Some marketing companies promise to do everything. We prefer to specialise in a few of the more important things. Established in 2011, we’ve built a small but potent reputation for obsessive quality and service, focussed around everything that makes a business successful in the digital space.
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We hate waste. That’s why we love Web marketing. By understanding your customers we can design your online marketing strategy to reach only the prospects that best fit your best customer profile. With modern behavioural tracking techniques, offers can be specifically targeted to customers based on their browsing patterns and preferences. Web marketing packages from £350.00 per month
It’s not enough to just be online, an e-commerce site needs to be on-message, on-time and on customers’ expectations. Obsessing about the tiniest technical detail is a given for us. We not only test and re-test client e-commerce portals to make sure their bullet proof, we also ensure that every product explains itself, giving the customer clear, powerful reasons to buy. Then we make sure orders are picked, packed and posted perfectly to deliver on the site’s promise. Magento 2 websites starting from £1500.00
We know there’s something a bit wrong with us but everything has to be just right. The downside for us is a life of constant fretting over the smallest detail. The up side for customers is a mail order fulfilment service where ‘OK’ is never good enough. Fulfilment from as little as 32p per order
Pay per click can be a powerful tool for driving genuinely interested customers to your site, ready to buy. It can also be a powerful tool for the big beasts of the web jungle to drain your company of cash and give little in return. We make sure our client get pay-per-click that delivers payback. PPC management from £350.00 per month (excluding ad spend)
The internet is a popularity contest. The prize for being most popular isn’t just vanity, it’s sales. We’re obsessive networkers, always looking for ways to use emerging social media to get our clients’ names noticed and products sold. Social media management. Social media packages starting from £200.00 per month
It takes eight times the marketing investment to win a sale from a new customer compared to sales from an existing customer. But you still need to invest in targeting both. Our obsessive attention to detail in testing and comparing the best marketing messages to each customer segment for the best response means our clients always get the best return from their marketing spend.
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About
Founded in early 2011, we have grown modestly over the past 5 years. We pride ourselves on our out of the box thinking and obsessive, compulsive ethos towards our clients. We are digital specialists offering expert services in areas such as AdWords, SEO, WordPress and even Magento certified ecommerce shops. We operate a small, professional team who have a wealth of experience in the various digital fields holding accolades from Google, Magento, Adobe and other well-known providers. As well as the complete online marketing offering we can help you with business coaching and mentoring and even source and apply for various grants and funding options to help cover the costs of online expansion and marketing. Drop us a message and either Linden or Neal will get back in touch with you for a chat.
Ethos
News
20i who are they?
Author: Neal Foster
Tags: #Hosting #BigPlayers
I received a fairly standard direct mail piece through the post a couple of days ago. It was from a company called 20i.com. It mentioned resller web hosting and other bits and pieces so I had a read.
After completing a read their offering looked really good. Seperating them from the other resellers on the market they appear to be offering SSD storage as standard on all their shared hosting accounts - which is a massive seller! SSD drives tend to be expensive to upgrade to with current providers and dramatically increase wite speeds, thus page load time.
Along with SSD storage they claim to be operating a monitored auto scalling shared enviroment. Basically if a website experiences a massive spike in traffic, IE an email marketing campaoign is sent and the site receives a high volume of clicks when people open, they grab the site and drop it into a dedicated enviroment to see out the spike, its then moved back automatically when traffic drops to the normal levels.
I havent tested the offering as of yet but I intend to so the above is what 20i claim to offer - I see no reason to doubt them however.
Upon doing some more digging (it wasnt hard, I checked out their about us page!) I was astonished to find the 2 founders of 20i are the guys responsible for 123-reg, then Heart Internet. Hosting with them seems a no brainer.
Check them out at 20i.com.
Neal
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Backing up your website
Author: Neal Foster
Tags: #Backups #Everytime
Backups are important. We have all learnt (most likely the hard way) how frustrating it can be when you make an edit and don’t backup the file. Ctrl Z can only get you so far.
Server/Website backups are just the same. A lot of sites are suffering from hackers finding vulnerabilities in paypal apps etc and making unwarranted changes to code. This is an easy fix if you have a nightly backup and can easily restore to this.
Backups can take up a lot of server space. We recommend a nightly local backup then uploading to a remote server (used purely to store backups) that is free from the same infrastructure as your main server.
Talk to us today about remotely backing up your website and keeping it safe and secure.
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Time to upgrade?
Author: Neal
Tags: #Magento2 #Upgrade
Is your ecommerce shop made using the ever so popular Magento platform? If you recognise the logo and colours above from your administration area then the answer is most likely yes! Are you aware of the version you are running?
Magento CE (community edition) began at version 1.0.X and climbed to version 1.9.2.4 before Magento 2 became available.
