Following on from our blog "Is Marketing Automation Relevant to SMEs in the UK?"  in the series on marketing automation for small businesses, we came across some recent research from marketing software research and review company Software Advice. This research shows that only 2% of SMEs have a marketing automation platform and 47% are still using manual methods.

Taken from a sample of 365 interactions with marketing automation purchasers, they analysed the top reasons why companies were evaluating marketing automation, as well as reasons for buying, and what those companies were currently using, across a variety of market sectors.  Bear in mind that this is a US company, so 60% of their clients are American, but outside of the US, they receive most of their queries from the UK and Australia.  So although these results might be more representative of  a more international base, US trends in business often wing their way across the atlantic to the UK. [read on]

I thought it about time to highlight some of the significant enhancements we've added in the latest release of CommsBox™. As always we've added in a lot of ideas we've had floating around for a while along with a number of new features that have been heavily influenced by market research we undertook last summer.

So, what's changed?

1. Improved contact journey tracking and analytics
2. Integration with third party web sites
3. Improvements to the email marketing tools
4. Major enhancements to the CMS to work with responsive content
5. Redesigned template management opening the system to 3rd party designers

I'll take a look at each of these in turn.

Contact Journey Tracking

Previous versions of CommsBox have introduced our clients to a rich set of analytics allowing them to understand, rank and manage their contacts. With version 8 we've taken this further. If you're used to a standalone mailer you're probably also used to knowing who clicked on the links in your email. That's [read on]

Under UK law web-site owners have a responsibility to make "reasonable adjustments" to ensure that their websites are accessible to people regardless of their abilities, or disabilities. Reasonable will mean different things to different organisations and with different budgets. A good level of accessibility can however be achieved with very little if any additional cost.

This article poses some questions - and simple tests - that you can apply to your own web-site. The tests are based on the Firefox browser with the excellent "Accessibility Extension" installed. Unfortunately there is no equivalent plug-in for Internet Explorer.

Think of the questions posed here as a mini audit of your site. If you'd like us to take a more thorough look for you then please ask about our accessibility audit.

1. Can the user change the text size?
Test : Increase the browser font-size using "View - Text Size - Increase" from the Firefox view menu. Does the size of the font increase? Does the design still work?[read on]