Buyers don't care about your product or service. They just care about the problems and opportunities they face and how your expertise can help them. Accordingly, Marketing and Sales share a common goal: earning the right to connect with buyers. more

Most companies must deal with clients. Unfortunately, some clients can be extremely difficult. To help you identify and handle challenging clients, Ciplex created this infographic highlighting the most common difficult-client types. more

With the prevalence of the smartphone, email has become a virtually "always on" channel. It can lift retention, increase brand favorability, and create more payers out of players (or subscribers or members or prospects...). more

Working through a six-month rebranding effort, we learned seven key lessons we deemed worthwhile to share in the hope they can help others who might face similar challenges. more

Shoppers plan to spend $92-$96 billion online during the 2012 holiday season. To help brands understand how to reach those online shoppers, Maxymiser created this infographic of five online-shopper personas. more

When Hurricane Sandy hit the East Coast, millions lost electricity, heat, and water. But just a few days later, many companies promoting to those millions had—cluelessly—gone back to business as usual. Here is a list for brands that "surged" and brands that "sank" in Sandy's aftermath. more

Among the brands listed on the Interbrand Top 100, more than nine in ten (95%) use Twitter and nearly one in four (23%) use it as a customer service platform (i.e., they have a Twitter handle dedicated to customer service), according to a new report by Simply Measured. more

BusinessNext Social conducted a study of CMOs in the Fortune 100 to see which of them were most socially active in 2012. Surprisingly, only one in five Fortune 100 top-level marketing/communications executives have an active public presence on social networks, the analysis found. more

Online video is a highly engaging and versatile tool for B2B marketing and lead generation, including tradeshow marketing. This brief case study shares how a B2B technology company used online video to increase in-person tradeshow meetings with targeted decision makers by 218%. more

Have you ever wondered whether a Facebook contest will work for your B2B company? Here are some helpful tips to consider before creating a Facebook contest. more

Facebook's Open Graph is a formidable force that is changing the way brands and consumers interact. As 2013 approaches, more brands will try to quantify the ROI of their Facebook marketing investments, and the Open Graph provides significant opportunities to do just that. more

Having a strong online presence is essential in today's economy, and an excellent way to ensure such a presence is to establish a blog that's connected to your company website. more

Retailers are planning now to deal with the oncoming consumer-oriented buying frenzy that is Black Friday. Here are eight tips for retailers on preparing a checkout line for the crowds and excitement of an event filled with great opportunity—and great risk. more

Over the past year, America's top brands have made few improvements in how they use online branded communities to reach their customers: A dwindling proportion is using a strategic approach to social engagement in 2012, and most have recorded static or falling engagement activity levels, according to a report released ... more

We're not talking "Welcome back John" and certainly not "Dear Valued Customer." Real personalization goes much deeper than that today. Call it Personalization 2.0: it means the delivering the right content to the right person at the right time on the right device, using the right channel, published on the ... more

A note to our readers: MarketingProfs has decided to cease publication of the Get to the Po!nt (GTTP) newsletters, and this issue of the Email Marketing GTTP is the last you'll be receiving. We hope you continue to enjoy our daily newsletter, MarketingProfs Today, and our best-of-the-week newsletter, MarketingProfs This Week. "According to a study by Litmus, ... more

Your customers see the world through a lens of comparisons to meaningful reference points. That has repercussions for the design, measurement, and analysis of customer experiences—and, by extension, customer loyalty. more

Not Apple, not General Motors, not Microsoft. If we're talking the really big brands currently dominating American consciousness, we're talking politics: the 2012 US presidential election. And the relative strengths and weaknesses of the competing campaigns point to some interesting lessons for brands. more

"If you check your subscriber lists, you'll probably find contacts lingering who should have been dealt with long ago," says Denise Keller in an article at MarketingProfs. "Instead of sitting in limbo, uncertain whether to save or dump email addresses, you need to decide which contacts you should keep and ... more

A note to our readers: MarketingProfs has decided to cease publication of the Get to the Po!nt (GTTP) newsletters, and this issue of the Social Media GTTP is the last you'll be receiving. We hope you continue to enjoy our daily newsletter, MarketingProfs Today, and our best-of-the-week newsletter, MarketingProfs This Week. Facebook ... more

Engendering trust in your company and understanding what your customers consider great service are vital to getting testimonials from them. Here's how we marketers can make it easy to get those customer testimonials. more

Social media is a powerful thing, which is why it can wreak havoc if misused or misdirected. Here are five rules for building users' trust, interesting them in your business, and getting them to talk among themselves about it. more

To find out what times during the day are best for email opens and click-throughs, GetResponse analyzed 21 million messages sent from US accounts during the first quarter of 2012. The study found that 23.63% of all email opens occur within the first hour after delivery. Within the second hour ... more

"The key to being a good consultant of any kind is to ask the right questions," Michael Teitelbaum notes in a recent post at Marketing Trenches. "I've seen that the best sales and account managers I have worked with treat initial interactions with prospective clients as fact-finding missions rather than ... more

The most fundamental tenet of professional services marketing is trust. How can you expect potential clients to retain you if they don't trust you? You can't. Until recently, only one path led to trust between you and clients; now, another path is available to you. more