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Archive for the ‘Tips’ Category

Email Marketing – an under utilised tool

Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009

Consistently rated as the primary means of business communication (ahead of telephone and postal mail), it seems unthinkable in this current day and age that people are not utilising this fantastic, cost-effective marketing tool.

An Email Marketing System (a simple online application to manage and distribute emails on designed stationery) can provide the following benefits:

1. Reduced costs and saved time

  • No printing and no postage
  • Traditional direct mail costs from around £1 to several pounds per recipient and can take many weeks to implement. With email, the cost can be reduced to as little as 1p per recipient and delivered within hours.
  • Targeted marketing: Made available by the recipient management tools within an Email Marketing System, your business can ensure only interested clients receive your mailings thereby eliminating “junk mail”.

2. Increased sales

  • Increase your sales conversion rate and generate repeat sales by using email campaigns to remind your current customer base of all the services and products you offer.
  • Cross-sell products and services using links from the email to your existing website.
  • Enhance the convenience for new customers requiring updates on your products or services by means of a subscriber form on your website, where contact information is collected.

3. Instant measurable results

  • Instead of waiting weeks for responses from direct mail, you can view a report of your email marketing campaigns within minutes of delivery. In-depth statistics and reporting allow you to evaluate the results, including vital data such as how many people have opened the email and even finding out which links have been clicked. This concisely presented information will allow you to continuously improve the effectiveness of your future campaigns.

Spring Bud are confident that our beautifully designed Email Marketing System is class-leading, simple to use and represents outstanding value for money.

CSS Quick Tips: print stylesheets

Wednesday, April 29th, 2009

A print stylesheet — a special stylesheet which formats your website for printing — can be utilised to hide unneeded parts (the site navigation) and save ink for your visitors (swap that white text on a black background for black text on a white background!).

Here are some tips for improving your print stylesheet.
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CSS Quick Tips: advanced selectors

Tuesday, April 28th, 2009

One of the many advantages of CSS is the ability to select parts of your web page based on a stylesheet, which means when adding content to a website you need not worry about how it is formatted. Headers will be the right size and font, links will be the colour specified. It is all taken care of and you don’t need a manual or reference guide on how to format a page (great for Content Management Systems!)

Advanced selectors can select specific parts of the page and alter them. For example, you can select the first letter of a new paragraph and make it big (for a drop cap) or select the all email links and format them a different way.

Some examples below.

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CSS Quick Tips: text-transform

Wednesday, January 28th, 2009

One of the great benefits of CSS is the ability to easily update or change the look of a whole website by only editing one file – the stylesheet. So whenever a heading is to be IN ALL CAPS, consider using the text-transform property.

h2 {
  text-transform: uppercase;
}
<h2>This header will be in all caps!</h2>

This allows you to write a header in the normal way, but have browsers interpret it as uppercase. Not only is this great for changing your mind later (you don’t have to re-write all those headings!) but it means your visitors can specify that they’d rather see headings in ‘sentence case’ by use of a user style sheet