Every successful online retailer uses this technique to entice shoppers to their site with:

• Special offers for a limited time – e.g. Rohan just sent out ‘20% off all shirts for next 48 hours only’
• Announcements of new products available – e.g. ‘new season stock now in’
• Advance sale notification – many sites offer their regular customers code that allows them to have first pick of sale items before the general masses
• End of line bargains
• Reminders – e.g. ‘don’t forget to buy sunscreen for the upcoming hot weather’

Why it works 

Email marketing works for a variety of reasons...

It allows targeting

• It is data driven
• It drives direct sales
• It builds relationships, loyalty and trust
• It supports sales through other channels

Modern email marketing services and solutions support database integration, segmentation and various other tricks and techniques for improving the targeting of outgoing messages. Advanced methods generate on-the-fly emails customized down to an individual recipient basis. And every email campaign you send out generates actionable data you can use to refine your approach and messages.

Here’s some evidence to support this:

1. The DMA puts email marketing's ROI for 2011 at $40.56 for every $1 invested. The figure for 2012 is predicted to "fall" to $39.40, when email will account for $67.8 billion in sales (source:DMA 2011)
2. 72% of respondents to an Econsultancy survey in early 2011 described email's ROI as excellent or good. Only organic SEO scored better (Econsultancy 2011).
3. A 2011 MerchantCircle survey of over 8,000 local business owners in the US found email marketing cited by 35.8% as a Top 3 most effective marketing or advertising method. Only social network profiles and search engine marketing scored higher (source:MerchantCircle 2011).
4. A 2011 business survey by Ireland's Marketing Institute saw 84% claiming email marketing was important or very important to their marketing strategy (source: IMI 2011).
5. The ForeSee Results 2010 report on the effectiveness of social media found that promotional emails were the second biggest influence on retail website visits. The biggest influence was familiarity with the brand (source: ForeSee 2010).

Fancy a break from paying employees' NI contributions? If your small business meets certain conditions, you could get £50k potential savings through NI holiday scheme.

PRESS RELEASE

Just two months to make the most of Cumbria’s award-winning planning support

The award-winning Rural Planning Facilitation Service (RPFS), managed by Cumbria Rural Enterprise Agency, has funding and capacity to help at least 20 more businesses with their planning applications before the money runs out later in the year.

 “The service has been available since 2002 and has helped almost 1000 rural businesses in Cumbria to develop and grow,” said Lynne Fox, CREA’s Chief Executive. “Businesses get expert input from a professional planning advisor before they prepare a planning application, avoiding any pitfalls, emphasising the benefits of their idea, exploring options and anticipating possible challenges.”

“From our past experience, we know that businesses that have anticipated potential issues and have already addressed planning concerns will be in the best position to win approval and make the most of their business ideas,” said Lynne.  “And we’ve worked with projects within the Lake District National Park and in other sensitive areas over the years so any rural project can benefit from our advice.”

The Northwest Regional Development Agency has supported the RPFS since it began but is not able to continue funding beyond November 2011.  “We are sorry to see the end of the funding but keen to ensure that every last penny is invested in support of Cumbria’s growth,” said Lynne.

“The service is free to businesses and can cover all sorts of work, from innovative new builds and farm building conversions to sustainable energy installations.  But we need people to get in touch as soon as possible so that they can meet with an adviser on site, and get the advice for free before the funding finishes.  After November, the service will still be available but on a chargeable basis.”

 The Cumbria Rural Planning Facilitation Service (RPFS) won the national RTPI (Royal Town Planning Institute) Rural Planning Award in 2008 in recognition of its work with businesses and planning advisers across rural Cumbria.  “The award was a real stamp of approval for a practical approach that has helped so many Cumbrian businesses to develop successfully,” said Lynne.  “Now we just need to make sure that anyone wanting that help now is aware of what’s on offer but also of the urgency to act now.”

 Business owners interested in finding out more should contact Gemma Barnes in CREA’s Kendal offices on 01539 726624 or via gemma@crea.co.uk.

 ENDS

 Caption: Lynne Fox, Chief Executive of Cumbria Rural Enterprise Agency

 Case studies

Case studies of businesses across Cumbria that have benefited from the Rural Planning Facilitation Service can be found online at www.crea.co.uk.These include Wasdale Yurt Holidays (west Cumbria), Holmescales Activity Centre (near Kendal), Peter Toaig Furniture (near Penrith) and Castlerigg Camp Site (near Keswick).

