At Fetch, we understand that finding perfect social media images, blog or website images can be a challenge, especially if professional photography isn’t your forte. Too often, we settle for mundane, overused stock images that not only lack originality but also come with a hefty price tag. The good news? There’s a whole range of websites out there that offer an expansive collection of stunning, free images, and we’re here to guide you through them.

Before we get going though, lets take a quick look at the main image licensing and copyright types so you can be sure to keep within the law.

Creative Commons

Creative Commons, a nonprofit entity, facilitates the sharing and utilisation of creativity and knowledge through legal tools offered at no cost. They provide a range of licenses, from those permitting unrestricted use without the need for attribution, to more restrictive ones that limit usage types and disallow modifications.

Public Domain Works

Public domain works refer to materials where copyright protections are no longer in place, have been relinquished, or never applied.

Royalty-Free Images

Contrary to what the name suggests, royalty-free images often aren’t free of charge. Generally, they require a one-time payment, granting the user permission to use the image.

Non-Copyright Images

Non-copyright images are free from any copyright restrictions. These images are available for use by anyone and are considered communal property.

Here’s our top recommendations for websites where you can find a variety of engaging, free social media images and more:

Unsplash:
Renowned for its vast collection and free use license. A great source for social media images.

Pixabay:
Offers over 320,000 photos, art illustrations, and vectors, all under the Creative Commons license.

Canva:
Known for its design platform, Canva also boasts 1.7 million free stock photos, perfect for designing social media banners or flyers with added flair.

Pexels:
A reliable source of high-quality, Creative Commons Zero licensed images, Pexels is a go-to for enhancing your online presence.

Burst (by Shopify):
Burst provides high-definition, public domain images ideal for both personal and commercial use.

Reshot:
This platform offers unique, free stock photos, catering especially to freelancers and startups.

Gratisography:
For whimsical and humorous images, Gratisography is your destination, offering free images without copyright restrictions.

Free Images:
With over 300,000 images under its own license, Free Images offers a diverse range of visuals.

Life of Pix:
High-quality, public domain photographs perfect for social media and websites.

Kaboompics:
Unique for its color search feature, Kaboompics is ideal for creating aesthetically pleasing content.

Shutterstock:
While known for its vast paid library, Shutterstock also offers free images, enriching your visual content.

Getty Images:
Offers a limited range of free images, suitable for non-commercial use via their Embed feature.

iStock:
A part of Getty Images, iStock provides a selection of free stock images.

Freepik:
A valuable resource for creators, offering millions of free assets from illustrations to vectors.

Picjumbo:
Adds fresh, high-quality images daily across a wide range of topics, ideal for bloggers and web designers looking for up-to-date visuals.

Skitterphoto:
Run by three Dutch photographers, this site offers a range of free photos and encourages contributions from other photographers.

Freerange:
A diverse library of images covering various topics, updated daily with photos from in-house and external photographers.

StockSnap:
Known for its high-resolution images and user-friendly search function, StockSnap.io adds new photos weekly.

Picography:
A popular choice for finding free images across numerous categories, suitable for various business needs.

Shot Stash:
A creative professional’s haven, offering 7,000 images under a Creative Commons license, free of restrictions.

Libreshot:
Features images by photographer Martin Vorel, covering categories like architecture, business, nature, and technology, available for commercial and private use without attribution.

The abundance of websites offering free social media images and more means you’ll never be short on choice, and armed with the above websites you’ll be well-equipped to easily find compelling and engaging free images that align perfectly with your marketing goals. Need help with your content marketing and more? Get in contact with us today.

The post 21 Websites with free, high-quality images in 2024 appeared first on Fetch Social Media.

When customers are constantly bombarded with notifications, it can be challenging to capture their inbox attention. However, there are ways to make your email marketing campaign stand out and be more effective, whether through the subject line, thank you pages, or through the content of the email itself.

To help, we’ve compiled five steps for success when launching an email marketing campaign. Utilising these tips will help cultivate a more personal relationship between you and your customers, grabbing their attention without being invasive. It will also help build trust, assuring that your customers stick around and look forward to the emails they receive from you.

