Many businesses are stuck using basic POP3 email accounts that come bundled with normal web hosting accounts; these are perfectly usable email accounts, but they lack any additional features to help your business work effectively. With the steady increase in mobile working, and the desire to be ‘in the loop’ when out of the office, more and more business are looking for email services that allow them to work smarter.

We can provide a lot more detail about the service features, but here’s a quick summary:

Key Features

Exchange Alternative
Exchange Server is Microsoft’s collaborative email platform. For most SME’s it’s prohibitively expensive to deploy and maintain. Mailr offers comparable functionality at a fraction of the cost.

Webmail Client
All your email, contacts and calendars are accessible via an advanced webmail client. Check and respond to email from any computer or device connected to the internet.

Anti Virus on Server
Mailr scans every email for viruses, and quarantines those that it finds, protecting your mailbox and PC.

Anti Spam on Server
Mailr features advanced anti-virus software to reduce spam in your inbox. The filter is configurable per mailbox.

Access Email Anywhere
Mailr stores all of your email and appointments on a cloud server. This means that you can access your mail from any device anywhere you have an email connection. If you read an email on your phone, it will be marked as read on your PC, any email you send from your PC will be in the sent folder on your phone. Appointments added to your phone will go directly into your webmail and PC calendars.

WebAdmin Interface
Mailr offers an advanced administration interface available on the web. You can add, delete and modify user accounts and setup email aliases across your domains.

Shared Calendars
Shared calendars enable you to see what others in your organisation are doing.

Cloud Hosted
Mailr is hosted ‘in the Cloud’. This means that it is always on and is scalable. You never need to worry about how much email you are storing (2GB storage available as standard, extra storage can be added at cost).

Push Support
Mailr offers PUSH support on a variety of mobile devices covering calendar events and email. Most users do not require this, but it is available as an extra cost option if required. A quotation can be provided on request.

Support Levels

The Mailr service is available with 3 support levels with corresponding price points:

No Support
No bundled support from WDL. A nominated individual has administrator access to your domains and can contact us with support issues; the resolution of those issues is charged at our standard hourly rate.

Admin Support
A nominated individual has administrator access to your domains and provides user level support within your organisation; issues they are unable to resolve can be escalated to us. The resolution of escalated support issues is included in your monthly fee.

User Support
All Mailr users within your organisation are able to contact us with support issues. The resolution of user support issues is included in your monthly fee.

We’re very proud of Mailr, and we think it’s worth mentioning that we use it internally for all of our email and calendars. Get in touch to find out more about how it can help your business improve it’s efficiency.

Our professional sending engine can schedule your campaigns, manage your bounces, and handle your unsubscribers. You get full reporting on each and every campaign, as well as optional Google Analytics tracking for e-commerce sites (track someone from clicking a link in your email right through to checkout).

If you’re interested in email marketing for your sites or services but don’t know where to start, our team can help you create beautiful emails, focus your content, and help you decipher the reports and analytics afterwards.

Key Features

Key features of the Circulate.it service include:

Subscriber list management
Automatic and manual subscription and unsubscription systems, list-specific statistics.

Campaign management
Create new campaigns with emails based on templates, previous campaigns or completely customise the new campaign.

Unlimited email templates
Additional templates can be commissioned (at cost) from WDL to be used in any of your future campaigns.

Full reporting
Complete statistics on opens, clicked links, bounces, forwards, deliveries and unsubscriptions for every campaign sent (as well as open / click behaviours for each subscriber list).

Website integration
The system can produce a form that allows users on your site to sign up directly to your marketing lists without your intervention.

Self Service
The Circulate.it service is available from any web browser via secure login. This means that you are able to build and send email campaigns yourself (WDL can look after this for you if required, additional charges apply).

Advanced Features

The features described above allow you to get started sending targeted marketing emails to your customers straight away. However, the system we provide is scalable, and we are able to provide you with an enhanced service.

Advanced Templates
We can design and build custom email templates for your use, fully integrated into the system.

Managed Service
If you don’t want to get involved in building and sending emails yourself, WDL can provide a managed service for you; all you need to do is send us your content, and approve the email before it’s sent out.

