We have a track record of providing a diverse range of campaigns from small-scale invites to monthly corporate newsletters and one-off competitions.

I will outline here some of the key factors of starting out with a targeted email campaign. If you are interested in seeing how this can benefit you directly, please get in touch [contact].

The benefits of email campaigns

It’s cost effective – While the cost of actually designing your email creative can be comparable to direct mail, the big savings start when you consider there are no printing costs and you can get your message delivered for around one pence per recipient.

It’s immediate – Email generates an immediate response, instead of waiting for a subscriber to visit your site you can get your message to them when it counts. The majority of your recipients will see your message in the first 24-48 hours.

It’s relevant – Email makes it easy to segment your subscribers using a variety of criteria like demographics and past campaign behaviour (such as clicking a certain link). This way you can ensure your message goes to the individuals most likely to be interested in your offer.

It’s completely measurable – More than any other form of marketing, email can provide actionable data on the results it generates. Keep track of who opened your email and when & where, what topics they were interested in, who forwarded it on to a friend, and much more.

Design

We can design for any type of email campaign, including quick announcements, email newsletters, catalog emails and press releases. We can design one template which can be re-used time-and-time again, or we can design one for each campaign. You can also personalise each email by using custom fields (for example, the recipients name) to adapt your emails for individual subscribers.

Campaigns can be designed as rich HTML with images and text for the majority of email clients (Outlook etc.) but also have a fallback of a text based version for Blackberry handhelds etc. Each campaign can also be displayed and archived on your website.

Campaign Analytics

If you know who opened your emails, what they clicked on, who bounced and who unsubscribed, you can start to understand who your audience really is, and what they are interested in.

For every campaign you send, we automatically create reports that are easy to understand, automatically updated and are simple to share with other people. We let people unsubscribe instantly from any email they receive, and your list is updated automatically, we also instantly remove hard bounces, and re-send your campaigns automatically to addresses which soft bounce.

Sometimes people forget that they signed up for your emails, and hit the spam button. We instantly remove people from your list when they make a spam complaint, ensuring they do not receive any more email.

When you start your first campaign you will be given access to your online analytics software to see all the reports for your campaigns. Here are some highlights of the information that you will have access to.

Campaign snapshot
See how your email campaign has performed at a glance. Find out how many recipients opened your email, clicked a link, unsubscribed, forwarded your email to a friend and loads more.

Recipient Activity
Our recipient activity report lets you get down to some serious detail on your campaign. Easily see who opened, who clicked, who bounced and who unsubscribed. You can even search for a specific subscriber to see exactly what they did with your email.

Link activity
The Link Activity Report makes it very easy to see what your subscribers found most interesting, as well as who clicked and who did not.

So, as you can see, the benefits are great, and starting with a new campaign can be extremely easy, all you need is something to say… We can then work together to build you a well targeted marketing campaign that will work hard for you.

Get in touch today. You should also follow us on Twitter and Facebook.

If you have any questions, please post them below.

After an initial meeting, it was clear that a comprehensive and highly organised website was going to be key to help understand how all of these strands pull together not only for the fans but for the Brownswood Family and their wide network of associates.

We started with an audit of the current site; what we needed to keep, what we didn’t, new additions and what wasn’t working. Analytics helped to work out these details from a consumers perspective, but it became clear that the internal systems of bringing together all these elements needed to be streamlined to allow Brownswood to focus less on the workings of the site and concentrate on creating quality content.

This was achieved through a number of strategies, but primarily by limiting the number of steps to add content to the site and avoiding the need to duplicate content across multiple networks. For example, we chose select third party content providers to upload each type of content to and then feed this information automatically into our site. The main source being Soundcloud which we are using to stream all audio through our own music player using their api which fits seamlessly into our design. We still have a ways to go with elements of the integration, and we are treating it very much as an ongoing process.

Brownswood Soundcloud Player

On top of this streamlined and efficient structure it was always going to be challenging to design a site that would tie all the different content types and strands of Brownswood (each with their own branding) together, be visually strong and unique without overshadowing the content or confusing the user experience. This was overcome by creating a very strict and defined grid with modular elements that are colour coded for each section of the site. This also helps the navigation to be as intuitive as possible so that the visitor understands where they are in the site without needing to stop and think. To strengthen this, the super talented Ben Connors created some beautiful sketches for the headers of each section that reinforce the individual sections and brands whilst visually tying the site together. These are also design to break out of the grid to stop the overall design being to linear or stuffy.

Illustration by Ben Connors

The grid was also hugely important for creating a responsive website that would be able to scale to the multitude of screen sizes that the website is consumed on. The Analytics showed that around 20% of the traffic was coming from mobile devices. Obviously, creating a site that didn’t work as well on mobile as it did on desktop was out of the question. Maintaining two websites, one for mobile and one for desktop is also a big no no, and I always hate the sites that redirect to a stripped down mobile version – just show me the site, don’t discriminate because I’m on my mobile.

