Sep 201813

Internal Marketing for Garment Decorators

etrader, hints and tips, latest news, marketing

In this weeks blog we have put together our thoughts on Internal Marketing and how it can help grow your garment decoration business.

Internal Marketing is used by Marketers to motivate all other departments in the workplace with the common goal of achieving customer satisfaction. Internal Marketing is a case of promoting your business internally to staff and giving them all the tools to succeed promoting your business and its products/services.

With careful management create your businesses core values, ethics and personality and consider how you display want these to come across both internally to staff and externally to your customers.

Implementing Internal Marketing techniques improves how your business operates in-store and how staff from every department interlink to achieve success. Create a culture that represents your business and get everyone singing from the same hymn sheet using Internal Marketing, from production to customer service and sales, make sure your staff know there is a common goal in place – to produce high quality branded clothing and satisfy customers!

Not everyone has the same passion for print & embroidery as garment decorators, so when it comes to recruiting staff this is key to achieving success.

Internal Marketing creates a dynamic work place and a strong culture within the workplace, it empowers your employees and encourage them to be pro-active, innovative and work on ways new creative ways of achieving success. Creating a dynamic pro-active workplace requires careful management, planning and a comprehensive Internal Marketing plan.

Successful Internal Marketing reduces stress and anxiety for workers and creates a happy workforce which makes for a much more productive team. Happy staff are proven to be more committed, determined and go above and beyond to make sure they can achieve success for your business; and provide your customers the best experience possible. Staff essentially become ‘Brand Ambassadors’ for your business…

Whether it is simply a case of incentivising your staff through things such as cash bonuses, time off, extra holidays etc or improving internal communications with monthly newsletters, competitions, social events or team bonding events there are several ways to market your business internally and engage with staff across all departments.

Sep 201807

Voice Search: The Future of Online Marketing

ecommerce, etrader, hints and tips, latest news, marketing, seo

“Hey, Google! Do this, do that”, at first glance this seems like a bit of fun at home or in the office, but voice search is becoming increasing important for your business to consider with Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

As of late last year, there are a reported 33 million users using voice search bots, whether it is Siri on the iPhone, other assistants on smartphones or devices like Google Home or Amazon Echo. 

With these numbers growing year on year, advancement in smart technology, Comscore predicts 50% of all searches with be carried out using voice search, with 20% of these without a screen.

So, what does this mean for your business?

Your business needs to keep up with the times and prepare for this, with users going away from traditional search to voice search consider how your website will be found via voice. 

Things to consider include:

Aiming for position zero: Something that fea etrader






Apr 201905

Maximising Your Customers Data

ecommerce, etrader, hints and tips, latest news, marketing

Data is all around us, there is no hiding from it. From the basics such as customer information, names, addresses and contact details to the more complex monthly accounts, customer orders and website data, it can all be used to shape your business by identifying the best avenues to explore – ones that you might not previously have considered before analysing your business data.

Measuring the data that your business has access to can also help to streamline your business, its production and how every department operates. In production departments, items such as machine time versus output, machine downtime versus costs etcetera can be monitored, with the resulting data giving you a real understanding as to whether your business is operating efficiently.

Data doesn’t necessarily have to be raw numbers either: it can be qualitative, which can add just as much value to your business. Opinions and attitudes can be analysed not only to develop your business internally, but also to provide great insight into what your customers think of your services and products, which you can then use to help train your staff and review your business’s various operations.

There are several software packages designed for garment decorators that allow you to measure not only the basics, such as names and addresses, but also what customers have bought, what items they’ve clicked, where they saw your business advertised and so on.

The obvious way to use this data is to keep in touch with your customers through marketing campaigns. By having extra data at your fingertips about their clicks and buying habits, you’ll be able to further tailor your campaigns, which should improve engagement rates (again, data collection here is invaluable – want to know which one of two email subject lines will lead to a higher open rate? Test one subject line on 20 customers then the other subject line on another 20 customers. Whichever one scores the highest open rate can then be used for the remaining mail out. Simple).

