Small businesses go social to stay engaged with customers.

Small businesses are beginning to see how social media can help them stay connected to their customers. Last year social media adoption grew from 12% to 24%. Connie Steele, who is a director at Network Solutions (as you probably know a provider of online solutions for small businesses) said that “Social media can be the best friend for small business owners who constantly seek new ways to attract new customers and retain the ones they have at a relatively low cost.” Read...

Email Marketing Lessons from 2009 and How to Apply Them in 2010

Here are some interesting statistics about email marketing. The analysis is compiled from over 30 billion emails sent by Epsilon in 2009, across multiple industries and hundreds of clients. Read...

Measuring up email and social media

by Ros Hodgekiss Depending on how much effort you put into your monthly newsletter or social media efforts, the capacity for each channel to drive traffic to your site can be quite variable. We found that a whole month of Facebook updates and tweets drives roughly half as much traffic to our site as our monthly newsletter does over the same period, meaning that the social media crowd (roughly 9% of this combined audience) generated 30% of resulting traffic from Facebook, Twitter and email: Read...

Five Technologies That Will Keep Shaping the Web in 2010

by Dave Sparks As we’re coming to the end of this year, everyone starts to look towards the next one and there will no doubt be an upsurge of articles predicting the web trends of 2010 in the next days to come. However, in this article, we’ll be talking about what’s actually driving these trends now, and what they mean for the future of the internet. Read...

The Evolution of Web Design

by Cameron Chapman. Since the first websites in the early 1990’s, designers have been experimenting with the way websites look. Early sites were entirely text-based, with minimal images and no real layout to speak of other than headings and paragraphs. However, the industry progressed, eventually bringing us table-based designs, then Flash, and finally CSS-based designs. Read...

8 ways we increased ecommerce sales by 10,000%

by Paul Boag A 10,000% increase in sales over 5 years. Sounds incredible doesn’t it. Just to make that an even more incredible, their average customer is in their 80s! Who said the elderly don’t use the internet. When we started working with Wiltshire Farm Foods their monthly revenue was a 100th of what it is today. Of course in reality that success was not down entirely to us. Matt Curry, our client at Wiltshire Farm Foods has put his heart and soul into that website and as I say in Chapter one of the Website Owners Manual, it is the site champion who makes or breaks a site. Read...

Using A/B testing to boost your email response

by Ros Hodgekiss The A/B testing feature was released earlier this year atop an amazing wave of excitement and anticipation. Many of you may have already had a chance to run A/B tests on your campaigns, however if you haven’t, you will find that its a very effective way to maximize your campaign results and learn about your subscribers. Secondly, it ensures that the message the majority of your subscribers receive is the most relevant choice – this is a win for everyone. Read...