DRIVING A 249% INCREASE IN UKBF’S SITE TRAFFIC WITH CONTENT AND EMAIL MARKETING
Brief
Online small business community UKBF wanted to increase website traffic and use content to showcase the strength of its membership offering.
Client
Services including content strategy, blog post writing and email newsletters were used to showcase current members, drive new memberships and reinforce UKBF’s authority on small businesses
THE CHALLENGE
UK Business Forums (UKBF) is a well-established online community for small business owners. Its forums were thriving, with thousands of active members posting regularly, but content on the site wasn’t delivering the same results.
UKBF’s team wanted the content to showcase members, drive membership sign-ups and reinforce UKBF's position as an authority on small businesses.
“Having recently acquired UKBF, we wanted to tap into Inkwell’s knowledge of marketing to small business owners. We’re happy to say the impact has been immediate, with a dramatic increase in email performance and uptick in the number of people reading our guides.”
— Rebecca Hill, CCO of Business Data Group, which owns UKBF
The newsletter features the most popular threads of that week to highlight the best of the community and drive engagement
THE PROCESS
Inkwell’s remit included the UKBF newsletter and we immediately looked at ways to improve the open rates and clicks through to the site. These included:
Experimenting with subject lines to increase open rates
Updating the layout to make it more visually appealing and scannable
Featuring audience-led content ideas
Featuring top threads to reward the community
Making the tone of voice more conversational and fun
We also identified a number of measures to improve the performance of content on the site:
Introducing long-form articles – taking a deep dive on certain subjects is great for search rankings. It also provides useful information for members, increasing dwell time, and positioning UKBF as an authoritative voice on business issues.
Featuring member interviews and comments in articles – this creates a stronger connection between the community and articles. Mentioning members’ businesses also provides community members with a reward for their involvement.
Using forum discussions to generate feature ideas – reflecting popular issues from the community in the content to ensure it’s relevant and useful.
Producing a range of different types of articles – including long-form guides, news pieces, listicles, interviews and member stories to appeal to different users.
Writing guides based on popular topics on the forums helped increase page views
THE RESULTS
In the first six months of the retainer, newsletter traffic to the website grew by 102%, demonstrating a significant increase in engagement and the value of the marketing channel.
Over the same time period, page views on the Guides section of the site increased by 249%.
Dwell times on a number of the most popular new long-form guides are over five minutes, demonstrating the value in content that has been well-researched and structured.
The top five performing articles include titles from a range of different types of content, reinforcing our idea that there is an appetite for variation.
“Inkwell have worked hard to support and advise us on our wider marketing and commercial strategy. It’s been great fun to work with the team and we’re proud to have made such an impact in just six months!”
— Rebecca Hill, CCO of Business Data Group, which owns UKBF
Work with inkwell
Want to reach small business owners with your next project? Get in touch with the Inkwell team today.