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]

Marketing automation is any software package or web development that allows an organisation to automate some or all of its online communications.  Usually these marketing communications are triggered by the action of a website visitor, for example a visit to a certain webpage or filling out a form.

If you think about Amazon, you'll quickly realise that marketing automation is not new.  For as long as we can remember Amazon and other big brands have been sending personalised, automated emails and delivering personalised web copy.  What is relatively new is the ability for smaller companies to target individuals with relevant, timed communications triggered by online consumer behaviour.  

So we can think of marketing automation in a number of ways. Firstly there is bespoke automation, the kind that big corporates will invest in, where the customer journey is carefully mapped out, and individual customers are treated as a market of one. Secondly there are all-in-o [read on]

We've been researching the adoption of marketing automation in SMEs.  Finding data is very hard, yet there is a clear feeling that adoption of automation is slow.  Recent research featured from Software Advice shows only 2% of SMEs have a marketing automation platform and 47% are still using manual methods.  And yet Econsultancy (2015) found that 88% of companies they surveyed were very clear or quite clear about the benefits of marketing automation including:

• More relevant communication
• Increased customer engagement
• More timely communication
• Opportunities for cross-sell and up-sell
• Saving Time
• Increased revenue.

So why are SMEs slow to jump on the marketing automation bandwagon?  Is it because they don’t understand the opportunity enough, or are vendors not meeting their needs?

We carried out in-depth interviews with SMEs in a variety of industries to find out what they thought about the marketing automation opportunity.  He [read on]

We're often asked why a product like CommsBox is better than a home-brew collection of disparate tools. The list is long but I thought I'd share a very simple example of how we've made use of our own tools in-house to give personalised and segmented messages.

Stages in Content Marketing and List Building

Like many companies we're interested in building our list of contacts organically, convincing people by what we know while at the same time balancing what we give away for free and what we offer in return for joining our list. A common strategy makes use of 'white papers' or 'reports' as a way to attract new leads. You write (or have written) a document of some value to your prospective customers. You place this on your web-site and ask your contacts to complete a simple form to gain access to it.

That's not enough of course, you need to get people to know that you have something they may find useful and so your write a few 'teaser' articles. You put one of these on yo [read on]

Marketing automation is fast becoming an important trend for digital marketers looking into 2015.  However, it is still early days for the adoption of this technology in British companies.  We set out to find out why and provide a guide to making the case for marketing automation for those wanting to persuade managers, colleagues or clients.

The benefits are clear. Good use of marketing automation enables companies to identify prospects and take them on a journey from first enquiry to loyal advocate.  The content of email messages can be personalised to the recipient and their interests.  Prospects and customers can be segmented into discrete lists so that you only  send information and offers that are relevant to your contacts.  This heightened understanding and targeting of messages to the customers needs can only be good for business.  So what is getting in the way of faster take-up?

Through talking to a wide variety of [read on]