Notes

The mission of the Cumbria Rural Enterprise Agency is to regenerate and strengthen the rural economy by creating sustainable employment. 

It was established in 1983 with a small team based in Kendal but it now has offices and facilities for small businesses and meetings in both Kendal and Penrith.  CREA’s portfolio of services includes Business Start-Up Advice, the Rural Planning Facilitation Service and Rural Small Building Grant Scheme, the Food Technology Centre, the Cumbria Business Environment Network and the Resource Efficiency Programme.

Since it began in 2002, the Rural Planning Facilitation Service has helped 958 businesses.  Other data, collected since 2006, indicate that it has supported the creation of more than 30 jobs and safeguarded over 40 jobs.

For further information, please contact

Sally Seed                                         Lynne Fox

Stoneleigh Communications               Cumbria Rural Enterprise Agency

01539 624732                                  01539 726624

I originally posted this in July and had a lot of comments and response to it, so I thought I'd draw attention to it again. I've noticed a few companies starting to run Olympic challenges and competitions. It's not for me to interfere with the marketing promotions and plans of companies I don't know - I have to assume they know what they are doing. There's a document you can download: Click here to download (pdf)

The Olympics are not that far away and already we can see and feel the presence of major sponsors ramping up their advertising and promotional campaigns.

That said, any company who is not a major sponsor who tries to get into the 'flag waving' spirit is straight-jacketed into a set of rules and regulations that, quite honestly, if I'd not read the document I would never have believed it.

In short, any company who tries to associate its name or brand with anything to do with the Olympics could be liable for a hefty fine. So say for example you are a restaurant in Manchester, and you decide to do a special menu to celebrate the Olympics using the circle emblem and the word Olympic and 2012 on your menu- you could be in trouble because you are associating your restaurant brand with the Olympics.

If you created a local paper ad with your company's logo and the phrase, 'Supporting the London Games', you would also be in trouble. At a conference I attended last year run by the North West Development Agency, fines in the region of £20,000 were touted.

Anyway, I don't want to get too 'soap-boxy' about it - but how on earth the entire nation is expected to get behind the games and support it with all these restrictions, I don't know. I don't want any small businesses to fall foul of this. So if you were planning to do an 'Olympic special' product or do some kind of patriotic window display in your shop - stop and make sure you read the document from the link below before you spend any money.

Click here to download (pdf)

I'd love to know what you think of all this - so do leave a comment. 

I put each software application through a series of vigorous tests...

Before I start, I had better explain my own needs here. As a freelancer, I don't have anyone else to read my work before I send it on. I use my own tips for proofreading such as:

• Printing off and reading on paper - this helps a lot as on paper you often spot things you wouldn't see on screen.
• Using a ruler - I often read back with a ruler under each line which helps me focus on one line at a time.
• Reading backwards - this can be helpful because you read each word out of context.
• Reading out loud - this is good for spotting missing prepositions and clunky sentences.

Even with all that, the odd thing can slip through the net. Essentially it's because my brain works faster than my fingers can type - this means when reading back, I see what I expect to see, not always what is really there.

Let me start with Whitesmoke (www.whitesmoke.com)   This company has a very effective affiliate programme going on - you can't move on Google for different people offering this product for sale. I tried it and quite frankly it failed the first test.  I typed in a sentence, and substituted the word 'by' for 'be', which within the context of the sentence, should have been very easy to spot. Needless to say it didn't. Plus, it doesn't like you evaluating other software at the same time and somehow managed to disable other things I was trying to use in order to draw comparisons. So my view, is not great.

My next one was Grammerly (www.grammerly.com). This is one of those sites where you can't get access to the trial until you put in your credit card details. I don't know about you, but this really annoys me. A good free trial should have no strings attached in my opinion. Anyway, I bit the bullet via Paypal (I thought at least that gives me an extra layer of protection). But it didn't download properly and and after an hour trying to sort it out, I gave up and uninstalled it. I might change my mind and have another go, but I wasn't in the mood to faff about. Easy should mean easy and this was a pain.

