We handle
email marketing for quite a few clients here at Designer Websites - this involves designing each individual campaign and, once the client has signed off on our design, converting and sending the mailer to that client's customer base.
Having done this every week for several years, we now have a pretty good idea of what works and what doesn't when it comes to email marketing campaigns. Here are some top tips from our professional web design team:
- Keep your prime content above the fold. People get a lot of emails nowadays, and if your customers have to scroll down to find out why you're emailing them...well, they won't. They'll delete your message and move on to the next one. That doesn't mean you can't put anything under the fold, but you should definitely put the 'meat' of your mailer right at the top if possible.
- Brand strongly and consistently. You want to make sure that the recipients of your email know who it's coming from. You also want to make sure that, if they click through to your site, the transition from email to web page is as smooth as possible. Consistent branding is essential for both of these goals - make sure your company name and logo are exactly the same in your mailers as on your website, and make sure that they're prominently displayed in both places too.
- Use your best images. If you're promoting products in your mailer, make sure you've got decent photos of them. Images are what make people click, and the better your images are, the better your CTR (click-through rate) will be.
- Don't go overboard. There's always the temptation to cram as many different products and offers into a mailer as possible, but with this sort of thing, less is almost always more. A single clearly-stated, well-presented promotion will elicit a better response from your customers than a confusing, overcrowded jumble.
- Check your landing pages. What page(s) are you linking to from your mailer? Is the content of your email campaign an accurate reflection of the corresponding content on your website? If not, you'll probably see a lot of people clicking through to your site and then leaving right away because they couldn't find what the email promised them.
- Put some thought into your subject line. The subject line is the single most important element of any email marketing campaign - after all, if nobody's interested in your subject line, they won't even bother to open your email and see what you've sent them. Do your best to write something that will grab the attention of your customers without looking too much like spam. Oh, and be sure to triple-check your spelling - nothing will kill the recipient's trust more quickly than a typo in the subject line!
Would you like our professional web design team to handle your email campaigns for you? Click here to request a quote, or give us a call on 01446 339050!
With highly skilled staff and a state-of-the-art clinic in one of Portugal's top tourist destinations,
Rio Surgery are among the world's top providers of cosmetic surgery treatments. From breast augmentation and facelifts to liposuction and tummy tucks, they offer a very wide range of procedures, all of which are performed by experienced plastic surgeons with superb track records.
More and more Britons have been opting to go abroad for plastic surgery of late, and Rio Surgery's bosses were keen to capitalise on this increase in so-called 'cosmetic tourism' by promoting their services to the UK market. To do this, they needed an English-language website on a .co.uk domain, and that's where Designer Websites entered the fray - we designed and developed Rio Surgery's entire website from scratch, creaing a professional-looking online presence that the company can now use to reach a whole new market.
In addition to the sleek, responsive design and the user-friendly enquiry system, the Designer Websites team also supplied much of the copy for this website, ensuring that English speakers would find it easy to navigate the website. While Rio Surgery are based in Portugal, everyone at the clinic speaks fluent English, and it was important for us to make sure that potential clients weren't worried about language barriers getting in the way of their treatments.
So, if you want to combine your plastic surgery procedure with a luxurious holiday in Portugal, visit
www.riosurgery.co.uk now. We can't recommend them highly enough; they've been a joy to deal with, and we hope that they're as proud of their new website as we are!
Want our professional web design team to create a website for your business? No matter where you're based, we'd love to hear from you! Click here to request a quote.
We specialise in
ecommerce websites here at Designer Websites, and so we often receive enquiries from business owners who are wondering whether or not ecommerce is the right choice for their company.
More often than not, the answer is a resounding 'yes' - ecommerce is a fantastic way to grow your business, reach new customers, and increase your profits. However, we do occasionally come across clients for whom an ecommerce website simply wouldn't make sense; sometimes, it's better to have a simple brochure website that drives lots of enquiries than to have an awkward ecommerce website that makes life difficult for potential customers.
So which side of that line does your business fall on? Read on to find out whether or not an ecommerce website is the right choice for you...
An ecommerce website is ideal if:
- You sell a wide range of products. Websites are capable of showcasing far more products than a bricks-and-mortar shop, and if you have a lot of different items on offer, an ecommerce site will probably be the single most efficient way for you to sell.
- You wish to market to a wider audience. If you're only selling from a physical location at present, you're only reaching a tiny percentage of the market (i.e. those within travelling distance of your shop). Even if you have multiple locations, that's still nothing compared to the reach of an ecommerce website - imagine what could happen if you made your products available to the entire country, or even the entire world!
- You already have a non-ecommerce website that gets a lot of traffic. If you have a website that doesn't allow people to buy your products, chances are you're missing out on a lot of sales. Many internet users now expect the option to purchase online, and if your website doesn't offer this, you'll lose your customers to a website that does. The solution, of course, is to upgrade your site with ecommerce functionality - you'll be improving user experience, and since your website already has some history with the search engines, it will likely rank much higher than a brand new website would.
An ecommerce website probably isn't right for you if:
- You aren't equipped to deal with a large volume of orders. Opening up your business to the whole country (and possibly beyond) will almost certainly result in a lot more orders. This is great news if you can handle the demand, but if you can't, things will very quickly turn sour, especially if customers aren't receiving the goods they've paid for. In the age of the internet, disgruntled consumers can ruin a company's reputation astonishingly quickly!
- You only want to target a small area. Want to keep your business local? If so, ecommerce may be the wrong choice for you, particularly if you don't have the means to fulfil orders from outside your chosen territory. That said, we have produced ecommerce websites for a few region-specific businesses, and they've done very well indeed - just make sure that visitors know right from the outset that your site only caters to one location!
