I’m a freelance web designer in Enfield, London. I’ve seen people do all sorts of unbelievable things when it comes to email marketing. Heck, I’ve done some myself when starting out in the beginning! Here are some more of my tips for a stronger direct marketing campaign.

Subject of much discussion

It’s impossible to overstate the importance of a strong subject line to a web design professional or freelancer, and to any business. A subject line is what draws you into opening an email. Think of it, would you open an email that said SUBJECT: NONE? You wouldn’t, so why should anyone else?

Deadlines are always a good call to action for customers checking their emails. Add a time limit to your offering and you’ll find that more people click through.

Avoid spammy words wherever possible. Words like ‘WIN’ or ‘Free’ could be bad if overused. Avoid excessive punctuation in your subject lines. One exclamation mark is fine if you MUST use it; two or more is wrong, unnecessary and it looks unprofessional. Avoid any sort of aggression in your subject lines and don’t be too forceful. A well-known company – who shall remain nameless – once sent an email newsletter out to over 200,000 people with the subject line: ‘PANIC, PANIC… BUY OR DIE!” Needless to say, a vocal portion of their customer-base didn’t find it amusing. They were forced to apologise to customers in the next edition.

There is no sure-fire formula for a good subject line, but split-testing will allow you to learn which subject lines work best for specific campaigns. Play around, analyse and learn from the data.

Testing: 1,2,3…

A big hurdle for designer-developers is testing. Testing, testing, testing. Testing your email campaign – pre-send! – can help to maximise effectiveness. The following browsers are key for testing how people see your campaigns.

• Internet Explorer 6, 7, 8 and 9
• Opera
• Mozilla Firefox 3
• Google Chrome
• Apple Safari 3

Gone are the days of browser simplicity. So many people use different browsers these days that it’s an absolute necessity to test as many as possible to ensure there are no glaring issues for people reading those newsletters. You might design an email marketing masterpiece, but your campaign could be rendered moot if it malfunctions in different browsers. (Bill Gates, we’re looking at IE.) Use as many of these as possible and you’ll be taking a giant leap forward, web designers, into making your direct marketing campaigns as effective and bug-free as possible.

Wide open spaces

Some readers will use the clever trick of previewing the email in their preview panel; they won’t even open the email straight away. The smallest panel is roughly 600px wide, so bear that in mind when you’re designing.

Out of character

Encoding all characters will stop strange symbols from appearing in your newsletter copy.

“It’s this line of code that contains one apostrophe from Microsoft word that could throw everything out”

Make it work:

"It&#146s this line of code that contains one apostrophe from Microsoft word that could throw everything out"

Little touches like the ones above can really strengthen everything you do. Strong direct digital marketing is a matter of poring over the finest details to improve your design and development offerings for your business or freelance projects.

I’m Pete Winter and I’m a freelance web designer and developer in Enfield in London. Please contact me for more information.

In this guide I hope to enlighten those looking to create a successful email marketing campaign for their business, services and/or products.

I provide email marketing in Enfield and email marketing in North London area, and the tips and tricks I discuss here in the blog are based solely on what I have learnt from my own experiences.

Let’s recap the key factors in creating a healthy, accurate, interesting and successful email marketing strategy and campaign:

• Content
• Design
• Accessibility
• Practices
• Subscribers

We’ve gone through Content and Design, so now let’s take a look at Accessibility.

3. The Science of Accessibility

It’s analogy time – think of yourself as a mad scientist. You need to experiment in order to produce a perfect formula that works.

Email marketing is very much about producing a formula. You need to test it out on different clients to see what works and what doesn’t. It’s a good way to be sure that you are using the right ideas. Check to see how it looks on different email readers. A quick and easy method that won’t cost anything is to set-up accounts on Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo and AOL, and then send it to all of those accounts. Test it in different browsers too from Google Chrome to Mozilla Firefox.

Test, test, test. That’s the only way to understand if it is going to work and what bugs need to be fixed.

Remember, some users don’t want to receive emails from you full stop! Be dignified about this fact and make the “unsubscribe” button very visible. Don’t try to trick users… it very rarely works anyway and only serves to make them angry and annoyed. Plus you don’t want to start receiving spam complaints right?

Don’t be afraid to combine plaint text with HTML to create a multipart email. I also recommend that you use a pre-header for email preview that gives the first line of text in the email at the top, usually after the subject line. It makes it clear what this email is about. Never be vague! Use a re-header to summarise the content of your email. Perception is everything from the outset.

