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…]

The Golden Rule for Marketing

Golden RuleMarketers are looking for a way to get attention, to get their message across and ultimately to get an advantage over their competitors.

Marketing has become a bad word to many. As a marketer you may even cringe in certain settings when you are asked what you do. Unfortunately, you know the feelings toward marketing is sometimes justified. Even some of the best brands fall for the worst marketing tactics at times. [Read more…]

B2B Email List Guide: Buying, Renting or Building Your List

B2B Email List OptionsWhether you want to promote your upcoming webcast, send a multi-channel campaign, or give your telemarketing team a list of contacts to call down on, it starts with a list.

So should you rent, buy or build an email list? How much do the different options cost and when are they most appropriate? This guide will get you started. [Read more…]

6 Best Tactics for B2B Lead Generation

Fireworks and Ferris WheelYou need to generate leads, right? If you are a B2B marketer, particularly one focused on making a complex sale in a large enterprise, the answer is almost certainly a resounding yes.

The B2B lead generation landscape has changed tremendously in the last decade. Today, B2B lead generation relies heavily on digital marketing and this list reflects that switch.

To make this list, tactics must be cost effective, measurable and scalable. In addition, they need to offer sufficient targeting for the broader marketing efforts of many mid-sized or large enterprise marketers. [Read more…]

Outbound Marketing for Modern B2B Marketers

Inbound MarketingInbound marketing may be the hot topic for B2B marketers today, but today’s big B2B inbound marketers are all active outbound marketers as well.

So how do you pair your outbound marketing activity with your inbound marketing?

Here are six ways outbound marketing can support and scale your inbound marketing efforts and some of the channels that are appropriate for each one. [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…]

3 Questions For When Mobile is the First Screen

my iPhone family pileMobile devices are expected to be the primary mode of internet access in the next three years. This is worth saying again: Your company’s digital experience will be primarily via mobile devices.

The current response from marketing falls woefully short of where they need to be in a few short months.

Discussions of mobile marketing quickly turn to apps, mobile sites and how to make content mobile-friendly. Even when embraced, this response is eerily similar to early websites, which extended brochures to the web by merely converting to HTML and adding hyperlinks. [Read more…]

Five Signs Your Content Marketing is an Illusion

do not look at the center...Content Marketing should provide valuable information to your market at large and to prospects at each stage of the buying process. Ideally, your content is easily discovered, naturally making you and your content a resource.

But how do people find your content? Is it through search and peer recommendations (which are increasingly connected), or will they only find it in their inbox?

Five Signs of Illusion

Here are the signs [Read more…]

Part One: Marketing Measurement and Pissing People Off

You know the line “you manage what you measure”. So do you consider what matters but is not measured? As digital marketers, we tend to measure the positives. Even negative measurements are rarely negative, they are just small positive measurements — low response rates or conversion rates.

Over the last 10 to 12 years, a number of online tactics have come and gone. A few of these delivered great results on paper, blinding marketers to the negative impacts that were not measured. Here are three activities which such negative impact that people fought back, outright disabling marketing tactics. [Read more…]

Email List Rental: Approach with Caution

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The email list rental business is suffering, and no wonder. EmailExpert posted “We WILL Share Your Email Address” a few weeks ago, after receiving an email from Kodak, modifying the original permission received and notifying recipients that Kodak will begin sharing email addresses with other Kodak companies.

I was floored when I first read this. Kodak had a complete disregard for its relationship with the customer. Unfortunately, I understood how they landed there. Email is probably one of the most cost-effective channels for Kodak, and this allowed Kodak to quickly expand its email marketing. While all major marketers should understand email today, email is Kodak’s marketing, not their core business.

A few days ago, I was shocked to find, in my spam folder, a similar email [Read more…]