Why use an 'integrated' marketing platform?

Process data flowsWe're asked this quite often. Many people we talk to were looking to update their web site and CommsBox does a lot more than simply running a very good web site. So why? As a potential client why should you invest in a product like CommsBox rather than go down the traditional route of separate web site, CRM system, email marketing plaform, blogging system?

The answer lies in the information 'flows' within your organisation. Where is data generated and what could you do with it given the right tools?

Where does your data come from?

Information about an organisation's leads has traditionally been captured by people within the organisation and this has often been the justification for a CRM system. A single system into which sales, marketing and other employees can capture information about leads and about customers.

The Internet however opens up a whole lot of new sources of information about your leads, much of which is hard or impossible to capture manually:

Responsive Websites Explained, Marketing Review interview with Peter Wilson

Last month I was invited onto Star Radio's Marketing Review programme with Cambridge Marketing Colleges to talk about Marketing Automation. We did get a little side tracked so in this podcast we're discussing responsive web sites, why they are important and why it's critical for marketers to consider their organisation's web site as the critical key stone in their marketing tool set. We'll be appearing again in the new year with the rest of the interview where we'll get back to the original subject!

Responsive Website

We can of course provide much more to marketers than a responsive website, however there is little point driving traffic to your website if half your visitors then have a bad experience!

For those of you that have read my previous articles you'll know I've been a little frustrated at times when companies contact us to discuss digital marketing only to discover they've just "done their new website".

There's nothing wrong of course with choosing the best graphic [read on]

Enhancing Customer Lifetime Value through Automation

Digital SLRMarketing Automation is often talked about in terms of moving a new contact through the sales funnel until they become a customer while, of course, minimising the chance of them falling out of the funnel! Lead 'nurturing'. It's equally applicable when maximising income from existing customers. We've all heard the saying that it costs more to acquire a new customer than to keep an existing one.

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is a prediction of the net profit attributed to the entire future relationship with a customer, adjusted based on when one might expect to achieve that profit. It's purpose is to reflect the value today that the future business with that customer has to the organisation. It's a complicated subject and at the end of the day it's a prediction - not a fact.

One thing is clear though. Increasing the average CLV of your existing customers will be easier than acquiring new customers. Assuming you exceeded their expectations on that first purchase then you already have a [read on]

Top 5 Digital Marketing Trends for 2015

For those who missed our Smart Digital Marketing for Growth Seminar, here is an extract from the Keynote talk on the Top 5 Digital Marketing Trends 

A lovely lady called Joan was 104 last month.  The year this lady was born saw the first official airmail flight. On February 18th 1911 Henri Pequet carried 6,500 letters a distance of 13km from Allahabad, India to Naini, India.  The letters bore an official frank "First Aerial Post, U.P. Exhibition, Allahabad. 1911". The aircraft used was a Humber-Sommer biplane, and it made the journey in thirteen minutes.  Wizz forward to 2015 and Joan’s birthday post on Facebook is shared 2 and a half million times in just 3 days, not 13 km in 13 minutes but around the globe instantaneously.  It’s actually quite hard to wrap our minds around the scale of changes that have taken place in a century, from 6,500 letters on one flight, to 50 years’ worth of Youtube video content being uploaded every day.

The [read on]

5 Steps to Convert Email Subscribers into Customers

For those of you who could not make the Webinar in conjunction with Brainstorm Digital last month, here is the full version for you to view.

Many people assumed after social media became all the rage that email was dead – but that just hasn’t been the case. On the contrary, email has proven to be not only resilient, but a very, very efficient way of communicating with leads, and actually turning them into customers.  In a SmartInsights survey of 7,000 marketers late last year, email was rated far and away the most effective platform, followed by SEO, Adwords, and then social media.

The problem for many businesses, is that they simply don’t know how to take advantage of this enormous asset – their database of potential customers.