API integration
Of particular interest to e-commerce providers – ever wanted to send specific emails to purchasers of particular goods or services? The API for our service allows your website to add customers to separate or segmented subscriber lists on purchasing products from your store

Autoresponders
Not heard from a customer for a while? Our service can send a reminder or time-sensitive offer (free delivery? %age off next order?) to customers who haven’t ordered for a particular amount of time.

Initial Setup

There is an initial setup fee (contact us for pricing) which includes the following

• Setup and initial configuration of your account
• Addition of the relevant updates to your domain DNS (this can help reduce the chances of your emails being classified as spam)
• Import your existing customer lists into the system (assuming they can be supplied in a spreadsheet format)
• Creation of a single basic email template, usually reflecting the design of your website
• Addition of a form to your website to allow visitors to signup directly for your marketing campaigns
• 1-to-1 training

This is only a basic summary of how circulate.it can help you to communicate with your customers – give us a call or pop in for a chat about how we can help you to get the best out of your customer lists.

Last week Elliot (WDL MD) and myself joined other businesses from the Colchester area in meeting our allocated students from Colchester Institute’s Career Academy.

Back in July 2011 I first went along to the Institute to hear about their new IT Career Academy. During the event I was encouraged by the energy and enthusiasm of those who spoke so passionately about the Partners in Business programme. When I returned to the office I discussed the event with Elliot and we both decided to join up. CRB’s were filled in, and forms were signed and sent off. There was no turning back at that point.

Having committed ourselves to mentor a student over the next 18 months we were both unsure of our role, about what we were supposed to do, and ultimately what kind of student we would get.

Our ‘mentees’ were hand-picked for us by the staff at the Career Academy and the pair were great company during our first meeting. They had lots of questions about what we did and our experiences of working life, and in a room full of other mentors and mentees, we were left to our own devices to find out as much as we could about each other and seek out opportunities to build our relationships on.

The introduction lasted about 45 minutes and we arranged to meet again in a couple of weeks for a second meeting. Elliot and I asked them to think about what they wanted to achieve from the programme and to bring some questions for us to go through next time.

The Career Academy is a fantastic opportunity for both the students and the mentors alike and we can see many benefits for both of us during the months ahead.

A few of our responsibilities as mentors include;

• Preparing the students for employment and/or higher education by helping them gain the necessary skills to be ‘work ready’.
• Establish a positive, personal relationship with the student through regular interaction and consistent support.
• Help the student to develop life skills and instil the framework for developing broader life-management skills.
• Increase students ability to interact with people/groups from various backgrounds by introducing them to different environments.

Any tips would be welcome!

I know I can speak for Elliot too, when I say that we are apprehensive about the next 18 months. We are both acutely aware that we have a responsibility to give what we can to our mentees and to help them to achieve their personal goals. But equally (pressure aside), we are excited and looking forward to the challenge.

No doubt we’ll keep you posted during the process and who knows you may be hearing from our mentees at some point in future too.

About Saffron Tax Partners

Saffron Tax Partners is a specialist tax business, providing a dedicated and proactive personal service to private clients.  Based in The Gherkin building in the City of London, we provide a wide range of tax services, helping clients steer a path through increasingly complex tax legislation.

Expertise

Areas of expertise include compliance with the rigours of the Self Assessment regime, through the completion of annual Tax Returns for individuals, partnerships and trusts, and dealing with all correspondence with HM Revenue & Customs on our clients’ behalf.  We are particularly experienced in dealing with the specific, and especially complex, tax issues for individuals not domiciled in the UK.

We also address any appropriate tax planning issues with a view to the mitigation of liabilities, covering capital gains tax, inheritance tax matters and at the same time raising awareness to any other relevant commercial considerations.  Most importantly, the Saffron team of vastly experienced tax professionals all take real pride in understanding our clients’ differing needs, and building long-term business relationships.

Working With WDL

We have worked with WDL since our inception, and they have proved invaluable in establishing the Saffron brand.  We have received several compliments on the quality of both our website and corporate identity, a testament to the fine work undertaken by WDL. We have been especially grateful for the highly responsive way Elliot Smith and his team have dealt with our business.

I know, right?

