Rapid Web News

Most businesses have seasonality within their product offering. When your high season is coming up, you start to gear up for increased sales and marketing activity, right? And do you remember to include an email marketing campaign in your strategy? Many companies overlook the power of email marketing in boosting their seasonal sales.

We have found that strategically timed email campaigns can make a big difference to sales figures, and are a really cost-effective marketing tool. Putting your brand and your product in front of a customer or potential customer at the time when they are most likely to be interested in buying, and providing them with quick, easy steps to purchase.

At Rapid Web we regularly help our customers with their email marketing campaigns. For some clients this means designing a template or set of templates for them to use in their chosen email marketing software – these ensure consistent branding and styling and give clients the ability to tailor the message content, including both text and imagery. For other clients, we complete a full email design and handle the mailing lists and dispatch for them. If you need any advice on utilising email marketing to improve your seasonal sales, speak to our team today.

Ecommerce is continuing to grow, with more and more shoppers purchasing on the web rather than going in-store. Selling your products online shouldn’t start and finish with your ecommerce website, though. It is also important to create Google Product Feeds so that your products will be listed in Google’s Shopping listings.

Big name online sellers such as Amazon and Play also offer companies the ability to sell their products through their channels. Many are put off of these channels as they don’t wish to share a percentage of their sales with these big brands, and because setup of accounts and upload of products can be a daunting task.

But these are big selling opportunities to miss out on. Amazon and Play are well-known brands that customers have confidence in purchasing with – until you are a bigger name brand yourself, there will be many consumers that may be wary of ordering with a brand that they don’t know. This is also true in the way that customers search for products – although there is a large percentage of people that will use Google searches to source products from the most-effective supplier, there are also many that will go to straight to Amazon, Play and a select other few sites to find the products that they’re looking for.

Rapid Web has been helping a range of our clients to get their products listed with Amazon, Play and eBay, and listed in Google Shopping. These clients see some great increases in their sales – with some reporting that their figures almost doubled. In these cases, we have taken away the stress of the account set ups and the creation and upload of product feeds, and the increased sales have certainly been with the fees and charges. Talk to our team if you need any advice on offering your products across additional retailers, rather than just on your own e-commerce site.

Rapid Web has recently completed a new website for By-Auction, a collection of member estate agents providing property services and offering properties for sale by auction. They approached us to develop a site for them that they could use to provide members of the public with tips and advice on selling property at auction, as well links to the member sites, dates of upcoming auctions and auction catalogues.

By-Auction asked us to develop the site with WordPress integration and to apply a custom design/theme which was created to fit their requirements. ‘Expert Agent’ was also integrated into the site to populate the property listings section of the site automatically.

There are so many ways to access the internet and view websites now – computers, laptops, tablets, smartphones – and figures show that over 10% of internet browsing worldwide is now done via a mobile browser. Of course users expect websites to display and function correctly across all of their devices. So what do we do as web designers to make sure that this is the case? We design sites to be responsive. Media queries are used to recognise the browser’s width and capabilities (such as if it is touchscreen), and different styles and functionality are applied to a website to suit the user’s device. For example, a smartphone will have a much smaller screen area for the display of content. And websites being used on touchscreen devices need to have elements and navigation that are big enough to touch with fingers rather than a mouse cursor.

A great example of a site that we’ve developed recently with a responsive design is the new website for The General Architecture Company. The site has been developed with 4 different stylesheets – 1 for monitors and laptops, 1 for tablets in landscape view, 1 for landscape smartphones and 1 for portrait smartphones. We’re also working on a responsive design for our new client Atomic Threads, which will enable users to easily shop online for their range of retro tshirts and clothing across all of their devices. So if you’re looking for a responsive design for your new or existing website, speak to the Rapid Web team today.

BTT Communications had not updated their website for a considerable amount of time and required the build of a new website with a content management system. The site needed to reflect the new branding that the company had adopted since the first site had been built.

Our design team worked closely with the client to draft and finalise a structure and style for the website that reflected the company’s branding and personality. We also worked closely with the client to discuss their requirements for the initial content for the site – our team sourced the required imagery and wrote the copy for site, all of which was reviewed and signed off with the client prior to the website build.

With all of these details agreed and signed off, the build and launch of the website was completed quickly and efficiently.

To view the new improved website visit: BTT Communications