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From beauty and healthcare to store cupboard essentials, subscription sales are big business. But with Covid kickstarting a wave of cancellations — and the recent rise in living costs only impacting our bank balances further — how can you ensure you’re getting the most out of your subscription sales? Here are six ways to stay one step ahead.

Subscriptions are a convenient way to get what you want, when you want. And while you’re guaranteed to never run out of your favourites, sometimes it pays to keep things fresh. Think about how to add value — whether that be rewarding loyal customers with exclusive offers, introducing new products, or looking at new ways to improve the customer experience. Because when you’re up against cancellations and competitors, there’s no time to be complacent.

It goes without saying that your buyers want efficiency. We’re talking low prices, products delivered on time, and a hassle-free process. But think about how you can go above and beyond on experience. Are there ways you can make unboxing even better? If your products are sold as gifts, can you add notes, gift wrapping, or make things more personalised? Physical aspects like this can sometimes have the biggest impact.

It’s not just your customers that can benefit from adding more flexibility into the mix. Let your users personalise their subscriptions by introducing 2-week, 4-week, or 6-month delivery options. Or optimise your retention rates by adding the option to pause rather than cancel. You can then keep nurturing your paused subscribers with emails or other retargeting activity to encourage them to sign up again at a later date.

You don’t need to drive sales to get more from your subscriptions. Can you streamline your processes by switching deliveries from monthly to three-monthly? Will offering 500ml instead of 100ml product sizes help cut your postage costs? If you’re shipping across borders, it’s always worth using third-party fulfilment to find more competitive rates, cut delivery times, and navigate any red tape around tax and duties.

To drive sign-ups, make sure you’re clear when it comes to giving users a reason to buy. Ensure your reviews are a prominent part of your product page designs. If you offer multi-buy discounts, make them eye-catching. And if you’ve set up 

 programmes, promote them in banners, pop-ups, or follow up emails.

A final way to discourage your subscribers from opting out entirely is a cancellation flow. By pairing persuasive messaging with intelligent UX design, you can keep users on board and deter them from hitting “cancel”. It can work pretty well as a last-ditch attempt to keep your subscribers, but it’s worth seeing how you can engage them in other ways before they reach this stage.

How to maximise subscription-based sales (at a time when everyone's feeling the pinch)

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More often than not, growing your business means expanding to bigger markets. However, a recent survey from ShipBob revealed that 1 in 3 business owners are concerned about the post-Brexit red tape on shipments to the EU. Plus, it also showed that almost half of business owners see rising shipping costs as their biggest challenge over the coming year.

When you throw the latest increases in fuel prices, and higher-than-ever customer expectations into the mix, cross-border shipping is becoming all the more complicated. Here are 7 ways your e-commerce business could benefit from using third-party fulfilment to sell in Europe and beyond.

The biggest benefit of outsourcing vs. handling fulfilment in-house is the savings you’ll make in time and resources. If you’re a small-scale business, picking, packing and sending orders can be time-consuming. But when you take into account high stock volumes, taxes and duties, and seasonal staff shortages, things will only get tougher — especially if you have an influx of orders. Third-party logistics take away that pressure, giving you time back to concentrate on sales, marketing and product development. So all that’s left for you to do is focus on growing your business.

Local returns and exchanges: taken care of

When you’re selling overseas, the cost of returns (in both time and money) only multiplies. Plus, local customs charges make returns at a cross-border level a complex business. A third-party fulfilment provider will work with local partners to take care of any taxes and duties associated with returns and exchanges, so you can offer different returns options to customers based on their location. And when it comes to reselling, you’ll have a better idea of what’s coming back into stock as well as turnaround times.

For many consumers, free shipping can sometimes be a deal breaker. But with everyone now feeling the pinch, offering shipping to customers that’s low cost, and as fast as possible, is harder than ever. By outsourcing your fulfilment, you’ll be outsourcing the search for the best rates. A third-party provider pulls together buying power, helping you get the best rates from multiple local partners and passing on any savings to you. They can also advise on how to become leaner with your fulfilment costs, for example, how to make changes to the size and weight of your packaging to save on international shipping.

A better user experience = higher conversion rates

When it comes to ordering online, expectations are higher than ever. Users want fast, low-cost shipping — without the hassle of additional charges at customs. A Delivery Duty Paid service ensures all delivery costs are shown up-front, at the checkout. And a more straightforward path to purchase — paired with faster shipping — means higher conversion rates. Plus, if your product arrives safely on time, or even faster than expected, then it’s a big tick in the customer retention box.

