1. Using colour to engage viewers with aesthetics
Here at Infotex, we aim to offer the widest possible spectrum of digital marketing services.
You are probably already aware that we offer help with both website design and email marketing, for example. But did you know that certain website design techniques can be applied to marketing emails to improve the chances of recipients responding positively? While an email has a very different format to a website, they both need to be visually appealing and useful in order to succeed. Ergo, the techniques that are used to create one can often be applied to the other. In today’s blog, we’ll look at the website design techniques and strategies that can be deployed in your best email marketing campaigns.
Black-and-white textual emails are suitable for ordinary communication, but they aren’t very well adapted for marketing. In order to grab your recipients’ interest, you should utilise colour, just as you would on your website. Adding colourful, visual elements to your emails makes them more aesthetically engaging and encourages recipients to devote more time to reading them. What’s more, you can deploy the colours that you use across your business to reinforce your brand.
In addition to deploying an attractive colour scheme, you should also consider using images in your marketing emails. Images are very effective at drawing recipients in simply because, when people see an image, they instinctively want to understand what it’s about. An image can intrigue a viewer by making them consider its context. Including images on a web-page encourages visitors to read the text. Similarly, including them in an email increases the likelihood that it will be read thoroughly.
An important part of designing a website is ensuring that your viewers don’t become overwhelmed by data. Every well-designed website utilises areas of white-space so that viewers aren’t confronted with a solid wall of text and images. Emails should use white-space in the same way. Nobody wants to open a marketing email and see a solid block of text or images, so give your recipients some breathing room. This will make it easier for them to absorb your email’s contents and may encourage them to act on what they read.
If you need further assistance with either website design or email marketing, get in touch with us today. We’re always eager to help.
On the 8th of September 2017, the race speeds through our county of Suffolk, from Newmarket to the finish line in Aldeburgh. We have always loved the race at Infotex – the cyclists pass our offices and last year for the Women’s Tour we were out on the road cheering them on.
This year in 2017, we had the chance to get closer to the event, and become even more of a participant. Suffolk Coastal District Council, together with the fantastic marketing company The Bridge, approached us to become a sponsor of their Taste of the Tour campaign, a campaign which supports the Tour itself by engaging with the community and local businesses through bike trails, family activities, and encouraging local food businesses to give a ‘taste of the tour’ by coming up with menu specials and special events.
Infotex is always keen to contribute to events that benefit the local community, especially an event such as this which promotes local business, family activity, wellbeing and engagement. Through consulting with Suffolk Coastal District Council we were delighted to be offered the opportunity to produce a unique logo for The Taste of the Tour, and building them a website which encourages engagement and participation in the campaign.
Our design team worked on a logo that incorporated the spokes of a bike within a strong stamp brand, and created a website with stunning visual scenes of our beautiful local area, together with clear information on local activities and events.
It was really pleasing to see the momentum grow with the Taste of the Tour, with more companies joining up to take part along the way. The culmination, of being at the finish line waiting for the cyclists to hurtle through the High Street of Aldeburgh, felt truly exciting. The kids from the local primary in Aldeburgh had their own mini race which was really delightful. People from the whole area were lining the streets – whole area was buzzing with excitement.
We were so pleased to be working with Suffolk Coastal District Council on Taste of the Tour, and we look forward to going on Tour next year! We are also please that they delighted with the results [get quote], and we look forward to working with them in subsequent years to build and celebrate the Tour of Britain with The Taste of the Tour campaign.
Cllr TJ Haworth-Culf, cabinet member for Customers, Communities and Leisure, said:
“Thank you to Infotex for putting their hard work and creativity into the Taste of the Tour website.
“The platform allowed us to promote the OVO Energy Tour of Britain in an exciting way and to encourage more people to get involved with the international cycling event.
“We’ve had some great feedback from families taking part in the bike trails and we hope we can build on this success as cycling continues to grow in Suffolk Coastal.”
If you haven’t already got a Google My Business listing then what rock having you been living under!? It provides those searching for your business with all the important information they will need such as:
In addition to this, a Google My Business listing is essential to a website’s local SEO, especially those searching using local terms. Fully optimising your listing could help improve how your website ranks organically on Google for a whole array of search terms related to your business.
The best thing of all? It’s completely free!
