Recorded Devilery

Getting started with the Facebook page

The first challenge is to set up our new Recorded Devilery business page in Facebook and the starting point for this is the “create a page for a celebrity, band or business” link at the bottom of the sign up form.

Next come a number of choices for the way the page is classified, if you’re running a local business, like many of the small retailers and other companies that we represent then the first choice is the one for you. Businesses that deal with a wider client base might prefer to choose the “brand, product or organisation” choice and public figures and celebrities would choose the third choice.

Having completed the form, which is pretty self-explanatory the next stage is to create a Facebook account if you don’t already have one, this involves filling in your email address and receiving a confirmation email. Click on the link in the confirmation email and you’ll be taken to your brand new company Facebook page, which won’t look very impressive to start with, but it’s a start!!

Facebook for business

Mention Facebook to most small businesses and they immediately think of teenagers chatting to each other and posting photos of drunken nights out, you could be forgiven for thinking that this is where it’s at and for the most part you’re probably right, but things are changing quickly. With any new technology and publishing platform on the internet it’s often better for small businesses to wait until the popularity has reached a tipping point before jumping in and getting involved. I would say that both Twitter and Facebook have reached that point in the U.S.A and are about to do so in the UK and Europe.

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Update to boyzone website

We’ve recently updated the boyzone website with a section specifically for Ronan Keating to help with promotion and news for his new album “Winter Songs” and his tour which starts in Australia in the New Year.

Each of the Ronan pages includes links to his official sites and to social network sites along with a Twitter feed which brings in tweets from Ronan in real time. A feed to the “Ronan” category on the site selects specific Ronan news to bring into the page.

Spam Laws

One of the best ways to avoid being branded as a spammer is to make sure you are using a permission-based tool that follows strict, permission-based guidelines to protect users from sending spam  such as the one we use at Recorded Devilery.

Some useful guidelines include:
• Communication – Your subscriber registration page must state why you are collecting the visitor’s email address and how you plan to use it. Also it should be clear that you have agreed to not sell or rent your lists.
• Verification – New subscribers are automatically sent an email confirming their interest in receiving emails from you. This is known as an opt in and is the basis of permission based email marketing.
• Unsubscription – Every email sent should contain an unsubscribe link. When a recipient clicks the link your subscriber lists are automatically updated to prevent the sending of unwanted emails.

Review your email marketing
It might be useful, from time to time to take a moment to read the following questions. You REALLY don’t want to answer “Yes” to any of the following:
1. Are you using a purchased list of any kind?

2. Are you sending to non-specific addresses such as: sales@domain.com, business@domain.com, webmaster@domain.com, info@domain.com, or other general addresses?

3. Do you have any abuse@, postmaster@, or hostmaster@ domains on your list?

4. Are you sending to distribution lists or mailing lists which indirectly send to a variety of email addresses?

5. Are you mailing to anyone who has not explicitly agreed to join your mailing list?

6. Does your email’s subject line contain false or misleading information?
Answering “Yes” to any of the above questions could see you labelled as a spammer.

Start your on-line retailing now

Research, carried out by accountancy firm Deloitte, claims the online retail market, worth £9bn in the UK in 2005, will leap to £25bn by 2010, as more consumers switch to the convenience of online purchasing. This means that 70% of shoppers this Christmas could be doing part of their shopping on-line, the research also found that 46% of people buy more products online now compared to the previous year.

In a survey 61% of people said that internet retailers need to offer a more flexible service, such as in-store collection.

The research also claims that about 75% of retailers say online sales have increased compared to this time last year, while 85% expect them to increase over the next 12 months.

Ian Geddes, retail consulting partner at Deloitte, said:

“Online retailing continues to rise at a much faster pace than the overall retail market. As recently as 2005, the online market was worth under £9bn. By 2010, we forecast the market will be worth more than £25bn. While this is still a relatively small part of the total retail market, the influence of online has a much wider reach. The digital age has embedded itself in mainstream life.”

Now could be the time for smaller retailers to jump on board and offer services that the bigger companies can’t. Appealing to a local niche market could be one way of doing this by offering either free delivery or collection from a shop.