If you’re looking for ways to become more sustainable as a business, then third-party fulfilment can help you get there. If you’re selling goods with an expiration date, they can help you reduce waste by ensuring the right products leave the warehouse first. They can also help you introduce initiatives such as “less than perfect”, where products that may have slightly damaged packaging are sold for a discounted price. Plus, many work with charity donation partners, so you have other choices if you find that reselling returned items isn’t working for you.

Why 3PL is great for growing your e-commerce business across borders

Images can often make or break a sale or conversion. As they say — an image is worth 1000 words!


However, they can have a huge impact on website speed. A majority of the data transferred on website loads turn out to be images — 

about 63% according to the HTTP Archive Web Almanac

. For eCommerce sites, that number is likely a lot higher. If images load slowly, or don't load at all, it won't just make for a poor experience for the user — it will also slow down the rest of the website.


We use Image CDNs (Content Delivery Networks) to make it as easy as possible for us to build websites that perform great when it comes to images — without sacrificing the design or imagery.

How image performance is traditionally tackled on the web

We encourage our clients to upload images at the best quality they have, which means a typical image might come from a studio camera and be up to 10MB in size. This doesn't seem like much in a world of MicroSD cards with hundreds of gigabytes of storage, but when it comes to downloading images over a mobile network, it’s huge.


I tested a website with a 2.3MB image on my phone's 4G in a city and it took around 14s to download. The same page on the rural 3G internet (that still covers quite a lot of the UK) took almost a minute! Multiply that by 10-20 for your average, well-designed website and you can guarantee the users won't bother hanging around. Any improvement we can make to how fast images load could be the difference between a user clicking ‘X’ or converting. And this is without taking into account the people on restricted data plans where that image might be 2-3% of their data for the month.


So we need to reduce the size of images on webpages, but we can't just squash them smaller without considering a few things.

Websites are displayed at all sorts of screen sizes, widths and resolutions — the same website might be on a small budget smartphone or a huge desktop monitor! This makes resizing images and decreasing the resolution a bit tricky. Ideally, we should download an image at the size we need it, but how do we know the size?


The web gives us a way to specify lots of image sizes. The browser then downloads whichever one it needs, factoring in screen size and screen density/'retina' displays.


For every image that's a lot of resizing to do!

JPEG, PNG and GIFs are still what most images are saved as. However, new image formats (including WebP, AVIF and JPEG XL) have the ability to compress images by discarding detail that viewers can't see.


I took a demo image in a JPEG format at 3MB and used a JPEG compressor to reduce it to 600kB. But converting it to WebP, AVIF and JPEG XL, it came out as 360kB, 280kB and 240kB respectively. A massive improvement on our original image.


Unfortunately, we can't just use the best one — different browsers and operating systems support different formats. While 


Ideally, we’d offer the best a browser supports. But that means generating even more image files before taking on a bit of a tricky setup.

Mobile and tablet devices (and some laptops) have screen resolutions that are similar to a desktop but are a lot smaller. This means a phone may use an image the same resolution as a desktop when it's not at all needed for the small phone screen. You can find out more about this technique from the post 

"Halve the size of images by optimising for high density displays" by Jack Archibald

 but it's something that's worth considering for a high performing website.


When you optimise images manually, you will use a 'quality' option or slider. It probably goes from 0–100%, where approaching 0 the image will be compressed more to reduce data, and the worse it will look. Best practice would be to set the slider as low as possible without seeing any meaningful loss in quality. However, a simple image without much detail may compress to 55% without any difference, whilst a busy, high detail action photo may need more like 90%. This makes automatic optimisation tricky and less efficient, as to keep both of these images looking great we set it to 90%, wasting data on the simple image.

Depending on what you use for your CMS/website platform and how good your developers are, your website may already be using some of the above. Most CMSs will convert or resize every image on upload and serve them from the same hosting. However, this has its downsides:

Large storage requirements as every image is converted to ~40 different formats;

Slow upload speeds while images are processed;

The impact of image requests on your web server ;

The CMS doesn't support different image formats or compression;

Makes development slower or more difficult;

Images stored in a code repository makes code management harder.

A combination of these issues made managing images difficult. That’s why we searched for an easier option.

We've mentioned Image CDNs previously, but what actually is an Image CDN?
An Image CDN is a Content Delivery Network that specialises in Images. It's a third-party service that hooks up to your website and takes over the job of manipulating images.