The main question that has been on my mind, as a Digital Marketer, is what does 2012 have in store for SEO, along with the general field of Online Marketing?

Content

What’s the score?

First things first, I know that content will remain King, although a lot more emphasis will be placed on the ‘freshness’ (thanks to the ‘Freshness Update’ Google applied to its algorithms on 2nd November 2011, which affected approximately 35% of searches) and quality (thanks to the ongoing iterations of Google’s ‘Panda Update’, originally launched in February 2011) of the content.

What can be done?

Make sure you update your site regularly with high quality, insightful, UNIQUE content which contains original analysis. Readers don’t want to see re-hashed articles on your site when they could read the original article in more depth on someone else’s site.  Remove or improve shorter articles because it is better to have one longer, in-depth piece on a topic than two pieces of shorter content virtually saying the same things but in a slightly different way.

Make sure you talk about timely topics as soon as they are relevant, to capture users who want information from your site’s point of view about a trending topic. However, there will be times that you just can’t generate enough original comment about a topic to put out a full article on it – in this case, write a tweet/Facebook post/Google+ post to acknowledge the event and here you will be able to at least express some sort of feeling about the event and what it means to your business. These social media posts may well be pulled by the search engines when someone searches for the topic.

However, bear in mind that search engines will also want to display general or historical information about a topic when it develops and pops up in the news again. Therefore, you need to make sure that your site contains ‘evergreen’ content about all relevant topics for which you want to have ‘expert’ status. ‘Evergreen’ content isn’t as time specific so can be read all year round. An example of this might be a ‘how to’ article on a bank’s website, for example ‘How to open a bank account’.

Authority and Trust

What’s the score?

Search engines want to rank authoritative and trustworthy sites well. This is all part of trying to provide the best user experience to searchers when suggesting potential pages to them in search rankings.

If users click through to your site from the search engine rankings, the search engine would rather the user enjoy the experience (website design is also important here) and stay on the site because it is a huge indication that your site is relevant for the search term that made your site appear.

Authority and trust play huge roles in user experience – who hasn’t gone to a website, seen the first page, screamed in horror in fear that just being on the site is going to end up in the theft of their identity and/or credit card details and clicked the back/close button faster than The Flash? I figured the number would be small.

Users are also looking for indicators that the information they are reading is accurate and that the person who wrote it is somewhat of an expert in their field. Are you more likely to click on an article about interviewing celebrities by ‘Parkinson’ or ‘Joe Bloggs’?

Remember that if a user (is logged into Google) visits your site from the search listings, is horrified by what they see and exits quickly back to the search results, Google registers this ‘speedy exit’ and then displays a ‘block this site from the search results’ link for the user to click on. If the user clicks this link, they won’t see results from your site when they next search using the same term (and it won’t reflect well on your site in Google’s eyes). You will have lost a potential customer and will lose traction with Google, who will likely reduce your rankings as a result.

What can be done?

Make sure that your site is designed well and contains accurate content by people who know what they are talking about. Proof read your content to check for factual and spelling/grammatical errors (I will NEVER buy stuff from sites that have spelling and grammatical errors – if they can’t be bothered to proof their text, how careful are they going to be with my credit card details?).

Give your authors an online presence by using authorship markup to enable Google to list your article along with the author’s name and a picture of him/her. Your readers will start to recognize the author (it’s easier to remember a face than a name) and want to click on their other articles when they see them, especially if they had a great read from the first piece?

If you are an ecommerce site taking payments online, register for industry standard security protocols (e.g. an SSL certificate) and display a badge, on your homepage, to show your users that the credit card information they enter will be safe.

Make sure that your site users can contact you and display contact information prominently. This will help because users will be able to see that they can contact someone who runs the site if they have an issue (and that it’s run by a real person/company and not a fraudster who is going to rip them off) rather than clicking back to the search engine results after 10 seconds.

Social Media

What’s the score?

Social media equals lots of user-generated content (blogs, images, videos). Firstly, search engines love new, fresh, unique content. Secondly, because people are looking for this type of content, search engines want to keep the users happy and want to present this type of content in search listings.

Social media is a great way to raise awareness of your brand because search engines will display items like Tweets, blogs and YouTube videos in the search listings. If you don’t have a presence in these areas, you won’t be there for search engines to list when the time comes.