1. Think of an email marketing campaign as a two-way conversation

Do you enjoy chatting with people who just go on and on about how great their business is going without asking anything about you? Or would you prefer hanging out with people who ask about you and share valuable and interesting information based on your responses?

An email marketing campaign follows the same principle. It’s not a place to brag about your business; instead, it’s an opportunity to provide useful, compelling content to your prospects and clients based on their interests. Think of it as a value exchange: you give readers important and interesting tips, stories and special offers in exchange for their time.

It’s also a place to show your personality. Be conversational with your reader instead of speaking in “marketing-ese” or in a dry “press release” tone. Send new opt-ins a welcome email that asks them to whitelist your email address, thanks them for subscribing and explains what they can expect to get from you in the future. Your emails should be written with openness and a friendly tone while remaining professional and aligned with your brand voice.

When you send engagingly written, valuable emails, your subscribers will be more likely to open and read them, which boosts your deliverability for the future.

2. Use authentic and transparent subject lines

Respect your readers’ intelligence; don’t try to trick them with deceptive subject lines. Click-baited opens will make your readers lose faith in you and will eventually lead them to stop opening your emails altogether, making your messages more likely to end up in the spam folder.

This doesn’t mean you should be boring. Tantalise the reader — but do it with clever copy:

• Keep it short. Keep your subject lines between 6-10 words for easiest readability.
• Make it personal. Swap generic greetings for personalised ones to better catch your readers’ attention.
• Offer a solution. An email subject line that offers tips or solutions will draw attention and be more appreciated.
• Build curiosity. Open-ended questions and clever subject lines open up a conversation and get you noticed by scanning readers.

More tips for getting your email opened:

• Use numbers to make a point or statement.
• Encourage action with a clear CTA.
• Include the occasional emoji.

Avoid using these spam content filter triggers:

• Sale.
• Free.
• Advertisement.
• $$$$$.
• ALL CAPS.
• Excessive punctuation.
• Too many emojis.

3. Test, test, test your email marketing campaign

There’s always room to improve your email marketing campaign, and one of the best ways to do that is through continuous split testing — pitting two or more versions of your email message against each other to see which performs better.

This gives you valuable insight into the email campaign’s performance while allowing you to increase engagement, opt-ins, and conversions by improving the quality of your final product. It all comes down to learning what your market wants to see in their inbox and adapting.

Split test everything: send dates and times, subject lines and preheaders, email templates, design and body copy. 

4. Segment emails based on customer data

Your list is one of your most valuable assets, as it contains everything your contacts have told you about themselves since day one. Between behavioral and demographic information gained in your CRM, you’ve got your finger on the pulse of each contact’s engagement with your business. Use the data to segment your list and send tailored content to each group.

By separating your list into groups based on their interests, you open up the opportunity to personalise your email marketing campaign and, in turn, significantly improve your email marketing results.

74% of marketers attribute targeted personalisation as the reason for increased customer engagement.

Here are a few types of segmented emails you might send to your list:

• Send an email about a sale at your bricks-and-mortar store to locals only.
• Send your top customers VIP sale offers and customer appreciation messages.
• Send cart abandoners and other hot leads special incentives to start shopping with you.

5. Optimise your thank you page

Take advantage of every opportunity to set the stage for future engagement with new email subscribers. Here are some ways to optimise your thank you page and increase the value of your opt-in process:

• Use a merge field to personalise your thank you message.
• Tell them how excited you are that they’ve joined your list and that you’re grateful they took the time to sign up.
• Give them a preview of the awesome content they’ll be receiving from you and the frequency with which they’ll receive it.
• Include social sharing buttons.
• Ask them to whitelist your sender address.

If you need help with improving your email marketing strategy and campaign effectiveness, contact us today.

The post Email marketing campaign – 5 steps for success appeared first on Fetch Social Media.