Most of the time they sit between the web server of your website and the user, 'transforming' images on the fly based on the image URLs.

Image CDNs take so many of the best practices for image performance that are difficult to implement and give them to us for no effort and very little cost. The features vary depending on the exact provider, but some of the benefits include:

Converting images into the best format the browser can support;

Automatically determining the quality level depending on the image;

Offloading the load, cost and time of image processing away from the CMS and hosting;

Making generating images a lot easier for developers by just adding some info to the URL;

For mixed-platform agencies (Series Eight builds Craft and Shopify sites) it's one workflow for all projects.

How you implement an Image CDN depends on the CMS you use, the Image CDN provider and how you set it up. But the simplest setup is putting images on your website or a storage bucket like S3 and configuring the Image CDN to pull images from there. Then you put together a URL:


Let’s go through this URL line-by-line:

The subdomain you set up with the Image CDN when you set up an account;

Specify which image we'd like to use by name or URL;

Automatically set the format to the best that’s supported;

The image should be resized or cropped to a width of 900 pixels and height of 600 pixels;

Finally use the ‘high’ quality profile the CDN provides

The syntax varies depending on the provider, but doesn’t vary too much from this. Using this simple syntax you'd change some of these parameters — just using text within the URL — and the image served will be different. That is so much easier and faster than having to generate new image sizes or transforms for every instance.

As Shopify tries to make its tools as developer-friendly as it can, a basic Image CDN is actually already included with your Shopify plan for free!

 liquid filters to generate the URLs for images uploaded to the Shopify admin or in the assets/ folder of your theme.


A simple Shopify Image CDN implementation would look like this:

more advanced Snippet for image processing in Shopify

 that more intelligently retrieves the image sizes and prevents Shopify from cropping mis-sized images poorly.


Shopify's Image CDN does a good job to get started, including automatically converting to WebP if it's supported, optimising images and making it easy for developers to generate new images. It doesn't have more advanced functionality like AVIF support, format quality comparison, or the ability to define a quality level — essential for the hi-dpi practice. It can also change the aspect ratio of images when they’ve been uploaded too small — something to watch out for!


If you're looking to really push the performance of your Shopify site as much as you can you could consider using a third-party Image CDN like 

Craft CMS has the ability to 'transform' images, which will resize and convert images on your Craft server and save them in the server's files or storage bucket. This has some of the limitations I listed above and an Image CDN makes it a lot easier to work with. Craft also makes it easy to set up an Image CDN.


We use Craft's AWS S3 integration to store images elsewhere and link Imgix to the same S3 bucket. This means the only change needed in Craft is to point the public URL of your ‘Filesystem’ to the Image CDN subdomain.


A simple implementation of how you can use an Image CDN in Craft with Twig looks like this:

 for a full implementation including hi-dpi images.

 handles format conversion — even to AVIF — automatic optimisation, format quality comparison and makes it really easy for developers to generate different image sizes.

Image CDNs can work in pretty much any circumstance to improve the performance of images and the ease of development. I've personally also built WordPress, Jamstack and React sites using Image CDNs, and know of others having used them to make images on .NET, Umbraco, Java, custom frameworks sites and even iOS and Android apps easier!

Image manipulation and optimisation on the web can be tricky — and there’s lots to keep track of! Image CDNs make it so much easier to manage images when developing, so much so that personally I use them on every site I work on — no matter how small or large.


If you’re a developer looking to improve the performance of images on the sites you build, consider trying out an Image CDN and seeing how it improves your workflow and sites. And if you really want to dig into the details I’d recommend reading 

Image CDNs, their benefits and how we use them

It’s been hailed by Shopify as the next era of commerce — and the ecommerce giant has rolled out a whole host of new features and functionality to help businesses find and engage with customers, drive more sales in international markets, and do it all in a way that’s faster and better than ever before.But do these latest updates live up to the hype? We narrow down 10 of Shopify’s best new features and give our honest verdict on each.

By integrating wholesale with your website, you can set specific pricing for wholesalers on a per company basis. When a wholesaler is logged in, they get the same experience but with their own custom pricing. Plus — developers have full control of the wholesale site, so it can be totally customised, too.

 A gamechanger. So much easier and better than previous apps and options. Set to make wholesale on Shopify 1,000% better

Markets makes it easier than ever for your business to go global. It enables you to sell in different countries and regions with different languages, currencies, pricing and payment options. Before, you’d need a separate Shopify store for each county. Now, you can manage all your markets in one.

