Yeah, there are newer social networks for keeping in touch with your customers, but none of them deliver the same results as email marketing.

Why?

Because emails move the conversation about you, your business and your products to a place that’s really personal – the inbox.

Building an email list helps you get a return on your marketing investment

Let’s look at an example that shows why email marketing is important.

If you have any type of online presence, you will have found it’s all for nought if you don’t have visitors. The ability to generate traffic will make or break your site and your business. If you’ve tried, you know it’s hard work.

You begin publishing content, tweeting, posting on social networks, and running adverts to drive traffic to your site.

Soon enough you get some traffic. Great! But only some people buy. Other visitors may come once, but never again. They know a little about you, but aren’t ready to buy yet. They may think to themselves they’ll come back later, but when the time comes, they’ve forgotten you.

This is a real waste of the time, energy and money you have invested in generating traffic.

What should you do?

Ask your visitors for their email address

A lot of website owners leave money on the table by not asking for visitor’s email addresses. If you don’t ask, you don’t get. By asking for an email and getting an opt in, customers are giving you permission to email them and start building a relationship.

Something magical just happened. You didn’t make a sale but you still got a return on your marketing investment. You now have a potential customer that has expressed interest in your business. That’s valuable.

Okay, they haven’t bought anything. Yet. Maybe they don’t need you right now, but if you mail regularly, you will be on their minds when they do.

Emails give you a direct line of communication with your customers and help you turn conversation into sales.

Now, this doesn’t mean you should bombard them with offers and sales heavy messages. That’s a sure fire way to lose your customers and ensure they never open your emails. Or worse, unsubscribe.

So, what should be the focus of the emails you send?

Send out email jam packed with valuable content

Yep, you read correctly. You have access to your customers inbox. That’s a sacred trust. Don’t blow it. Now is your chance to deepen your relationship, establish yourself as an expert and as an adviser to your customers.

How do you do this?

Simple. Move the free line. Take your very best information and give it away. For free.

Show your customers that you know what you’re talking about. Give them a real reason to read your emails and look forward to them in the future.

Special offers and announcements have a time and place

Although giving away your best material may sound counter intuitive, don’t worry. You can still actively market your products and services. It’s all about timing and placement.

If you’ve just launched a new product or service, feel free to send out an email about it. Just not too often.

This isn’t an exact science, but you want to aim to send out 4 or 5 pieces of valuable content for each ‘sales pitch’ / ‘announcement’ you send out.

Post your content to your blog

Whatever you’re sending out to your customers, should be posted to your blog. Whether it’s an article, video, presentation slides, or anything else, post it on your blog. Remember, search engines love fresh content that’s posted regularly. It’d be a shame if your best value knowledge was confined to the inbox.

Then make sure you follow these rules to get the most out of your email efforts, on your site and in the inbox.

1) Have a strong headline that grabs your reader’s attention. This applies to your blog post title and the subject line of your email.

2) Use sub headings to ensure ‘skimmers’ can get the jist of your article without reading the whole thing. Engaging sub headings encourage skimmers to stop and read content as they glance down your content.

3) Use a strong, relevant image to capture your readers interest.

4) Add the end of your article include a call to action for your relevant product, service, or email list. This is a must!

5) Conversation is good. Write a thought provoking question at the end of your post to encourage questions and comments. This applies to your blog post and the email you send out.

Use the right tools

If you’re going to build an email list, I recommend using email management software. There are lots of companies out there that will store your emails securely, help you design beautiful emails, track metrics like open rate, ensure you comply with relevant laws and ensure emails actually get delivered.

You have a few options. Two that I’ve used personally are MailChimp and our own RX Host Email Manager. MailChimp is a good starting point, and free to begin. With the RX Host Email manager the main difference is that you can choose between paying monthly, or paying each time you send.

