Sending email is easy, we all do it every day. But communicating with thousands of potential customers, racking responses, and being able to judge the effectiveness of each campaign, is where you need sophisticated management software. Doing all this is easy with our Sendit Email Marketing Tool to assist you with your online marketing campaigns.

Sendit has been developed to cope with the demands of high-volume email campaigns, anything from 1000, to over 1m (yes million!) subscribers each month. It’s an incredibly powerful and feature rich piece of software. Sendit allows you to create a fully branded, email marketing campaign within moments. You can insert your own pictures and change text and font styles with ease, then simply import your list of subscribers and send your masterpiece with the click of a mouse.

We take all the pain out of list management by handling the messy stuff like bounces and unsubscribes automatically. And of course the crucial part of any marketing campaign is to measure its effectiveness by reviewing your campaign related sales, conversions and finding out who clicked which links…

…Or to put it another way, if your email is telling potential customers about 10 brand new products, after the campaign has been delivered, you’ll be able to click into the reporting section and download a list showing who was interested in which products! No more need for endless cold-calling to try and establish interest – you’ll already know!

If you’d like to see just how easy it is to build your own HTML mailer you can have a play with our live demo area: http://sendit.south.co.uk – There’s no registration required. Simply type in ‘testing‘ into the Username and Password fields

Or just call Martin 0845 644 77 44 / 020 7871 0900 for a demo.

We’re so pleased with it, that we’ve also built a new demo site at http://cms.south.co.uk that showcases the benefits of using the system and includes a testing login area where you can try it out for yourself to see how easy it is. Simply go to http://cms.south.co.uk/live-demo to login.

The CMS is now more expandable, which means we can plugin new modules such as the European Language packs, or the Rollback module which allows you to revert to a previous edition. Additional plugins are available for eCommerce, blogs, RSS, and Twitter feeds. The Global Settings function now includes areas for your tracking and analysis codes.

Of course we’ve kept the advanced User & Groups functions, but we’ve improved it so that you can now allocate as many – or as few – pages and sections, to any particular user. Version 3.0 expands on this and introduces a new series of site-wide editing preferences. You can now choose between Admin, Editor or Contributor, so you can quickly divide the workload between as many people as you want – and be sure that they can’t break anything! (Though if one of them did make a mistake you can simply use Rollback to restore!)

The Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) abilities are also improved. Of course we’ve built the system to ensure it only generates standards compliant code. But as well as s site-wide meta data option, you can now include specific meta information on each page – so you can be as detailed as you want to be.

If you’re thinking of upgrading your current site (or building a totally new one), don’t make any decisions until you’ve had a look around the demo site – and of course logged in to the admin area to see just how easy it is to manage your own site on a day-to-day basis.

If you’d like any further information about SouthCMS, or what it can do for your business, then just get in touch, or call 020 7871 0900.

As always, we are glad to continue to welcome long standing clients back again and again.

OSS recently asked South˚ to work on creating a set of icons that would denote their business areas and fit in with the style previous icons already in place and compliment the brand.

What do they denote?

These icons try to encompass these complex areas of the business without being too specific. In order the icons represent:

• oil sales
• oil collection
• hazardous waste collection
• parts washers
• industrial services
• fragmentation
• environmental.

How will they be used?

They are to be used throughout merchandising, sales collateral and other avenues of communication including their website as a quick visual key to specific areas of the business. Working in conjunction with a more specific red icon set in a similar style which will denote, for instance, specific model parts washers or the schedule of waste collections.

I need to know this, why?

Well, we just wanted you to know that South˚ and  our team have created, worked within and developed brands of all levels. We work right the way down from the heady heights of brand values, right the way down to grass roots level.

So if you think South˚ is too big for your bedroom business or too small or your multi-national…

…think again, we work with both.

Well. We say a three way pitch, as the creative work was to be decided on the basis of a first round of visuals pitched by all three chosen agencies. It was later decided this wouldn’t be necessary once they had seen the materials from South˚. You can imagine that we were particularly happy to win a client such as ‘greytogreen’ without a protracted pitching process, this is happening more and more to South˚ – in the recent economic climate with prospective clients facing tight time-scales and even tighter budgets, a great creative team at the right price is becoming essential.

In fact what excited us the most was that we would be working with people who know exactly what they want, and act upon it swiftly and decisively.

Work started immediately and just 48 hours from the word “Go” we delivered the ‘napkin sketches’ and in a little over week from this post we’ll be delivering a polished identity with corporate guidelines to follow and all while developing the look and feel for their workshop materials.

Check back soon to see how we’re getting on with the finished product…

This initial campaign is looking like a resounding success with 20% of readers following links to the website and less than 0.1% showing little or no interest. Of those opening the mail over two thirds clicked through to the website!

Our email system provides a comprehensive set of real-time reports allowing our clients to accurately measure the effectiveness of every campaign they send. We go beyond opens and link clicks and can even measure campaign related sales, conversions and ROI.

If you want to know more about how to get your customers interested in your products, reading your content and focus your sales team on potential sales then get in touch and we will show you how.

South˚ has its fair share of motorsport enthusiasts and so it came as a pleasant surprise to those of us watching the Formula One this weekend, to find BBC’s Jake Humphrey race around Silverstone GP in a car that only a few months ago existed as a visual on our Macs.
Looking after the design and advertising for the Elise Trophy, Lotus on Track, Lotus Central, Ben Elliott Racing, Forza West and half a dozen other motorsport brands, we’re lucky enough to see our work on TV fairly frequently. Fast forward 35 minutes into the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix and there’s the car we painstakingly airbrushed in Photoshop, surrounded by the support teams faithfully wearing the promotional clothing we supplied, embroidered with the logos we created on a race track adorned with the names of brands we’ve been fortunate enough to work with over many years. A moment to savour perhaps?

Fast forward another 2 minutes and that same car is now in lots of little pieces being towed / swept away.

They say that all publicity’s good publicity and we can’t argue with that. We will have to insist next time however, that our motorsport design and advertising exposure receives the full 15 minutes’ worth of fame!

We have started on the new identity this week and as ever, we’re kicking off with our favourite bit: the brainstorms and pencil sketches. Next week will be delivering a choice of directions for the team to choose from and just a few weeks from now, should you meet the team from Strategic Technologies, you’ll find the logo on their business cards is one that will have started its life on the pages of a South˚ sketchbook.

South˚ have a history of working with promotional merchandise and POS companies starting with Gordon having cut his teeth running studios for several promotions companies in the 90s. With wins to shoot and design the POS catalogues for Magners and Bulmers as well as websites for winegiftcentre.com and a range of catalogues and websites for Willis Publicity, our new friends at Barsdirect.co.uk clearly feel they’re in good hands.

Check back in a few weeks and you’ll find a link to the new site.

http://blog.south.co.uk/2009/seo-tips-content/
http://blog.south.co.uk/2009/seo-tips-coding-and-hosting/
http://blog.south.co.uk/2009/seo-tips-metadata/
http://blog.south.co.uk/2009/seo-tips-linking/
http://blog.south.co.uk/2009/seo-tips-submission/
http://blog.south.co.uk/2009/seo-tips-conclusion/