Check how your website is functioning by looking beyond the visitor numbers: when are customers visiting, what pages are they looking at, what ones are they ignoring, where are they coming from, how long are they staying? All this can be used to check your site is working for your business.

You can also take a close look at what’s happening on the purchasing side: when are customers are ordering, what they are ordering and how frequently they are ordering? Use the information to work out when best to hold promotions that will get people visiting during the quiet times – plug the gaps and maximise your sales.

Featured Snippets’, Google Home & Google Assistant read these out first.

Consider what questions your customers commonly ask and pop up that relate to your core products & services and build content around this. But where traditional SEO in the past relies heavily on keywords & content, simply answer the question.

Keep the answers concise, conversational, almost to the point where it comes across conversational.

Perfecting your local SEO: 39% of voice search users are looking for businesses information, so ensure your Google My Business listing is optimised and complete. Complete your profile so when a user asks to find local businesses your business appears at the top.

Verify and authenticate your business on things such as Google Maps & Google My Business. Little things like a fully completed listing with store times, services and a bit about what you do go a long way to helping you achieve voice search success.

For example, when a customer asks, ‘where can I find t-shirt printing in London?’, ‘what time does the nearest printers shut?’, ‘where is my nearest printer?’, these little things will help your business get found using voice search.

On-page content: Steering away from traditional SEO where content is built around keywords and lots of content creation, content that will be found using voice should be concise, grammatical and answer the question appropriately. It should reflect how you might engage with another user and not a Google bot.

Focus on providing text that your customer may find useful and helpful, things like FAQs, help with print & embroidery, they want the answers and they want them within seconds. On average, each user will not listen to an answer for voice search over 15 seconds, you have that amount of time to get your point across to the customer – its all about “meeting the information needs of the customer”.

Important: There is still room for traditional SEO, do not go rushing to your website deleting pages of content. Just consider if this is authentic content, useful for the user and helps your customer with whatever their query might be.

The factors mentioned in this article also aide traditional SEO, things like writing content in a naturally, engaging and conversational way, optimising local search etc will all help your website get found online and visible in Googles SERPs. 

Aug 201830

Email Marketing: Running Campaigns for your Customers

ecommerce, etrader, hints and tips, latest news, marketing

Email Marketing forms a crucial part of any businesses online marketing. A way to reach your existing customer database and win new business, it is one of the simpler forms of online marketing that many small businesses are missing out on.

Optimising your email campaign is the difference between your email being a resounding success winning business and being sent straight to the junk folder. 


Below are some of our top tips to help get your business started with its email campaigns:

Focus on the subject line. The subject line is the most important thing to consider, this is the first thing the recipient reads and is make or break for whether they open your email or chuck it straight in the junk folder. First things first it needs to be eye catching, test out your email subject lines and analyse which achieves the highest open/action rate.

Strive for inbox placement. A difficult one to measure, but not all email campaigns need to be actioned straight away, they just need to leave a lasting impression on readers. Just focus on the brand, the core product and services not super salesy jargon – you don’t want a reader to think it is spam and treat your email like junk.

Ensure the email is mobile optimized. Most email software will provide a mobile view of your email, ensure that it can be optimised for any device. Approximately 65% of emails are read on a smartphone/tablet (Marketing Land, 2017) so ensure your email looks the part on any device.

Personalise where possible. Use tags to deliver a personalised message to your customer, use their name, business name etc to give an email a more personal feel. People know emails are being sent to thousands at a time, but you don’t want to make them feel like another name of your mailing list. This encourages better engagement with readers!

Segment your email database. To go one step further and provide an even more personalised touch segment your database. Funnel down your customers and sort them by interests/industries etc into small niche mailing lists and send them a highly personalised email specific to their niche. For example, don’t just send your customers emails about workwear, filter the type of business and got a bit further.

Reduce text and optimize call to action. As much as Marketers hate it, people won’t spend a lot of time reading your email once opened – consumers decided within a split second if it is of interest or not. Be short, sharp & concise with any text to grab any attention. Focus on providing clickable calls to actions and leading them to enquire, order etc.