In order to make your emails accessible to all you really need to be clear and concise. Testing is the most effective way to get there. Be the mad scientist and find your perfect formula.

In the next blog I’ll be discussing Practices and how they matter in the grand scheme of email marketing.

My name is Pete Winter and I provide a service for email marketing in Enfield and email marketing in North London. Contact me for further information or to discuss projects. 

The focus was on the importance of creating worthy content that didn’t resemble spam or useless, meandering information. You can read that blog HERE.

I provide email marketing in Enfield and email marketing in North London area, which has seen me experience the many different facets and factors of the email marketing process. It’s easy once you know the tricks and tips of getting it right.

Once again, the primary factors involved are:

• Content
• Design
• Accessibility
• Practices
• Subscribers

So, to continue the rundown on the ultimate tips list…

2.       The devil is in the details of Design

Why is design so important?

Well, there are a number of factors involved with its importance but none more so than the basic principle of an aesthetically pleasing email marketing campaign being easy to look at. Overly complex, poorly executed designs can easily lose the interest of the target audience simply because there is too much colour, text etc.

What you need to consider is brand consistency in email marketing. You need to incorporate aspects of your brand’s style, design and aesthetic in order to successfully perpetuate your image throughout the campaign. Include the company name, logo, colour scheme – keeping all these essential elements consistent with the brand itself. This uniformity helps your audience to feel that your emails are both familiar to them and expected.

Think of those fonts! Many email marketing design choices make the easiest of mistakes – bad font choices. The difference between an email in Verdana or Calibri versus an email written in Comic Sans or Impact can be all too obvious. You want to be taken seriously so use a serious, legible font. This includes getting the right font size. A helpful way of making your decision on what the best font to use is choosing a standard system font that everyone will have (e.g. Times New Roman, Arial etc.)

Remember, we’re living in the 21^st Century now! Don’t leave out mobile users. A large portion of people use their phones to check their emails so make sure your emails and landing pages are accessible to them. The less complicated you make it for them to view your pages, the smoother the reading process will be overall.

Design matters most when you boil down the essential needs of an email. It needs to look good, read easily and feel familiar. Without implementing a considered, well thought-out design strategy, you’ll end up with a flood of users sending your email campaign straight to their junk folders.

In the next part on this series in the ultimate tips for email marketing, I’ll take you through the importance and ideas behind Accessibility. Stay tuned.

My name is Pete Winter and I provide a service for email marketing in Enfield and email marketing in North London. Contact me for further information or to discuss projects. 

Email marketing is a hard thing to get right and unless you’ve had experience in the area of it, it’s best to do some research before getting in too deep, too fast. You wouldn’t go swimming in the sea without knowing how to swim first now would you?

I provide email marketing in Enfield and email marketing in North London area, and from my experiences there are certain ‘Dos’ and ‘don’ts’ I have come to learn are very important factors in whether or not an email marketing campaign will be successful.

So let’s start the rundown…

Consider these primary factors as where your focus needs to go:

• Content
• Design
• Accessibility
• Practices
• Subscribers

Keep your eye on the machinations and details of these key concepts and you’ll never go too far wrong.

This blog will focus on the first of these concepts:

1. 1.       Content is key.

This is the most obvious thing in the world. Without interesting and well-thought out content to engage people, you’re already shooting yourself in the foot.

Email marketing should be about personalising the email to each recipient. That doesn’t just mean including the recipient’s name either! It’s about inserting relevant content for them specifically that tailors the communication. There’s nothing worse than a general email that is tailored to everyone and ends up interesting no one.

Be economical with your messages too. Don’t waffle on! Get to the point and make sure the point is interesting and relevant. Always be cutting the length of your email marketing messages leaving the essential information.

Avoid spam words and phrases that turn your content into spam mail. Forget using words like “Free,” “Guarantee,” “Risk Free,” etc.

Solicit feedback from your readers if you can. Soliciting responses is a good way to create social interaction and educate both you and your readers about what works and what doesn’t. Sometimes to provoke a response from your readers can work in your favour.

Email marketing can live or die based on its content. Remember, its not about crunching the numbers and getting your message out to  general audience with reams of information. It’s about specifically targeting those that you want to target with concise, simple, spam free information that feel and look personalised.

Check back here to read the next part in this series and find out about the next key stage to successful email marketing. I will focus on the Design factor next.

My name is Pete Winter and I provide a service for email marketing in Enfield and email marketing in North London. Contact me for further information or to discuss projects. 