Also, if you can get your users to talk about your brand and share content related to it, more people will hear about you and link to you which should increase the likelihood of being listed in relevant search listings.

What can be done?

Engage with your users via social media platforms, especially Twitter, Facebook and Google+. Do this by posting regularly and frequently. Share great deals on social media sites, tell users about your new blogs/other content.

Encourage your readers to follow your social media pages by adding buttons from sites like Twitter, Facebook and Google+ to key pages on your site.

Also, encourage your readers to share your content with their friends/followers by adding Facebook ‘Like’, Google ‘+1’ and Twitter ‘Tweet’ buttons to your content.

Finally, make it easy for readers to share your content on social bookmarking sites by adding buttons for sites like Digg, StumbleUpon and reddit to your content.
What are your thoughts for how to keep up with Digital Marketing in 2012?

As you may, or may not be, aware, WDL employed a new Digital Marketing Specialist at the start of December 2011 to look after new and existing clients’ Internet Marketing accounts. That new employee is me, Emma.

I wanted to write a company blog post to introduce myself and explain more about my background, the work I do, and the work I will be doing, at WDL.

Colchester, here I come

Life in Colchester began for me when I was 18 and I moved from a very small town in the West Country – Devizes, in Wiltshire, is famous for its castle, the Wadworth’s Brewery (famous for its 6X ale sold across the UK) and having one of the most impressive set of canal locks in the UK.

‘Why did I leave the gorgeous countryside to come to Colchester?’ I hear you ask; I moved to study a degree in Linguistics at Essex University and hopefully start a new life in a bigger town with more opportunity than the small town I was leaving.

During my stint at Uni, I specialised in foreign languages (Spanish, Portuguese and Italian), how people learn foreign languages, the hidden meaning behind what people say (Pragmatics) and the neuroscience of language (how it is stored and recalled from the brain), including language disorders (e.g. Specific Language Impairment and Aphasia).

I graduated from Essex University in 2007 with a 2:1 (Hons) in Linguistics and moved into my first job five months later as Online Editor of Compareandsave.com.

What on earth is SEO when it’s at home?

Initially, I was employed solely to write the content (e.g. news, blogs, guides, etc.) for compareandsave.com but, to do this well, I first had to get to grips with how the internet can be used to increase the visibility of products, services and opinions.

So, it was here that I was introduced to the world of Digital Marketing (I define this as ‘communicating to your target audience about something, using the internet as the medium in which the communication takes place’), including Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising, Email Marketing , PR and, most importantly, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), which I’d never heard of before.

Within the first few days of my new job, I started to learn that a degree in Linguistics was actually going to come in handy in Marketing and SEO, much to my surprise.

After all, in my humble opinion, Marketing is about communicating to others and my knowledge of the language used to communicate was going to help. Plus, search engines need to be ‘linguistically trained’ in order to understand what a searcher intends to find when he types a query (a word or phrase) into Google or Yahoo so that the most relevant results (web pages) can be returned. What’s more, search engines need to know how queries/words relate to each other in case other results/pages might be helpful to the searcher (i.e. synonyms).

Being fresh out of Uni, I could write – I’d done nothing but write essays for the last 4 years (there was a bit of partying in there too, though) – and the search engines love content so it was a match made in heaven.

Oh yes, the worlds of SEO and Marketing are all about the Linguistics.

What does this mean for WDL’s current and prospective clients?

I have the training, tools and experience to help you achieve increased online visibility and get your site in a better shape to rank well in the search engines – and it’s something I love to do.

For example:

If search engines love content then, so do I.

After solely managing all the content for one of the UK’s biggest comparison sites, I bring with me the tools to advise clients on tailor-made content strategies for their website(s). Once the content is planned out, I can write (or commission someone else to write) content that meets your customer’s demands and those of the search engines.

If search engines like looking at your site(s) in minute detail then, so do I.

Search engines rank websites based on hundreds of relevancy factors. I have the understanding of these (publicly-available) relevancy factors and the keen eye to find elements on your site(s) that need to be fixed in order to have a better chance of appearing for the queries that your potential customers make in the search engines. I can also look at the wealth of information provided by analytics programs to find areas where your site is and isn’t performing optimally for your users.

