Need artwork for an advert??

Are you thinking of putting an advert in a local magazine or paper?... Who is doing the design for you?

People think of CFL as a Direct Marketing Agency or Database Specialists...however we also have a full Design Studio.

Our designers can work to deliver any supplied brief - that's a given. Where our talent and flair really shows is when we deliver on a brief you didn't know in the first place!!

We specialise in the Leisure and Retail Sector, especially for the Licensed Trade

For a very competitive rate we deliver on the strength of our ideas.

We can even place the advert for you whether is a local trade magazine advert through to a National news paper.

We can also create artwork for HTML Emails, Web banners, Facebook Images or any other Social Media Profiles.

Call Paul or Clare on 01225 782669 or log onto www.cflmarketing.co.uk

Please see some examples below of our advert designs.

Discount vouchers remain popular for eating out.

Two-thirds of people have used a discount voucher when eating out, although just 18% say they go out more often as a result of the vouchers, according to new survey from Deloitte.

The Taste of the Nation survey of 3,000 people found that 59% have used a special offer voucher when eating out, with 48% of people claiming they use vouchers in a bar or pub.

However, 25% say they go out more often than they otherwise would as a result of an outlet offering vouchers and only (18%) would stop visiting an outlet if vouchers were no longer provided.

Jon Lake, corporate finance director in the licensed retail group at Deloitte, said: “Vouchers have proved an effective tactic by some operators for encouraging consumers to eat in their outlets, and have risen in popularity since the recession.

However, the popularity of some of these schemes has raised concerns some operators are now reliant on them.

“In the run up to Christmas, voucher offers were removed by some operators. Other outlets offered a different deal, such as three-for-two, instead of the more generous two-for-one and buy-one-get-one-free offers, or a gift with every main course.”

CFL Have been helping many pubs and restaurants with their pre and post Christmas discount voucher promotions both online and offline. Please see some examples below.

5 email marketing insights for 2012

MarketingSherpa recently published the 2012 edition of its Email Marketing Benchmark Report and once again, it’s full of really interesting insights.

Yes, it’s a report that focuses mainly on the US market (only 16% of the 2,735 respondents are based in Europe) but I still think we can learn a thing or two from the findings of this report. I’ve chosen these five findings to share with you:

1. Relevance and timing issues
Only 28% of marketers report their messages contained relevant content, are sent on time to targeted subscribers, and had a clear conversion goal.

What does this mean? To stand out in today’s overloaded inboxes, you need to consistently provide value to your subscribers. You can’t just continue to send everything to everybody. Instead, make sure that each and every message is well targeted and relevant to the person that receives it. Otherwise, your messages will get deleted, even before they were opened.

2. Marketers confident in email ROI
More than a quarter of senior marketer executives felt email is producing ROI, and almost half believe it will eventually produce returns.

What does this mean? It’s obviously crucial to get management buy-in if you want to increase your email marketing budget/resources. The best way to get their buy-in is by showing them the impact of email on the marketing-sales funnel. If you can’t measure how much money your email programme is contributing, focus on how many (sales-ready) leads you are generating, rather than reporting only on the opens and clicks of your campaigns.

3. Wise list growth tactics
37% of marketers say their organisations shared premium or educational content in exchange for an email address. Sweepstakes (used by only 10% of marketers) and gift cards (used by 6%) are not very popular when it comes to growing your list.

What does this mean? Incentives are often used by marketers to persuade web visitor to give them their email address.

The trick is to find the right incentive. You don’t want to get just any email address; you want to get email addresses from people that are likely to buy your products or services. You’d probably get a ton of email addresses if the incentive is something that attracts to the general population (like the ubiquitous iPad giveaway), but will they also be interested in your products?

Experience has taught me that email addresses collected using sweepstakes, giveaways and contests typically don’t perform very well in terms of open and click-through rates.

4. Email budgets on the rise
67% of marketers plan to increase their email budget in 2012, with 20% planning to increase it more than 30%.

What does this mean? Email marketing is still a crucial component of your online marketing strategy and, if executed well, it will drive a lot of business and revenue at a low cost. But marketers need to invest in strategy, expertise, integration of systems and resources.

5. Value of automated, triggered emails
90% of marketers found that sending emails automatically to a subscriber based on triggers like planned dates, events or behaviours are the most effective tactic to improve relevant communications.

What does this mean? The great thing about automated email messages based on triggers is that you typically set these messages up, optimise them and then sit back and watch the results come in while you focus on getting another automated message set up.

Quick wins in email marketing
If you don’t have a lot of resources to dedicate to email marketing, focus your efforts on automating email campaigns where possible. The top four automated messages include welcome emails, thank you emails, transactional emails and post-purchase emails.

Text is best for mobile promotions European consumers chime, new report reveals

Mobile-owning consumers in the UK, Germany and France prefer receiving SMS-based promotions as opposed to other mobile channels, new research published by theDirect Marketing Association (DMA) has revealed.

