2015 - Page 2 of 6 - Creative Agency Secrets

Grow your mailing list fast – with a Lightbox

16 September, 2015/0 Comments/in Case Studies, Content Marketing, Direct Marketing, Email, Marketing, Marketing ideas, Strategy /by Creative Agency Secrets Team

One of the simplest and yet, most effective methods we have found to grow our mailing list at Creative Agency Secrets, has been with the integration of a ‘Lightbox’ or a ‘pop-up’ plugin.

For any business operating with an online presence (let’s face it, if you’re not, you should be!), one of your primary objectives should be to acquire email addresses of potential customers to sell your glorious products and services.

However, relying on customers to navigate your site and opt themselves in is like telling your dog to fetch a ball that it doesn’t know exists. You need to show them the ball and especially why they want to chase it!

Okay, what is a lightbox?

To put it simply, a lightbox is an extension programme on your website that jumps up at your visitors displaying a customised message, usually requesting visitors to supply their email address in exchange for some kind of benefit. These benefits are typically newsletter subscriptions, prize giveaways, eBooks, online courses and other free rewards.

Key factors to building an effective lightbox

Firstly, your lightbox needs to stand out. Web users are exposed to multiple lightboxes on a daily basis. You need to ensure yours captures their attention. Most lightbox software allows customisation of colour schemes and text which aid in making it visually appealing when it appears on your website. Aside from being eye catching, you need a powerful and enticing message that will draw them in as well as outline clearly what they get.
The lightbox should serve a single purpose – sign up here to receive benefit ___. If you make it too complicated, visitors will lose patience and simply close it without completing the signup.
Offer your visitors something that they want. No visitor is going to sign up for your offer if they have no interest in it or cannot see any real value from it.
Set frequency and page display settings to something reasonable that will not drive people away. Your lightbox should be a passive reminder, not an aggressive punch in the face to get visitors to sign up.
Associate it with your email client management software and it will directly import the email addresses it collects into that programme, saving you time and effort.

Once you have your lightbox setup, you simply launch it and leave it to acquire all those precious email addresses on its own. Easy!

bizsparkup lightbox creative agency secrets

An example of a Sumo Lightbox on a client’s website

Some lightboxes work better than others however. Our previous (paid) lightbox on one client’s website appeared cluttered and ‘busy’ on the webpage. After some deliberation we decided we should see what else was available.

We assessed a number of alternatives across a range of features such as mail client integration, level of customisation, price and so forth. Although paid and free versions existed for most options, we discovered the benefits of many of the premium lightbox providers were not substantial enough to justify the purchase.

Our clear favourite at the end of the process was a product called ‘List Builder’ developed by Sumo*. Their simple user interface meant it was pleasant for our visitors to engage with and the customisable colour and text allowed us to align the lightbox with our clients’ brands.

In the first few months, we saw the number of subscribers jump from roughly 20 – 30 per month to over 300! Our mailing lists continue to grow steadily and our lightbox is undoubtedly a key driver in facilitating this.

So what are you waiting for? Convert your web traffic into willing customers immediately, or get in touch if you would like us to help you get there.

*For a full breakdown of the lightboxes we compared, click here.

Affiliate marketing tips

14 September, 2015/0 Comments/in Marketing /by Rebecca Caroe

Affiliate marketing is a technique that businesses can use to boost their revenue by advertising for another company. This relationship is dependent on three participants; the publisher, the advertiser and the consumer and each plays an integral role in the process.

The publisher is the one who refers the consumer to the advertiser’s website and in turn receives a kickback from the new viewership. The publisher usually works on commission which varies according to the amount of new clicks and views that they pull in, which can be tracked by unique links.

To harness this technique to its full advantage advertisers must incentivise the publisher to produce

Affiliate publisher relationship

a high quality and interesting way to point new users to their site. This doesn’t have to be expensive but if you’re lacking a research department you’ll find yourself paying more than you should.

Using an affiliate link within copy should not be overly noticeable or stand out too much or this will defeat the purpose of the exercise. Whether you’re an advertiser or publisher it’s important to know how to add a link without it sticking out like a sore thumb. Try to find a publisher who knows how to do this well by creating engaging copy with links that supplement, rather than detract, from the text.

Sites that are successful at this are these Amazon affiliate sites that make a lot of revenue through different strategies. Get a free report of 37 strategies for Affiliate Marketing from R.O.EYE.

Deciding how long you would like your advertisement to run for is a key part of the process as it will allow you to determine how much you would like to spend. You can change a number of different factors or even test the waters before you pay up, depending on which affiliate program you use. Sites like paypal-bingo.org keep their links up on different affiliate sites long term as they can be slotted seamlessly into a number of different articles. These articles will usually pop up on Google, even if they’re not brand new, which offers a steady stream of new readers to the site.