Christmas emails

Three things to avoid when you carry out your Christmas email campaign:

1. Sending far too many emails: If you send too many emails over Christmas, your valuable readers will just regard it as spam. As always send only emails that are of value to your readers and which you know they will want to read.
2. Offering discounts: Discounts are fine and a lot of people will be happy to receive them, but make sure that discounts are enough, there must be other ways you can convey the value that you’re offering, try and be creative and offer something unusual.
3. Sending and not tracking: If you are looking after your own email marketing, rather than using a managed service like that offered by Recorded Devilery. Make sure you have a means of tracking and analysing who is opening your emails and what links they are visiting when they do.

Let us know if you have any exciting tips for adding value to Christmas email.

You May be spamming and not know it!

You would think that most people would consider email spam to be something that they haven’t asked for, unsolicited email offering to help with certain physical problems. A recent survey entitled “Spam Complainers Survey” suggests that there may be reasons to be concerned if you think you are sending emails that your permission based mailing list want to receive.

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Ten Tips for Email Marketing

When you start to consider email as a means of marketing and reaching new prospects as well as strengthening the relationship you have with existing customers it is important to keep in mind some very important rules. Here are some of the critical things that you should consider when you begin.
1. Only send emails to people who have requested to receive them or to those who you have an existing relationship with. These might be prospects to whom you have sent information to or spoken to on the telephone or they may be existing customers or colleagues. The key is that they must know who you are and why you have contacted them.
2. Take every opportunity to build up your email list with valuable contacts, when someone makes an enquiry by telephone or in person, ask politely if you can add them to your list. Make sure members of your staff who come into contact with potential and existing customers get into the habit of asking for email addresses. Sign up forms on your website, feedback forms and competitions are other good ways of building your list.
3. Only include content which is relevant to the people you are sending to or to the product or service you are offering. The content should be benefiting the recipient of your emails in some way, either by making them aware of something to their advantage or telling them something of interest.
4. When you send your welcome email or perhaps even on your thank you page it is important to include a message like: “To ensure receipt of our emails, please add yourname@yourcompany.com to your Address Book.” This address will be the “from” email you are using and will improve your delivery rate by avoiding messages be directed into junk mail folders. It’s good practice to add this into your emails to make sure that your recipients are reminded to do it. By being added to their safe senders it will also mean that images are displayed in your emails.
5. Make the From Name for your messages either your company name or the name of a person at your company. Once you choose a From Name, keep it consistent. This will help people to recognise that this is a valid email as they quickly scan through their inbox.
6. If you are sending nicely formatted and illustrated HTML emails, make sure you also have a plain text version for those who can’t or don’t want to receive the full HTML version. With increasing numbers of people receiving emails on their mobiles a text only version may be more appealing to them.
7. Send emails at regular intervals if possible and not more often than is appropriate. If your emails have good quality content that the recipients find interesting and useful, they will look forward to your nest email and read it.
8. Timing can be important; in general it seems to be best to send business emails between Tuesday and Thursday and either just after the start of the day or just after lunch. For business emails, late afternoon or just before people leave the office is not such a good idea.
9. If your emails are going to consumers, then early evening may be a good time or perhaps on Fridays if you offer something which they might buy on the internet at the weekend. Much of the timing of your emails will depend on who your target is and their particular habits, but it’s important to consider this when you schedule your email sending.
10. Using lots of upper case text or exclamation marks within the subject line or body of your emails is a good way to aggravate spam filters and will result in your emails either being deleted or sent straight to a junk email folder.

More older groups use social networking

According to research published by Ofcom more people from older age groups are joing social networking sites.

People aged 15 to 24 who have a social network profile has fallen from 55% in the first quarter of 2008 to 50% in the first quarter of 2009.

At the same time British 25- to 34-year-olds who have a social networking profile has grown by 6% to 46%, and the proportion of 35- to 54-year-olds by 8% to 35%, according to Ofcom’s Communications Market report. read more

Chocolate brand use social media for marketing

Chococo, a luxury chocolate brand, based in Dorset are about to launch a community website to help them generate marketing data.

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