It’s the most wonderful time of the year! If you’re in the retail business, the Christmas season has always traditionally been the best time to boost your sales. Not only is Christmas usually the time of the year for consumer spending, but it’s also the time when consumers feel the most generous.

If you’re looking for ways to sell your product or services during this time of year, then you’re in the right place! Here in this blog, we will be providing you with several ways to boost your holiday marketing:

Give discounts and coupons

One of the best ways to attract customers during the BER months is by providing them with irresistible offers. So, make sure to think about what your offer will be and how you want to relay the message to the people. Some examples of the discounts and coupons that you can use include:

• Free shipping
• 50% off
• 20% Cashback
• Freebies
• Limited time offers
• Mega sale (10.10, 11.11, 12.12)

Provide them with a solution

While selling your product may be the main objective, it is important to market your product by means of showing consumers the kind of solution your product can provide. This will help establish trust and eventually help you gain loyal customers in the long run. For this reason, we recommend understanding how you can offer tips and tricks that will simplify the daily life of your customers, or offer a solution to their problems. Some examples you can try include:

• For toy stores, you can write a blog about “Ten skills your child learns while playing board games with their friends.” 
• For fitness establishments, you can write a blog on “How to maintain your weight during the holiday season”. 
• On the contrary, if you own a coffee shop, you can write about “How to add a little holiday twist to your latte at home”.

Choose your platform

The most important thing you need to remember is that you cannot advertise your brand anywhere online since it requires you to pay tons of money. This is why if you’re on a budget, you need to pick your platform wisely. 

Regardless if it’s print or online, you need to assess where your customers usually spend their time and promote there. At the end of the day, it all really depends on your industry and the location of your target customers.  Here are some examples you can try:

• If your business is inside the mall, it may help to target your ads to people who frequently visit that mall or live nearby. You can advertise using Facebook ads and use the mall as a point of interest as well.
• Additionally, if you are a fashion brand that has a physical store but also sells online, you can offer special online-only sales via email marketing, social media marketing, or SMS advertisements.

Know your target market

If you’re planning to sell your products or services online, it is important to take into account customers that are interested in what you’re offering. To gain revenue during this time of year, make sure to ask these questions to yourself:

• Who do I want to sell my products and services to? 
• Are the buyers composed of office workers or civilians who are simply looking for something that can help them during this season?
• What are companies looking for during the BER months?
• Which age group fits our products/services?

Change your branding and design

You may not be aware of this, but people actually tend to be more visual than text-based. This is why you always need to make sure that your design incorporates a great high-quality photo that will go with your message. 

Since it is the Christmas season, we recommend incorporating marketing materials that look festive while still retaining your branding aesthetic and accents. Moreover, if you want to go the extra mile to advertise your brand, you can also create limited editions of your products that incorporate the Christmas theme. Keep in mind that it is up to your branding aesthetic to see what fits well with your current design.

Happy BER months everyone!

Christmas is just around the corner, so it is important to always be prepared and ahead of your competitors. What are you waiting for? Make the best out of this season by planning early and offering something irresistible to your consumers today!

Here at iManila, we create various digital marketing strategies that can support your business objectives – whether that means driving awareness, generating leads, or increasing sales.

With 25 years of experience in the industry, iManila is committed to providing our clients with innovative digital solutions. We are a full-service website development and digital marketing agency ready to help you with your web design, hosting, and digital marketing needs. Inquire now and message us today!

These days, there are numerous ways to reach your customers through digital marketing. However, one of the most direct methods is through email marketing. Running email marketing campaigns has its own challenges but when done correctly, can give you the most loyal followers which may prove to be income-generating for your organization. Below we’ve outlined some email marketing tips digital marketers should know in order to add to their marketing arsenal and in order to create meaningful and well-converting campaigns.

Have a Good Call-to-Action Button

At the heart of every email is the call-to-action (CTA) button. The goal is to get customers to open and click your email in order to generate traffic to your landing page. Multiple CTAs can be a detriment and confuse readers from the real message that you are getting across, so having a singular powerful CTA can help drive better traffic to your website. 

A good email is one that guides the readers to eventually click on the CTA, teasing the different benefits of going to your landing page. Make sure that the message you are displaying in your email is the same as what is displayed on your landing page. Having a corresponding message can help make whatever you are offering more resonant to your readers. 

Encourage replies through a strong subject line and personalization 

Marketing today is more engaging than ever. Emails are not exempt from this as they can also be the starting point of conversation between a potential customer. You can encourage this by starting off with a strong and enticing subject line. What are you promising your reader? How can you make your email stand out in your reader’s inbox? 

