3 Email List Segments That Help Maximize Your Inbound Marketing

Is your email list building strategy part of your inbound marketing?

It should be.

Email is a separate inbound marketing channel and more effective channel for lead nurturing. Your inbound marketing strategy encompasses lead generation, nurturing, and conversion. So, how good are your email lists?

Don’t just spray and pray — blasting emails and hoping your subscribers love it. Instead, if you segment your list using these three categories, you will almost immediately see an increase in the conversion rate, an inbound marketing goal. [Read more…]

3 Tips for CASL-Compliant Email List Management

The Canadian Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL) – a definite step towards better consumer rights – shook small to mid-sized enterprises not only in Toronto but the entire country. After all, inbound marketing employs a number of channels that use commercial electronic messages (CEMs), which fall under the new CASL regulations.

One inbound marketing effort that will need to be kept CASL-compliant is your email marketing. Email list management, in particular, can now be trickier than you’re used to. Luckily, you can take practical steps to not only manage your local Toronto email list for better inbound marketing but also stay compliant to all of CASL’s rules.

Email Marketing - Inbound Marketing

Photo courtesy of Danard Vincente(CC Attribution)

Never Purchase or Rent a List

Seriously, with the advent of spam, this was a shady thing to do even before CASL anyway. While it is true that the grey of renting or purchasing lists presented a lot of opportunities for small businesses in principle, it simply isn’t an inbound marketing best practice.

With CASL’s nuanced rules on consent and the renewal of consent, it’s imperative that if you still buy or rent email lists, you stop. Before you droop your shoulders and bow your head, however, know that this is in fact an opportunity to learn the actual best practices in email list building,  which are more sustainable and profitable in the long run anyway. If you haven’t already invested in a third party email management company such as HubSpotMailChimp or Constant Contact now is the time. 

CASL: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

Are you ready and fully compliant for Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation?

CASL was born in a bid to join the rest of the G8 in helping legislate how businesses and entities send commercial electronic messages (CEMs) throughout Canada. CASL covers all electronic communications between brands and receivers save for fax. But what does the new law mean for your inbound marketing efforts here in Toronto or throughout the country?

Good: Transparency & Global Initiative

Trust lies at the core of any relationship between brand and consumer, and spam is a huge detriment to trust.  Spam can lead to the downfall of an inbound marketing strategy. And this means CASL is, at its core, good for business.

Nurture Your Current Customer Base With Dedicated Email Sends

Lead nurturing via email is an essential part of inbound marketing. Connecting with your current customer base is one of the most rewarding investments. The question is are you maximizing that opportunity?

Here’s a 5-point check list for dedicated email sends:

Nurturing Your Current Customer Base with Dedicated Email Sends
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Testing 1, 2, 3: the forgotten key to your Internet marketing success

Testing is the hidden key to your Internet marketing success

I’ve worked on a lot of online marketing initiatives over the past decade or so, working with everyone from 1-person law firms, to big marketing agencies, to some of Canada’s largest corporations. And many have been very successful. But even the most successful campaigns could have been better.

Here’s where I see marketers and agencies missing a huge opportunity for better results from their Internet marketing.

[Read more…]

Internet Marketing Tactics To Turn Sales Reps into Rockstars

Let’s be honest.

In most companies, the Sales and Marketing teams don’t really work well together.

Sales reps don’t loop back with Marketing to give feedback on new insights they’ve discovered concerning what the client or customer’s needs are, which would help improve Internet marketing efforts.

On the other hand, Sales will say Marketing doesn’t do a great job helping sales generate and nurture leads.

[Read more…]

Lead Nurturing: Your Online Marketing Secret Weapon

Nurture and believe

On this blog, we talk a lot about generating new traffic to your business’ Web site and converting that traffic into qualified leads that help your business grow.

But we haven’t talked much – yet – about what to do once you’ve got those leads. How do you use Internet marketing to help progressively introduce those leads to the value that your product or service provides and to support them towards deciding to buy from you?

That’s what we’re going to talk about today.

[Read more…]

5 ways to make your online marketing really work

Internet marketing word cloud box package

Last time, I wrote about how, as owner of an online marketing company, I get to see first hand how many agencies – and many a digital agency to boot – fail with their campaigns because they fail to understand how the Internet has changed the buying process. (You can read the article here).

Now I want to talk about a new model of marketing that wins by connecting with customers’ new ways of choosing and buying.

[Read more…]

Web site opt-in: generate converts; not just conversions

The music industry is well known, now, for riding the short bus to the digital future. But where the major labels have been failing, some independent artists have been excelling at online marketing, and often even seasoned digital marketers can learn a thing or two from them.

[Read more…]

The perils of rented/bought lists

On LinkedIn’s Digital Marketing group, Karen Whitaker asked:

Can anyone recommend some inexpensive mailing software that offers full reporting (opens, clicks, forwards, soft and hard bounces, replies etc) that does allow purchased lists to be used?

Karen, if — and I repeat, IF — you can conclusively verify that the purchased lists are compiled using double opt-in with full disclosure you may — MAY — be able to convince a full service mail deployment provider to work with you. These would include ThinData (http://www.ThinData.com ) or Cheetah Mail ( http://www.cheetahmail.com/ ).

Most self-service providers like MailChimp, Constant Contact and Vertical Response won’t work with purchased lists because most of those lists are not compiled according to the legal and ethical guidelines for our industry.

Self-serve providers don’t have a business model that allows them to work one-on-one to identify the rare exceptions to the rule, whereas the higher-cost full-service providers do.

All of which should be a caution against using bought or rented lists — they’re mostly crap.

As an alternative, I often recommend partnering with list owners — publishers, companies in adjacent verticals — and having them send messages to their fully qualified lists introducing you to their community. That way you’re doing true permission-based relationship marketing.