On-page SEO doesn’t need to be complex. It’s just about giving the reader — and search engines — what they want

If a reader lands on your page, it’s because both they and their search engine have decided that your page best fits their needs. On-page SEO is about making sure that your page pleases both the bots and the people looking at your web page. This requires a mixture of quality page design and quality page content.

Let’s take a quick look at both!

On-page SEO Checklist: Page Design

Title tags
Does your page have a punchy, attention-grabbing title which is fewer than 580 pixels long and contains your target keyword?

URL
Does the URL of your page explain what the page is about to both humans and search engines?

Alt-text and descriptions
Do all of your images have relevant alt-text and descriptions? Where possible, do they contain keywords?

Meta description
Does the meta description for your page grab people’s attention, contain a keyword (where possible) and consist of fewer than 1840 pixels?

Site speed
Is the website running as fast as it possibly can? People can be a lot more impatient than you might think!

Mobile-friendly
More people use mobile than desktop. In fact, this has been the case since way back in 2016. So, does the website work as well on mobile as it does on desktop?

On-page SEO Checklist: Page Content

Headings
Does your page contain headings which break up the text into easily digestible chunks and (where possible) contain your keyword?

Sentences
Does your page contain a mix of longer and shorter sentences? Are there some sentences which are too long? Are there some sentences which are too short? According to Yoast, more than 20 words is too long for a sentence. However, take this information with a pinch of salt. Long sentences are not inherently evil, but too many of them can confuse your reader.#

Paragraphs
Does your page contain a mixture of longer and shorter paragraphs? Are there some paragraphs which are too long? Are there some paragraphs which are too short?

Clarity
Will your page content clearly and concisely satisfy the desire of your reader? In other words, have you delivered what your title and headings promised, without waffling?

Keywords
Does your page naturally contain the target keywords? If not, ask yourself if your page is actually about something else.

Internal and external links
Where relevant, does your page link to other pages on your website? Where relevant, does your page link to sources beyond your website?#

Length
Does your page contain enough information? Without waffling, is it over 600 words? If not, ask yourself what extra information needs to be added, or whether this page is worth making at all.

And lastly…

On-page SEO doesn’t need to be complicated, but it does need to be done right. Need help? Check out more about our search engine optimisation services today.

The post On-page SEO Checklist appeared first on Fetch Social Media.

Did you know that email marketing is the number one tool for customer engagement? Email actually has the highest ROI of any marketing channel which makes getting email marketing design crucial.

In this blog we look at how you can get amazing results when you design and structure your email campaigns correctly.

The importance of email marketing design

First, lets look at why email marketing design is so important.

More than 70% of businesses use email to communicate with customers, either through newsletters, promotional messages, or just transactional emails. Since your customers are getting dozens of messages each day, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to stand out.

While it’s your email subject line which dictates whether your client will open your message, the design of the email determines whether you’ll gain engagement again in the future.

Everything from your choice of typography to the formatting of your emails can determine what your customers think and feel about you. With this in mind, here are some top tips for your next campaign.

1. Have a goal

Every message sent in an email marketing campaign needs a distinct purpose. Some emails are transactional, thanking your customer for making a purchase or letting them know when they can expect an item to be delivered. Others are promotional, intended to advertise a product or service.

Knowing the purpose of each email will help you to choose the correct design. For instance, welcome emails are great for grabbing your customer’s expectation at the start of an email campaign and setting expectations.

They have a 91.4% open rate, and they let your audience know what they have to look forward to.

A welcome email should be straight to the point and provide your customer with useful information about your service or company. A promotional email highlights some of your latest products or deals based on the segment of your audience you’re sending it to.

2. Get your email structure right

When you’re perfecting your email campaign design, formatting and structure are crucial. Research shows the average attention span of an adult falls somewhere around 8 seconds. You only have a small opportunity to capture your customer’s interest and keep it. Text-heavy email campaigns are rarely the best choice, unless you’re delivering an important message, or sending a welcome email.