Makes selling internationally super simple. It has some teething problems (that Shopify is working on) but it’s still well worth it for international stores.

 All plans, bonus features with Advanced and Plus

The days of single discounts are over. Instead of relying on custom development or apps for multiple discounts (such as 10% off plus Buy One Get One Free), Shopify now allows you to combine discounts at once.


Much easier to put together combinations of different offers. The possibilities are endless — well, almost anyway.

Previously, pre-ordering and TBYB (Try Before You Buy) functionality was pretty painful. You needed to apply a custom checkout process, which meant separate flows for pre-order and buy now products, less customisation and a clunky user experience. Shopify took note, and has now integrated both in the main checkout.


 Well worth it for user experience alone. There aren’t many apps out there that support it yet, but many more will soon.

 All stores with a Pre-order or TBYB app like PreProduct or TryNow

With so many apps out there, it can be hard to separate the good apps from the great ones. Enter: Built for Shopify — a new program to highlight and promote high quality apps to users.

 Couldn’t have come soon enough. Not only will it make it easier to find the right apps, but it’s paving the way for better app building, too.

The Search and Discovery app will supercharge your store’s search functionality. Gone are the days of custom apps or third-party search tools. You can now prioritise certain collections or products, or add/remove search terms.


Great for those looking to provide a better browsing experience without overhauling the entire search functionality.

 Still in early access, so only available if invited. But it’s coming soon!

Shopify Audiences has the power to increase your return on ad spend. It adds an extra layer of intelligence to live digital ads on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or Google that are promoting products on your Shopify store. Plus, it leverages data about customers and products from other merchants, helping you to optimise your ad strategy.

 Definitely worth a try if you’re already running digital ads. Has the potential to reduce ad spend and improve your conversions.

One for your developer. Functions allows devs to have more control over Shopify's backend logic. You can discount products within the checkout or modify the price based on a wide range of different circumstances, i.e. the options chosen on a product, the combination of products in the cart and more.


 Has lots of potential. It’s opened the doors to a whole new world of pricing.

Printing and paying for labels just got easier than ever. Shipping labels can be automatically created for orders purchased in the UK and France, and you can compare multiple carriers without third-party apps.


 Definitely one to watch — especially if it can simplify your shipping process or reduce costs overall.

Shopify’s new Twitter functionality promises to convert customers in just a few clicks. Great if you have a large following or regularly connect with users on the platform, the Twitter Shopping feature allows you to add the ‘View Shop’ button to highlight products from your Shopify store on your Twitter profile.

 Simple to install and super useful if you find you have a large audience on Twitter.

Shopify’s summer 2022 release: 10 of the best new features

Working from home, across borders and time zones, it’s not often we get to hang out in real life. But this September, we swapped shoulders-up-socialising for four days of fun in the sun as part of our Series Eight team retreat.

The location was Ericeira — a Portuguese seaside town known for its colourful tiled streets, pastel de natas, and boutique bars and restaurants. It also happens to be Europe’s Surf Mecca (which may have had something to do with Mario…)

We kicked off the first night with dinner and drinks at our aparthotel, You & The Sea, then found ourselves a beach party, right across the street. The next day, after collecting our official trip merch (shout out to Fran for the amazing hats and t-shirts!) we blew away the cobwebs with a walk around the town with a local guide. We learned about the history of the fishing village, ate award-winning pastries, and discovered how to spot a good ATM from a bad one. Back at base, there were sauna sessions, beach swims, and time in the pool. And then it was back into town for cocktails and tacos at the Mexican restaurant, Calavera.

On Friday morning, some of us took to the beach for a few hours of surfing before joining the others for yoga in the outdoor pavilion. After an hour of stretching and meditating (and even a little snoring), it was time for lunch and drinks on the balcony. And before long, we were back on the water — this time, stand-up paddle boarding up a nearby river estuary.

Our last afternoon together was spent mountain biking along the Lizandro river. The tour took us across rope bridges, along bamboo-lined trails, and convinced Nate he should (and then shouldn’t) buy a bike. After two hours of cycling in the sunshine, we reached our final destination, Manz Winery, where we sampled six locally grown wines. And thanks to a delayed transfer back to town, we also got to try the best wine in the house: a 2016 Manz Douro Reserva.

