Wax Lyrical is one of the UK’s largest privately owned home fragrancing companies, designing and manufacturing luxury scented candles, reed diffusers and private label collections.

They came to us asking for a soft approach to marketing that would engage and educate their customers about Wax Lyrical and their products. Gencia Media had re-designed and launched a great new website and they wanted everyone to know about it, whilst keeping in touch with old customers and attracting new ones.

We came up with a plan which consisted of themed campaign’s, social media competitions and affinity campaign’s. By creating engaging email newsletters and increasing their social media community, with Facebook followers increased from under 500 to over 1500 and Twitter followers increased from under 1000 to over 2200, we helped Wax Lyrical increase site visits by 41% and revenue by 50%.

In today’s challenging times, Email Marketing can offer a fast and cost effective way to distribute news, offers or generally keep clients and prospects in the loop on what’s happening within your business.

One of the main benefits of email marketing lies in the ability to check offers have been read, clicked on and even which offers were most of interest to whom. It can also measure specifically, the part of your email which has hooked them in.

For any company looking to utilise this marketing tool, the first task is to assemble an ‘opt in’ email database to send out to.

However many businesses we talk to often struggle here because of a failure to manage customer records or properly log incoming enquiries.

So if this sounds like you, here are 5 key ways to help you build a targeted database – and take the first steps towards email marketing success.

1.  Collect business cards at networking events

It’s always a good idea to collect business cards at any networking event you attend as it provides an invaluable way of forming/maintaining new business relationships. Make sure you keep them close to hand as you never know when you might need them.

2.  Pull together all inbound enquiries

Whenever someone contacts you with an enquiry be sure to always take all of their details. It sounds simple but it’s easy to forget! That way you can always do follow up calls to check that they are happy with your service or tell them about new products or deals they may be interested in.

3.  Sign up widget & Recommend a friend

Why not incorporate a sign up widget and recommend a friend section on to your website? You can either offer a discount for just the current customer or spread the offer to both parties. This is an effective way of increasing customers and encouraging the promotion of your company through word of mouth.

4.  Current customers

Don’t forget your current customers! It’s easy to focus all of your efforts on trying to attract new customers and neglect the ones that you already have. Reward your customers for their loyalty with offers and deals.

5.  Competitions

When it comes to holding competitions social media is your best friend. Post your campaign on Facebook or do a ‘Re-tweet to win’ competition on Twitter.

Once you’ve built your database, you are now ready to go with your first campaign.

For more ideas, costs and ways LiveWire Campaign can support you, call 0161 2145218 or email info@livewirecampaign.co.uk

Have a time sensitive campaign to send?

Want to spread a number of campaigns over the week or month ahead?

LiveWire Campaign’s new Scheduled Sending functionality lets you do just that!

Simply send the campaign as you would normally, then on the Confirm Details screen, tick the Send Later box and select the date and time you want the campaign to be sent.

This is one of a number of ongoing updates to LiveWire Campaign functionality - let us know what you think - and if you have any suggestions, please add a comment to this post, tweet @LWCampaign - or send an email to info at livewirecampaign.co.uk.

We’ve made a number usability enhancements to the LiveWire Campaign reports summary screen.

Click through and open percentages are now shown on the summary screen, together with the date and time of the last recipient action - so it’s now easy to see at a glance any campaigns which have had recent activity, without having to click into each report.

You can also sort and filter the summary report by any of the displayed values - which makes it much easier to get an overview of the campaigns you are currently interested in.  This together with the summary statistics, allows you to perform comparative analysis of the best (or worst) performing campaigns, which should help you to create even more effective communications going forward.

And by popular request, we have also added a Hide Test Campaigns button, which quickly removes all the Test to Self campaigns from the list.

This is one of a number of ongoing updates to LiveWire Campaign functionality - let us know what you think - and if you have any suggestions, please add a comment to this post, tweet @LWCampaign - or send an email to info at livewirecampaign.co.uk.

We have made substantial enhancements to the email generation engine for LiveWire Campaign, in order to improve how emails are displayed in Outlook 2007 and Outlook 2010.

In making these changes, our goals were to:

• Make emails display identically in Outlook 2007 Outlook 2010 to how they display within the Web View, and within other, standards compliant email clients.
• Minimise any change in the appearance of existing campaigns

By and large, we have achieved these goals - the majority of email campaigns now appear virtually identical within Outlook 2007+ to how they do within the browser, with the exception of some minor differences in campaigns which use functionality which is not supported within Outlook 2007+ (for instance background images in headers don’t show in Outlook).

This has been accomplished with minimal impact to existing campaigns - however, as the display code used for the majority of sections within the campaign has been changed significantly, it is unavoidable that the appearance of some campaign templates may be effected.

We therefore recommend that you recheck the appearance of any campaigns you have already created before sending, to ensure no unintended impact.

As always, your feedback is appreciated - add a comment to this post, tweet @LWCampaign - or send an email to info at livewirecampaign.co.uk.