Working with a site that compliments your business will make the whole process much easier as they won’t be trying to disguise your brand in an awkward way. It also helps if they’re in some way knowledgeable about the subject area as they will be able to create more targeted, high quality content without a lot of research. If they can make their copy timeless and always up to date then the views will keep rolling in even after the initial buzz after publishing. Informative articles are evergreen so make sure that your publisher is working hard to create content that will continue to bring in readers no matter how long it has been since originally publishing.

Above all track your clicks so you can see which publisher is doing the most for you. You can even use a link shrinker like tiny.cc and give each publisher a unique address to publish, then you can manage these simply and easily.

Fast-track your social media skills

3 September, 2015/0 Comments/in Social Media /by Rebecca Caroe

When you know you need social media skills and don’t want to hire an agency to do it for you – the best solution is to get trained.

The excellent Wanita Zoghby-Fourie is hosting Social Media Conference on 18th September in Auckland.

Her talents have persuaded BOTH Facebook and Google to share the platform to enable you to learn faster. (Believe me, these guys normally don’t ‘play together’, this is a huge achievement.)

Who should attend

Predominantly for solopreneurs, small and medium business owners, and people working on social media roles either within corporates or externally. Although the conference is aimed towards small to medium business, we believe that the same rules apply across all businesses. Everything online is scalable depending on size.

This conference is for you if you are wanting to use social media and online marketing to maximise your business online.

Get a discount – just for you

Creative Agency Secrets clients can get a special discount of $200 use the coupon code SMCONNZ15

Our Speakers are

Annah Stretton, known for growing her small business into a fashion franchise,
Evan Hick from Facebook and Simon Laird from Google – the two giants in Social Media who have the latest information,
Natalie Cutler Welsh who is a social media and networking guru from Gotogirl and has come back from the San Diego Social Media Conference with fresh perspectives to share,
Troy Rawhiti-Forbes from Spark who is the online communities specialist.
Cassie Roma who hails from San Diego and has helped small business owners with social media and now works for Air New Zealand as their Social Media Manager and
Leon Jay who is the founder of Fusion HQ, was the Director of Marketing for Mark Joyner, featured on the Internet Marketing Magazine (a space only reserved for those who have generated more than seven figures online), and has grown his small business into a million dollar enterprise.

Sign up today – you won’t be disappointed!

Help with email headlines – a short guide

21 August, 2015/0 Comments/in Blogging, Content Marketing, Copywriting, Email, Marketing /by Creative Agency Secrets Team

We work day to day with clients on email campaigns, personalised cold emails, event invitation blasts and much more. Over the years we’ve become accustom to building effective email headlines that get emails read and replied to, and we’ve noticed that without that experience entire campaigns can be rendered useless. So if you lack experience building effective email headlines that get your campaigns read and replied to then you’ve come to the right place!

The Creative Agency Secrets short guide to email headlines

Email headlines are a lot like blog headlines. We’ve boiled it down to a few select simple rules:

Short and simple.
Getting to the point quicker with fewer words helps grab attention and keeps it. Shorter headlines are also usually more exciting which entices further reading.
Promise what the full message contains
If readers believe the title is misleading to the content, they’re more likely to discard your email after reading it! It’s all about trust, people.
This also comes along with cohesion and comprehension because if you’re conveying two things at once the reader is less likely to understand what you want them to do and why.
Relevant to the target audience.
This tends to be a given because again, the headline of the email should reflect on the content and your content should be getting sent to the right target audience. But too many times we see email headlines that reflect a part of the content which isn’t interesting or relevant to the target audience. Make sure the your next email headline brings out the part of the content most likely to interest your intended readers.
Make readers curious.
Don’t give them everything, leave them wanting! This should be simple with our first rule of headlines being short but sometimes a “90% of x does y” type of headline isn’t as effective as “So how many of xes do ys, you think? Here’s your answer:”

You may be a cut above the rest now that you know these 4 simple rules, but we’re not done yet. We want to arm you with the best practices, so here’s some fantastic email headline examples (we found many of these on CopyBlogger! They’re a brilliant content marketing resource):

“Why you should always [content]”
“Your answer to [content]”
“10 ways to [content]”
“Your competitors do [content], why?”
“What everybody ought to know about [content]”
“You Are Not Alone“

Which is your favourite? Let us know how your next campaign goes!

Want to learn more about email marketing, or get an experienced marketer to build campaigns for you?

Contact us! We’re your next big marketing success.

Interview: Cecilia Robinson from My Food Bag

6 August, 2015/0 Comments/in B2C, Digital media, Marketing, Social Media /by Rebecca Caroe

Creative Agency Secrets were honoured to meet Cecilia Robinson the dynamic and fast-talking founder of MyFoodBag. We met in their delightful offices (fit out by Adam Mercer, Architect).