Search is the big issue for websites and web developers these days. A website without a search strategy is a website that is in serious trouble. As the internet grows exponentially, search rankings play a pivotal role in the building of brand awareness for a website.

Working as a web developer and web designer in London, I’ve worked on projects after another web developer and had to pick up the pieces of their work. I’ve seen some projects with incorrect or bad SEO and meta-data; and I’ve seen websites built without any SEO or meta-data whatsoever. The blame lies on both sides; the web developer should have factored it in and the person paying for the service should have the work checked over. Or at the very least, they should be asking for a report on what the developer has done to optimise the search engine data and meta-data.

Failing to factor these elements in when developing a website can leave your website crippled from the start.

Coming up on the first page ranking for Google can have enormous benefits for a business. It immediately opens you up to a huge audience of people, depending on your search term, and coming first means that they are more likely to click through to your website as they browse for the information they are looking for. Good SEO data is data in the site, copy or otherwise, that has been seeded with keywords or phrases relevant to your business. Without relevant keywords peppered through the web copy, your site will struggle to appear in the first 10 pages of search results. URLs should also be web-friendly, structured and descriptive to help search engine pick up more information to rank your page.

When a web developer designs a website, freelance or otherwise, they should look to add in unique meta-descriptions relevant to the site content. They should do that for every page without fail. Unique meta-descriptions are essentially extra bits of content that can guide people to clicking through from the search engine. They appear underneath the link to website and describe that particular page, so it’s important that they are unique and descriptive to encourage clicks. Most web developers and websites fall down at that hurdle because they don’t know enough about it.

It’s quite common for web developers to just use generic website information for the meta-description, if anything at all. They tend to find some blanket description of the site, brand or person and seed it into the meta-descriptions all through the site. On every page. That presents a problem when you want to be found as a priority result on Google, Yahoo, Bing etc., because people won’t click through from search if they can’t read an accurate or succinct description of why that result is relevant in their search.

Take my site for example:

<meta name=”description” content=”I can create websites, email newsletters, advert, brochures, flyers and more.” />

This is how I appear in Google search. For someone looking for a web designer in London, this gives a short description of the service that I offer and tells them that I might be what they are looking for. Meta-descriptions don’t count towards ranking, but they do count towards getting people to click through. If it doesn’t accurately describe a URL’s content, you will get very few visitors.

Using good meta-data in conjunction with a structured SEO strategy will improve the number of the visitors to your website very quickly and it will certainly improve the quality of those visitors, too.

Companies began to give up on email marketing at that point, considering it a medium that had had its moment in the digital marketing world. After all, social media could reach a wider audience and target a more engaged audience through a new social channel.

Social media is free. It’s free, it’s easy to update and it opens a business up to potentially huge audiences that email can’t always reach. It’s also a more organic and more fluid channel in the sense that you can update audiences in real-time about the news happening in your business. With development apps to boot, web designers from Enfield and beyond could start to customise social media; they could upload graphics and ecommerce elements into Facebook to allow customers to buy as they engage. They could make social media work to changing needs in an instant without any trouble. The only problem was that businesses then began to solely use social media to engage with consumers and market the company. Email was left by the website.

My work in web design has extended beyond Enfield in London and I’ve helped clients across the UK. Time and time again, I’ve seen that people had forsaken email marketing. That’s changing now.

Email marketing is enjoying a resurgence as both client-side designers, freelance web designers and developers start to combine the two media to seed content that will engage consumers across different marketing channels. Emails are a temporal but effective means of digital marketing for freelance web designers. It’s a chance to exercise creativity in creating striking designs, but it’s also a chance to engage your audience and create a wider awareness of your particular business.

Email without social is almost unheard of these days and rightly so. Email marketing gives out a specific message at a specific time – offers or sales, new campaigns happening within the business. Despite that, email marketing that integrates social media buttons into the graphic design can lead people onto social media for an update on current offerings from the business. As they go through to social media, they can engage with the customised content, which will then lead them through to the website and the website will lead them to purchase. (Providing the website has a strong digital and user experience strategy in place.)

These days, digital strategy needs to encompass an ever-branching array of media to ensure that it’s comprehensive and effective. This applies to freelance web designers when designing to briefs and to everyone involved in marketing brand messages to consumers.

My name is Pete Winter and I’m a graphic designer in Enfield. Contact me for further information or to discuss projects.

