Email is one of the most powerful mediums that you can use to talk to visitors, customers and prospects. In this article I will discuss 12 best practices that you can use everyday in your email marketing activities.

1. Spam Filters
The majority of large Internet service providers now use many spam protection mechanisms to trap unsolicited email before it gets to the inbox. Spam filters generally “rank” each email by criteria, and, if that email rates above a certain level, then it is flagged as spam and deleted.
To make sure your emails don’t get flagged as spam — and deleted before they even get to your subscribers — avoid using words such as ‘Free’, ‘Save’, ‘Discount’, etc in the subject line and content of your email.

2. Click-Thru Rates
Emails can contain a lot of text and graphics, and this sometimes makes it harder to get your subscribers to perform a certain task, such as clicking on a link to see your special offers.
Research tells us that the majority of Internet users respond better to a plain, bold, blue text link, opposed to a banner or button. Therefore if you are going to include links in your emails, make sure they are bold, blue and underlined. This will mean that more subscribers click through, meaning more conversions.

3. Personalisation
If you were standing in a crowd, which of these would get your attention: “HEY, YOU!” or “HEY JANE” (assuming your name is Jane). The power of personalisation can and should be used in your emails. Starting your email with “Hi [subscriber name]” can increase both your reading and click-thru rates by up to 650%. This is because your subscribers feel like they already have a relationship with you as you’ve addressed them by their first name. (more…)

No matter what you call them these are tools you can’t go anywhere with out these days, as I mentioned earlier in a blog post social marketing sites such as facebook are more important to children these days than their family. Social networking is now a commodity to add onto phones, and is now part of the marketing plan and advertising staple.

Engaging in some form of social networking, media marketing is now a necessary evil. However there are different communication strategies to consider in the social media arena.

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At Armadillo we’ve been tweeting and blogging for our clients for sometime so we thought we’d share some positive reasons why you should be using social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin. You can now interact with people you would probably never get to see normally using standard prospecting techniques; this may be because they live in a different country, time zone, are too senior or have too many gatekeepers.

Twitter and Facebook are great listening tools, you can follow whoever you want and people are genuinely happy to have as many followers as they can get. In this Internet, Facebook and Twitter era there is no excuse not to have found out something about the person you are about to meet. Our lives have become increasingly public as people add information on line, information you would struggle to glean on a first appointment. (more…)

5 years ago Berry Burgess and Lee Skinner formed Armadillo after choosing the name from a recipe book in Berry’s kitchen, (it could have been Tomato, Lemongrass or Red Snapper Creative!)

From our first creative day in July 2005 we understood that it was not just great ideas that were important, but great communication delivering effective results for all our clients, large and small, time and time again.  We have grown from small shoots to a respected strong team covering all marketing and creative genre including advertising, brand, design, web, e-marketing, SEO, and everything else in-between, which is a success story in this current climate. (more…)

Picture the scene: England are playing Portugal in the semi-final of this year’s World Cup. The match has gone to a penalty shoot-out. The score is tied at 1-1 as Wayne Rooney steps up to take the kick that could break our 44-year hiatus. All over the country, football fans hide heads in hands, unable to watch – as do the marketing men from the companies selling food, beer, replica football shirts, flat-screen TVs and garden gnomes dressed in the England kit.

So with the hype building, some businesses may be tempted to work the event into their marketing strategies/platform to attract some of the football feel-good factor to their brand. But when it comes to the World Cup you should be wary. (more…)