Posts is one of the latest features to be added and just another reason why your business should be taking full advantage of what a GMB listing could offer.
Recommended Factors to Optimise your Local Ranking on Google
The Posts feature in Google My Business allows companies to post an image with short write-ups accompanied by “calls to action” below in the form of buttons. The variety of opportunities that this gives small businesses to promote their product/service are endless –
Those three examples are just the beginning in how you could use Posts to market your business directly onto the Google search results page. These posts would also expand the size of your listing, a huge bonus due to the hypercompetitive nature of the Google SERP.
Once setup, there wouldn’t be any extra work involved in posting here if you are already using social media outlets such as Twitter/Facebook. This is the answer to the question “How can I promote my business on Google without spending loads of money?”
If you are interested in setting up a Google My Business (GMB) listing and utilising Google Posts then please get in touch with us and we’d be glad to guide you through the process. Our marketing department have a wealth of experience helping businesses improve their online presence through Google My Business.
Naturally this raises many questions.
Many of us at Infotex have been in the industry long enough to remember the early days of experimental viruses that were written as a side project to demonstrate the authors expertise and in general not intended to cause mass damage e.g. the Melissa and Nimda worms from early 2000’s.
Sadly this all changed when CryptoLocker was released in 2014. The positive motives of authority and experimentation were replaced by greed and now crime. Suddenly someone had discovered that by encrypting (effectively password protecting) the victim’s documents people could be extorted to pay in order to regain access. By coupling this to the Bitcoin anonymous virtual currency there was a way to extort money without being traced or blocked by law enforcement – a perfect opportunity for the bad guys.
WannaCry is a variant of CryptoLocker. It uses the same cryptography to “password protect” your files that is used on the web for encrypting credit card information. That makes it very difficult to regain access of your files without paying the ransom.
What’s special and therefore dangerous about WannaCry is that it doesn’t just rely on people opening malicious attachments or visiting infected websites. Instead, it just needs access to a computer network. Once in, it spreads like wildfire. It gets in due to a subtle programming problem with Windows file and printer sharing. You will likely have read that the weakness was originally discovered by the USA’s National Security Agency (NSA) who controversially kept it secret for use by them to attack suspects computers. Secrets are all fine until they’re out. This leaked and suddenly all the world’s attackers became aware of the issue before Microsoft did themselves.
Microsoft released a patch to fix the problem in March which should be automatically installed on the majority of computers within a few days however some people, such as the NHS have automatic Windows Updates turned off, may not realise Windows Update is not working properly or are simply running machines too old to receive updates.
The good news is that Windows 10 doesn’t appear to be vulnerable to WannaCry but future variants are likely to try alternative ways, so following good practice is still advisable.
First and foremost, ensure that you have Windows update running and fully up-to-date. Microsoft provides advice how to do this on their website.
Windows Updates are released at least once a month, within the Windows Update program you can view your recently installed updates and should see Microsoft’s “Cumulative Update” that was installed around the 15th March 2017 which provides protection against the bug that WannaCry uses to spread across a network of computers although you can be infected via other means.
If you are running Windows XP, which has been unsupported for a few years now, you should update to a newer version of Windows, however, Microsoft has taken the exceptional step of releasing a one-off update for this issue.
Secondly, ensure your emails and computer in general have a working anti-virus installed. Make sure not to download attachments from emails you don’t recognise.
Thirdly, ensure you have backups which are not accessible on the computer (a zip file of your Documents is no use if it has also been encrypted).
Infotex’s primary website hosting platforms (which hosts over 99% of our client’s websites) runs on servers provided by the Linux operating system which is not affected by this issue so your website hosted by us itself is unaffected. We take security of this platform very seriously and are always happy to discuss measures specific to any client’s environment with them.
Emails processed by Infotex’s Flexidial mail platform has an option, enabled by default, to scan all emails for virus’s and these scanners were updated instantly to protect against email borne copies of WannaCry and will be similarly for future variants. If you want to check that email virus scanning is enabled on your account we’ll be happy to check that for you.
By bringing together developers, sales, marketers, designers, management and support under one roof we have created a vibrant, interconnected environment that will carry Infotex into the next chapter of its 20 year (and counting!) journey.
