Pop Quiz! Direct Mail is: a) more expensive than email b) quaintly old-fashioned c) regaining popularity in B2B circles d) often overlooked as an effective way to reach customers and prospects. Answer: (e) all of the above. Yet many B2B marketers continue to be allergic to the idea of using… Read More
Category Archives: Installed Base Marketing
Getting the Most from Salesforce.com: A Conversation with David Taber
Salesforce.com is a dominant player in the CRM category and an integral part of many companies’ lead management, database marketing, and demand generation programs. Yet in my experience marketers often have a love-hate relationship with Salesforce, a tool originally designed for salespeople that now, like it or not, has become… Read More
When Emails Go Bad: A Lesson in How to Apologize
If you’ve been involved in email marketing for any length of time, no matter how diligent and prepared you are for every campaign, something somewhere at some point will go wrong. And when that happens, a very large number of people will receive a message from you that isn’t quite… Read More
TechValidate: Marketing Content that Writes Itself
What single hurdle keeps B2B marketers from achieving the best possible results from inbound marketing, social media, and lead nurturing? It’s content. (Or rather, it’s LACK of content.) Without a consistent stream of compelling, original, relevant information to offer, landing pages fail to convert visitors to leads, blogs wither, and… Read More
Generating Blog Traffic (and Leads) Using Email Subscriptions
Either by the time you read this (or, if not, soon thereafter) this blog will have undergone a design facelift, its first since we launched it two years ago in April 2007. The new design is in sync with a similar upgrade of the monthly bulletin that goes out to… Read More
How Often Should I Email My Database?
A client writes: “What’s best practice in terms of how many times per month you hit each key contact in your database?” This is becoming a common question, driven in part by the trend in B2B towards more proactive lead nurturing and the rapid adoption of marketing automation systems. Suddenly,… Read More
ConnectAndSell: Novel Solution for Increasing Sales Efficiency
If part of your lead generation or lead nurturing strategy involves outbound sales calls, then you already know one of the key metrics critical to sales productivity is connection rate – i.e. the percentage of dials that result in live conversations. Typical B2B connection rates range from 15 to 30… Read More