Consider using a “reverse pyramid” structure, to format your email in a way to draws the eye and encourages action. At the very top of your email, you use a header to instantly grab your customer’s attention with an offer of value. After this, you can include an image or video, followed by a small paragraph of informative text.

At the bottom of the email campaign design, you add a CTA button in contrasting colors, which your customer can click on to move to the next stage of the journey.

Though you don’t have to follow the exact same structure for every email, it’s best to find a way of pulling your reader’s eyes down the page. Images and carefully formatted text are great for this.

3. Get the email marketing content right

There are few things more important than the right content in email marketing design. When your customer opens a message, they should immediately see information tailor-made to their interests. According to studies, using segmented lists to send targeted email campaign designs to different customers leads to a 760% increase in email revenue.

For instance, if you identify yourself as a male when you sign up for the RipCurl newsletter, you’ll get information about their top-selling products for men.

Remember, it’s not just what you say with email marketing – but how you say it too. Your content should clearly showcase your company’s unique voice. You’ll also need to ensure the text, buttons, graphics, and videos in your email work on every platform. Your messages should be easy to read on any screen.

4. Highlight your brand in email marketing design

Email marketing, just like any kind of advertising, is a chance to showcase your unique brand personality. You’ve already taken the time to create a set of brand guidelines which include your chosen colours, logo design, tone of voice, and so on. Ensure all of the components of your brand shine through perfectly in your emails too.

Color psychology makes a huge impact on modern audiences. Most of the time, you’ll stick to your brand colours, with contrasting shades to draw attention to CTA buttons and links.

At certain times, however, you may need to adjust your colour strategy slightly. For instance, greens and reds may make more sense to your audience during the holiday season. You could also tone down your colours when you’re sending more serious messages.

5. Design your email for the appropriate platform

Making the correct impact with your email campaign design means ensuring your customers can access and enjoy your messages on any platform. Remember, today’s customers read their emails more often on mobile devices than ever before.

The good news is most email marketing tools come with pre-designed templates you can use which are already mobile responsive. These templates will automatically look incredible on any platform, so you don’t have to worry about text being harder to read on a smaller screen.

When designing your emails for mobile, think about the kind of features which are going to be essential for your audience in this environment. Should your buttons be bigger, so they’re easier to tap? Should any slideshows in your emails have swipe functionality? Also, make sure your videos and animations don’t play automatically when an email opens on a smartphone? This can reduce the risk of your email consuming too much bandwidth.

6. Optimise your CTA

Call to action buttons (CTA) are one of the most important components of email marketing design. When you’re sending messages to your target audience, you’re also nurturing them towards a sale. Your CTA buttons tell your clients which steps they need to take to progress on their buying journey.

Your CTA needs to be engaging, appealing, and easy to see. Focus on the benefits your customers are going to enjoy when they click on this button. A single call to action can increase your chances of sales by 1617%.

To get the most out of your CTA, make sure:

• It’s clear and easy to see
• Customers can easily tap or click on it
• The copy highlights the benefit to the customer
• The button sends the customer to the correct landing page

7. Use images correctly in all email designs

Finally, branded emails would be pretty boring if they didn’t have any images or graphics to show off. The pictures in your email help to pull your customers down the page, split up segments of text, and even demonstrate the benefits of your product or service.

Ideally, you’ll want custom brand photos to have the best impact on your audience. If you can’t afford these, then you can look into some of the free stock photos available online. Just be sure you stay away from any images which seem obviously fake.

Remember, like all parts of your email marketing design, your photos are a representation of your brand. Choose images to match the personality you want to create. Where possible, you can also experiment with things like animations, looping clips, video, and gifs. These are all becoming increasingly common in email marketing, and they’re easier to access thanks to email marketing software.

Ready?

Email marketing is easily one of the most valuable tools you can access when you’re nurturing customers and building a memorable brand. Although, like most things in your marketing strategy, it’s important to get the your email design and content right. Need help? Get in contact with the Advocate team today and let us show you how we’re helping brands grow through effective email marketing and automation.

The post Email marketing design – and why it’s important appeared first on Fetch Social Media.