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email marketing certification

HubSpot Email Marketing Certification: What You Need To Know

HubSpot is back at it again with another marketing certification. This time it’s on email marketing. In this article, I’ll tell you who can benefit from getting this certification, what the classes contain and what you need to do to pass it.

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Sales and marketing knights fighting the lead nurturing battle.

The Essential Guide To Successful B2B Lead Nurturing in 2016

You’ve created content, promoted it on social media, optimized it for search and earned some leads, but now what? How the heck can you end the age old war between sales and marketing and get them to work together to turn those cold leads into paying customers?

You guessed it:… Lead nurturing.

Lead nurturing is THE way to close the gap and actually see results from your inbound marketing. Good lead nurturing will get your leads more engaged, qualified, and save you tons of time and money.

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Drip. Drip. Splash!

Lead Nurturing Drip Campaigns Need Splash

The marketing phrase “drip campaign” sounds so weak and wimpy.

Unfortunately, it’s often an accurate description. We’ve all been on the receiving end of what seems like a non-stop series of marketing emails from someone trying to tell or sell us something.

As part of an Inbound Marketing methodology, digital drip campaigns are initiated by a website visitor that converts on an offer for content. By their online behavior and completing a form, they have self-identified and opted-in for more information. They have now triggered a sequence of personalized emails that will be sent to them automatically as part of a direct marketing work flow.

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Email Marketing: The B2B Marketer's Loyal Hound

Email Marketing: The B2B Marketer’s Loyal Hound

There a lot of different content mediums these days. Every couple of months or so we hear about a new social platform or the demise of an old one. Us marketers are always chomping at the bit to learn the newest trend, tool or trick so that we can say we’re at the forefront of the societal shift that these new content mediums are creating.

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Blogs, Vlogs, Podcasts and Email Marketing Pros and Cons

Blogs, Vlogs, Newsletters and Podcasts: B2B Marketing Pros and Cons

Are you strapped for time? Don’t have the resources to crank out content on a blog, podcast and a complex workflow of lead nurturing emails? Great! This article is for you.

There are a lot of methods of packaging great b2b marketing content: newsletters, blogs, podcasts, youtube channels, Periscope, Twitter and a million more. Blogs, vlogs, podcasts and newsletters are in a category of their own because of their ability to serve as a foundation for a content strategy. There are many businesses right now that use one of these four methods as their primary method for publishing their content.

In this article I will explore the roles of these different kinds of content, their different strengths and weaknesses and hopefully help you to know what’s best for your business.

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A B2B Marketer wondering through a CRM jungle

How To Keep Your CRM From Growing Into A Mysterious Jungle Wilderness

If your organization has been around for more than a year and you haven’t started to clean out your contact database you’re way behind.

If you don’t go through your CRM to organize and clean, it will soon turn into a wild jungle full of mysterious mystical information that is no use to you or your company.

People’s relationship with your company is always shifting. Here are some common reasons that CRM hygiene is important:

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email marketing maze

5 Steps That Lead to Relevant Emails and Better B2B Inbound Marketing

Social media and content marketing often get the press, but with these 5 steps, your email marketing will be a relevant message that drives relationships.

Many of our customers dismiss email marketing because it has been done or is dead. That can be true, if you’re just delivering a sales message with little relevance. Just be aware that 62% of adult US internet users read and send emails daily, and over half of them check it first thing every morning.

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A/B Testing In Progress

A/B Testing Fundamentals in B2B Marketing

A/B testing is a great, economical way to learn more about what motivates your target audience’’s buying behavior. Hopefully everyone is already utilizing A/B testing as a part of their B2B marketing strategy, but if not then this blog is intended to demonstrate how easy it can be.

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scrubbing your lists

B2B Data Hygiene: It Pays to Scrub Your Lists

Any B2B marketer who has initiated an email or direct mail campaign lately knows that business marketing data degrades quickly. Bounce rates are hitting the ceiling. Direct mail return rates are shockingly wasteful. Data master Dun & Bradstreet says the current level of data quality costs U.S. business $600 billion per year in printing, mailing costs and staff overhead alone.

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Marketing Automation - Lead Nurturing

B2B Marketing Automation for the Inbound Challenged – Part 2: Lead Nurturing

Last week I explored the process of lead scoring, and today I’ll focus on the next step of the marketing automation process: lead nurturing. Once your lead has been appropriately scored and has permitted you to communicate with them, the nurturing process begins. Without a proper lead nurturing program, any lead scoring efforts will prove worthless. In Brian Carroll’s article Lead Nurturing – Ripening the Ripe Bananas, he says that up to 80% of marketing expenditures on lead generation are wasted due to lack of commitment and discipline. Try to put yourself in your leads’ shoes. What kind of attention and information would you want from a prospective vendor? Many buyers look for qualities like trust and credibility. Be sure to provide valuable information that will validate you as a credible source. Make it apparent that you are the best solution to their problem by giving them valuable, accurate information.

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