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.

Maile Ohye followed up her outbound links article on Google’s Webmaster Blog last week with a succinct explanation on the value of good quality incoming links, and the importance of a well thought-out strategy. It’s another good example of how Google is opening up about its processes, and it also backs up what we’ve said about inbound links for a while now.

Another thing we’ve said over and over on Green Notes is that there’s no secret with this anymore. The whole point of a search engine is to enhance the user’s experience, so if you’re doing something that goes against this then you’re likely to be damaging your SEO potential.

Google Webmaster Blog’s Maile Ohye posted a really useful article this week on the subject of outgoing links on your website. It answers some common questions and worries about adding links, and explains how they can provide a reputation-boosting effect to your site.

The importance of incoming links is well-documented, as are the various processes to follow when developing a link building strategy - but outbound links haven’t been so clear-cut, until now.

Ultimately, like everything else relating to SEO and websites, outbound link strategies revolve around providing the user with the best experience possible - and employing a healthy dose of plain old common sense.

Take a look - here.

There isn’t any single big secret about SEO - it’s largely a combination of clean up-to-date structural coding, good copy, strategised in-depth link building programmes and regularly refreshed content (all things we’re good at here at Greenmedia.) There are so many myths and misconceptions about what makes good SEO, some based on out-dated web practices, lots based on unethical methods and quite a few based on nothing more than bad guesswork and plain ignorance.

In this article we’re covering two topics that regularly crop up in SEO conversations - meta description tags and meta keyword tags. Neither is particularly important these days, but this doesn’t stop them being the invariable reference points for every amateur SEO expert out there. Perhaps it’s just because they sound a little bit technical… who knows?

Meta description tags

This is the copy that can appear on a search engine results page, and is literally just a description of what’s on the page that’s being referenced. The important thing to know regarding meta descriptions is that they don’t have any bearing whatsoever on your search engine ranking. None at all. Despite this, it’s still worth giving them some attention as they may well be the difference between a click-through and being ignored from a search results page. Write at least one definitive meta description for your website, and if your content is diverse enough then write them for individual pages. Just don’t expect that that they’ll boost your search ranking, they won’t.

Meta keyword tags

SEO would be a far easier practice if it was simply a case of filling up your webpages with meta keywords, but the general experience and usefulness of search engines would also go through the floor as everyone would be doing it - which is why it isn’t so simple now. Meta keyword tags are a legacy of what can be called, in web terms at least, the ‘old days’. Things have moved on. They’re essentially irrelevant now, and the major search engines don’t place any ranking priority on them whatsoever. Google and MSN ignore them completely in this regard. Yahoo and Ask do briefly consider what is in the tag, but they don’t prioritise it over the body content of the website and don’t use it at all for ranking.

Always keep in mind that you’re writing for human users and that the goal of the search engine is to maximise the user experience. The whole idea of a meta keyword tag - loading a line of code with words that the user can’t see - goes against this entirely.

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’re proud to announce the launch of Cranio - a custom-made jewellery website with a twisted soul. The ominous dark design, driven by the powerful white-on-black skull logo, is the perfect showcase for Cranio’s brilliant product portfolio.

Skull rings, classic horror style rings and ancient Egypt influenced jewellery, everything on Cranio comes from original designs, painstakingly hand-crafted in the finest materials. In truth, Cranio’s rings are less like jewellery and more like individual works of art. Take a look at the Cranio website to see for yourself.

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.

We set our new email marketing system live today, with a debut mailing for a BMW client the first to experience the all-new features and results centre. All of our email marketing from this point will be through the new system, and we’re looking forward to seeing even better performance ongoing.

So, what’s new? In a word - everything. We’ve built from the ground up to create a system that is capable of providing the most complete service to our email marketing clients. The previous platform was already delivering outstanding performance, but with this new system we’re taking it to the next stage. Here are some of the new features;

New interface

Intuitive, easy-to-follow and beautifully presented. The main sections are divided with sliding tabs, clearly indicating each category. Results and statistics are shown in 3D graphs and simple grouped listings, making it easier than ever to navigate.

Unlimited link tracking

We’ve taken the limit off the number of traceable links that can be placed within an email, so no matter how wide the scope of your email marketing, our new system can comfortably cover it. Each link is clearly titled depending on its destination, making it easy to quickly scan through your listings and check performance.

Wider results date range

Date ranges have been extended to ten days from mailout, meaning that you can identify any opens or clicks within that period and clarify exactly when they happened. Discover when your recipients are most likely to act on your message and set target dates for the future.

Performance comparisons

Compare results from any two mailings, side-by-side. Find out what worked, and refine your approach for the next broadcast.

We’ve revamped our in-house email marketing system in the last few months to incorporate some exciting new features and introduce a new presentation interface. The new system, which is currently going through its final test sessions, will supercede our EDM for Business platform when it launches later this month.

Throughout the last eight years the Greenmedia system has provided email marketing to some of the biggest names in various sectors on a global scale, with phenomenal results across the board. We’ve built up an email marketing client list that currently includes the likes of Aston Martin, Audi, Porsche and numerous other prestigious marques - all of which have been acquired due to the continued strong performance of the system. We thought the time was right to take it to the next level, so, that’s exactly what we’ve done.

We initially created the system because we couldn’t find anything out there that provided all of the email marketing features we wanted to offer our clients. In building from scratch in-house with our own development team, we were able to produce a system that offered the latest features in a single, scaleable package. In the eight years that have passed since version 1.0 went live, there have been countless additions and amends, but it is still the case that nothing else quite like it exists in terms of mass email marketing packages. We firmly believe that Greenmedia’s email marketing offers a superior service, and our experience in the area is second to none.

The revamped version marks the biggest change to the system to date, and we’re sure that it’ll provide the platform for even more email marketing success when it goes live soon.