The Magento 2 engine runs completely different to 1.9.2.4 and prior releases and in most cases requires a total rebuild of the websites template files to carry the same look and feel over to the new platform. Not all custom modules (extensions) have Magento 2 versions either so these also need to be looked at in detail before a conversion/upgrade can be attempted. Thankfully there are now plenty of tools out there to allow the conversion of the data - Your sales history, products, customers and everything else.
One of the big worrys developers and ecommerce businesses will talk about is Magento 1 becoming EOL (end of line) and thus support halting. I disagree with this and dont see it as a major convern ased on the size of the Magento CE community. People will always be using it, coding for it and fixing bugs that they find. Even if they arent, the community will always be there to help and offer assistance with problems - Im sure.
I would recommend that all shops are brough up to the last release though. This is version 1.9.2.4 - the most secure release. Upgrades from 1.8 upwards arent releatively compicated but you should check your version first. This can be found at the bottom of your administration screen once logged in.
We provide upgrade services so talk to us if you need any assistance.
Neal
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Mailchimp automation
Author: Neal Foster
Tags: #Smart #EmailMarketing
Automated email marketing is a phrase used quite often, both all over the internet and also on A LOT of cold calls by the likes of Pure360 and others.
It won’t mean much to a lot of people, even people who are using Mailchimp and other services quite frequently to send out their email campaigns.
That’s because it isn’t as straight forward as you may think to setup and integrate – but once it is it requires very little maintenance and can literally see your profits go through the roof.
An interesting fact I learnt (don’t quote me to the percent but I’m fairly sure I’m very close) is that you are 65% more likely to convert a existing customer than you are a totally new one. What I learnt from this is that it’s very important to keep talking to your customer and subscriber base. If you find you aren’t converting from these efforts, then you need to work on segmenting your data and sending the right messages to the right customers.
A first point of call if using Mailchimp is to sign up for their Manddrill exteniosn. They allow you 2,000 emails off the back of this for free and further emails are quite reasonably priced. The next step would be to install and configure the Magento module by Ebizmarts that allows Magento to talk to Mailchimp.
You can now start gathering information on your subscribers and just exactly what they are looking at/interested in on your website.
Lastly you need to create a great set of email templates that you can start firing out to customers based on their actions on your site.
Talk to us today about integration, we have done it a thousand times and we can really get your email marketing flying.
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PCI compliance made easy
Author: Neal Foster
Tags: #PCI #EasyPeasy #Compliant
PCI is a problem ecommerce companies are faced with once a year. It’s not so daunting if, like us, you deal with the PCI scans and questionnaires monthly for various clients.
Your merchant services provider such as Wordpay, Sage pay or Payment sense will require you usually to do two things to become compliant – if you don’t they will sting you with a rather higher non compliance fee, usually circa £40 per month on top of your usual fee.
The first step will be to complete a questionnaire. In most cases this is quite simple and if you follow best practice the questions will make sense. Most companies use a 3rd party webhost for their websites and this would be selected, if so during the questions.
The second maybe to provide a scan of your webserver via a recommended company such as SecureTrading. They will require the IP address of your server and they will carry out a thorough check of any potential vulnerabilities in the server’s hardware and software. This is where you will require full access to your website server (usually at root level) that a shared hosting platform will not provide and also the use of an advanced server admin to fix the flagged vulnerabilities. This can become quite costly.
A quick alternative for this is to use a PCI compliant webhost (such as ourselves). We, for instance carry out quarterly scans of our servers and tackle any software updates etc that we are required to do. We will also deal with our clients and a one to one basis and babysit the compliance process and address any site specific issues that need tackling.
We are Magento hosting specialists and can make PCI easy.
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How important is page load time?
Author: Neal Foster
Tags: #PageSpeed #LightningFast
The time it takes your webpage to load is critical. I can’t stress enough how important this is and literally the faster the page loads the higher your conversion rates will be.
47% of online consumers expect webpages to load in under 2 seconds. The ecommerce average is around 4.5 seconds. Every single second can result in a 7% reduction in conversions via your website.
We use GTmetrix.com to analyse our websites and work to a sub 4 second load time on all our Magento ecommerce websites. GTmetrix takes the top page speed tools and gives you a ranking for them all, including Googles Page Speed tool.
There are a lot of ways to improve the page load time of your site, most of which will require an advanced developer or server admin to assist with setting up. The best way is to use a good, experienced web host for your website. If you do this, then most areas will be ticked and page speed shouldn’t be too much of an issue for you.
We are Magento certified and have our own bespoke Magento server that we offer hosting packages on. Talk to us for a quote (it won’t break the bank!).
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01937 547059