- Your products are too complicated for ecommerce. Some things simply can't be sold directly over the internet. This is often the case for companies who specialise in bespoke items; it is possible to integrate some customisable features into an ecommerce website (for example, we have built sites that sell things like personalised clothing and customised labels), but after a certain point, it just becomes too complicated for the end user. Alternatively, perhaps you'd rather get people on the telephone instead of selling to them online - giving your customers a phone number instead of an online checkout allows you to speak to them personally, provide a better solution for their requirements, and perhaps even upsell your products and make more money!
First Encounters Ultrasound is a company that provides private pregnancy scans for expectant parents. They have state-of-the-art clinics in Bristol, Cardiff, and Swindon, and are among the UK's leading experts on 3D/4D ultrasound technology.
While First Encounters offer a variety of different scan packages, the company specialise in 4D ultrasound scans, which allow you to get a detailed look at your unborn baby:
We recently designed a
new website for First Encounters Ultrasound, and since then, they've seen a major boost in traffic and enquiries. The new and improved version of their website (
www.firstencounters.co.uk) went live on the 2nd of June 2015; the following thirty-day period saw an
18.79% increase in organic Google traffic. That's almost
800 extra visitors over the course of just one month!
Traffic stats from Google Analytics.
This additional traffic comes thanks to some superb organic rankings. At the time of writing this post, the website now appears on the first page* of Google results for a number of relevant keywords, including 4d scan, 4d pregnancy scan, and gender scan (*please note that Google results may vary based on your location).
Responsive Design & Mobile Traffic
One of the biggest driving factors behind the decision to redesign the First Encounters website was the continuing swing away from desktop computers and towards mobile browsing. The First Encounters team wanted a site that would look good and function well on smartphones and tablets (as well as on larger devices), and our web design specialists rose to the challenge as usual, creating a responsive, user-friendly website that adapts to any screen size:
We are very proud of the website that we created for First Encounters, and sure enough, our efforts to make the site 'mobile-friendly' yielded great results. After the new site went live, First Encounters saw a 66% increase in mobile traffic, and a 27% increase in traffic from tablets:
Stats from Google Analytics.
PPC Advertising: Google AdWords
Once we had completed the new First Encounters website, our
PPC specialists were asked to take over the company's Google AdWords account. Within thirty days, we had increased the site's AdWords traffic by a spectacular
90% (roughly
1,160 extra visitors) - and all
without any change to the company's AdWords budget!
First Encounters received a total of 315 bookings in June 2015 - their highest monthly total to date! Here's what Warren Boulton, the company's Commercial Director, had to say about this outcome:
"As a company targeting a particular audience within a specific demographic, our website is the foundation of our marketing strategy. However, in recent times, it had become increasingly evident that our continued growth and development in both existing and new territories would require an online presence that reflected the changes in SEO criteria, combined with compatibility across the multitude of devices from which our site is accessed.
"In response to these demands, Designer Websites have developed a fully responsible website that provides clear functionality across all platforms, particularly the mobile and tablet devices that our clients commonly use. The search engine optimisation used in conjunction with this design has enabled us to achieve the #1 in many Google organic listings within one month, and their continued support with social media and news blogging further assists with this cause.
"The Designer Websites team are friendly, professional, and extremely knowledgeable, delivering results in a timely manner and providing a highly commendable service from an extremely trustworthy organisation."
Can we help your company to succeed online? Would you like us to create a mobile-friendly website for you, or manage your AdWords accounts? Whatever you need, you can get a quote here.
HenStuff.co.uk is an ecommerce website that sells a huge variety of hen party accessories and novelty gifts. The site attracts a colossal number of visitors - especially at this time of year - and desktop users only account for around 50% of this traffic. The others are using smartphones, tablets, and other portable devices to shop for their hen party supplies.
In light of this fact, the HenStuff team decided that it was time to go responsive. They contacted Designer Websites and asked us to come up with a responsive design that would give mobile users a better experience on the HenStuff website. They also requested an updated payment system that would make it easier for their customers to complete online purchases.
Responsive Design
HenStuff's old website was good-looking and reasonably user-friendly, but it had been designed with desktop computers in mind, and didn't cater to mobile users very well. We addressed this by creating a brand new responsive design that adapts to the screen on which it is viewed, meaning that all visitors now get an equally excellent browsing experience, regardless of what kind of device they're using.
The HenStuff brand has been around for quite a few years now, and it was important for the new website to retain the image and personality that the company has established for itself over time. As we reimagined and restructured the HenStuff site, our design team kept a close eye on all branding elements (including logos, site copy, and images used) to ensure that everything remained consistent - after all, we wanted to make sure that HenStuff's customers still recognised their favourite party store!
Improved Payment System
The new HenStuff site uses Sage Pay Version 3, the latest version of Sage Pay's much-lauded payment gateway, to process customer payments. Simple, user-friendly, and exceptionally secure, we feel that Sage Pay is a superb choice for any ecommerce website, and HenStuff have already been reaping the benefits of this improved system (as have their customers!)
Tokenisation is a major feature of Sage Pay's latest version, and we incorporated this functionality into the new HenStuff website to make life easier for loyal shoppers. Customers can now make use of a Fast Pay option, which uses Sage Pay's fast and hyper-secure token system to store customer details, allowing near-instant checkout on future purchases.
This is a particularly great feature for HenStuff, a company that gets a lot of business from repeat customers who organise/attend a lot of hen parties. HenStuff.co.uk is one of the first websites in the hen party industry to utilise a tokenisation option like this, and this - together with the new, mobile-friendly design - will really help to give the company an edge over its competitors.
