Engage Interactive Blog

It doesn`t seem like a day goes by at the moment without talk of job losses, bankruptcy and general fear in the economy. We’re here to add a silver lining to the otherwise dark cloud and highlight how we can help you weather the storm using effective online marketing and even cash in on the crunch.

We’ve seen a considerable shift over recent months, with clients moving a large proportion of their marketing spend from offline to online as they look to work smarter and maximise budgets. It finally seems that the cost value of e-marketing, coupled with its now proved effectiveness has finally started to hit home.

We’ve done a quick bit of maths and reckon we’ve sent around 1.5 million e-mails out for clients to date via our own e-marketing system, Broadkast (shameless plug I know!). Below are a few of the top reasons that we think should help hammer home why you should be jumping on the e-bandwagon!

E-marketing allows you to…

1. Save money

I feel like I re-iterate this point over and over again but in such a price-sensitive market as we’re currently experiencing this is still a massive feather in the cap of e-marketing, where the delivery cost per person is just a few pence, much lower than print, radio or TV advertising.

2 – Track and adapt

No other form of marketing gives you the same insight into your customer activity. Whether you simply want to see who has opened your campaign, or perhaps track which links they clicked, who they forwarded it on to or whether they unsubscribed (god forbid!) – all the information is just a click away. Over time this allows you to build up an idea of what kind of marketing, tone of voice and even e-mail layout your customers respond to best – allowing tweak your e-marketing to achieve maximum effectiveness.

3 – Steamline your marketing with advanced subscriber targetting

One of the most under-utilised, but powerful features of e-marketing is the ability to hit specific segments of your database with targetted news and offers. Advance planning is the key with this as it’s harder to retrospectively obtain information for an already existing database. Have a good think about how to best slice up you subscibers – for example, if you run a national chain of restaurants you’d obviously want to gather every person’s local, or favourite. A clothing e-tailer would perhaps want to segment by age range and definately sex. Once you have this data capture in place, you can just sit back an watch a whole wealth of important information flood in, ready for you to plan your e-marketing world domination strategy!

By targeting your campaigns, you’re streamling the process and also making it increasingly cost effectice (more money saving!) whilst also making subscribers feel like you really understand them, as you’re only pushing relevant offers rather than sending indiscrimate bulk mailouts which may only really be applicable to a fraction of your database. This haphazard approach not only does this costs more, but also drives people who aren`t in the target demographoc to click the dreaded unsubscribe link as no-one likes or has time to read irrelevant content.

5 – Get personal

The internet is often criticised as being a bit of a faceless, impersonable place – and rightfully so most of the time. Luckily your e-mails needn’t be tarred with the same brush. Broadkast lets you personalise all aspects of your e-mail based on any of the segmentation you’ve created, for example:

Dear Alex,

We wanted to say thanks for people such a loyal fan of our Leeds venue and wanted to give you a little offer via e-mail…

Suddenly I’m feeling a little bit more special than just another ‘hi customer’ e-mail and thus much more inclined to read futher and click around a bit.

5 – Initiate all-important regular communication at a lower cost

Whether your list is 500 or 500,000, you should mail to it on a quarterly basis at the very least. If you do not meet this minimum threshold, you risk diluting the power of permission that you achieved when you acquired them as an opt-in email subscriber. Lower costs make quarterly mailouts achievable at less than the price of a single print run in some cases.

The reason behind keeping regular: You may have signed up for various newsletters, updates and alerts from trusted websites and brands, but if you don’t hear from them for five months, you may grow disinterested or worse forget that you granted them permission to send you email communications in the first place. Infrequent messaging could lead to a rise in unsubscribes.

On the flip site, research shows regular e-mails help develop brand loyalty and affinity, which in the current climate is worth it’s weight in gold.

And that brings this post to an end. I hope you found it useful. If you fancy putting any of the above into practice, then why not take Broadkast for a demo, our fully featured e-marketing tool. We’re pretty sure you’ll love it!

Back in May we gave everyone a sneak peek at our brand new, fancy pants CMS. Now that a few of our clients have had the pleasure of being our guinea pigs, (and seem to be enjoying it) we thought we’d let you into some more juicy details.

Looking good

The biggest change over our old CMS is the look. It’s simple and clear and built completely with the end user in mind. We’ve also constrcuted it so all the client branding is kept separate from the main design, making it ideal for rolling out as a white label solution.

Pick ‘n’ mix

Knowing that every project is different we’ve built the entire system with customisation in mind. For example, the system behind an online shop will be very different from that of a restaurant. For that reason each component of the CMS is modular. When we start work on a website we choose what is needed and disable anything that isn’t. This makes sure that there are no unnecessary sections that you’ll never use.

Control your minions

For larger companies we’ve implemented user levels. Using these you can restrict access certain areas of your website. This is perfect for giving employees access to content relevant to their department but keeping them out of high end management functions.

Suggestion based searching

To make your life easier, which is the goal of course, we have used a suggestion based search system. Anyone who runs a shop will know that a lot of products can make it very difficult to keep on top of everything, with this system you will never loose track of a product even if you’ve forgotten it’s name. Failing all that cleverness, there is also a simple category search option.

