Direct Marketing & Digital Marketing Agency - Ashley Bolser Agency

Specialist Expertise

Because we offer such a wide range of services, we thought we should draw your attention to the areas where the Ashley Bolser Agency really excels. These are areas where we have particularly valuable experience or specialist skills.

• Direct response thinking
• Financial services marketing
• eCRM
• Purposeful creative
• Design for the digital world

Direct response thinking

As the Ashley Bolser Agency has grown, and our range of services has become more diverse, we've made sure that we've never strayed from the principles of direct response - no matter what work we undertake.

Ashley Bolser, Dominic Howe and other senior members of the team have direct marketing experience gained at top agencies like WWAV Rapp Collins and EHS Brann. This has given our agency a solid foundation in understanding people and what makes them respond. Direct marketing is only a small proportion of what we do today but our direct response thinking informs everything we do - from building a website to creating a new brand, designing a brochure to devising an eCRM programme.

Direct response thinking, in the most simple terms, is knowing how to make people buy a product or service, buy more frequently, increase the amount they spend or provide personal details for future communications. And because we've demonstrated our success at this for clients such as Asda, Nokia and Pizza Express time and time again, we've grown into a highly trusted and respected agency.

If you'd like to find out more about the psychology of response, a good start is Robert Cialdini's Influence: Science and Practice

• See Wikipedia entry about Robert Cialdini
• Talk to us about direct response thinking

Financial services marketing

The financial services industry is one of the biggest employers of direct mail and direct response thinking, so when you consider our specialist expertise in this area, it should come as no great surprise we have significant experience in this sector.

Amongst many achievements, we launched ASDA Financial Services and continue to work across all the products, including credit card, loans, savings and insurance. We also help BGL Group increase insurance sales through internal communications programmes. These have encouraged sales advisors to overcome objections in car insurance sales, educated a South African call centre team about ecological issues to support a carbon friendly car insurance product and helped upsell optional extras for home and car insurance. In addition to this, senior members of the team have launched the Capital One credit card, Argos credit card, Barclay's Online Banking and worked on the MasterCard global brand.

All our financial services clients benefit from our ability to produce compliant marketing that works. This is thanks to our extensive experience in financial services and our pro-active approach to staying up-to-date with regulation and legislation.

• Read the financial services marketing case studies
• Talk to us about financial services marketing

eCRM

Successful eCRM relies on understanding what you need to do to get the desired response from your customer and then making it as easy as possible for them to act. Because this plays directly into our strengths in direct response thinking and digital, the Ashley Bolser Agency is a natural fit for eCRM.

Through our work with Nokia, PizzaExpress and Asda Opticians, we have lots of experience managing different relationships within one, often enormous, customer base. We've helped our clients recognise different behaviour patterns and motivations. And by creating programmes that respond directly to these, we're able to employ specific triggers that will make the customer act in the desired manner. Getting these triggers right is what can make or break a campaign. Fortunately, we are experts in direct response and have an almost instinctive ability to say the right thing to the right customer.

Our background in direct marketing gives us the ability to develop databases and help you run highly cost-effective campaigns. And because we have an in-house digital team consisting of developers, as well as web designers, we can build you a bespoke system across email, website and mobile channels if required. You'll also benefit from our extensive experience in eCRM as we've already learned how to avoid spam filters and make an email design work across a number of clients - including Outlook, Entourage, Hotmail and more.

All our systems are tested rigorously from a technical position and with a huge dose of common sense. We make sure that everything customer-facing is straightforward and easy to use. We also make sure the reporting tools we provide give you the information you need clearly and with added value.

• Read the eCRM case studies
• Talk to us about eCRM

Purposeful creative

Our creative has a job to do. And that's to get across the content that will directly lead to a sale. If creative doesn't do this, it has no purpose and is of no value to your business.

Good creative has a short and long-term effect. In the short-term, it gives you an immediate and measurable return on investment. And in the long term, it makes your brand loved. That's when people make seemingly irrational choices to buy from you over and over again, regardless of the competition's offering.

In order to make a sale, the creative needs to communicate a message that's relevant and welcome. And if you keep getting this message across to your customer, possibly through eCRM, it builds to the long-term effect of your brand becoming relevant, welcome... and loved.

Because we work in an area that's half way between art and science, some of our approach to creative is instinctive and some of it is learned. We always look for opportunities to test different ideas in a live environment (rather than focus groups) so that we have quantifiable proof of what produces the greater response. As we all know, what people say and what people do are two completely different things.

• Talk to us about creative

Design for the digital world

User Centric Design
All our digital projects are focused around the user, whether it be a simple brochure website, large corporate infosite, client backoffice or simple data administration. We always remember we aren't the ones using the site, always focusing on the end user, the desired actions and outcomes. Without boring you with code or jargon, we'll often build fast prototypes for you to play around with before we get down and dirty with any visual design or backend geekery. We even have an in-house User Acceptance Tester to make sure our projects do what they say on the tin. You can rest assured your digital project will always have the best chance of achieving success.

Ruby On Rails
We use Ruby on Rails for many of our online applications and website developments. The Rails framework allows us to rapidly develop web applications using test driven development ensuring that the codebase is solid and works without errors time and time again. This along with the availability of many open source plugins and gems for Rails means that we can keep our codebase size lean and avoids having to write code that somebody else has already written - 'reinventing the wheel'. This Agile approach to development means that we can make changes, run our tests and deploy within a matter of minutes.

• Read the Digital case studies
• Talk to us about digital