The Green Media portfolio page has been updated today with a selection of November’s work, including some fantastic email marketing campaigns for Bentley and Audi.

Next month’s updates will include a suitably stylish Maserati campaign as well as the amazing new website for specialist motor brokerage Precious Metals.

It’s really easy to get used to a particular approach to online marketing and stick to it. More often than not an initial wave of good results will cause this, but you’re likely to find that churning out a repetitive promo will end up generating less and less interest over time, and even turning your customers off completely.

There are plenty of ways to keep things fresh, and with a little strategising you can find a number of different approaches that you can keep to hand in your marketing arsenal, picking and choosing to suit. Here’s an effective one to try out…

Occasionally promoting an individual product or service can be a great way to generate interest in your wider offerings. Singling out one area of your business can create a more exclusive focus to your marketing, making a refreshing change from more general sales advertising. When you’re only taking about one thing you’ve got a better chance of streamlining your message and getting a positive reception - then opening the door to other opportunities.

A recent e-flyer for Aston Martin Lancaster Cambridge (take a look at it in our portfolio) showcased a rare V12 Vanquish, presenting the car as a ‘last chance’ for prospective buyers. Another email marketing campaign for Porsche Centre Cambridge highlighted a unique pink Boxster, the only one of its kind available at the time. Both campaigns played on the ‘opportunity’ of the offering, instantly demanding attention.

As well as drawing attention to a particular product or service, this type of marketing can also generate interest in your other offerings and create clear selling opportunities that otherwise wouldn’t have existed. Although you’re genuinely advertising a single item to begin with, you’re ultimately exposing your prospective customers to everything else that you’ve got to offer once they click-through to your website or walk into your shop.

Think about what you’ve got to promote from every angle, and you might find that an occasional detour from a usual approach can deliver results.

Take a look at our newly updated portfolio page to see a selection of what we’ve been creating here at Green Media during October. You’ll find our debut Lamborghini and Toyota e-flyers, the website for Brenikov Training and the latest Aston Martin email marketing.

We’ll be updating the page regularly, so be sure to check it out again soon. Next month’s additions include an absolutely stunning Bentley email marketing campaign, which is our first sole branded work for the classic marque.

“Click here” is one of the most enduring terms used online, and has been around from the start. In fact, searching for “click here” on Google brings in an incredible 1.3 billion results, demonstrating how ubiquitous the term has become. It’s the second-nature anchor text choice for a lot of web developers and search copywriters, although moving away from it is so easy - and beneficial.

While “click here” still has great relevance in email marketing for obvious reasons, you’re missing an ideal SEO opportunity if you continue to use it indiscriminately on websites. From both a user accessibility and search engine indexing perspective, the term isn’t exactly the most helpful. Thinking about the search engines, if an anchor text and tag uses some of the keywords relating to the page that it’s linking to, then it’s far easier to classify - boosting the relevancy to a given topic. What’s more, your real-world users will know instantly what they’re clicking on, so you’re enhancing their visit as well. “Click here” doesn’t offer any information whatsoever, other than the presence of a link.

It’s another example that usability and creating a positive web experience should always be at the forefront of your web development and copywriting.

So, try to come out of the “click here” safe zone and you’ll soon find that SEO benefits will follow.

Today’s financial climate demands that you keep on marketing, but it also demands a more pragmatic approach to your advertising in order to continue being effective. Marketing for marketing’s sake simply won’t deliver the results you need now.

Prospective customers are resistant - even immune - to traditional hard sell advertising during an economic downturn, and you could be wasting budget to carry on with the same approach that perhaps worked for you two or three years ago. Think about what you’re offering, and how you can offer it in the most suitable way for today’s buyer.

A recent email marketing campaign for our client at Cloverleaf Honda took a direct conversational copy style, outlining Honda’s response to the credit crunch and showcasing some models with massive savings. This moved away from the typical salesy marketing that a customer might be expecting, and towards a more open tone. We combined the copy with a clearly laid-out branded design and a personalised email subject line, and as a result achieved a click-through rate of almost 30% - smashing the industry average of between 5-10%.

These results show that the customers are still out there - it just takes a different approach to successfully connect with them now.

We sent an email marketing flyer for Lancaster Cambridge Aston Martin last week which resulted in an immediate sale of a brand new DBS, continuing the fantastic performance for this client.

Talking figures, the cost of the mailing was just £212, and the Aston Martin DBS retails at around £149,000.

