If you've heard it once, you've heard it a thousand times: subject lines matter when it comes to email marketing. Think of subject lines like the headline of a newspaper article. If it grabs you, you start to read. Over the past few months, the author collected subject lines from all sorts of senders, all based on how they grabbed him the second he saw them. What you'll see here is quick analysis of what he liked or despised. The hope is that after perusing this piece, you get a sense of what other marketers are doing and how you can be better, resulting in more opens, more views, and more purchases. [Read the full story] Marketing Articles: Most Recent

Viral marketing has been all the rage in recent years: Companies are intoxicated with the idea of creating the next video that spreads across the Internet and becomes a viral sensation. But for every successful viral effort there are countless attempts that totally miss the mark. Here's where David Meerman Scott comes in. Scott understands why ideas spread in a Web 2.0 world, and he educates his clients on why the "old school" rules of PR and marketing are totally irrelevant in a time of content-sharing on YouTube and Twitter. [Read the full story] Marketing Articles: Most Recent

With the growing significance of the Web as an integral part of the long B2B sales process, companies are more aware of the value of content: meaningful communications material that attracts and holds prospect attention. But... where will that content come from? It can (and should) come from you and your employees. [Read the full story] Marketing Articles: Most Recent

As a result of its online customer community, a company can get much more than basic product feedback. It gains deep insight into the needs of customers, and creates ever-greater customer loyalty by embracing customers as co-designers. Most importantly, the company goes directly to the source for product enhancements, pulling new innovations and ideas directly from the minds of the customers who use, buy, and recommend its products. This is the holy grail of customer-centered product design. Online customer communities can enable the connections, host the conversations, and facilitate the processes that make routine innovation possible. [Read the full story] Marketing Articles: Most Recent

We design our marketing campaigns for "rational" buyers. But do buyers ever act rationally? In a preview of his keynote at the MarketingProfs event next month, NY Times bestselling author and MIT Prof Dan Ariely talks about the irrational factors that influence buying decisions. [Read the full story] Marketing Articles: Most Recent

An engagement between a buyer and a seller begins with a single point of contact. It could be as a sale or an inquiry that, with the appropriate follow-up, can be converted into an ongoing experience for both the seller and the buyer. It is such an experience or set of experiences that create what we define as an engagement—or at least the potential of creating one. [Read the full story] Marketing Articles: Most Recent

As a marketing professional, you likely work in a specialized function that may feel like a silo in your company. But you're also best positioned to break down the walls between your function and others (like R&D, sales, finance, and so forth). It's not an easy task, but the following five tactics can help. [Read the full story] Marketing Articles: Most Recent

How can you build and steward a long-term customer relationship if you can't access your prospect in the first place? To reach those big fish takes creativity, perseverance, ingenuity, chutzpah, and, sometimes, just plain dumb luck. Here are five creative ideas that will get you in the front door. [Read the full story] Marketing Articles: Most Recent

Today's technology offers ample opportunities to start conversations with and among customers, fans, foes, competitors, and the press—any person or group who cares to listen and, perhaps, act on the messages received. By some estimates, 85% of the information companies collect is not in a form that they can access or analyze—it is unstructured. The Gartner Group reports unstructured data doubles every three months while seven million web pages are published every day. This cacophony presents the one of the biggest challenges companies face today. [Read the full story] Marketing Articles: Most Recent

HTML email marketing is now thriving and widely encouraged for its strong ROI and results. Pundits predict an ROI of $45.65 for every dollar spent on email marketing in 2008. Email was also voted best marketing vehicle for customer retention, according to Jupiter Research. HTML email has come a long way, but there is one major pain point that remains: compatibility across all major email accounts. [Read the full story] Marketing Articles: Most Recent

One of the biggest challenges that marketing departments face is producing marketing tools that actually get used by the sales team. You want to create marketing tools that help sell products, not collateral that sits on a shelf. So how do you do it? How do you create a marketing tool that not only gets used but also can reinforce your marketing messaging so that everyone is speaking the same language? [Read the full story] Marketing Articles: Most Recent

Blogging takes advances in marketing one step further by allowing businesses to initiate conversations with their audience. Gaining a better understanding of your customers allows you to more effectively and efficiently market to them. This, of course, lowers your marketing costs. [Read the full story] Marketing Articles: Most Recent

You may or may not be using the basic segmentation strategy of RFM (recency, frequency, monetary): dividing your email mailing list into a few buckets based on recency in ordering or visitation to the site, the number of times they've ordered or visited the site, and the lifetime spend. But here's a better approach to segmentation. [Read the full story] Marketing Articles: Most Recent

As web marketers seek new ways to boost conversion rates and improve the site experience of their visitors, interest in multivariate testing is on a feverish rise. But those unfamiliar with the techniques are often unclear about where to start, or how to ensure success. [Read the full story] Marketing Articles: Most Recent

Marketers must continually fight the temptation of executing random, disconnected lead-generation activities to prospects. Success today requires marketers to apply the discipline of campaign development in order to establish a relevant, timely dialog with the target audience. [Read the full story] Marketing Articles: Most Recent

Online users expect more today from Web sites, and competition is fierce. Marketers should be considering how to change their sites to keep up with customer expectations of the Web, and to increase conversions and enhance the brand experience. In fact, all companies with public-facing Web sites may soon be challenged with a redesign. There is opportunity for marketers to take the lessons of customer-centricity and put them to work to optimize customer relationships online. [Read the full story] Marketing Articles: Most Recent

Email marketers must keep in mind that a consumer who decides to opt in to the brand's email channel is likely a fan of that brand. Do not lose those consumers by making the following mistakes. [Read the full story] Marketing Articles: Most Recent