In this webinar we talk about the dual roles of personalisation and automation.  Many companies are used to sending mass emails to their whole database, without recognising the differences between individual [read on]

Qualifying contacts through Lead Scoring

The task of your marketing activities is to deliver qualified leads to your sales people. The higher the quality of the leads you pass over the more efficient the sales process will be. Ideally you only want to pass over pre-qualified leads that are most likely to generate sales.

Lead Scoring InfomaticIf the number of leads you're generating is small then it's perfectly reasonable to use a manual approach to qualifing those leads, or even just dealing with all of them as potential sales. As the reach of your marketing campaigns grows you'll start to generate more leads than you can comfortably manage by hand.

The solution is a lead scoring process by which each contact is awarded a number of points. The higher the point score the higher the quality of the lead. The number of points each contact has can move up and down depending on how much you know about them and how well they engage with your organisation.

Rather than have to manually score each lead it's generally more practical to automate so [read on]

Smart Digital Marketing for Growth

Announcing our Free Half Day Seminar in association with Beanstalk Marketing, Smart Digital Marketing for Growth, Welwyn Garden City, 15th October.

Buyers are changing their behaviour, are you? Commsbox has teamed up with leading integrated marketing agency Beanstalk Marketing for this half day event where we'll be talking about how business can respond to these changes.

Super-fast internet connection, smartphone ownership, easily accessible content are all enabling the consumer to take the buying process into their own hands.  Whereas once you could rely on push marketing via TV, radio and press, you need to ensure that it's your brand that is most easily found on your consumer's next Google search, and that you capture and nurture those leads.  

Smart digital marketers now need to focus on five things:

  • being in the right place at the right time when the consumers' search begins
  • having relevant information available to help consumers in the buying [read on]

How to give your website a responsive makeover in 24 hours

At CommsBox, Friday is playday, whenever we can get away with it. So last Friday we set ourselves the challenge of giving an old non-responsive website an overnight facelift. Like all good stories, let's start at the end and work our way back. This is the result of "Playday Friday" - how the Radical Thinking web site was given a responsive makeover in 24 hours.

The new Radical Thinking website

The design of the Radical Thinking website hasn't been touched in over 5 years and was looking terribly tired and, more importantly, wasn't responsive. It's a common problem, we are all so busy running our businesses and looking after our clients that our own web sites can get a little neglected. Many companies are finding the same. Their websites were designed at a time when pretty much everyone viewed a website on a fixed screen - either a laptop or a PC.

The advent of greater smartphone and tablet usage brought about the responsive design era. If you're not familiar with the term, responsive design simply means that your [read on]

Building a new web site? Why beauty is only skin deep!

It's time to revisit your web site! Whatever the initial driver it's worth taking a step back and asking "how does my website fit with my overall digital marketing strategy?", which in turn will lead to "what technology could help me meet my marketing objectives?".

CosmeticsMany organisations are waking up to the opportunities of digital marketing, recognising that their web site can be much more than a digital brochure instead becoming part of an active digital lead generation engine.

Despite this recognition I'm quite surprised by the number of organisations that approach us to discuss digital marketing and tell us "we're just developing our new web site, it's almost ready". Often the new website will tick all the visual boxes. It'll be responsive and look really cool. How did they choose the technology to use? There are various reasons including "it's the thing our web developer recommended", "it's what everyone else is using", "our techies liked it".

This is unfortuate. The decision [read on]

CommsBox at the 9th Cambridge Digital Marketing Conference 9th July 2015

imperial war museum duxfordWe're looking forward to speaking with digital marketers about marketing automation at the Chartered Institute of Marketing 9th Cambridge Digital Marketing Conference.  The conference takes place at the fascinating Imperial War Museum at Duxford on Thursday 9th July.

The line-up this year has an impressive mix of must-see digital marketing experts from industry and professional bodies.  We are particularly looking forward to hearing Dave Chaffey's talk on B2B and B2C content marketing tools and techniques, and the Internet Advertising Bureau's Tim Elkington on the State of the (Digital) Nation.

