Author: David

Many businesses send out electronic business cards throughout the month of December, but did you know this can be a perfect opportunity to boost your marketing? Using your opted-in list, you can mail out your greetings cards and include a special offer to entice previous customers back. Many companies will include a gift card or money off voucher that the customer can use next time they purchase from you.

When designing your Christmas card, try and make it fun and reflect your business. Be sure to include your logo somewhere and engage your customers. If you would rather post a card out then be sure to add the details or your website along with the voucher code they may need for their special offer. You could also add a section to be completed for them to update their details (should they need to and opt into receiving further communication. This will allow you to keep your database up to date.

You may want to reflect the festive theme into your website too so when a link is clicked from the card the website has the same look and feel. You can do this simply by changing your banner or adding some falling snow over the images.

If you have an e-commerce website then you should already be planning for any January or New year sales you may be having. In mid-November, sales start to happen on days such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday and after the festive period, many shops decide to have another sale to get rid of last year’s stock.

When advertising sales on a website there is a number of ways in which you can do it. Some businesses decide to show people what items will be in the sale but stop the purchase of these until the day the sale starts. Others will release all the sales products only on the day the sale starts with no time for browsing. The beauty of online sales is you are not restricted to usual shop opening hours so you may find that you get a pick in traffic around midnight on the day of the sale. You need to ensure that your website hosting will be able to manage with the additional traffic and that your checkout process is working as it should be. Making the checkout process easy and fast will entice more people to use it.

Think about how you are going to allow customers to filter your sales products e.g by price, by saving or just by category.

Websites can really help a business grow and can vastly improve sales and conversions. When designing your website you do need to speed a good deal of time not only figuring out what you would like on your site but also how you are going to display it. Psychology plays a massive part in web design as you may be surprised to learn how some subtle differences can have a big impact on how the site is interpreted.

Colours that you decide to use on your site can mean a lot. Colour is a tricky thing. You have to use it in the right way, at the right time, with the right audience, and for the right purpose. If for example you have a website that sells children’s toys then you will want it to be fun and bright and may use a number of different colours to portray this. If you want a website that is all about natural, organic products then you may opt for subtle colours of greens and browns to reiterate what your company is about.

If you want to make something stand out on your website you may be tempted to use a different colour on the font for that section or to surround it with a colourful border.

It’s happening with such little fanfare that it may have escaped your notice, but a battle is going on for Net Neutrality. With the encouragement of the Trump administration, the FCC in the US looks to repeal it, though it has for now been restored by the US Senate.

Even if it didn’t escape your notice, you may not have any idea what that means, and why you should be concerned about its future.

Put simply, net neutrality is the principle that ISPs (Internet Service Providers) do not discriminate or charge based on who a user is, where content is coming from, and so on.

So why is it coming to an end a problem? Well, you may recall a few years back, BT throttling it’s dial-up internet speeds to drive people onto broadband; the risks here are much the same, but on an expanded scale.

It’s not beyond the realms of possibility therefore that businesses, with corporate interests to protect, could throttle or pay to throttle both access to competitors. Press influences, or bad political actors could readily throttle or pay to throttle access to information. That works in reverse too – the wheels could be greased in right direction, for the right fee.