Amazing balustrade of a tree branch

Spaceworks does My Food Bag offices

In an e service – the ability to scale is the most important thing – service based businesses are really hard to scale.

Building that in for My Food Bag is an ecommerce business was key.

The first idea – my concept was in 2010 but we weren’t exploring it at that stage. I had been at home just before I had my baby and I was really sick of it doing cooking, cleaning – I wrote a business plan 40 minutes later clicked save.

What marketing are you doing now?

Growing brand awareness. We aligned Nadia’s brand with us – it was about concept education – teach in the market around what the service is – people may not like to be told what and how to eat. We did that through social, PR and the TV and that continues.

Re-engagement – we call it on-boarding process – we employed a CMO from Taste Australia – these customers usually stop buying because it doesn’t suit their family lifestyle – we have high retention and low churn – it’s a priority to maintain them.

Measured churn since we started – we are world class in terms of retention – and we benchmark against other key suppliers.

It grows month on month – there are customers who have bought 104 weeks worth with us.

We have focused more on acquisition – life-stages are key. If they go across a certain point in our delivery service we know they’ll stay with us.

The recipe folder is a key piece of collateral and it becomes a collection, it’s all about the experience. We do programmes of freebies or recipes for Mother’s and Father’s Day and Christmas.

Surprises are frequent in your bag – chocolates, children’s yoghurts – Easter will be hot cross buns and a recipe.

We’ve done big giveaways too e.g. trip to Vanuatu.

Partnerships are possible but with 15,000 subscribers – it becomes a big task to get enough free product often we have to sponsor it ourselves or bigger suppliers give it away free. We never give small samples – it has to have tangible value. Paneton gave us croissants for Christmas morning – it has to be sharable… small giveaways wont’ work.

Experience – every single product we’ve done has been an experiment. $50m run rate business – the CFO is protective of our revenue streams. We are about to launch childrens lunch boxes but you never know if it will work. General we’ve done well.

We have given away books and trips. Social media is a really big avenue for us to talk to customers and they talk back. Issues are always responded to and we often get told our customer service is good.

We do it all in house, it’s all personal contact.

Bring values – all staff members have 50% discount scheme for all our products. They have to eat using our products if you don’t know and love it you can’t sell it. It is part of their lifestyle – that is part of the way we are. The guys cook us lunch every day and today we are doing cake tasting. We are doing a 2nd year birthday party too soon. We have to taste 10 different cakes….[no sympathy from me].

Anton is our test chef – we do 14 recipes a week – one recipe takes 10 hours from testing to photography and it is 140 man hours a week.

We run “just on time” – we do recipe planning some time out. On a Tuesday we may have to make a last minute change if there isn’t broccoli because it isn’t there in the shops. It switches from rocket to spinach.

We educate customers so that if we make changes they have to just live with it – we advise changes by email because once the recipe cards are printed, we can’t re-print in time.

Utter delight – our customer feedback is amazing.

I’m in chemotherapy and its a life saver.

We get a lot of heartfelt replies and you’ve saved my marriage because I can cook.

Key for us to focus on our growth to build a really good brand with Nadia it has been a fantastic journey.

What next?

We are building a mobile recipe site and want to integrate Nadia’s site into the my food bag site.

Six Good Reasons to Hire a Business Coach

6 August, 2015/0 Comments/in Marketing /by Rebecca Caroe

Hiring a business coach is not at the top of most company owner’s to do list, but it really should be. This is because the right business coach can make a world of difference to you and your business. A good coach will help you in all sorts of ways. Below I cover just a few of them.

Get you moving

It is human nature to get comfortable and slow down. We have all done it – set up a business, worked like crazy getting it off the ground, and then taken our foot off the pedal. Running a business is hard, so it is all too easy to lose focus and drive.

A good business coach will get you fired up again. They will get you following a plan and monitoring progress, and keep you moving forwards.

Challenge you

There are only so many hours in the day, so once we find something that works and earns us money there is a tendency to stick with that process and just carry on doing it. This can work fine for several years or decades even, but inevitably, things change.

What worked ten years ago is not likely to be as effective today. The market moves on and consumers want something different. If you do not move with the times and search out new opportunities, you will inevitably begin to lose market share.

A good coach challenges you. They help you to recognise that you have gaps in your skill set or that your skills need to be updated. Being challenged is always a good thing. It makes you think and motivates you to take action that you would have not otherwise taken.

Provide support and encouragement

We all need support, and we all need encouragement. A good executive coach will provide both.