Of course, my experience can mean a lot more to you than the above two examples so, if you are looking to improve your website, not only for the search engines but to give your customers/users a better experience on the web, get in touch with me and I will do my very best to help you on the way to Online Marketing success. I look forward to working with you in the future!

apple.com 1997

apple.com 2012

Looks aren’t everything I hear you cry, but having a website that is modern and professional in design can help maintain user attention for longer which, will help push your site up the search engine highway.

Ask yourself this when you next visit a website that you may be making a purchase from. Do you trust that company with your credit card details? What worked 10 years ago may not be working for your site today. Modern browsers are smarter and include features which are waiting to be used. Below is a list of some of the latest trends which will be making a big impact in 2012.

Bright and Colourful is Key:

Neutral colours are great for subtle design elements but bright hues of color can really grab a user attention and make a call to action stand out on your site. It can be difficult when selecting the right colours for a website but the general rule of thumb is to keep with no more than three main colours. It is also important that the colours on your website match your current branding otherwise it can make a logo stick out like a sore thumb.

Typography:

Font style is a vital ingredient with any design. They can help to change the meaning and tone of a sentence. It can be a struggle for any web designer when selecting fonts to use on a new design. Generally we are limited to web safe fonts which can be very generic and lacking in character (pardon the pun!). Luckily there are some ways to get around this. There are many free font archives available which offer a wide range of free font styles. Google offers its own version of web fonts which you can download and use in your new design http://www.google.com/webfonts.

Bigger text is better and if you want to get a message across it is always good to increase the font size. There are many good reasons why increasing your font size can make a big impact on the usability of your website. For example at the age of 40, only half the light gets through to the retina as it did at the age of 20.  The following article has put forward a good argument for increasing the size of the body text on a website which I hope will have a big impact in the New Year http://tiny.cc/4f4kh

CSS3 + HTML5

These two have been around for a couple of years now but with the legacy that is Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 6 still on its death rattle it’s been hard for these new features to be used during the building stage of a website. It is said that CSS3 and HTML5 will be big this year and there is plenty of reason why it will be great move in the right direction.

There are many options available including box shadows, animated buttons, multiple backgrounds, rounded corners and transparent images. All these can help to create amazing new website layouts.

Responsive Web Design

Responsive web design refers to the development of a website which changes the contents layout depending upon the size of the screen the user is viewing the site on. Why would this be important to me you may ask yourself. Have you recently viewed a website on a mobile device or tablet? Some sites which are not designed for mobile devices can offer a poor user experience and in some cases will not work at all.  Mobile devices currently hold around a 7 percent share of web traffic, which is set to increase by 17 percent in 2012. This, in turn, will only further increase as we enter faster mobile broadband territory. These are potential users which may not be getting the experience you wish them to have from your current site.

For more information:

http://inspirationfeed.com/articles/design-articles/web-graphic-design-trends-in-2012/

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/05/more-guidance-on-building-high-quality.html

http://designmodo.com/responsive-design-examples/

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-20118380-94/mobile-devices-driving-nearly-7-percent-of-web-traffic/

WDL was asked by Mosaic Publicity to design and build a content managed micro site for the Holiday Inn Express Birmingham South. The client was looking for a sophisticated and professional design which matched the wider Holiday Inn brand and shared the design and structure elements of other Holiday Inn Express micro sites.

The deadline – before Christmas – was met so they could catch customers looking to stay in Birmingham over the Christmas period. The booking form is key to the design as the client wanted this to be featured throughout the site to enable the user to gain access at any stage when browsing the website.

Other features of the site include, a newsletter sign up, a virtual tour and special offers areas.

We will be running a skeleton staff between Christmas and New Year, but it’s business as usual from Tuesday 3rd January 2012. See you in the New Year.

Apparently he had won and his video (although not sticking to the brief) was being displayed on both www.essexapprenticeships.co.uk and www.dbtraining.org.uk.

We hope his slightly comical attempt at showing what an apprenticeship is like will educate and inspire other young people to follow in his foot steps and find an employer themselves.

The Apprentice is Given a Camera to Play With