Measuring your marketing

To make your marketing really effective, you need to measure every marketing activity that you carry out. You can start by measuring the number of enquiries that you generate from each activity and how much it costs for each enquiry. Go a stage further and measure the number of new clients generated from those enquiries. [...]

What sort of thing can you write about in your newsletter?

In my spare time I read all sort of things, and one of them is the National Trust magazine. It has recently been redesigned, bright, colourful and modern, but the thing that struck me this morning was how informative it was about what the National Trust is doing. There is also a broadsheet-style newsletter-featurette for [...]

Feast versus famine – which do you prefer?

Do you recognise this scenario? You start your business and you’re not very busy, so you do lots of marketing – going networking, sending newsletters and mail shots and all the rest – and it works! The business starts coming in and soon you’ve got plenty to keep you busy. So busy in fact that [...]

The importance of a personal email list

None of us like receiving spam. So considering we all hate spam so much, why do businesses still pursue buying lists of contacts to sell their wares? Why is it that they cannot wait to build up a personal communications list – is it because it takes too long, it is too much hard work [...]

Don’t waste your time writing that newsletter!

I’ve just spent an hour catching up on reading newsletters. I often don’t have time to read them as they arrive, so put them somewhere safe and then read them when I have time. I copied a bunch of these newsletters onto my laptop, so that I could read them, while I sat in a [...]

How do you integrate your online marketing, to save time and money?

The number of ways that you can promote your business through online marketing is constantly growing. It is now accepted that you need an online presence in order to market your business. I was asked to speak about this at a recent FSB IT event in Reading, so I thought I’d share with you a [...]

Can blogs and newsletters exist side by side?

I’m often asked if blogs and e-newsletters can exist side by side. In my mind it is imperative, because to me visibility on the internet is paramount, and the more places you can publish your message the better. Worries about overlapping should be waved aside, as different people read different forms of media, so if [...]

How to encourage newsletter signups from your website

This scenario arose from one of our new clients, which I would like to share with you. They migrated from their previous newsletter system to JAC, Appletree’s version, and consequently were issued with new code (website background instructions) for their new newsletter’s sign-up form to be placed on their website. One of the main reasons for a sign-up [...]

10 steps to succeed in online marketing

There are many examples of online marketing throughout the internet for all of us to see, and plenty of posts and articles from gurus and experts all saying how wonderful their versions are. So I have added my tuppence-worth to the fray to let you know what I think of this subject! 1. Understand exactly what marketing is. [...]

What makes a good newsletter?

As a result of doing some research into what people think about e-newsletters, the answers have been varied and very interesting, fuelled by diverse attitudes and individualistic insights. One thought is that e-newsletters need to be well crafted and sent to the right people.  Unlike paper newsletters, they are not a medium for lengthy and multiple [...]