Remember, if you need help with your email marketing campaign, we’re always here to help. We have 10 spots available each month for our email marketing coaching. Where we work with you for 30 days to get you started on email marketing. If you’ve already got a list of subscribers we’ll help you optimise your campaign to generate more subscribers and improve your open rate.

Sign up now for coaching or get more information.

Do you use email marketing on your website or blog? If so, what’s your best tip? Leave a comment below and let me know. Oh, and if you have any questions please leave those in the comments below and I’ll be happy respond.

Why did we decide to do this? One of our clients approached us and asked if we could help them pick a property management software package. And so, the journey began. We set about looking at existing products on the market and evaluating them. At the end of this journey we decided that the existing products were either, too cumbersome, too hard to use, too expensive or both. Our client asked if we could help solve their pain. We agreed, and the rest is history.

We’re aiming to launch our new property management software before the end of 2013 and are currently accepting users for beta testing. If you’d like to get involved please let us know!

What work have we done?

The project consists of two web properties. Firstly, the marketing site that details the features and pricing of the property management software. Secondly, the application itself, built completely in house using Ruby on Rails. Both sites are up, yet both are very much works in progress and changing constantly.  Stay tuned for posts on our blog and the Property Management Blog about what the software will do and how it will work. We’ll also be doing a series showcasing the technology behind the whole endeavour.

Sites Mentioned

Property Management Software HQ – Marketing Site

Property Management Box – The web application

We are going to be launching a “grow your business online” series of blog posts. We’re planning to pack these full of useful case studies and actionable steps to follow. Expect no holds barred honesty and the very best knowledge we have to share. We are not going to give you a taste and the ask you to buy the “full guide”. Everything we post will be publicly available for free.

If you’re interested and want to be informed of new posts please put your name and email in the newsletter sign up on the right. –>

Why are we doing this?

As we said above we genuinely want to help other businesses get ahead and succeed this year. This isn’t entirely unselfish though. We hope as you grow and follow our advice we’ll trust each other more and in turn do more business together. We will also be offering to help “hold your hand” and action the points we mention for a fee.

Don’t forget, join our mailing list to be kept in the loop. Leave comments below if there are particular topics you’d like us to cover.

If you’ve started using Asterisk, what do you use it for and what’s your favourite feature?

What is VoIP?
In basic terms it just means your business places calls over the internet. You can make calls to other VoIP users (in most cases) for free and you can also call tradition fixed line phones and mobiles globally.

What are the benefits of VoIP to your business?
Firstly, in most cases you can receive calls vía a normal landline number e.g. 01, 02, 08 etc but pay a substantially lower monthly charge compared to your normal line rental.

Secondly you can have a lot more features on your VOIP line. Forget being tied to one telecoms provider and paying their expensive call charges. You can route your calls to take advantage of any provider that offers the cheapest rate to any destination.

For example, your business regularly calls India and Brazil. Your current fixed line provider may charge 11p and 16p per minute respectively.

You switch to VoIP and find two different providers that offer great rates. One is cheaper to India, the other Brazil. You can utilise both providers and your system will route calls via the provider that is cheapest as soon as it recognises the country you are trying to call.

(prices in this example are for illustrative purposes only)

Have a small team or multiple offices or remote workers?

Forget installing expensive Private Branch Exchanges (PBX – phone branching systems) hardware that usually costs thousands of pounds.

VoIP phone systems allow for use of IP PBXs (branching systems that run online). These open up all sorts of high end telephony options for your business. Some of the features include:

• an extension for every user with Voicemail and follow me
• call transfer
• call hold (with music)
• call recording
• auto attendant menu systems
• Interactive Voice Response Menus
• Call forwarding

These features are useful as calls between users (whether in the same office or not become free of charge). You can answer multiple calls whilst only having one number and not paying multiple line rentals.

Remote staff are always reachable on their extension as long as they log in from wherever they are with an Internet connection.

Menu systems allow you to route calls to the right teams in the right offices.

Calls can be handled differently depending on the time of day.