Keeping it simple

All too often, Content Management Systems are simply too complicated. It’s easy to try and throw in everything and kitchen sink – resulting in an end product which is unintuitive, bloated and complex. At every stage of the development we’ve sat back and given everything a good once over, trimming back any excess fat, tweaking those all important small details and refining everything so that every section does exactly what it needs to do, and no more. How refreshing!

Seamless integration

Some content management systems make themselves quite obvious with familiar colours, styles and layouts. If you’ve used any of the big electronics shops you’ll know what I mean. Because our CMS is so flexible you’ll never have that problem. We can fit the CMS around your website rather than the other way round.

The next stage…

We’ll be getting a demo site up as soon as possible so you can go and have a play yourselves, but in the meantime if your interested, get in touch and we’ll be glad to see how we can help.

Whilst having a quick browse through the BBC website, I came across this article highlighting the finds of the latest Ofcom report into the country’s online spend, both in time and money. The report found that Britons are spending more time using the internet and other communications services that ever before, but paying less for them. This is great news for the industry as it basically means people are logged on for longer – and if they’re logged on, you can market to them.

According to the report, the real surge came in the use of mobile broadband after a big marketing push by mobile phone companies – “Between February and June this year, monthly sales of these devices, which give internet access to laptop users, rose from 69,000 to 133,000 a month.” The hype definitely worked, as we even popped out to grab one of these ‘dongles’ the other week and it’s been working great ever since  (Until we can utilise our iPhone 3g connection through a laptop for free of course)

All this comes at a time when the terms ‘credit crunch’ is being whispered like a swear word on ever street corner and stories of bankruptcy and redundancy are littering the news. Luckily, digital looks to be the last stand against the crunch should it continue to worsen. It’s still recognised as the cheapest form of advertising, and based on the stats above is obviously becoming more and more accessible by the day. Long live the Internet say we!

For a bit more light reading, we also found this article quite insightful on the subject of marketing your way through a recession.

Well, not really, but it has been just over 6 months since we stepped tentatively into the realms of running our own proper business with offices, employees and even a water cooler!

In that time we’ve tried to keep you up to date with a lot of our work but there isn’t time in the day, or space on the page to feature all of it in detail, so I thought I’d just list all the sites we’ve turned around in a mere 180 days (and occasionally nights).

Business started with a bang back in December with some work for Headland and Propaganda which we can’t name as we’ll be shot (seriously, it was in the contract!) but then we were asked to develop the main site for Propaganda themselves and it all took off from there….the following sites were designed, built, tested and launched (and invoiced!) in quick succession:

• Propaganda
• Kobe Bar
• Napa
• ATC Properties
• Blush Baby
• Staying Cool
• At The Races
• Preston Museums (flash and build)
• Arc Inspirations
• Broadkast
• Belgo
• Huxleys
• Lowry (interactive flash)
• Server Team
• ETM Offroad
• Smith Smalley Architects

On top of all that we’ve launched microsites for At The Races, created countless email newsletters, maintained our existing clients sites, judged local talent (no, really!), decorated the office, driven fast cars and managed to do it all without a single computer being thrown out of the window.

Taking into account other projects which can’t be mentioned, we make that an average of 3 site launches a month and there’s more to to come! Despite the glorious sunshine and Amazonian temperatures in the office, we’re currently designing and developing new sites for Steenbergs organic, myTripBook, Mojo Bar, Proline plus a couple of big projects for Hemisphere, which we’ll be telling you about soon!

So you’ll forgive us if we’re just a bit pleased with how things are going, and forgive us a bit more if we open our modest little office cooler and crack open a can of Relentless in celebration!

Just a quick post while I enjoy my Waitrose smoked salmon and cream cheese sandwich – yeah, we’re pretty posh round here. Anyhow, last week we all headed down to Northern Design Competition to check out the best talent our region has to over across a range of design disciplines, from motion graphics through to fashion.

Hosted by the legend that is Harry Gration, the night saw the culmination of some fantastic pieces of work, whittled down from 2,600 initial entries – which made for some fiercely contested categories. You can see a full list of the winners here.

It was great to get involved in the judging for this years event which has been going from strength to strength since it’s inception 2006. I’ve got high hopes for next year’s awards which will undoubtedly raise the bar yet again, making them a permanent fixture in the UK design calendar.

That’s all for now, see some photos below. Sandwich was nice too.

…as NatWest told us in 1991.

Taking a well deserved break from the grindstone we decided to take Vauxhall up on their rather terrific offer of thrashing their cars around a track for half a day.

The day started not so bright and very very early, following a late but great night at the annual Northern Design Awards. The early evening mantra of ‘we’re definitely not going to stay out late’ went out of the window somewhere between 8.30pm and 1.30am. Never the less, a quick 130 mile blast down the motorway to Rockingham and we were ready for the 8.30am breakfast and safety briefing. The day consists of 90 minutes worth of autotesting (basically going round cones as fast as you can) followed by 90 minutes on the actual track accompanied by instructors. Now I’ve been a to a few of these sorts of events in the past, but never experienced one where you’re so well looked after. All the Vauxhall and Rockingham staff and instructors were incredibly helpful and friendly it almost made you guilty for burning their clutches and squealing the tyres at every corner.