While every web designer would consider themselves a good web designer, there are so many pitfalls facing web designers in Enfield and everywhere. Whether you’re a freelance web designer or gainfully employed either client or agency-side, web design is about balancing beauty with functionality and ensuring that the end goal creates a smooth user experience that will encourage return visits and more traffic. This blog post is about what not to do in web design as a guide for those just starting out.

What’s your type?

When you find a typeface that you like, it’s like the world just fits together. Typefaces can be the difference between slick web design and dodgy. It seems like web designers have gone mad on an Arial and Arial black binge-cycle without the purge. That’s not to say that it shouldn’t ever be used, but discretion is advised.

There are some fantastic typefaces out there that are free to download from a number of sources. Smashing Magazine frequently offers web designers a rundown of the top free typefaces, so there’s no excuse for choosing something like Arial excessively or… Dare I say it… Comic Sans.

Most freelance or professional web designers will probably have felt a shudder as their eyes scanned those two grotesque words and rightly so. Comic Sans has spun out into the world of web design and the digital world like a modern day plague, infecting everything from graphic leaflets to blogs and even emergency services’ signage.

A good typeface can transform a web design from good to great in a matter of minutes.

Background checks

Backgrounds are such a difficult thing to get right for a web designer. Success can mean a cool, professional and sophisticated website that will make people want to use you again and again. Choosing a bad background or designing a bad background can turn all of your hard work into an abomination.

Textures and colours are key.  Insanely bright colours will deter a visitor instantly and they will leave a website if they can’t bear to read the text against the background. It has to be a calm and subtle colour; electric green or yellow are out!

Distracting textures on the background will also deter visitors and let down a web design. Add a slight, subtle texture and you’ll create a rich effect on the design.

Flashing your visitors

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: web designers and developers have abused Flash. Flash should never be used to completely design a website. It should be there to enhance, augment and complement a web design, not replace it completely. Use Flash sparingly and you can create astonishing, professional effects; use it too much and you can create a Flash overload that won’t run on a lot of machines and will look excessive to anyone wanting to browse quickly and efficiently through a website.

These are just some of the things to watch out when designing a website. A good web designer will be able to use their discretion to avoid the usual pitfalls that occur when people don’t work to a brief or a clearly laid out architecture. If you’re looking for a simple answer to what not to do in web design, there isn’t a specific one. It’s about using your intuition and instincts and following the brief of the client with the user in mind.

My name is Pete Winter and I’m a web designer and web hosting service provider in Enfield. Contact me for further information or to discuss projects.

One of the most undervalued features of the graphic and print design world are the simple things. Graphic design for print mediums is a lost art form to an extent amongst some businesses. It seems advertising online is the way many have chosen to go, reducing, or even in some cases abandoning wholesale, the idea of print advertising.

It’s what I like to call Leaving Las Leaflet.

I’m a graphic designer in Enfield, and my experiences have covered a wide range of the mediums listed above from advertising campaigns to brochure and leaflet design to company branding. Graphic design is a crucial part of delivering messages that businesses need to get across to their target markets. It can help promote their brand and bring in new business.

So, what does graphic design in print offer businesses these days that the web does not?

That’s the question to ask.

Company branding

If your company is looking to promote its own brand within the business itself through having branded stationary, letter heads, business cards and assorted products related or used in-house, graphic design and print media are the perfect way to deliver the best results.

Having a well-designed company logo nicely printed on a business card or stationery items speaks volumes about the professionalism of the business and the brand. It means you have a brand worth promoting.

Advertising outside the Internet

Of course, there are other ways to advertise that can be just as effective as online methods and techniques. Think about events that you may need to publicise or promote, or perhaps there are special offers you need to advertise. Sometimes these events and offers might even be area or location specific and distributing leaflets, flyers and even posters are a better way to target the specific area market you want. This extends to publishing adverts and spreads in magazines, newspapers etc.

This is when graphic design and print media become a huge help to businesses. These mediums help to convey information about your business that people may not know and it is a good way promoting your brand to individuals and in specifically targeted locations.

Print is not a dead medium for advertising!

Browsing the brochures

Tour operators, healthcare services, retailers, food and drink outlets plus an endless list of other businesses and industries require brochures to advertise their repertoire of other services, offers and products. Brochures can be used for any company or business that has a lot to sell or a lot to say.

Whether or not the brochure will be interesting or aesthetically pleasing to look at is down entirely to graphic design choices. A business that deals direct with the public in particular should have some kind of mini-brochure to accompany their services.