You can also block calls to premium lines and unwanted numbers without having to pay extra fees to your telecoms provider.

How can I get started?
We are currently rolling out VoIP services to some existing clients ranging from solo entrepreneurs to small businesses.

You can view our plans here or contact us to discuss your needs.

I am happy to announce that we’ve just finished up a brand new blog for online perfume store Pure Parfum. The blog is newly launched so there are only a few posts, and we are working closely with the Pure Parfum team to help them get started with a solid content strategy that will help with their SEO and marketing efforts. Given that online perfume sales is a rather competitive industry we’ll be looking at strategies that will help this new online business succeed by driving traffic from social media sites such as facebook, twitter, linkedin etc.

Pure Parfum operate entirely online and have no retail locations. This cost saving allows them to provide brand name and designer perfumes to the public at the cheapest prices possible. So if you like cheap perfumes make sure you check out the Pure Parfum store and grab the rss feed from their blog to keep up to date with their latest offers and deals.

We are also providing hosting services for their WordPress blog.  If you’ve got an offline or online business and would like to talk about WordPress Hosting or developing an online content strategy to help with SEO and driving more traffic, talk to us. We would love to help!

The site is a revamp of the client’s existing site and features a clean new look and feel. Additional features include an appointment booking system, homepage slider, search engine friendly pages, special offers, opening times and is easy to update using the included content management system.

So, if you want to see what the site looks like, or you’re in need of an Osteopath in Chelmsford, make sure you take a look at http://www.chelmsford-osteopath.co.uk.

Now, compared the Zen Cart, the Open Cart admin dashboard is relatively easy on the eyes and intuitive, but it would still take a fair amount of time to manually assign the same 3 images to each product.

I wrote some SQL statements to take care of the job in less than 5 minutes (although I did spend a long time trying to do the job in one statement, but was unable).

So if you want to assign for example image1.jpg, image2.jpg and image3.jpg to all of your products in Open Cart as addition images here’s what you have to do.

1. Upload the pictures to your server

2. Open PHPmyadmin (via cPanel)

3. Open your MySQL table and select the SQL tab at the top of the screen

4. Run the following commands:

a) Copy all the product ids to the product_image table.

INSERT INTO product_image (product_id)
SELECT product_id FROM product

b) Now replace the null image value with the image and sort code of your choice:

UPDATE product_image
SET image='data/image1.jpg', sort_order=0
WHERE image IS NULL

c) Now we need to add all the product IDs to the product image table again

INSERT INTO product_image (product_id)
SELECT product_id FROM product

d) Now use the same code from step b, but replace the values e.g.

UPDATE product_image
SET image='data/image2.jpg', sort_order=1
WHERE image IS NULL

e) Repeat steps c and d until you’re done.

I’m sure this isn’t the most elegant solution, so if you have a better method please do leave a comment below!

With a good merchant account you usually have to pay a monthly fee, but this often gives you a few hundred that are free of any other cost! For example, your average sale is £100 and with PayPal you spend 3.4% (£3.40p) + 20p = £3.60p to process the transaction.

Make 10 sales in a day and you’ve spent around £30 just on processing fees! Most merchant accounts start at around £20 – £30 per month give you at least 100 free transactions. Meaning you could save yourself a lot of money in the long run.

We’ve written an in depth UK Merchant Account Comparison that provides an in-depth explanation.

This update boasts a number of slick new features – we’ll add video tutorials soon.

Instead of going over all the new features again, the purpose of this post is to encourage you to update your installation.

You should be able to upgrade in just a few clicks from your WordPress Dashboard (admin area).

If you’re one of our customers and are having trouble upgrading, please create a support ticket.

Oh, and before you upgrade please make sure you backup your WordPress and database!

Don’t forget, we love WordPress and equally love providing WordPress Hosting. Whether you’ve got a site or looking to start one, we’d love to talk to you about our UK based web hosting.