As the year draws to a close it seems an obvious time to reflect back on the past 12 months. And oh, what a year it’s been for 1973!

We surpassed our own expectations, gaining large international clients, building strong partnerships with marketing agencies and we’ve expanded our team to support our growing business. In addition we’ve also been recognised for our expertise in email marketing speaking at leading industry events and delivering client webinars to train, engage and motivate client supply chains in the intricacies of delivering effective emails.

It has definitely been our most progressive year to date, with even better things to come in 2017. Watch this space!

  Sharing our skills and knowledge

At 1973 we continually push the boundaries within email marketing and we’re delighted that other industry experts recognise our enthusiasm and unique skills. During this year’s annual Litmus conference, we were asked to present one or our leading edge projects to over 200 developers to demonstrate how an interactive shopping cart experience can be achieved within an email. This received excellent feedback and we looking forward to being involved again in 2017 to share more ideas and insights into the capabilities this platform offers.

2016 also saw 2 exciting trips to the States to work on various large rebrands and product launches with some of our key clients. Working at a strategic level, we provided advice and guidance on messaging, design, email promotions, nurture tracks, landing pages and lead scoring within Eloqua. We implemented the technical stuff too!  Designing and building assets to enable full tracking and reporting, whilst ensuring campaigns were delivered smoothly, on time and to budget.

  Projects we’re most proud of…

We take great pride in everything we do and we’d like to share 3 of our favourites from this year. Not only were they fun to plan, design and build, they also achieved a fantastic response.

Based on the popular TV show ‘Say Yes to the Dress’ we designed an email to make hard drives more appealing to a female audience. Through careful use of colour and imagery we created a romantic feel and further enhanced it by including an interactive shopping experience. This enabled products to be saved to a shopping cart before transferring the customer to the website to finalise their purchase. Take a look.

We’re made up to have been part of an award winning campaign, the ‘Holiday Smooch Booth’. This interactive photo booth required us to develop a bespoke application to allow users to customise photos and share them on social media. Using PHP, MySQL and various JavaScript libraries, we were able to make it responsive across all devices including mobile, tablet and desktop so  everyone could join in the fun. The engagement and interaction was amazing and due to its success, campaigns of a similar nature will be rolled out again next year.

One of the most exhilarating projects we have been involved with is Seagate’s ‘Gaming Heroes’.  Still running, this campaign requires high levels of interaction from the target audience. To achieve this an array of visually engaging marketing resources have been created, both on and offline, including social media, POS print, emails and landing pages, all of which promote a weekly competition where gamers upload their video clips to win a prize. There will also be a grand prize draw for the overall winner. Want to enter? Click here….

  Our growing client base

We are thrilled to be working with such a diverse client base of large organisations and smaller SMEs; and this year has been exceptional. Gaining clients from all around the globe and working in close partnership with other agencies, we have enjoy taking on new challenges utilising our knowledge and skills to deliver digital marketing campaigns through platforms such as Eloqua and Marketo.

Having the opportunity to explore new ways of working is our thing. We love collaborating with clients and creating something special, which not only looks good and offers an excellent customer experience, but delivers against goals and objectives.

  Embracing technology

To streamline our approach and ensure our clients receive the best service, we have been developing our in-house processes and procedures utilising advanced technologies to speed up efficiencies and guarantee best practice. Through Salesforce we are now operating an effective CRM system to centralise customer communications and interactions as well as integrating it with other leading edge technologies. We are also working towards becoming a Marketo Partner to offer a broader email service to our clients, which sits nicely alongside Eloqua.

  Our expanding team

This year has welcomed 4 new team members. Alison Mizen has joined us in an account management / marketing manager capacity, guiding our internal marketing strategy as well as supporting client campaigns. Cheryl Keates and Justin Treharne have enhanced the creativity of our design team bringing news skills to graphic design and animation, and Glen Smith has joined our developers coding complex and innovative emails to ‘wow’ our customers.

Over the coming weeks and months we will be expanding the team further. The next step is to recruit another enthusiastic and highly motivated developer, then from here we will be bringing in more account managers and designers to enable us to continue to offer a quality and personal service to our clients.

  Coming up in the New Year…

Keep an eye out for a string of webinars we will be involved with in the first quarter. On the 7th Feb, Email on Acid have kindly invited us to share insight into workflows for delivering effective email campaigns. We will also be running a series of our own webinars, looking at the fundamentals of email marketing (7th March) and how to push the boundaries (30th March) to create something really exceptional.

  Thank You!

We would like to take this opportunity to thank all our clients, blog readers and newsletter subscribers for all the continued support and positive feedback we have received this year. The future is very bright and exciting for us and we want to continue our journey with you alongside.

Have a fabulous festive break and we look forward to sharing more tips and tricks with you in 2017!