Make social sharing available. A simple but very over-looked one, ensure your email can be shared using Social Media buttons. Many email providers make this a simple click of the button. This helps grow the reach of any campaign you might send further than your customer database and reach potential new leads. Provide clear share buttons for your readers to engage with!

Aug 201824

How Rich Search Results Can Help Your Business

ecommerce, etrader, hints and tips, latest news, marketing, seo

Google snippets give you instant answers to your queries. Snippets and cards are images, ratings, reviews and so on that enhance a search engine result page (SERPs). 

Rich search results highlight key information and help search engines gain an understanding the page and its purpose. Implementing rich search results such as cards and snippets can help your website stand out from your competitors.

It requires a more astute developer to tag things such as corporate logo, contact details, social media profiles, carousels and breadcrumb navigation. Pretty much anything can be tagged to potentially appear as a rich search result, from blogs & news articles to events, business details and product information.


So why consider this?

It is a lot more difficult technically behind the scenes, but the results are huge. Rich searches appear right at the top of a SERP, in the coveted ZERO position above organic results. So even if you are not ranking organically, it gives you a fighting chance to get seen on Google.

The answers are detailed, displayed in a box and often more eye catching than a traditional search result and due to their eye-catching nature often have a higher click thru rate (which Google can only consider a good thing!)

Voice Command Searches

The benefit of rich results is also evident as the results work seamlessly with devices such as Google Home & Siri, so if a consumer is searching on the move and asks relevant questions searching for goods, rich snippets are played rather than a whole page of results. With an increase in voice search this can only be an advantage for businesses.

How to get the most from rich snippets?

Building and optimising your site around keyword snippets will increase your organic ranking, increase your websites traffic and decrease your websites bounce rate.

To get your business going with rich searches, here are a few basic tips:

  • Provide partial answers and encourage click through. Ranking for a rich result is one thing but making sure it does not display everything is another. Ensure it displays just enough to encourage users to visit your website.
  • Make sure users get an awesome user-experience (UX). Ensure your website is optimised, up to date with information, details and provides customers a user-friendly experience on-site.
  • Embrace organic practices. To rank well and for rich results a website first and foremost must follow Googles SEO guidelines and best practices.
  • Write in a natural style. Snippets rely on quality well written content, not content focused purely on ranking. Write in a conversational style, almost like you are talking to a customer. Once this is done keep on top of it and always freshen it up every few months.
  • Work with a credible company. Web design companies often promise the world, do your research and work with the right company for your business. Outline why you want your site built in such a way to get found for rich snippets and many will be excited to work on such an interesting project!
Aug 201802 Remember, however, to play by the rules. There is a whole host of data guidelines and regulations out there, with the obvious one being the data protection act.

You must give your customers all the options available for opting in/opting out/unsubscribing, along with mentioning they may be contacted in the future for marketing purposes. Most customers won’t mind you using their data to contact them to promote your business or products, but playing by the rules will protect your business.

One last thought

Managing your data is vital. First and foremost, make sure all the data you’ve collected is secure. It also has to be accurate, relevant and up to date to be of any significant value to your business – ongoing data collection is an essential part of any business strategy.

Mar 201908

10 Quick SEO Tips!

ecommerce, etrader, latest news, marketing, seo

In our latest blog we have put together ten quick simple tips to help improve your print and embroidery businesses search engine optimisation (SEO) and help your business get found online. 

What's the point in having a website if it can not get found by your customers? More customers than ever before are looking online, shopping around for options and its crucial your business can be found for key searches such as t-shirt printing, workwear and so on...

SEO is essential for businesses looking to keep up with its competitors, generate new business and win orders both local and further afield.


With this in mind we have put together ten top tips to help improve your businesses visibility online:

1. Create/claim a Google my Business listing: Creating a listing for your business helps your business get found for local searches with minimum fuss. Google my Business provides customers a whole host of information including opening times, customer reviews, products and services you provide.

2. Add your business to credible online directories: Adding your business to relevant online directories such as Yell, Yelp etc is a straightforward way to ensure your business gets found online locally. Ensure these are kept, valid and up to date.