They will help you to have a balanced view of your abilities and achievements. Providing you with the support that you need when you feel you are getting nowhere fast. An effective coach will encourage and motivate you to work through tough times and achieve your goals.

Marketing

Regardless of the type of business you run marketing is crucial. It is the only way to grow your business and take it to the next level.

There are several ways to learn how to market yourself, and one of the most effective ways is to do so with the help of an executive coach. The right business coach can help you on many levels including helping you to market yourself and your business more effectively.

Finding a good coach

Whether you need executive coaching in New York, Adelaide or Birmingham you can benefit more from the business relationship by looking for someone that has experience. A coach that is on the same wavelength as you, and has helped other businesses, can help you to progress faster in your career and build your business.

When hiring a business coach take the time to check out their credentials and their previous work. If they have a good track record interview them. This is the surest way to know whether you will get on with each other and form a strong and lasting business relationship.

Good copywriting for membership websites

30 July, 2015/0 Comments/in B2B, Case Studies, Copywriting, Marketing ideas /by Rebecca Caroe

This month we’re working on two clients both with membership businesses. They need strong copywriting on both their home page and the landing / squeeze page where the pitch for members is made.

We got out and tried to find some good examples of membership sites where a really compelling landing page lays out the offer and the benefits.

It was surprisingly hard.

I had hoped that Copyblogger would be good – but despite moving much of their content behind an email registration wall, the old landing page is no longer there – maybe they’re so well known that the benefits are no longer needed.

We did find some….

Blogging Concentrated Prime

A subscription service for monthly coaching and education on all aspects of blogging for profit – this page really lays out the details of what a member gets and shows archive material which is also available to each new joiner. The video welcome is a nice touch.

Blogging Concentrated Prime membership area

Tom Poland’s 8020 Center

A totally different approach is used by expert business coach, Tom Poland. He uses a letter form to make a strong offer in the headline and a personal offer – with a guarantee.

Tom Poland’s 8020 Center offer copywriting

EConsultancy and Digital Marketer

Both offering education services to modern marketers, these sites have a near-identical page layout and copy style. Interestingly, the DM list of advisory courses look like individual tiles, but they all go to a letter-style long copy landing page from the founder, Ryan Deiss.

Econsultancy landing page copywriting example

Digital Marketer landing page copywriting example

Got any other examples?

Should an educational business use an e book for marketing?

16 July, 2015/0 Comments/in Case Studies /by Rebecca Caroe

A client writes

I have had two requests come in over the last 2 days for an e-book – should I do one and what will it do? Also should we run a meet up each month?

An ebook is a great marketing tool because it can achieve several objectives

Showcase your skill / expertise
Recruit email addresses to a subscription list
Act as a filter for new customers (turn them on or off)

This business sells education to a niche of health and wellness professionals and so encouraging them to buy training to up-skill their business can be encouraged by demonstrating the success others have had in an e book.

It could also cover some of the topics at a high level – while leaving the reader wanting more and so coming back to buy from the business.

Using Meetups for business marketing

Meetups can be a great marketing tool especially if you sell an intangible services. Before starting you must answer these questions

What purpose will it achieve?
How will it push people towards signing up for your courses

If you decide to start a meetup, I’d recommend using meetup.com and it’ll cost you about $10 a month. Think carefully about what name you give it and whether it’s purpose is to support graduates of your training or to act as a recruitment tool for new course signups.

Want more marketing ideas for your business?

Get in touch for a free 20 minute discussion by clicking the link bottom right on this page.

The blue icons opposite are part of our 8-Step New Business Development Methodology.

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Let’s look at corporate responsibility….

18 June, 2015/0 Comments/in Marketing /by Rebecca Caroe

What does your company do as far as embracing diversity within the work place?

Poly Emp Employment & Advisory Service is a supported employment agency that works with young people that have learning and intellectual disabilities. We place young people that want to work into mainstream employment. To do this we actively market to work places.

Did you know that 17% of New Zealand’s population have a disability? These people all shop, work, go on holidays and contribute to their community in some way. Unfortunately these people with a disability encounter huge barriers when it comes to finding employment. Creative agencies will all know that when you understand the impact of disability on customers your clients will reach a wider market as all of these customers have family, friends and colleagues.

Poly Emp Employment & Advisory Service has recently placed a client of ours at Y & R NZ Ltd in Auckland. This young man has a learning disability and visual atrophy. This young man is an admin assistant at the business, he does all sorts of basic tasks for example kitchen duties, simple admin duties, setting up meeting rooms, organising client refreshments and collating financial invoices. This is a job that was created for this young man.

How about giving someone a chance at being a contributing member of society by employing them? Contact me anita.walker@manukau.ac.nz at Poly Emp Employment & Advisory Service let’s have a chat.

Archive for year: 2015