Nearly all search engines use spiders (also known as robots, their original name) to go out and scour the Web looking for Web pages. These search engine spiders then bring the data back to be indexed by the engine. Since roughly 1996, individual meta commands have been used on individual Web pages to modify how search engine spiders behave. The most useful of these commands are fairly universal and respected by almost all search engines. Here are some of the more popular ones and reasons you might want to use them (or not). [Read the full story] Marketing Articles: Most Recent

Web analytics tools and pay per click reporting features are becoming more sophisticated, offering savvy marketers vital insights into what's working, what's not, and what needs more effort. But there is so much data available that it can become difficult to determine what to look at and which to ignore. TMI (or Too Much Information) becomes both a blessing and a curse. [Read the full story] Marketing Articles: Most Recent

When Bob Lutz of GM or Jonathan Schwartz of Sun set up their blogs, they probably didn't worry too much about the review with Legal. But how does, say, a midlevel corporate marketer or product manager set out to create an "official" blog with the sanction of Legal? [Read the full story] Marketing Articles: Most Recent

There are plenty of reasons for email marketers to pay attention to their unsubscribes. But if we read a bit between the lines, we might find some value by learning both to reduce the number of unsubscribes from our campaigns and to better engage those who stay with us. [Read the full story] Marketing Articles: Most Recent

We may all be tightening our belts a bit more soon. As a result, our marketing budgets will be under even more scrutiny, and marketing professionals will be held even more accountable for the money they invest. The pressure for marketing to demonstrate the contribution and value it is making will increase... yes, even more. [Read the full story] Marketing Articles: Most Recent

Ever sigh to yourself, "There just aren't enough hours in the day!"? You're not alone. Most marketers are overloaded and under-resourced. But it doesn't have to be that way. And managing your time more efficiently isn't the answer. Nor is simply delegating. You also need to be discerning about what you take on. In fact, when was the last time you prioritized your "to-do" list based on what will help further your marketing career instead of merely what will get you through your week? [Read the full story] Marketing Articles: Most Recent

If you hadn't paid much attention to title tags until now, but you implemented the basic concepts covered in part one of this series, you are already well on your way to creating a better user experience as well as a more-optimized search experience. Of course, most of us aren't satisfied with just the basics. [Read the full story] Marketing Articles: Most Recent

Mobile technology continues to develop. The number of consumers with mobile devices capable of retrieving and viewing email continues to increase rapidly. The early adopters of the Blackberry have given way, in numbers at least, to those using what are fast becoming fully functional internet-ready devices. With multiple mobile platforms on the market and mobile phone companies vying for the sale of not only the devices but also the data plans that supply the bandwidth, these "mini-messengers" are in the hands of millions of consumers. Could your email be more mobile friendly? [Read the full story] Marketing Articles: Most Recent

For personalized gifts retailer Personal Solutions, matching up complementary items for a monthly catalog was one thing. Manually serving up suitable recommendations and keeping up with seasonal inventories for real time online sales without an automated process was another.[Read the full story]
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Wacom's digital pens and their capabilities are well-known in the business world. To continue growing, however, the company needed to address the consumer market. Here's how it effectively reached a new fan community. [Read the full story]
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In late 2006, Dollar's business was slowing at New York's LaGuardia airport. With some outside help, the local marketing manager developed an email survey, then used the answers to pinpoint Dollar's weaknesses. The resulting efficiencies helped Dollar grow its parking-related business by 24%.[Read the full story]
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AutoAnything.com, which sells custom-made automotive accessories and performance parts, designed its homepage almost a decade ago. But as e-commerce has become more competitive, the site needed a strategy. After testing different versions of landing pages, AutoAnything.com increased landing-page conversions by up to 12%.[Read the full story]
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From establishing your company as an expert to providing a forum for testing new products, and much more, blogs can be useful, cheap and effective. Want to give it a go? This 65-page Bible of Blogging will get you started. [Download] Marketing Downloads: Most Recent

This Guide explores the three stages of effective marketing, and how you can determine which approaches will give you the greatest bang for your buck. [Download] Marketing Downloads: Most Recent

MarketingProfs research provides B2B marketers guidance for making budget and media mix allocations by exploring the issues and emerging trends in 2008. [Download] Marketing Downloads: Most Recent

Find out what's new, what's hot and what's not in B2B marketing trends. [Download] Marketing Downloads: Most Recent

Get the most up-to-date info on email marketing. Step-by-step guides and answers to all those annoying questions about contradicting metrics. [Download] Marketing Downloads: Most Recent

"This is a truth of the Internet," writes Seth Godin in a post at his eponymous blog. "When traffic comes to your site without focused intent, it bounces. [Seventy-five percent] of all unfocused visitors leave within three seconds. Any site, anywhere, anytime." Godin calls it "silly... [Read the full story]
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If you visit a new site called wowOwow.com —or, formally, The Women on the Web—you'll find a guided tour hosted by none other than venerable gossip columnist Liz Smith. She begins by explaining why a group of longtime friends—including Candice Bergen, Lily Tomlin and... [Read the full story]
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They email, they blog, they text, they chat. And now, they twitter. Yikes. Twitter.com offers a real-time service for "friends, family, and co-workers" to communicate what they're doing (in 140 characters or less)—"between emails and phone calls." Great. Do you really need to add this to your... [Read the full story]
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Samples are often touted as effective tools that give customers a taste of what your product will be like, and increase the likelihood of their buying it in the future. But what makes the consumer's experience with samples a positive one? According to researchers, it's nothing more... [Read the full story]
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On a recent visit to J. Crew, Jackie Huba asked the salesperson if a dress made her hips look big. The frank response, "Yes, it does," was followed with a swift recommendation for a more flattering alternative. In a post at the Church of the... [Read the full story]
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