One change that dramatically improved B2B marketing results

Slice of a TractorYou can’t rely on your own data.

Your prospects spend the vast majority of their time doing everything except opening your emails, visiting your site or viewing your content.

Despite the magic of marketing automation and the ability to collect information on every mouse movement on every page of our sites, we only get a tiny window into the lives of our prospects. And that tiny window can turn out to be very misleading. [Read more…]

Should You Celebrate Email Unsubscribes?

Celebrate Email UnsubscribesEvery time someone unsubscribes from my mailing list it stings a little bit.

To get on my mailing list, you not only had to sign up, you probably had to dig the Mailchimp confirmation out of your spam folder to confirm your opt-in! That was an active decision.

If you then unsubscribe, it means I didn’t meet the expectations you had. And that stings. If you are a blogger, I’m sure you can relate.

But actually, if you unsubscribe today, I missed your expectations long ago. I just didn’t know it until now. [Read more…]

Why Marketing Benchmarks Are Bogus

B2B Email MarketingWe like to measure ourselves against something. We want to know that we are doing good work.

Is my my email click rate good? Is my search conversion rate where it should be? Is my brand lift above average?

Ummm, but what are you comparing yourself too? A number in some book or website, based on the results of businesses nothing like yours?

Stop. Now. [Read more…]

Email Best Practice or Recipe for Disaster?

Email TipsYou strive to improve the performance of your email marketing. You test exhaustively. You pore over every benchmark and research study.

Subject lines, call to action, offer, design, images. You examine everything in your bid for more opens, more clicks, more leads and more sales.

These recent statistics and anecdotes point to a clear way to increase email open and click rates, but read on before you decide to test these approaches. [Read more…]

B2B Email Lists: How Publishers Use (or Abuse) Your Email

In B2B marketing, and particularly in enterprise technology marketing, publishers lean heavily on email lists for lead generation programs, including whitepaper and webcast promotions.

B2B email lists also still command high rental rates ($300+ CPMs are very common). Both directly or indirectly, email continues to be an important vehicle for B2B publishers.

But when you rent an email list, purchase an ad in an email newsletter or run a lead generation program with a publisher, do you know how much the publisher has used (or abused) their email list? [Read more…]

3 Ways to Fuel Your Marketing Automation Cycle with Data

Marketing automation is built on the premise of delivering the right communication to the right person at the right time.

Successfully delivering the right content at the right time hinges on data. Data that is provided explicitly by prospects, and more importantly, data that is provided implicitly through their engagement with your communications and content.

This is the virtuous cycle behind the communications in marketing automation. When any element of the cycle falls short, the entire cycle breaks. [Read more…]

How Not to Manage Email Unsubscribes [4 Awful Examples]

Unsubscribing should be easy!

Let’s face it, email is convenient, but sometimes email marketing sucks. Today’s business buyers are flooded with email they do not want and it seems cannot get rid of.

The problem is, publishers and marketers rely heavily on email. In order to keep their subscriber counts high and continue getting their message out through email, they make unsubscribing an ardous process.

Here are four examples of unsubscribe process that tell your audience you don’t care what they want, as long as they stay on your email list. [Read more…]