My name is Pete Winter and I’m a graphic designer in Enfield. Contact me for further information or to discuss projects.

Bigger is better?

It seems that big fonts are back with a vengeance for web designers. More sites are opting for strong typefaces at the top of the page design that boldly strike the visitor with an immediate impression. Designs like this seem to go hand in hand with the web design trend of ‘less is more’, too. Web designers are opting for simpler designers that make stronger statements; it’s a minimalist approach to web design and one that seems to be catching on, for web designers in Enfield and far, far beyond. Check out this Scandinavian web designer’s homepage for an example of the bigger is better trend.

HTML 5 vs Flash…

Flash is a beautiful program for a web designer to use. Having said that, there are serious limitations to a Flash website, such as the fact that Flash doesn’t work universally across all platforms. Working as a freelance web designer in Enfield has given me the opportunity to work with all kinds of different websites, including creating some beautiful pieces in Flash. It’s disheartening to create something that isn’t viewable by everyone, but you can’t take away the beauty and power of Flash animations.

With the rise of HTML 5, however, this is becoming less of an issue. Web designers and developers are still a long way off subverting Flash forever, but HTML 5 is allowing web designers to create beautiful approximations of the ‘Flash-effect’ that hold up under scrutiny.

Flash isn’t a bad program, but it definitely suffered from overexposure and that was down to web designers. A website shouldn’t ever be made entirely with Flash because it would restrict your viewership enormously.

QR?

Comscore finds 6.2 percent of smartphone users scan QR codes and QR codes are everywhere. It’s a hugely growing trend to make use of QR codes for a more interactive user experience. Is it a wise use of resources to create a QR code? Time will tell. For the moment, it seems very much like we are a long way off from the QR boom, but that isn’t holding web designers back. Although the trend is growing, it might not be the best use of time for a web designer just yet.

Muted colours

Politically and socially speaking, you could argue that the colour palette of the world has changed in the past ten years. This is certainly true in web design, where web designers are opting for a more muted and toned down colour palette in their websites. Subtle hues and pastel colours are making a strong statement on website designs, again linking back with the ‘less is more’ ethos. Jack Wills’ website is a strong example of the effect of muted colours.

Whether you’re a freelance web designer or a web designer working client or agency-side, a knowledge of innovations and trends is always beneficial to keep an awareness of what’s going on in the world of web design. Don’t be afraid to put your own spin on it and turn the trend into a revolution.

My name is Pete Winter and I’m a web designer in Enfield. Contact me for further information or to discuss projects.

The elements of good web hosting must incorporate and exemplify security, accessibility and speed. As a web designer in Enfield and web hosting services provider I’ve come to understand that you cannot cheat on this one – professional web hosting is the only way to go.

Hosting is essentially just like paying rent to work out of someone’s place that has lots of communal areas where you can meet A LOT of new customers. It’s a space/server where your site is connected to the Internet 24/7 and takes, to some degree anyway, the responsibility of managing the site out of your hands.

Most hosting packages include the following:

• Disk space on the provider’s servers
• A public IP address where your account is located
• A Control Panel for managing all aspects of your webspace
• An FTP account to your hosting account. This will enabled you to upload/download your website files to the webspace
• Some means of DNS control so you can setup your hosting to point to your domain
• Email/webmail

Here’s some tips on finding the right host:

1. Only use a web host if they can administrate or automate billings and payments. This often gets overlooked but is very, very important to the smooth running and operation of your site.

2. A decent web hosting service provider should never be plagued by consistent outages. Frequent outages mean there is something wrong with the service provider. Websites and online businesses rely on maintaining a consistent presence online. Being unplugged from that for too long can seriously disrupt and undermine image, income and search engine rankings. Good web hosting services will always have redundancy packages or back-ups to support any problems that might be encountered.

3. Always have a back-up, even if it means backing-up the website to your own PC. You can use other servers in other locations to back-up the site, just make sure you do. Once you have done this perform regular backups every week so you never have to play catch up if there are any issues later on down the line.

4. The use of branded, proven hardware is a sign of a professional web hosting service provider. Also the use of a superior internet connection should be a given.

5. Just because a web host is cheap, does not mean it will be a good deal. The goal is to have a stable, smooth presence on the Internet not to have to combat unforeseen outages, data losses or weak support.

That’s only scratching the surface of how to find a good web host really. But that’s my tips on it for today.

My name is Pete Winter and I’m a web designer and web hosting service provider in Enfield. Contact me for further information or to discuss projects.