Refrain from sounding robotic and impersonal. Much of effective marketing relies on that connection that you make with your potential customer. Try to personalize your email and make it sound like it is coming from a real person and work on your tone of voice. Personalization also matters in the content of your email, catering the message and content to what your segment or demographic may find most appealing. Are you using the tools that let you use your reader’s name? Are you sending out emails at the most optimal times? These are all personalization considerations for your email marketing strategy. 

Send test emails 

Think of this step as a way of proofreading your email before you send it to your actual recipients. Use this time to ensure everything is in order. Do they look the same way? Are they working across various email platforms? Is it optimized for mobile users? These are things you can check when sending test emails in order to make sure the actual email is at its best. 

Monitor analytics 

In order to gauge the effectiveness of a campaign, you turn to what the data says. These can bring a lot of insights to your campaign. For those using Google Analytics in their websites, you can integrate your data by tagging your emails with the campaign codes, giving you more insight into how visitors are getting to your landing page. Here are some of the most important metrics in email marketing: 

• Open rate – How many people open your email versus those that receive it. This tells you whether your subject line is enough to draw their attention. 
• Click rate – How many people actually clicked on your links or CTA versus those that opened it. This tells you if your content is compelling enough for readers to take the next step into your landing page. 
• Unsubscribe rate – This tells you if your message is resonating with your audience. High rates can mean that your mailing list could be the wrong target market. 

Despite having been one of the older channels of marketing, email marketing has continued to evolve with the trends. Creating meaningful engagement with customers is key to building that trust with them and turning them into customers. If you are looking to grow your business through email marketing, working alongside a digital marketing company can help bridge that gap faster. iManila is a digital marketing agency in the Philippines that is dedicated to helping businesses achieve their goals through their marketing expertise. 

Schedule a consultation with us and see how we can work together.

With 25 years of experience in the industry, iManila is committed to providing our clients with innovative digital solutions. We are a full-service website development and digital marketing agency ready to help you with your web design, hosting, and digital marketing needs. Inquire now and message us today!

Ask any successful business owner and they’ll tell you that they have been running their business towards a main objective using a variety of strategies to promote their brand and grow their business whether it’s through traditional marketing techniques or by doing their marketing strategies online. 

When it comes to online though, there are a variety of platforms and strategies that are available for your business. These days, many businesses run social media marketing campaigns through Facebook or Instagram, while others utilize search engine marketing or Google and YouTube ads. Others prefer to go the more traditional route of search engine optimization, while others prefer to target specific clients through email marketing. Whatever your strategy or objectives may be, in this article, we’ll lay out the top reasons why, regardless of what stage your company is in the growth process, your business needs a digital marketing strategy to grow and succeed. 

• To make sure your business is in the right direction. 

Without a digital marketing strategy, companies often fail to define their strategic goals to gain new customers or to strengthen relationships with existing customers. You won’t be able to accomplish your goals without any goals in mind. Thus, you won’t achieve the success you desire. 

Ideally, you should outline what you’re trying to accomplish through digital marketing for your business. Be clear as to why you’re investing money and resources in it. By setting goals, you can map out your path.  

It is impossible to allocate capital and resources correctly without a goal. In addition to your appointed resources being directionless, all your money and efforts would be wasted.

• To stay one step ahead of your new and old competitors. 

A good marketing strategy can give you a competitive advantage.  Invest enough resources in digital marketing. By not doing so, you will lose ground to your competitors. However, you shouldn’t rely on just any random approach, instead, your strategies have to be clear. 

There is more to marketing than promoting your products and services or increasing your company’s exposure. Creating your brand also means defining what your business represents and why your target market would want to be your customers. A good full-service digital marketing agency can do this work for you. 

• To identify your target market.

On the online platform, we can’t satisfy all types of people. With that said however, there are still some individuals who are most likely to become a long-term customer. This is why having a digital marketing plan is important for your business.

By assessing your target market strategically, you will be able to know their desires and show them how your product or service will meet their needs, and solve their problems in the process.

If everything we mentioned seems to be necessary for your business and you don’t know where to begin – let a digital marketing agency such as iManila help get you ahead of the game. With 25 years of experience in the IT industry and as one of the leading Digital Marketing Agencies in the Philippines, iManila has the skills and the experience to help you with your digital marketing strategy! Contact us now to learn more!

Web hosting is the most underappreciated part of the World Wide Web. Some people might not realize it, but every website actually involves hosting so that users can access it. 