On our final night, we put our new-found wine knowledge into practice and sampled small plates at Mar Das Latas — a local bistro famed for amazing sunset views and local Portuguese seafood. We finished the night with a few drinks, and before we knew it, we were each making our way back to Lisbon to begin our journeys home.

A special mention to the trip’s photographers, Bruno, Biel and Nate. And also to our newest teamie, Ellie, who joined us only two weeks before the trip but made the 10-hour journey via Edinburgh, Dublin and Lisbon to come and see us in person.

Ericeira 2022: our biggest and best team trip yet

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In the ecommerce world, your website is more than just a shopfront. It’s the foundation of your entire digital marketing strategy. Your website should be able to grow with your business. But how future-proof — and scalable — your site is, often comes down to the design. And that’s where landing page builders come in.

A landing page is a standalone web page made especially for a marketing or advertising campaign. It's the page that a visitor "lands" on after clicking a link in an email, paid ad, or social media post.

Landing pages have a single emphasis or purpose, known as a call to action (CTA). For example, to collect a visitor's contact information in exchange for something like a discount or downloadable resource. Web pages, on the other hand, often have multiple aims and will encourage users to explore the site further via secondary pages.

Yes — and no. If you aren’t experienced in web design and development, it can be pretty challenging to build a website from scratch. And that’s why so many people reach for third-party landing page builder apps. These apps offer some incredible features and make creating landing pages super easy. But there are downsides.

With basic third-party apps, your visitors can see through the gaps. More often than not, the landing pages turn out to be too far away from the design and branding on the main website. And inconsistencies like this not only make the user experience feel disjointed, it can lead to a lack of trust and reliability. In turn, this can impact your conversion rates.

Why a landing page builder is the way forward

A key part of a successful site is the fact you can manage and update the content yourself. And that’s where a landing page builder comes in.

A landing page builder is essentially a hidden page on your site that features a series of content modules. These modules can be shown, hidden or structured in any order to create pages for campaigns, products, competitions — or simply to expand on your sitemap. All the content is customisable, so not only can it be fully aligned to your goals, but it will fit seamlessly in with the rest of your website.


Being able to future-proof your site is something we consider long before it’s built. When we design a website, we ensure aspects of the design will function as standalone modules, so that they can be used for a landing page builder in the future. And if not, we make the necessary tweaks to adapt them.

But most importantly, when we’re designing a landing page builder, we take time to think about your marketing goals. It needs to include features that align with your digital strategy, whether that be complex submission forms, heroes that support different media, or basic text and image blocks. Because if you bombard your landing page with unnecessary widgets, you’ll only end up distracting users.

Here’s a round up of our must-have modules for a landing page builder.

A bold statement with supporting imagery or video that clearly describes what a visitor is going to get from your product or service.

These sections include supporting copy beyond the headline. The key here is to describe specific benefits along with features and strong supporting imagery.

Word of mouth is one of the most powerful sales tools. Provide real reviews and show names, profile pictures and what they bought whenever possible. The more information the better. Testimonials can take many different shapes:

When it comes to CTAs, it’s crucial to keep the text short, make the buttons and actions clearly visible, and support the section with eye-catching imagery or graphics.

Usually, most CTAs drive the users towards an embedded form. Its purpose has to be clear and concise and just require the essential fields for better conversion rates.

Landing page builders (and why your site needs one)

Your brand is your biggest asset. And your visual identity plays a key part in your business being recognised, respected and — ultimately — generating revenue. However, changes in strategy, target audience and design trends can all make your brand feel irrelevant or outdated compared to your competitors.

Here are just three signs that your visual identity could be due an upgrade.

Like everything in design, trends come and go pretty quickly. And if you’ve been living with your current logo for a few years now, chances are it's looking a bit behind the times. Just like people, brands evolve over time. So how you looked (or sounded) a few years ago might not be a true reflection of who you are now. But it’s important you resonate with your current target audience. And sometimes, that means adapting your look so you keep up with competitors.

A textbook example is Apple. To be one of the world’s biggest tech giants, you need to evolve or you get left behind. Here you can see how its logo has changed over time but still remained recognisable.

Recently, we worked on refining a logo in a similar way for 

. The brand’s current logo typography was uncomfortably wide, so we worked on spacing to create a more readable wordmark and clean, modern logo.

