users this year and plan to launch an Android version very soon.

Security breaches galore

This year we saw an unprecedented amount of security breaches – from the outage of the Sony PlayStation Network, to the phishing attack on Xbox users and security breach at Steam – to name but a few. There was also talk of a Facebook hack taking place in November but this never materialised. Security can never be taken for granted, and the Sign-Up.to team certainly shuddered when we saw the ‘worst passwords of 2011′ list.

Things to come…

In my next post I’ll talk more about what’s to come in 2012 but let’s not forget that Windows 8 was announced this year, as was Amazon’s Kindle Fire – a potential rival for Apple in the tablet market. There’s also the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee and the Olympics coming to London, so it’ll be interesting to see how the world of technology responds to those events.

What stories were important to you this year? I am certain that there are plenty more stories I could have covered here, but I hope this post has given you a nice little summary of the year gone by in technology. As always, please do get in touch with me via email or just leave a comment in the box below.

I’m no longer able to deny that Christmas is just around the corner, so it’s time to let you know about the changes to our support hours over the holiday period. This coming Friday, the 16th December, we will be closing our phone lines, live chat and email support desk at 2pm for our team Christmas party. We will also be closed from and including Friday 23rd December until Monday 2nd January, but we will be providing email support during UK business hours during this period.

Christmas business hours 2011

Friday 16th December: 0900 – 14:00

Monday 19th December: 09:00 – 18:00
Tuesday 20th December: 09:00 – 18:00
Wednesday 21st December: 09:00 – 18:00
Thursday 22nd December: 09:00 – 18:00
Friday 23rd December: closed (email support 09:00 – 18:00)

Monday 26th December: closed
Tuesday 27th December: closed 
Wednesday 28th December: closed (email support 09:00 – 18:00)
Thursday 29th December: closed (email support 09:00 – 18:00)
Friday 30th December: closed (email support 09:00 – 16:00)

Monday 2nd January: closed 
Tuesday 3rd January: normal hours resume (09:00 – 18:00)

These times only apply to our sales and support availability – as always the Sign-Up.to system will be available for you to use 24 hours a day and we’ll continue to monitor all services.

If you plan on undertaking any large data imports during this period please contact us in advance to ensure there are no delays in your data being approved. If you have any questions about this please contact us.

Finally, we’d like to wish you all a merry Christmas and a happy new year. See you in 2012!