The grid is designed to break down from 8 through 4, 2 and 1 columns to make sure that the site fits perfectly to the browser width wether it be on mobile, tablet or desktop; it also makes sure that whatever the future holds for browsing (tv, handheld consoles?), we have it covered. I love this illustration showing just how wide ranging internet enabled devices are today.

Device Diversity by anna_debenham on Flickr

Scaling the site goes someway to improving the user experience, but we really needed to take it further than that to maximise usability on multiple screen sizes. When scaling the main navigation menu to mobile size it would take up half the screen, pushing down the content to below the fold. So we completely redesigned the menu system for mobile sizes, making it sit at the top of the site allowing for much more of the content to be shown at first glance. For touch screens we also made sure that all image slideshows can be swiped, rather than the need for pressing buttons.

Work is still ongoing, as with a project of this nature there are always new ideas that come out during the design process, and new ways of using the site bring to light new possibilities for development. I have enjoyed working with a client that was receptive to and understood the design process and that continues to open the discussion for future development. As with all my clients, I hope this will continue to be an ongoing relationship.

Check out the site, and do let me know what you think by leaving a comment below. www.gillespetersonworldwide.com

You can test this out by resizing the browser and seeing what happens… or you can view it on your iPhone etc. The hard work in working out the code for this was done by Dmitriy, who has been amazing in getting this to work exactly how it should. The site runs on WordPress and thats where Roland has worked his magic to make it super easy to manage.

I am going to try and keep this site up-to-date as much as possible and keep the blog alive, so please comment with some encouragement, i am using the Facebook commenting plugin to make it as easy as possible to do so, and its not just limited to Facebook accounts, you can also use Yahoo, AOL or Hotmail. So there’s no excuse.

I recently found myself with thousands of bookmarks saved in my firefox browser. I just kept bookmarking stuff without really reading it or filing it… Everytime i opened up the bookmarks panel, i got a little despondent at seeing all these bookmarks unloved and just sitting there doing nothing, reminding me of how much time i don’t have these days.

So, when Gimme Bar came along i was hesitant, but hopeful (as i have already tried google bookmarks, delicious etc.). Now, after a little while of using it, i have ditched Firefox with all its bookmarks and started from scratch with Safari (I have kept firefox, in case i need something from before – i’m just not using it) .

It feels great. A clean start. So i have all my super important day-to-day sites saved in Safari bookmarks (ready for syncing with iCloud) and then everything else is going into Gimme Bar. How i use the information once its there remains to be seen, but i keep going there, and its nicely organised and visual. I think it can only get better too, once more people start using it and it matures as a fully integrated web app.

Probably the best thing about it is that you can save a video, rather than the whole page that its embedded in, or a quote, or a typeface, or just a picture… you get it. And then theres the Dropbox integration. It backs up all the stuff i put there into my dropbox at the click of a button, so it goes that little bit further than other cloud apps, in that i don’t feel that if all goes pear-shaped, then i have wasted my time or lost everything. I think its also just replaced iPhoto which i used not for my own photos, but pics saved from the web.

One minor thing that i don’t like is that it takes a fair few clicks to open up a web page you have saved and open that URL. So, if i have a collection of 10 web pages, i have to click on each one to find its weblink… would be easier, to have those links on the thumbs too. Like the thumb rollovers they have on http://siteinspire.com/.

But, i keep sending feedback (they have made it easy) and it is just a beta version, so we’ll see how it goes. For the future, I can see it integrating with the browser much more for adding, recalling and searching and also an iPhone app, so i can really begin to use it properly… I really need to check out the social aspect of it as well, and discover some people with interesting stuff to share.

You can follow my Gimme bar stuff here: http://gimmebar.com/user/leeharding or you can just check out one collection, like amazing photography http://gim.ie/pW8 - my collections are still in their infancy, and i’m trying to grow them slowly and organically, rather than just dumping anything for the sake of it. So i don’t end up like i did before…

YouTube was 5 years away from broadcasting it’s first video, the Search engine of choice was Yahoo (or maybe even Alta Vista), being able to surf the net from your mobile phone was a laugh whilst most homes were still on dialup.

The general state of design on the net seemed to be a far cry from the wealth of great design we have now – sites were either very basic HTML or increasingly, more and more sites were built using Flash. Flash seemed to be the tool of choice for designers coming from other media that were getting into the, now popular, realm of web design.

You didn’t have to worry about web-safe fonts or how the site looked in different browsers, you could use your skills as a designer and build a site that looked exactly how you wanted it to. No need to hand-code like a programmer, just learn how to use the Flash software and a few functions and away you go. Programmers also helped these would-be Flash designers by posting their source files on the net for all to use and learn from (Joshua Davis with his Praystation site being a pioneer of this). You could now design sites that looked good, moved around and were interactive. HTML just looked tired and basic. In 2001 Flash shipped pre-installed on all Windows XP machines making it available on 92% of all computers connected to the Internet.

Then along came video on the net. YouTube launched in 2005 using Flash to stream video clips. It made it easy to upload and to share video. Designers started to integrate video into websites and Flash quickly became the de-facto media player. As of 2005, more computers worldwide had the Flash Player installed than any other Web media format.

So what’s changed…?

This article is to be continued…