Burger King also recently showed us how the best trends go full circle. The bright blue, yellow and red logo had left the brand feeling stuck in the 90s. And so in a bold (and pretty brilliant) move, the logo first introduced in the 60s made a comeback. It gives a nod to Burger King’s heritage, but with simple, clean-cut lines and a flat, contrasting palette, it was made for the digital age.

Similarly, we gave the hand-drawn wallpaper design brand, Charlotte Jade, a complete transformation. By redesigning the entire hero logo, we created something that better represents the vibrant, nature-inspired luxury interior products and artwork they create — a more recognisable brand that suits their international ambitions.

These days, accessibility is everything, so it’s important that your brand can be adaptable. Your logo sits at the centre of your brand toolkit, so it needs to be flexible enough to scale to different sizes. Is it easy to view when you shrink it down? Or do the details get lost as it becomes smaller? If your logo can’t be identified when it’s favicon size (16x16), then it’s time to switch things up.

We’re not always talking about a complete overhaul. In some cases, you’ll just need to make a few changes to things like colours, typography and logo placement. Here’s a good example of how Guinness and Kodak have transitioned their branding from full logo lockup to mini mockup.

When it comes to building trust, consistency is king. Keeping your brand cohesive across all channels will help you become more memorable, recognisable and look more professional. So if you’re finding you don’t have a solid set of guidelines featuring everything from colours, slogans and other brand characteristics, then it’s time to invest time in creating some. Not only will it help you build more personality around your brand, but it will also save you a bunch of time when it comes to creating new assets for marketing materials such as emails, social posts and visuals for online and offline ads.

A business that’s nailed this is Airbnb. They’ve created a look and feel that’s so strong and consistent that even when you see elements such as colours, typography and tone of voice in isolation, it clearly belongs to the Airbnb brand.

3 signs that it’s time to make changes to your visual branding

Whether or not you have a wealth of data at your fingertips, there are always ways you can incorporate more personalisation into your marketing.


Here are four ways that you can easily personalise your content to drive conversions and increase customer loyalty.

If you’re a hotel resort in the Maldives, your target audience may include different demographics, for example, families, friends, and couples. Or, if you’re a clothing brand, your products could fall into categories including dresses for wedding guests, summer dresses, or dresses for parties. Creating dedicated landing pages around these specific search queries is a great way to display relevant content to specific audiences, and can also help drive organic traffic to your site.

When it comes to landing pages, you could even go one step further and utilise dynamic content based on your users’ search behaviour. If you know someone has visited your site before, why not display messaging such as ‘Welcome back’? Or, if geolocation data tells you a user is based in a country that you’ve recently started shipping to, then be sure to highlight this in your messaging. It’s little details like this that grab attention and drive conversions.


To get the best out of personalisation, it needs to feel personal. It’s important that your content is tailored to suit your customer, yet doesn’t overstep the line and feel creepy. Let’s say that someone provided you with their name when they signed up to emails. As well as including their name in email copy and subject lines, you can use this data to address them personally when they land on your site.


Or, why not use the fact that they signed up to your database a year ago as an excuse to send them an offer? Something along the lines of ‘We’ve been friends for a year - here’s a gift from us’ is a great example of how you can reward loyal customers and re-engage those that may not have shopped with you in a while. Subtlety is key, and often the smaller, more personal touches are the most powerful.

An obvious way to personalise your content is by including recommended offers and products. This could be something as simple as listing related blog posts or articles, or ensuring the userflow continuously directs your visitors to other important areas of your website. On the other hand, you could make the most of browsing data to showcase similar products and services.

Whether you upsell or cross-sell on your product pages, or wait until the customer reaches the checkout, your recommendations have to be relevant. If they’re not, you’ll just frustrate users and could risk losing them entirely. If they are relevant, then you’ll increase basket value and maximise conversions.


Although you can capture insights about your audience through their location and browsing behaviour, an easy way to avoid second-guessing and ensure you’re targeting the right people with the right content is to simply ask what they want to hear about. This is simple enough when it comes to email marketing, as you can ask them to tailor their preferences as soon as they sign up. But what about your website content?

, product page guru, Rishi Rawat ran an experiment with a client that was selling air purifiers. Instead of choosing between summarising the key information on the page or going into all the details about what the product is and how it works, he simply asked the audience ‘how much time do you have today?’ Those that chose ‘I have time’ were presented with the super-detailed version, while those that selected ‘I have two minutes’ saw a much more concise overview. The result? Conversions soared by 30%.

Just goes to show - you don’t ask, you don’t get!


