Direct Marketing & Digital Marketing Agency - Ashley Bolser Agency

These days there are loads of companies claiming to be experts at everything from direct mail to ecommerce. It’s a fact that marketing services are one of the most “over served” business areas in the whole economy. I think that’s because there are almost no barriers to entry in marketing and advertising .Too many companies running after limited client spend.  On the other hand most agencies will admit to a certain amount of frustration with clients not doing what they are advised to do.

So we decided that we would run our own ecommerce site to give us the practical knowledge of setting and up and running of a shop on the internet. This included all the things you might expect - digital elements like web site design and build, functionality, style copy etc. Also areas like secure transactions and accounting, notification of despatch, delivery etc. had to be thought of and solved.

Unlike most of our clients we also had to come up with a product and range, we had provided a simple web site for www.off-the-wall.tv and like the fact that they were a UK manufacturer with their own design.  So it was then that www.justtvstands.co.uk was born.

We buy product from them and some other select suppliers, load it up to the web and let the customers do the rest. We’ve had the opportunity to develop and learn in areas we don’t normally get involved with like credit card fraud. And to put it bluntly it’s been interesting, very interesting.

Top tips to prevent fraud

1. Look for stupid customer names especially ones without capitals and lazy ones like tuppie tuppie.
2. Look for emails that make sense with the name of the customer, some elements of the name are good
3. Look out for repeated mobile numbers on your customer information with different names and of course repeated delivery addresses.
4. Let bona fide customers call you on an area code number, we have one for Leeds because we are in Leeds
5. Hold dodgy looking orders and call the numbers provided, real customers don’t mind the call.
6. To date we’ve been very successful with Tens of thousands of pounds of sales being made to UK customers.
7. And we’re happy to keep developing tools like the customer feedback and review sections because they help confidence and sales.

Check out the site and let me know what you think?

I often get asked how to guarantee deliverability on the many email campaigns we work on. Unfortunately there are no guarantees to hit every inbox 100% of the time, but you can make sure that you give it the best chance. We have rigorous testing for all email campaigns and follow best practices in our own designs. Some examples of these are:

• Correct balance of text over imagery
• Call to action in the preview pane
• Rendering tests for online and offline email clients
• Testing against spam filters
• Live tests on our own email accounts and clients
• Subject line testing

But even then you can’t always guarantee it will reach the user. One example of this is an email newsletter I receive from www.returnpath.net, a company specialising in email monitoring and deliverability. Ironically, this email always goes into my junkbox time and time again.

I’ve never marked it as ‘not junk’ just to see if it ever lands in my inbox correctly without my intervention.

Actually whilst I’m thinking about the media I think it’s really, really negative and irresponsible to boot.

I wonder what they actually want. Do they want a housing crash, fuel protests, food inflation, general poverty and malaise?

Are we going back to the austerity of gloomy post war Britain? Sometimes I think the papers want us back to those days, of dark cold winters, food rationing and deference to your betters?

I wonder what the agenda is. I’ve really given up reading the papers as I end up depressed, worried and annoyed! I can’t bear the morning comic given out on the train, really I could do better!

About 7 years ago the papers were full of stories about recession and how far we were going to fall and talk about the economic “bounce”, would it be V shaped or U shaped, how much pain were we going to get? I lost my job because I was optimistic and my peers were pessimistic, OK the following week, the Twin Towers came down, throwing everyone into a crisis and generating shock waves across the world. No company or Country is immune to that type of event. But it was not predicted by anyone and most economic sectors really didn’t suffer over the longer term.

We are better off than previous generations, we don’t have to fear for our children’s future, we will probably adapt to climate change and develop the technology to help with Carbon emission and absorption.

I don’t want saccharine sweet stories but how about some more balance? What about looking at the real facts, what about solutions, what’s wrong with positivity?

This week I was asked if the business was recession proof. It’s not easy to answer that question with lots of economic indicators looking bad for business and consumers.

Even worse, the media seems to be in a frenzy of negativity about almost everything!

Thinking about my clients and what we do, I’m hoping that as long as we can measure and put a value on the work we do, we will continue to claim a reasonable share of marketing spend.

In fact during the last two downturns (recession is too strong a word for the economy over the last twenty years) client money moved from less accountable awareness advertising to direct response spend.

In hard times many companies need to keep advertising to maintain sales and market share but they also need to know where the money goes and how effective the spend has been. That’s where we come in.

Direct has also changed over the last few years, digital is now a fundamental part of our work. It’s the revenge of direct marketing over above the line. The world has come to our industry to use our skills to get customers to buy things, order stuff and get involved with companies.

So we’re not immune from the general economy but we could weather the storm better than most.

Heard an interesting comment the other day. When looking at an advert, Dom, the Client Services Director, said “I don’t need to read this to know it’s not good copy”. And he was absolutely right.

I realised that good copy starts with a format. How the copy looks will determine whether someone acts from it or not.

If you don’t get the format right, the content won’t be read. And as unread copy can’t help us get the response we want from the audience, it must be bad copy.

So we should remember to consider what shape the copy must take before tapping away on our keyboards. If we want someone to do something simple, let’s make it look simple with minimal copy broken into a few simple steps. If we want someone to make a complicated decision, let’s help them spend time with the idea by giving them copy in a broken up, multi-column magazine style.

Think about what you want someone to do and make it easy for them:

Use an appropriate format

• Is it a quick response you want? Use bullets to communicate key messages.
• Do you want a response based on a considered decision? Use longer copy in easily digested paragraphs. Let the sub-heads outline the ’story’. The content should follow the order it’s required in during the decision-making process.

Communicate the information that’s needed and only what’s needed

• If it doesn’t directly encourage a response, we don’t need it.