Posts Tagged ‘business link’

Achieving Email Marketing Results

Thursday, August 13th, 2009

Our Business Link email marketing and website conversion seminars are now in full swing, and early feedback from attendees is showing that it is a really valuable event.

The first session covers email marketing and how small and medium businesses can use it to drive new and repeat business back to the site to make it a success. The old marketing rule of 80% of your sales coming from 20% of you customers can be realised by using email marketing, moving away from the constant need to attract new customers to a greater emphasis on increasing spend from your exisiting customers.

By profiling your database to identify your best and worst customers you can use considered and targeted campaigns to reward those that are more likely to buy and become better long term customers than those that will take the special offer and run. Seth Godin, who is world reknown says ‘Focus on share of customer, not market share – fire 70% of your customers and watch your profits go up!’. While im not suggesting you do that, I would suggest looking at your database, profiling your best customers and use email marketing to target them.

There is some useful information on the newzapp website on how to conduct B2B email marketing campaigns, but the lessons also translate equally to B2C.

If you’ve not yet attended one of the seminars there are some places left at some of the venues however dates are running out, book your place at the Business Link website .If you do not manage to make it to one of these, we will be podcasting them and will have an online seminar version for you to be able to catch up on. I will post details as soon as we have it produced.

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Posted in Emarketing | No Comments »

Website copywriting – how to get it right

Wednesday, June 24th, 2009

Hopefully anyone interested in improving their site has checked out the subject of my previous post, and now has a little more of an understanding of how to structure a site and the elements that are important from a search engine perspective.

I attended a presentation run by Intergage back in May, and have been meaning to mention it ever since. The session included a really good slot from Roan Fair their Digital PR Manager. He has years of experience of copywriting working at one point as the Business Editor of the local Echo, and speaks really well on the topic.

The subject is an area of focus of the Business Link website reviews, and is commonly an area that is weak in small business websites. His basic principles are really easy to follow, and echo a lot of the points that I make when meeting customers.

He takes a simple 5 step strategy:
1. What is your readers’ biggest headache? Feel their pain!
2. Why have others failed to solve this nagging problem?
3. Why is your solution different? Prove it works!
4. Tell them how much better their lives will be with your solution
5. Calls to action – tell ‘em what they need to do!

The presenation, attached for anyone who is interested, has some really good tips in there that can be implemented to improve the effectiveness of business websites. Perhaps it’s time to ditch the company history from the homepage and think customer focussed!

Intergage Presentation Copywriting May 2009

Would be interested to hear from anyone who has made or is making similar changes to the site and the impact that it has to improve conversion rates. If you found that useful and feel that a Business Link run seminar would be worthwhile to learn more leave a comment and we will see what we can do.

Roan has a useful twitter feed for anyone who wants to keep up to date with the topic http://twitter.com/roanfair

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Posted in Web Design | 1 Comment »

Maximise Your Online Potential Seminars

Monday, June 16th, 2008

Our June series of events features the Maximising Your Online Potential seminar. This event has been a great success and visited Southampton – Hampshire, Guildford – Surrey, Brighton – Sussex, Oxford – Oxfordshire, Maidstone – Kent, and finally Reading – Berkshire.

The event was designed to give local businesses exposure to ideas of what makes a website a success and how to market it using the growing phenomenon of social media such as facebook.

We were lucky to get a great turn out at these events, and had some really good feedback from attendees.

If you want to ask the presenters a question or comment on your SEO experiences post away!

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Business Link eBusiness Events

Monday, June 16th, 2008

Part of my role at Business Link invloves creating seminars and events that I and my colleagues think the business community will find useful.

Please use this post to share your thoughts on what topics would you like to see feature in an events programme and you may find a seminar coming to you soon on that very topic!

Also any comments you have on times of day and length of seminars and level detail would be great.

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