4 Ways to Up Your Personalisation Game

You’ve finally reached the end of your rebrand project, which probably means you’ve nailed your brand guidelines, refreshed all your assets, and launched a shiny new website to match. But the hard work isn’t over yet.

Your new look (i.e. anything involving your new logo, font and colour palette) is handled by your design team. But how you sound concerns everyone from your customer service team and social media managers to the staff in your stores.

So how can you ensure your newly developed brand voice becomes embedded in your company culture and is used consistently across the business?

One of the best ways to create buy-in from your colleagues is to involve them in the creative process. It really pays to have different perspectives in the branding process - especially when it comes to painting an accurate picture of who you are as a brand and where you want to be. Plus, not only will they better understand why the change was necessary, but they’ll also feel valued and take ownership of this new brand voice.

A lot of us prefer learning by doing. So why not get hands-on and run brand voice workshops with individual teams? The interactive nature of a workshop means that the information is less likely to go in one ear and out the other. And by putting things into practice, you can run through real-life examples relating to specific teams and job roles, give constructive feedback if you need to, and ensure everyone feels confident using the new brand voice.

Make brand voice a prominent part of the workplace

Your brand voice guidelines shouldn’t be a list of dos and don’ts that’s hidden away in a branding folder - they should be easily accessible to everyone in the business. All your internal comms should already be written in your brand voice, but creating simple assets such as posters, branded slide docs, and even Slackbots notifications are an easy way to give your team everyday hints and reminders. 

 is a shining example of how to communicate brand voice - you can even read their tone of guidelines for yourself on their website.

Include training as part of the induction process

Formally factoring brand voice training into staff inductions is a great way to emphasise its importance in the business - particularly if the new employee is going to be customer-facing. However, this doesn’t mean making things too stiff or corporate. Simply make sure all your onboarding assets are written in your brand voice and run interactive sessions in the same way that you’d highlight any other important aspects of company culture.

Top tips for rolling out a new brand voice across your business

For many businesses, a blog is often an afterthought - especially if resources are stretched, you don’t have a copywriter, or simply lack confidence when it comes to creating content on behalf of your brand.

In an age of podcasting, video marketing, and apps such as Clubhouse, you may even be asking yourself ‘how relevant is blogging in 2022’? The answer is: very. Here’s why.

You don’t need big budgets for blogging. All you need are a handful of big ideas and somewhere you can talk about them. And because all you’re really paying for is a team member’s time, a blog can be a great way to easily add value to your marketing strategy.

But it’s not just your business you could be adding value to. If a prospect is sizing you up against a competitor, then using your blog to add value to your own products and services is a great way to stand out. Think about it: your customers don’t only just get your product; they gain access to a whole host of free content that will help them get the best out of what you’re selling. And at a time when everyone wants more for less, it’s things like this that can help you get ahead.

You can create a stronger brand image (and increase your credibility)

Our social feeds are now peppered with sponsored ads. Even when we don’t see that #ad hashtag in the corner of an Instagram Story, at a time when influencer marketing is everywhere, sometimes we can’t help thinking we’re being sold to. Your blog is a place where you can really showcase your personality and build an authentic brand story.

Unlike social posts (which can vanish from feeds after 24 hours) your blog is a library of content that stays live for as long as you want it to. And it's somewhere you can add posts that will gradually build your credibility and position your business as an industry leader. Yes you can add CTAs and use your blog to help drive sales and enquiries, but treat it more as a tool for starting conversations, creating communities, and showcasing your genuine self. Because when it comes down to it, there’s no better place to do that than your most valuable asset: your website.

You can incorporate more keywords into your site (and, in turn, improve SEO)

Blogs have historically been used to aid SEO. And although most businesses rely heavily on paid ads for driving traffic to their site, SEO isn’t dead. In fact, if a monthly blog post featuring all those great industry-focused keywords that Google wants to hear helps you climb the SERP, then as far as we’re concerned, developing a basic blog strategy is a quick win.

Plus, it’s important to remember that while paid ads appear at the top of the page, they aren’t always what users want to click on. Sure, Google has switched up its UI so that paid ads don’t stick out like a sore thumb as much as they used to, but it’s still clear which businesses have paid their way to the top. A lot of people will still navigate straight past them and start browsing through the organic results instead.

You can give yourself (and others) something to talk about

Having a bank of content to post about on social media is something any business dreams about - especially if you’re thin on the ground or simply don’t have the time or budget to invest in a dedicated social media department. A blog stocked full of great content is essential for any brand looking to incorporate more content marketing into its digital strategy.