3. Ensure your website is indexed: Use Google Search Console to index your sitemap and ensure that Google bots scan your website. To check how many pages are indexed type site:yourwebsite.co.uk into Google.

4. Test your mobile site speed: There is a growing importance on  how websites perform on mobiles/smart devices. Speed is playing a larger part in determining how your site ranks, use Google Test My Site to check how your site performs, it will identify performance, areas to improve etc.

5. Make sure these is a page title in place: Ensure all your webpages have page titles in place describing what you do, these are the first thing Google bots scan on your page.

6. Use long tailed keywords: It would take a lot of time/effort to get found for terms like workwear, shirts, polo shirts etc so use longer keywords in your on-site content. For example, branded polo shirts, personalised workwear London etc.

7. Build content for people, not robots: You are garment decorators, print and embroidery enthusiasts. Write about your passion, your business, its products and services then hopefully it will naturally get picked up for many key terms. Often people write ‘out of shape’ content focusing on keywords which is not entirely customer friendly.

8. Create quality links: Inbound links are another thing to consider helping your page rank in search engines. Collaborate with customers, local schools, sports clubs, businesses and link back and forth to each other, creating an online shop/testimonials page is always a common method employed by garment decorators.

9. Start a blog: Create a blog for your customers sake, not for SEO purposes. Content Marketing at its finest, produce quality, relevant content frequently and Google will reward you. This can include things like latest news, case studies, latest news etc.

10. Encourage reviews: Ask customers to use Google reviews, this will help give your results more prominence in the search results.

Feb 201921

Email Campaign Software: A Beginners Guide

ecommerce, etrader, hints and tips, latest news, marketing, seo

Email Marketing is one of the main components of a business’s online strategy. The average open rate for an email campaign is 20-30% and is five times more likely to be seen by your customers than messages on Social Media platforms.

It gives your business the chance to engage with both new and existing customers promoting your business, its offers and products at a cost effective price.

There are 100s of recognised pieces of software out there offering click & drop templates, easy sending, automation and much more. We have picked our favourite few below...

The industry leading software for email campaigns, Mailchimp is recognised worldwide. Ideal for small businesses, it offers a forever free package (up to 2000 customers/12000 emails) which includes basic features, easy to use drag and drop templates. The choice for small businesses, the free version also allows segmenting, so you can tailor your message for different types of customers and their behaviours.


Like Mailchimp their forever free package offers up to 12000 emails to 2000 customers and 100s of templates to customise. Where Zoho stands out is the A/B testing that is included in the free plan, test different subject lines for each campaign and monitor them with Zoho’s more concise and in -depth analytics. Recommended for users looking for a more analytical and scientific approach to email campaigns.

An interesting option Email Octupus offers a free of charge ‘Shrimp’ plan where you can send unlimited emails to up to 2500 customers. This offers plenty of templates and great value for customers looking to produce a larger amount of email campaigns. However, there is a compromise the functionality is basic and there is no automation (paid customers only), prepare to be more ad-hoc and produce emails as and when you need to send out a campaign.

Benchmark is visually the most pleasing of all the email templates. They have 100s of simple, elegant designs that are easy to customise. Benchmarks functionality is limited with only very basic features but just tops Mailchimp and Zoho’s useage with 14000 emails to 2000 subscribers. Benchmark is the ideal software to make a striking impression and communicate to your customers in a contemporary way.

Freshmail on the surface does not match the heights of other providers with free plans only available for up to 500 subscribers. But where it differs from the others that emails can be customised and designed using several templates using their mobile/tablet app. Customise on the go and create aesthetically pleasing campaigns anytime, anyplace.

Mailerlite offers easy to use drag and drop templates for up to 1000 customers free of charge. As well as unlimited sends the tools provided in Mailerlite is comprehensive compared to the others mentioned in the list, personalising, segmenting and A/B testing and some automation features are all readily available in the free plan.

Jan 201918

2019: What Trends Can We Expect?

ecommerce, etrader, latest news, marketing, seo

2018 was a big year for Digital Marketing in many ways including Social Media platforms offering businesses more functionality than ever before, the continuous rise of Video Marketing, the introducing of Mobile First Indexing by Google and of course the introduction of the dreaded four words we all love to hate General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR).