Websites are hosted on servers. Servers are powerful computers that store and process data, and web servers are those which store the files that make up websites and process requests to view these files.

Web hosting is an invisible yet essential element of the online experience. So, If you care about your website, it is important for you to make sure that your online site is in good hands. In this blog we’ll share with you some web hosting tips that you and your IT team should know.

There’s a huge gap between the different types of hosting. 

If you’ve spent any amount of time on a web host‘s website, you’ve probably seen terms like shared hosting, VPS, dedicated server, cloud hosting and WordPress hosting. They represent the different web hosting types, but not every web host provider offers them all. Plus, the hosting types differ from one another in significant ways. Take a look at some of the various servers below:

• Shared hosting

The cheapest form of web hosting is shared hosting. This hosting basically lets your website share a server and server resources with other websites. This level of hosting is really best suited for small sites that don’t need a huge amount of bandwidth. Since you are sharing resources with other sites, you should be prepared for the occasional slowdown should one of your site-mates start attracting a lot of visitors.

•  VPS hosting

VPS hosting is most likely a high-powered version of shared hosting, except that far fewer websites share a server’s resources, which are also a bit more segregated. In effect, VPS hosting is usually more expensive than shared hosting.

• Dedicated hosting

Compared to other hosting servers, dedicated hosting basically refers to an Internet hosting option in which a physical server (or servers) is focused on a single business customer. With this type of hosting, customers have complete control over the machine, so they can optimize it for their unique requirements, including performance and security.

• WordPress hosting

WordPress hosting lets you build a site in an environment that caters to the world’s most popular content management system. 

• Cloud hosting

Cloud servers are the newest type of hosting and the most popular among the websites today. With its latest developments, it lets you easily scale website power across multiple servers, though not every web hosting provider currently offers this as it is a new technology. 

Domain and hosting are not the same thing. 

Right from the start, you need to find a dependable and trustworthy registrar. Domain names don’t have to be registered at the same company.

Ultimately, domain name is the most expensive and irreplaceable asset, as it is your online identity, while hosting services are just there to accommodate the website. Most web-hosting providers would prefer to have your domain registered with them, as it is their other profitable revenue stream. However, it won’t be that convenient if the web hosting company decides to go down together with your domain. At the same time,if you are able to manage your domain and hosting across separate vendors or providers – then by all means do. The bottomline is you should always purchase your domain and hosting from a company that can provide you the proper support you need – including reminders to tell you that your domain is due for renewal! 

Know your hosting’s bandwidth and disk space. 

Bandwidth and data transfer are frequently used interchangeably to define the amount of data that your website serves to visitors, but the terms, technically, do not have the same definitions. Bandwidth represents the total amount of data that can be transferred at one time, while data transfer is the throughput or the actual amount of information that can be used over a given period of time.

Most websites won’t go past their bandwidth quota by high traffic alone, but if you have some files for download on your website, remember that it can possibly happen.

Don’t fall for “unlimited” storage! 

​​Web hosts will entice you to sign up for their web hosting plans with the promise of unlimited storage or monthly data transfers. Unlimited Storage seems like a great offer doesn’t it? RULE OF THUMB: Don’t believe it because it’s not an honest deal. Unfortunately many web hosting companies will tell you this with the knowledge that you probably won’t read the entire details of the server that you purchased. 

If you have ever studied the Terms of Service or Service Level Agreement of your web hosting service thoroughly, you will surely see a section about its CPU/Server Usage. We’re almost sure that there’s a limit stated there (as there is always a limit for everything in life!) in which case your hosting is not “unlimited”. 

This only means that if your website uses more than a certain amount of storage, it violates the Terms of Service and will be subject to termination. Of course, it is necessary for just about every hosting service to have something like that in their Terms of Service to protect resources on their servers from improper usages. However, many web-hosting providers are using the CPU/Server Usage to get around their Unlimited Storage promises. Bottom line is to make sure to read the Terms of Service thoroughly to make sure you’re getting your money’s worth. 

With 25 years of experience in the IT industry and as one of the first Internet Service Providers in the Philippines – and a Tech Company at heart, iManila has the skills and the experience to help you with your online presence whether it be through website or email hosting, website design and development, applications development, technical support or digital marketing. We have a variety of hosting packages that are available to suit your needs. For more information, you can check out our Shared Hosting, Cloud Hosting, Business Cloud Hosting, WordPress Hosting and Dedicated Hosting services. Contact us and we can help you identify the best hosting package for your business needs.