The study conducted by Toluna QuickSurveyson behalf of the DMA and report sponsor Velti, shows that 38 per cent of UK mobile owners prefer receiving promotional offers via SMS, compared to 15 per cent who favour mobile web.

For consumers in Germany and France, 58 per cent and 60 per cent respectively opt for SMS as their preferred channel for receiving mobile-based offers, whereas 21 per cent of consumers in both countries prefer mobile web.

In other findings, the research reports that 40 per cent of UK consumers are interested in being contacted via mobile by advertisers – four times as many consumers who said they would rather receive offers from their mobile network operators.

How do you limit unsubscribes?? - 10 top tips...

2012 is here, I, like many, will be thinking about customer retention. You don’t want your customers to have to unsubscribe from your emails.

Once a consumer unsubscribes from an email, the majority will not re-subscribe. Admittedly, unsubscribing from email lists per se would not make the top 10 list of resolutions, but enough people have the will to un-clutter their lives and get organised. And this can translate into reassessing which brands they engage with.

Here are some top tips on how to stop people unsubscribing in the first place. And, if they do, I’ll show you how to make it a positive consumer experience and take back control of the unsubscribe process.

1. Be relevant
The first and most obvious tactic is to make your ongoing email communications the most relevant you can. The more engaged your consumers are, the less likely they are to unsubscribe from your emails. The focus for this article is not around how to achieve this, but just to highlight one of my best pieces of advice when it comes to developing relevancy. As my American colleagues say “don’t try and boil the ocean any small steps you can make will improve relevancy and make a difference”.

2. Listen
Make sure you remember that email is there to help foster a relationship and all good relationships are about listening to the other person. Demonstratively acting on the information a consumer gives you, be it on frequency of email or type of offers, will make your consumers feel more engaged with the brand and email programme.

3. Sell the benefits
One best practice that brings great results when subscribing consumers is to clearly articulate the benefits of subscription. This messaging should continue, especially as those benefits should change over time as you refine the programme. So make sure your consumers know what those benefits are

4. Manage your email subscriptions
Creation of a subscription management page (SMP) also acts as a powerful tool in reducing unsubscribes for a variety of reasons.

The SMP page gives the consumer an easy place to update information. At its simplest (for example, a change of address) there are numerous stories of customers unsubscribing because they had changed email address and not seen an easy way to update. The other mainstay of the SMP page is allowing you to collect preference information that can then be used to make the content more relevant

5. Be flexible
Try offering changes in frequency. If the buying cycle for a product or service is infrequent, a monthly communication may be too much but quarterly would be more appropriate. Remember that the consumer will only be engaged with five to 10 brands at any one time. So, unless you happen to be an Apple or an Amazon, the chances are your consumers engagement will wax and wane over time. However, if there is still an ongoing periodic engagement, then you have a much greater chance to interact when the time is right for the consumer.

6. Respect people’s channel preference
Brands need to collect and understand their customers’ channel preference. I am a firm believer in the effectiveness of email and, as reports such as the DMA email benchmarking report H2 2010 http://www.dma.org.uk/toolkit/national-email-benchmarking-report-h2-2010 show, email is a powerful and relevant medium. Your consumers, however, live in a multichannel world so if they’d rather hear from you via social or mobile then you should be aware of this and act upon it. Again, having an ongoing relationship means you still have the opportunity to get them engaged with the email channel at a later date.

However it should also be understood that whatever options and data you collect make sure that this is used to enhance the consumers’ experience so that they feel there was value in giving up that information in the first place.

7. Take control of unsubscribe process
Make it easy for your consumer to unsubscribe and help reclaim the process from the spammer. This may sound counter-intuitive but consumer engagement is built on trust. Obviously, having a robust unsubscribe process is essential but so is making it clear in each email where people have to click to unsubscribe. And, of course, I would make it just as easy to change address!

Also if, for whatever reasons, your unsubscribe process is not going to be instant then make sure you manage the consumers’ expectations. Explain that it may take a few days and that they may receive an email in the interim.

8. Inspire trust with your unsubscribe process
Consumers have become increasingly wary of using the unsubscribe button because it was the way that spammers could confirm a real email address and creating distrust for all. As responsible marketers, we have a vested interest in being transparent and honouring expectations not only for the success of individual email programmes but for the overall health of the channel.

9. Use unsubscribe as a listening opportunity
If the consumer does decide to unsubscribe use this as an information/ listening opportunity, ask them why they are leaving. This information can then be used to better develop the programme. Done sensitively, asking why is not obstructive and also has the added benefit of helping stop unwanted unsubscribes. There have been numerous occasions we get requests from clients asking us to re-subscribe a customer because they were just clicking the links to make sure they could unsubscribe if they actually wanted to.