For Digital Marketing, we can expect Social Media interaction with customers to continue to grow and develop. Video Marketing will continue to dominate and grow rapidly with user generated content through Instagram, Youtube, Facebook Live etc. Businesses are striving to create ‘Positive Social Proof’ as someone customers can deal with and have a great experience with.


2019 promises to be an interesting year with the introduction of new technologies being used as part of the Marketing Mix. 

Here are three key trends to keep an eye on in the upcoming year:

Chatbots: There are no such thing as opening hours online, customers have access to your business, its website and Social Media 24/7. Chatbots are becoming more and more important to deal with your customers queries on demand. 

Frequently used on Facebook to help customers communicate with your business Chatbot usage is expected to rapidly grow. 

Chatbots can be integrated in a website, app or on your business’s social media accounts, they can act quicker than humans in dealing with customer requests and can provide a more personalised service by gathering user information that can later be used to tailor your businesses Marketing campaigns.

VR/AR: Virtual Reality & Augmented Reality are seen by many as a Sci-Fi like future, but they are very much here and slowly creeping their way into businesses Marketing activity. This is still at very early stages and for the foreseeable future will begin to grow exponentially but it’s a great time for businesses to invest and explore the options. 

VR/AR gives your customers the chance to be both engaging with your products/services and actively participating in your Marketing activity in ‘another reality’ putting them at the heart of your business.

Voice Search: 2019 is widely expected to see a significant growth in voice searches & queries - almost 1/3 of the 3.5 billion searches performed in 2018 were carried out by voice assistant devices such as Apple Siri, Google Home & Amazon Alexa leading the way.

This is expected to grow to almost 50% of searches in 2019. Your online presence needs to consider optimising content specifically for Voice Searches, focusing on ‘Position Zero’, Local SEO and creating content around questions your customers may ask.

Nov 201823

Why Reviews Are Important For Your Website

ecommerce, etrader, hints and tips, latest news

Online reviews can make or break how your business appears online. It gives your customers the chance to leave information on a public scale about you, your business, its products, services and their experience.

With customers having more information and knowledge of the internet than ever before they are prepared to shop around for a quality product and service. We have all used review sites in some capacity – Google Reviews, Trip Advisor, Yelp, Revoo and Trustpilot are a few of the most popular

Online consumers expect a quality, reliable service and over 70% of consumers search through review sites assessing their options before purchasing with an online business.


Of course, there will be apprehension using review sites as the power is in your customers hands, but the rewards are worth it. Here are three key reasons why reviews can work for your business:

  • Increased Sales: Using online reviews is a Marketing activity, it helps your customers in their decision making. With over 75% new customers happier to purchase online with recommendations and positive reviews from previous existing customers.
  • Gain Customer Insight: Online reviews will be able to give you an insight into what your business is or is not doing right. This will allow you to address any internal issues, create a more positive shopping experience for your customers and increase sales.
  • Improve SEO Rankings: The more quality content that is write about your website, the higher it ranks. It also shows Google your business is authentic, getting clicked on and actively engaging with customers.

Get it right online…

From a practical point of view, make sure you give your customers multiple opportunities to review your business. Whether it is a pop-up box, fixed bar or dedicated page on-site give them more than one opportunity to review.

Leading sites such as Trustpilot and Yelp offer several tools to embed on-site in a range of styles, just pick which suits your business more and make this available on your businesses site.

But it is all well and good having these on-site, but the next challenge is getting your customers to use them. Encourage your customers to leave reviews offering special offers, bonuses and discounts in return for their feedback.

One last thought, managing reviews…

Not all the reviews will be 100% positive, there will be the odd negative review and it is important how you deal with these.

There are 100s of online and in-store training courses specifically aimed at how to deal with online reviews. But the solution is simple - manage reviews like how you deal with customers in-store, be polite, professional, balanced and offer a solution for that customer, quality customer service goes a long way in-store and online.

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