There’s still lots of work to do to make this new office home, but here’s a few snaps of Riverside House just a few days into the move.
A prominent feature within Dock Lane.
Our foyer, new seating to be installed soon.
Our board room.
A nice, peaceful home for our development team.
This is our design and marketing room, we have an exciting plan for workbenches to replace these old desks soon.
Account management, new desks to be installed soon.
We’re really pleased with our new office, it’s a big step up from where we were before and brings together the Suffolk Infotex team and the Creative Intent team. We’re looking forward to adding our brand to this building over the next few weeks.
More updates to follow!
DOMAIN BREAKDOWN
There are two parts that make up a domain name, the first bit (not its technical name) and the domain extension – the dot com or dot co dot uk – at the end.
There are a massive range of domain extensions available, suitable for virtually every company type known to man. The most common and familiar extensions being .com and .net, through to specific country extensions (also known as country code top level domains – ccTLDs) such as co.uk, and .de, then to the more generic .info and .biz.
Google.com was supposed to be googol.com – a misspelling by a graduate student while checking domain availability was to blame
FORGET DOT COM, GO DOT NINJA!
As there are only a finite amount of .com or .co.uk domain names it is becoming harder and harder for new companies trying to find a suitable domain name. However, there has recently been over 1,400 new extensions released for pre-order opening up a Pandora’s box of possibilities.
These extensions include .shop, .wedding, .hotel and even .ninja! The aim of these new extensions is to more accurately describe your business (though we’re not sure how this works with .ninja…) and vastly grow the range of domains available.
Some other domain extensions that are soon coming available:
It remains to be seen whether all of these new domains will prove to be popular, or go the same way as .info or the distrusted .biz. Registration on some domains would suggest a high uptake. .Berlin received 46,000 registrations within its first month.
For a list of all new GTLD domains click here
The most expensive domain ever purchased was VacationRentals.com – for $35 million in 2007.
The new owner confessed to paying so much just to stop Expedia from purchasing it.
ALL CHANGE FOR .UK
Nominet, the company who oversee .co.uk domain names, have recently announced the release of the shorter .uk extensions. This is happening in the summer of 2014, and brings the UK in line with other large ccTLDs, such as France’s .fr or Germany’s .de.
Existing owners of a .co.uk or org.uk will be offered the .uk equivalent of their current address, with five years to decide whether they want it. Where competition exists (with one company owning example.co.uk and another owning example.org.uk) the .uk domain will be offered to the .co.uk registrant.
DOT BRAND?
In 2012 a registration process was opened to allow brands to begin to register their own extensions. The $185,000 registration fee would deter all but the largest brands, but it may not be long before you see .coke, .heinz or .nike in use.
The most popular country code extension is .tk – the small South Pacific island of Tokelau. The .tk is so popular due to their unique business model of being free.
QUICK TIPS FOR SELECTING A DOMAIN
The first domain registered was symbolics.com in 1985, for the Symbolics Computer Corporation
SHORT URLS
Short URLs (Uniform Resource Locator – this is the full address of a page, not just the domain name) are links that take a long web address and make it shorter. They are popular on social media sites as they make links much more shareable, especially for long addresses.
For example http://bit.ly/LjnWMf redirects to this page
There are various free URL shortening services, such as bitly.com and goo.gl, although it’s increasingly popular to register a short version of your own domain for social sharing. Amazon use amzn.to, the New York Times uses nyti.ms, and the already short BBC.co.uk uses the even shorter bbc.in on Twitter.
If you operate a lot on social media then a small investment in a short version of your domain name can further help with brand building. Ideally we’d like infot.ex, but the .ex extension doesn’t exist. Yet.
DOMAIN VALIDATION
Starting from 1st January 2014, ICANN (they oversee top level domains) are introducing a new process that requires domain owners to validate their contact details via the email address held against their domain. When a domain name is registered, transferred or due to renew domain owners will receive an email asking you to validate the email address. Failure to do so within 15 days will mean the suspension of the domain name, until it has been validated. Validation is simply clicking a link, you should not be asked to enter a username and password or any other details.
LIST OF NEW GENERIC TOP-LEVEL DOMAINS (GTLD)
Please note that not all extensions below will be available for public registration. If you’d like to check availability and release dates of any domain name then please get in touch.
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