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With the advances in email solution software, there is no excuse for any brand – old, trusted, worldwide, locale, established, re-trenching, building or otherwise – to ignore the hard work that has often taken years to achieve.

Seems sensible, but the litany of example after example of companies putting their brands at risk and downgrading their brand’s impact continues to this day. It has been – and continues to be – too easy for legacy email systems to enable cavalier attitudes towards the email space.

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When users visit your website, receive one of your emails or interact with any other piece of web-content relating to your business you are ultimately trying to drive them to complete your calls to action.

Every businesses calls to action on the web may well be different but will certainly be things along the lines of checkout, download & register - and they will depend on what type of products and services you provide.

Whatever it is you are trying to get your users to do they will fall into (for the most part) two camps. Those that did perform your call to action and those that didn’t.

The clever thing to do once you know which camp the user resides is to capitalise on that insight and expand the opportunity automatically by triggering an event of follow-on marketing activities such as a number of automatically sent emails over a period of time, a request (or a number of timed requests) to another application to send an SMS message for example, tag the user so you can learn more about what they did or didn’t do, organise your users into lists.

All these things help you maximise the potential of your marketing which in turn can drive up repeat business and help you to grow and retain more customers.

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We all have different ideas of what makes a website not only look good but also work well. In the end though, what we’re all trying to achieve is pretty much the same in that we’re striving to engage users so they interact with your business and at the same time do a bit of drum-banging by telling others about how good it is.

Our opinion is that you don’t need to create the best website in the world in order for it to work. But what you do need to is to make sure that whatever it is your website is about, that it captures the users imagination and makes them want to find out more.

Visual appeal goes some way to achieving that and the level you take it to depends on what your website is about - but Coca Cola, as an example, have used some neat tricks so that when you take a look at each product in their range (http://www.coca-cola.co.uk/default.html) the screen zooms around to give a little flashy presentation.

You might not want to go to that level, but using techniques like Coca Cola have done means you can get a  lot more info on your website without overloading it. With only so much space on websites and impatient users that want things and they want them now you need to think very carefully about what your most important user-engaging features are and hit them with it straight away.

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Data is often viewed as boring and just about the numbers. The truth about data is very different - it is alive with creative opportunity to help brands make their marketing more engaging and effective.

We were invited (along with Oracle & Experian - amongst other big names),  to present at a recent event discussing this topic and to answer big questions on

• How to connect the new data generated by digital marketing with traditional transactional databases.
• How to develop a genuine 360 insight into your customer by using multiple information sources.
• How to make the most of new forms of targeting: behavioural, location - based and by recommendation.
• How to measure effectiveness and optimise budgets on this new data landscape.

Over the next few months we’ll be running a series of articles on our blog to help you find answers to the questions above to help you become more creative with your data and to get the most from it.

If you have time then it’s worth taking a minute to have a look at the presentation we ran on the day - http://www.ipa.co.uk/Content/Content-from-Being-creative-with-data-25th-November

…our technical director Dave also has a spot on the video interviews - http://www.ipa.co.uk/Content/Content-from-Being-creative-with-data-25th-November

Watch out on Twitter or our blog for the first article in the series. (…and don’t forget to sign-up to our monthly email)