10. Avoid the spam button
Taking back control of the unsubscribe process is also important from two aspects. For many years, there was a trend for people not to unsubscribe but to hit this is spam button even though at some point there had been a genuine opt-in. With the increase of reputational deliverability filtering this can have a negative effect for the rest of your consumer programme and have a detrimental effect on the overall programme. Also the rise of functions such as the Yahoo unsubscribe folder – do away with the ‘this is spam issue’ but you lose the opportunity to understand why or to offer the frequency or channel options discussed above. So make sure you keep control of your unsubscribe process

CFL have the knowledge and experience to build a custom email campaign for your business - please email philm@cflmarketing.co.uk for some examples or call us on 01225 782669

DMA Report: Promoting to the Mobile Consumer

A recent study conducted by DMA and sponsored by Velti surveyed consumers across four countries and indicates that promotional marketers face both opportunities and issues when tackling the mobile consumer.

Consumers are generally open to promotional offers, but they have very clear preferences about where they want to receive them and the type of offers that they like. Getting the right pitch into the right channel will therefore have a positive uplift on marketing performance.
Key findings from this research indicate that there are both opportunities and issues facing promotional marketers as they look to tackle the mobile consumer:

• British and American consumers are different to those in Germany and France. In the UK and the USA, there is a strong appetite for preference-based offers (75 per cent and 72 per cent respectively) and very low levels of resistance to getting offers (5 per cent in both countries). In Germany and France, offers based on likes and dislikes also have the greatest traction, but at a lower level (46 per cent and 50 per cent respectively). There are also far more consumers in these countries who want no offers at all (22 per cent).

• Three quarters of consumers regularly pass on offers to friends and family - this would rise even higher in the UK and USA if there was an incentive to do so.

• Online promotional sources have been widely adopted, with Groupon taking the highest share (60 per cent of consumers in France use it, 52 per cent in the USA and 45 per cent in Germany). In the UK, My Voucher Codes maintains an advantage, at 42 per cent using compared to 35 per cent for Groupon.

• Printing vouchers remains the primary mechanism for redeeming offers in the UK and USA (71 and 75 per cent), but using discounts in online shops has overtaken print in Germany (56 per cent compared to 49 per cent). Half of British and American consumers are also redeeming offers online.

• Mobile redemption is growing steadily, at between 16 per cent in the UK, 17 per cent in USA, 18 per cent in Germany and 24 per cent in France. Mobile consumers are still principally using email to opt-out of promotional marketing (77 to 80 per cent) rather than SMS (18 to 28 per cent).

• There is still a task for brands and network operators to demonstrate to consumers the benefits of receiving promotional marketing and gaining permission to do so. In the UK and the USA, acceptance rates for promotional marketing received over mobile are lower than for promotions in general. Over time, willingness for these offers to be promoted via the mobile channel is likely to rise.

• While advertisers have a significantly higher level of preference over network operators when it comes to sending offers, this may be because networks have left a promotional gap - at best, only half of consumers in France have been promoted to by their operator in the last month, falling to one third in Germany and less than a quarter in the UK and USA.

Click Here to see the full Report - http://www.dma.org.uk/sites/default/files/tookit_files/velti_report_2011.pdf

Back to work and back to reality!!

Christmas is over, it’s a new year…its back to work and back to reality!!


Now is the perfect time to start over and think about driving more custom back to your business after the busy festive period.

January sales should be in full swing…but before you know it February will arrive…so its not too soon to start promoting Valentines.

So why not contact CFL to build a targeted promotion?

Whether its Design, Posters, Flyers, Mailings, Door Drops, Banners, Emails,Web Sites, Social Media, Data Capture or SMS text messages, we can help!

CFL posses that rare combination of operational experience, marketing flair and industry knowledge, our dedicated client services team will custom build a solution to fit any given brief or requirement.

Take a look at some examples of our work below


Remember – don’t just leave it and hope things will pick up.. drop us a line 01225 782669 - or email philm@cflmarketing.co.uk

Top retailers need to focus on email basics

There are many areas of email marketing that retailers need to work on, according to Silverpop’s 2011 Top 100 Retailers Study.

More than 20% of the UK’s top retailers send no emails in the first 30 days after opt-in. This could lead to new subscribers forgetting about the retailer and why they wanted to interact with them in the first place.

Silverpop also found that UK retailers are not making the most of opt-in and opt-out opportunities.

Although 97% of retailers who have an email programme placed the opt-in on the homepage, half of them placed it at the bottom of the page.

Email opt-ins should appear throughout the website, according to the study. New site visitors coming from search engines or social media sites won’t necessarily land on your homepage.

Marketers need to go where their customers are, says the study and encourage opt-ins in all those places. For example, SMS opt-ins from offline advertising and billboards or email opt-in forms on the retailer’s social media pages.

Only 27% of UK retailers offer consumers the choice to receive fewer emails or messages through other channels at the opt-out stage. Giving the subscriber more options could help avoid them hitting the unsubscribe button.

CFL are experts in building Email Marketing campaigns for our leisure and retail clients

Please see our best practice guide below

Integrated Email Marketing Best Practice

View more presentations from CFL Marketing

www.cflmarketing.co.uk