It’s another example of how effective our email marketing can be - delivering the phenomenal ROI that we talk so much about. As well as this, it’s a neat illustration of how continuing business marketing through the current economic downturn really does produce results, something else that we’ve mentioned recently.

It’s a rare industry that has remained unscathed throughout 2008, and there’s now a real need to evolve your promotional approach to meet with the changing day-to-day demands of the market. The first thing to consider is the be-all and end-all of your marketing - the customer. Ask yourself - do you know your customer as well as you think?

Avoid guessing what your customers are looking for, as even missing the mark slightly here will cost time and money. It is always worth doing a little research every so often to find out exactly how you should be marketing your product, and it becomes even more important during turbulent times like these. You’re likely to be surprised at how willing people are to give you the information you’re looking for, and a questionnaire on your website or a quick email flyer could be all that’s needed. Everyone’s got an opinion, and most people like the opportunity to express theirs.

It’s hardly in-depth socio-demographic analytics, but you will find out some information that is new to you - something that could help you avoid wasting your marketing budget at a time when it needs to be more effective than ever.

The marketing budget is often the first outgoing to be cut during an economic downturn, but it is almost always the case that any immediate savings will be massively overshadowed by the imminent problems that reduced marketing will cause.

Marketing is absolutely key to your company’s performance, so if anything a financial nosedive like the one that is happening right now should make your marketing budget more important than ever. Your competitors will be cutting their own marketing spend, and when that happens you’ll find voids opening up. It’s up to you to fill these voids and benefit. Cutting your marketing budget leaves the gaps for your competitors to fill, and isolates you even further from your goals.

Your customers and prospects haven’t disappeared - they still exist, they’re perhaps just more discerning than they were earlier. Again, it’s up to you to react to this.

Refocus on what you’re trying to achieve from your marketing. It’s likely that you’ll need to adapt your approach or even your offering, but giving up altogether simply cannot lead to a positive outcome.

Riding out the turbulence can empower your brand in other ways, particularly expanding and consolidating your share of voice (SOV). Eventually once the financial storm has settled, if you’ve stayed the course and been ever-present throughout then this will be abundantly clear to customers and market observers - you’re not meekly emerging from a wreckage like competitors who disappeared by cutting their marketing, you’ve never been away.

Image-heavy HTML emails, although looking great, often cause a number of problems across different email clients. Outlook 2007, Hotmail, legacy releases of Outlook, Gmail, AOL, YahooMail, Apple Mail and… whisper it… Lotus Notes all deal with HTML email differently and, unless you’re coding specifically to handle them all, they’re likely to display your email in a number of weird and not-so-wonderful ways. Considering the size of most commercial mailing lists it is inevitable that the recipients will be using a variety of email clients, so it’s essential that you factor safeguards into your mailout procedures if you’re going to avoid the headaches they can cause.

We’ve found the best way around this issue is to simply settle on a happy medium between text and images, something that looks great, will display correctly and consistently, and of course conveys the necessary message in the most effective way.

With this in mind, our recent email marketing for Jaguar adopted a subtle blend of imagery and text.

The copy - including the tagline - was presented in text format and we used a single image of the new Jaguar XK, along with the requisite branding. The large image was powerful enough to support the design and present a suitably glossy style, while the use of text rather than image-based wording meant that the flyer was displayed consistently across every email client.

Who uses which email client?

A recent report from Fingerprint shows that Outlook (all variations) and Hotmail are used by the majority of business recipients. Interestingly, Apple’s iPhone already has a 1.3% share of the business usership, underlining the fact that new platforms don’t necessarily take long to become significant. The notoriously problematic AOL Mail on the other hand commands just a fraction of a percentage. Either way, your customer list will contain users on these email clients - so you have to accommodate them in your coding.

What else is there to consider?

As well as presentation, the variation in email clients can cause a number of other unwelcome issues for HTML email marketing. Form handling, whitelists, click-thrus, downloads and forwards are all tackled in different client to client - and if you’re not considering this then there’s a major chance that the email marketing that you’ve carefully created is unrecognisably bad for some recipients.

Greenmedia’s experience in email marketing, coupled with the fact that we’ve created our own system in-house, means that we’ve got it covered. Take a look at our portfolio for a selection of email marketing that looks great across all email clients.

We added yet another prestigious motor marque to our portfolio this week, with the acquisition of Lamborghini as our newest email marketing client. The Italian supercar legend’s official Reading dealership is using our service to publicise their opening, with a striking flyer-style mailer.

We’re looking forward to future mailings with Lamborghini Reading over the coming weeks and months, keep an eye on our portfolio page to see the latest designs.