However, evergreen blogs aren’t just great for filling up social calendars. They can feature in marketing emails and newsletters, be included in internal conversations with clients and prospects, and can even be repurposed into articles for industry publications. And every link you include to a blog post is another opportunity to drive traffic back to your site.

You can connect with other communities (not just customers)

It’s true that your blog can help new customers land on your site and encourage them to convert. But that isn’t (and shouldn't) be your primary goal. Your blog is a great place to link to other sites, build communities with similar businesses, and simply build brand awareness in your industry.

Word of mouth is a wonderful thing. And so if people have heard of you, connected with you, or been following you for a while, you’ll be high on their list of recommendations when the time comes.

Why having a blog on your website is more important than ever

The world of web design is changing all the time, and while some trends come and go, it can sometimes be all too obvious if your site is in need of a facelift. However, it’s not just how your site looks that’s important - an out-of-date website can also have a significant impact on traffic, SEO, and even revenue.


Here are 6 reasons why it may be time for a website redesign.

Your site isn’t mobile-friendly or responsive

Mobile-friendly sites are nothing new, but it’s now more important than ever that sites are mobile-first. Mobile phones are the device of choice and it's vital that the user experience reflects that. Non-responsive pages, poor user design, and broken mobile elements will only drive users away. And there’s a high chance that they may not come back.

If your website’s main focus is to generate sales and leads, and it’s failing to do just that, then something needs to change. Conduct some DIY testing on the journey to the check-out. Is it over-complicated or littered with obstacles? Or has a heat-mapping tool revealed that users are dropping off in the same place or struggling to reach key pages? If your user interface is impacting conversions, then it’s definitely worth a deep dive into the design to see how things can be improved.

All businesses have to start somewhere. But if your brand has evolved so much that your website no longer gives an accurate representation of who you are, then it’s time for a revamp. It’s generally expected that your website will showcase everything there is to know about your business. For many users, it will be the first interaction they have with your brand, so first impressions matter.

Your website traffic is consistently down

The amount of traffic reaching your site can have a lot to do with the design. If your site doesn’t meet the user’s needs in terms of content, then this will impact your organic rankings. Similarly, a dated site with poor user experience means high bounce rates. If you can’t capture and keep the attention of your users, it’s likely they’ll only remember you for the wrong reasons.

So much of our lives are spent online, so when it comes to user experience, we have high expectations. A slow, clunky user journey will just frustrate your users, and could even cause them to navigate away from your site entirely. Long loading times can also negatively impact SEO, so it pays to have a lightning-fast site that’s super easy to navigate.

It’s safe to say that you probably already keep a close eye on the competition. But if you find your website is no longer measuring up or your competitors are now streaks ahead in terms of what they’re offering, then a new site is definitely due. You may still have loyal customers on your side, but if a new user is comparing you against the alternatives, you want to come out on top.

6 signs that it’s time for a website redesign

The best way to think about the content on your website is that it could always be better. Here’s why reviewing, refreshing, and removing content should be high on your list if it isn’t already.

You’ll make your site easier to navigate

By taking a closer look at your analytics, you may find that there are pages on your site that simply aren’t being seen. You could have separate pages with details of your brand’s history, mission and key values, but are people reading them, or are they simply taking up space in your footer? Or, are there key pages that are missing from your site?

A KCC (kill, combine, create) exercise can help you to streamline your entire sitemap. By taking a closer look at page views and the quality of the content on your site, you may find that several pages can be consolidated into one (or even deleted entirely) to keep your site clean, tidy and easy to navigate. You may even find that there are opportunities to create new landing pages for traffic that’s coming from paid ads or Google.

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Let us take you further than you’ve ever been

Take it from our people people

How to maximise subscription-based sales (at a time when everyone's feeling the pinch)

Why 3PL is great for growing your e-commerce business across borders

Image CDNs, their benefits and how we use them

Shopify’s summer 2022 release: 10 of the best new features

Ericeira 2022: our biggest and best team trip yet

Landing page builders (and why your site needs one)

3 signs that it’s time to make changes to your visual branding

4 Ways to Up Your Personalisation Game

Top tips for rolling out a new brand voice across your business

Why having a blog on your website is more important than ever

6 signs that it’s time for a website redesign

Why you should be refreshing (or sometimes even removing) your old website content

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