Ginger was next. (www.gingersoftware.com) This one I liked. It passed my tests with flying colours. Plus it has this additional nifty little feature that reads the copy out loud for you. The reading is not exactly BBC announcer quality, but it's certainly good enough to allow you to hear anything that doesn't work well.  So I think I'll by buying this one.

Stylewriter (stylewritersoftware.com/) is also good and one I will be purchasing. It's not quite as good as Ginger at spelling and grammar, but it does analyse your work very well and I can honestly say it pushed me to make some changes that created much better copy. Things like the passive use of verbs, and overlong sentences are flagged up. It also gives you a 'bog' score, which tells you how easy or hard it is to read the copy. Other nifty things include a flag on repetitive words, and words which are commonly misused. For example I put in a sentence that had the word 'contemporary' in it. The system prompted me to consider its true meaning. We often use contemporary to mean modern - when in actual fact it doesn't mean that at all, it means 'at the same time as'. I thought that used in conjunction with Ginger, this is a great tool.

I tried a free tool called Paper Rater. (www.paperrater.com/) This is mainly aimed at academic writers. The funny thing about this one was that it told me I had a pitiful score on vocabulary, saying that I should aim to use more complex words. As someone who writes a lot of marketing copy, my view has always been the simpler the better.  Anyway, if you're doing a thesis, this might be great, but for sales and marketing purposes, not terrific.

Perfect is a product from a company called Intelligent Software (http://www.intelligentediting.com/) I have taken a 30 free trial on this but so far I can't work out what it's supposed to do. I tried my benchmark tests of missing and incorrect prepositions and it gave my documents a clean bill of health. I accept that this does not sell itself as a comprehensive grammar checker, but it does claim to clean up common typos. In my mind a missed preposition is a common typo.  It also claims to sort out inconsistencies in documents such as acronyms and capitalisation. Again, I couldn't get anything from it. I'm guessing this tool is best used for situations where you have very long documents with lots of numbering and sub headings etc. The free trial is easy enough to download and the application neatly pops it into the Add ins tab in MS Word.

That's it for now - this blog post is now three times longer than the optimum length of a blog, so I better stop now before someone writes in pointing out all my mistakes.

Anyway, my parting thoughts are that while these tools are very helpful, we are all human.

It's a bizarre list - I don't know what I was expecting to find, but certainly not this. If you think about it, this is a social snapshot of modern society. 

That said, any company who is not a major sponsor who tries to get into the 'flag waving' spirit is straight-jacketed into a set of rules and regulations that, quite honestly, if I'd not read the document I would never have believed it.

In short, any company who tries to associate its name or brand with anything to do with the Olympics could be liable for a hefty fine. So say for example you are a restaurant in Manchester, and you decide to do a special menu to celebrate the Olympics using the circle emblem and the word Olympic and 2012 on your menu- you could be in trouble because you are associating your restaurant brand with the Olympics.

If you created a local paper ad with your company's logo and the phrase, 'Supporting the London Games', you would also be in trouble. At a conference I attended last year run by the North West Development Agency, fines in the region of £20,000 were touted.

Anyway, I don't want to get too 'soap-boxy' about it - but how on earth the entire nation is expected to get behind the games and support it with all these restrictions, I don't know. I don't want any small businesses to fall foul of this. So if you were planning to do an 'Olympic special' product or do some kind of patriotic window display in your shop - stop and make sure you read the document from the link below before you spend any money.

Click here to download (pdf)

I'd love to know what you think of all this - so do leave a comment. 

I recieved a note from Business Link this morning about a company in Lancaster looking for a Linux expert.

Here's the content of the email. If you know anyone who fits the bill, then please contact Sue Denver directly.

Bye for now

Jackie

Hi everyone,  my client Mpirical  based in White Cross, Lancaster have recently started development of a training course for a customer which involves a basic Linux programming.   Although  at an early stage in the development process, it’s possible that they may need to draft in some help during the development phase and also for delivery of the training, on a contractual basis, the equipment that the course is in relation to is a STB (Set Top Box) for IPTV. Therefore they are looking for a technical trainer with Linux experience to potentially assist  in this project. If anyone can assist with this please contact; Gavin Mitchell, 07872 469889 - 0131 440 7770 – gmitchell@mpirical.com   www.mpirical.com - Regards, Sue Denver, Business Link Adviser M: 07917053125