6 simple techniques to build business relationships through email marketing

Even though email marketing continues to be a core business-to-business (B2B) communication for sales and marketing teams, the market continues to grow from a solely email marketing approach to that of integrated marketing communication.

Rather than using email as a means in which to provide one-way communication the goal is provide marketers with the ability to track, build relationships and manage digital campaigns whilst monitoring a flow of leads - known as Marketing Automation.

Successful marketing automation campaigns consist of three core elements: 1. Email marketing 2. Lead generation 3. An effective marketing database. In this article we're going to look at some basic techniques to build B2B relationships through email. Join our free B2B Email marketing webcast for more details and examples. …

The tech and tools to keep your Contact Centre at the cutting edge

Cloud Computing and social platforms may be the IT trends dominating the contact centre landscape, but there are a host of other technologies that are helping businesses drive value from their call centres. While Cloud-based infrastructure is the fastest growing area in the call centre industry - doubling in size over the next two years according to DMG and social media is being wrestled from the hands of the marketing department to support customers over new channels, Contact Centre Managers are also at varying stages along the adoption curve of a number of other disruptive technologies.

Technologies for the Contact Centre

MyCustomer.com spoke with some of the leading experts in the contact centre industry to discuss what technologies you would find within leading-edge call centres of today and that could be…

Which tests are important to your mobile App's success

The success of your app relies on thorough testing and Customer Experience Analytics to reveal the friction points in the mobile user experience. As Kirk Knoernschild and Sean Kenefick, Gartner Analysts put it: 'Delivering quality mobile applications requires that organizations have access to a wide array of devices and perform many types of tests. To fulfill these needs, organizations must use several testing solutions'.   With so much competition for mobile apps. The apps that are left standing tall throughout it all are the ones who undergo thorough testing. Your mobile app strategy needs to intertwine fluidly with a testing strategy. This is not web testing on a desktop with a few different Operating Systems. These are platforms, different devices and different markets; Among other things of course.

Mobile Testing

In order to create a comprehensive mobile strategy, you must include various elements for testing as well as network infrastructure. You…

Which processes and tools does it take to make Inbound Marketing effective?

Companies are still trying to understand and make the business case to focus on Inbound Marketing, to secure resources for content or educate others on the difference between Inbound vs Outbound marketing. We thought this infographic from Salesforce Pardot sheds some light onto this with survey findings summarised from HubSpot's survey. For example, 92% of companies who blog multiple times a day, report it is key to acquiring customers.  It also highlights well the difference between inbound and outbound marketing and free tools in the marketplace across blogging, SEO, analytics, social and webinars. Interested in ideas for your campaigns, read Rene Power's 10 examples of …

Managing the Content Marketing Avalanche

Managing Content Marketing can often feel like getting caught in a relentless wave that you can’t fight against, so when speaking at the #B2Bconf from B2B Marketing managing this challenge is what I chose as my theme. I selected 10 key areas to help with planning in the year ahead based on the latest research and my experiences of content marketing. Most who work within B2B Marketing have bought into the power of content marketing to create leads, indeed any marketer who has worked in B2B industries for some time will tell you that they practised Content Marketing before Joe Pulizzi and the Content Marketing Institute created the category. In this post I’ll give a brief summary and recommendations based on the research and trends I covered in my talk with links to more detail. My Slideshare is embedded at the end of this post.

Trend 1: A planned,…

5 examples of how brands are using Snapchat to engage younger audiences

Have you heard of the photo messaging service Snapchat? You likely will have if you're a teenager or watch how teenagers use their smartphones. But if not, you may not have heard of it, since it's just 2 years since it launched. But it's definitely one to watch, if your brand needs to keep up with the social media engagement of the youth audience. These statistics on the popularity and potential of Snapchat speak for themselves:

350 million snaps per day shared via Snapchat (on a par with Facebook daily uploads)

Valuation of $3.6 billion sought (on a par with Pinterest)

9 percent of all call phone users in the US now use Snapchat according to Pew, which compares to 18% for Instagram

Facebook recently trying to…

Video in Email: benefits, myths and best practices

This infographic from Email Monks and Email on Acid showcases some interesting stats on video email. It may surprise you that HTML5 Video is now supported by 58% of email clients. Our new infographic also reviews some of the myths of using video in email marketing and summarises some best practices. Some of the many business advantages of using video in your email campaign are: Stand out from the crowd: Using video in email gives you the first mover advantage and helps you stand out from the competition. Increased ROI: Research has shown that video email receives a better response in terms of open rates and very high click-through rates compared to traditional emails. Better Branding: Using video email leads to increased website traffic, increased conversion rate, brand awareness, and more referrals in turn. Matches Human Touch: Videos…

Content marketing Survey on B2B marketing

The Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs, undertook a survey sponsored by Brightcove, to ask over 1,200 B2B Marketers in the US the key marketing tactics from last year and to discuss their focus for 2014.

 'Heading into 2014, many B2B marketers are feeling more confident than ever about the effectiveness of their content marketing strategies,' said Joe Pulizzi, founder of the Content Marketing Institute and author of Epic Content Marketing. 'Though the industry is still in the early adoption phase of content marketing, it's clear that many are seeing success and are continuing to increase their tactics and devote more resources, and budgets, to producing great content experiences.'

Key content marketing survey findings included:

93% of B2B organisations are using content-based tactics and 73% are producing more content than the previous year.86% have someone who oversees content marketing strategy30%…

Who are your audience on YouTube and what turns them on or off?

For any serious video content creator, YouTube Analytics (YTA) is an essential tool. Using YTA regularly is the only way to assess the performance of your YouTube channel and to see any significant changes or patterns in your audiences’ behaviour. The insights that YTA provides are designed to highlight to creators what they need to do to make better videos. If you are approaching your video output strategically, YTA is your means to regularly assessing the performance of your videos and using those insights to constantly improve your content and audience strategies.

This is an introduction to the main features of YouTube Analytics. The guide is divided into two sections; firstly, using YTA to help you build your audience and secondly, using YTA to improve audience engagement.

SECTION A - Building an audience

1 Who are your viewers?

The Demographics feature in…

Overcome your 'oops' with agile content marketing

All was well in the best of possible worlds...

July 2011. We were all excited: we had just launched phase one of our first major online content marketing campaign. We released on time and everything was all well in the world. So we continued preparing the content for phase two, and we released it as per the tactical schedule. Still with beaming smiles on our faces. Two months after the launch of the campaign, we thought: 'I know this is a long-term campaign and we’ve got many more phases to come, but how is it performing so far?'

Oops!

We had everything in place: the content and the promotion, and the page views coming in. Except we’d forgotten to instrument some of the calls-to-action and hyperlinks on the landing pages to see how visitors were behaving on the site.

Oops!

We didn’t have all the data we needed to…