Hightlights of the programme include

  • Industry Overview: State of the (Digital) Nation, Tim Elkington, Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB)
  • What's new in Search, Ann Stanley, Annicca Digital
  • Search (Re)invented, James Murray, UK Search Advertising Lead, Microsoft
  • How AVG married marketing segmentation, Rob Welsby, Further Group
  • SEO for International Business Success, Jack [read on]

Responsive Websites Explained, Marketing Review interview with Peter Wilson

Peter Wilson discusses Responsive Web Design on Star Radio's Marketing Review programme and why it's a necessary requirement for effective marketing automation.

Enhancing Customer Lifetime Value through Automation

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) predicts the nett profit attributable to each contact. See how Marketing automation can increase CLV through planned campaigns.

Top 5 Digital Marketing Trends for 2015

Extract from the Keynote talk by Caroline Wright on the Top 5 Digital Marketing Trends for 2015 at the Smart Digital Marketing for Growth Seminar October 2015

5 Steps to Convert Email Subscribers into Customers

A replay of the Commsbox and Brainstorm Digital webinar onthe 5 key Stages to convertemail subscribers into customers. Watch the webinar

Qualifying contacts through Lead Scoring

A robust lead scoring strategy can improve your sales process, delivering marketing qualified leads to your sales team

Smart Digital Marketing for Growth

Buyers are changing their behaviour, are you? Free half day seminar Grow your Business with Smart Digital Marketing, 15th October, Welwyn Garden City

How to give your website a responsive makeover in 24 hours

Upgrade a tired, old fashioned, dated web site into a fully responsive, refreshed design... in a day? Challenge accepted!

Building a new web site? Why beauty is only skin deep!

A web site should be a key element of any digital marketing strategy. Understand how the right technology can support your marketing activities.

CommsBox at the 9th Cambridge Digital Marketing Conference 9th July 2015

Commsbox will be speaking with digital marketers about marketing automation at the CIM 9th Cambridge Digital Marketing Conference at Duxford, 9th July

Key Learnings from Malcolm McDonald's Address to the CIM Small Business Conference 22nd May 2015

How to develop a strategy to grow sales and profits. A look at Prof. Malcom McDonald's talk from the CIM Small Business Marketing Conference - 22nd May 2015.

What is Marketing Automation and What Are The Benefits?

Marketing automation is any software package or web development that allows an organisation to automate some or all of its online communications.  

Driving Small Business Growth - CIM Conference 22nd May

The Chartered Institute of Marketing announce speakers for their East of England Small Business Marketing Conference 22nd May. Commsbox are exhibiting at event.

Small Business Marketing Automation Trends Software Advice Research

In our series on marketing automation for small businesses we report on recent research by Software Advice which showing trends digital marketing trends in SMEs

Is Marketing Automation Relevant to SMEs in the UK?

In preparation for the CIM Small Business Marketing Conference on 22nd May, Commbox presents marketing personas for SMEs using marketing automation.

How Has Mobilegeddon Hit Your Website Traffic?

From 21st April, Google has expanded it's use of mobile friendliness as a ranking signal. Commsbox looks at how you can see if you are affected.

Commsbox at CIM Small Business Marketing Conference 22nd May 2015

Commsbox is at the Chartered Institute of Marketing Small Business Marketing Conference, 22nd May, University of Hertfordshire. 

Step by Step Inbound Marketing Success

A well planned and executed inbound digital marketing strategy will help you engage your target audience. Here we take a look at how to get there!

How Ocado Markets to a Segment of One

A study by Teradata shows 90% of marketers want to embrace one-to-one personalisation. Here we analyse Ocado's ongoing, automated customer engagement process

What's New in CommsBox Version 8?

CommsBox Version 8 introduces enriched customer journey tracking, CMS support for responsive sites, enhanced email marketing tools and much more.

About Us

CommsBox was designed by YellowHawk Ltd in response to the needs of some rather large corporate and government clients. But then we realised we had something that small and medium sizes businesses could also use to fuel their growth.

It's really important that you know, like and trust the businesses you deal with. So we promise that you can always get to know us, and hopefully grow to like and trust us. We have an open door policy at our offices, and you can drop by any time (just drop us a line first – so we can get the kettle on!).

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