Posts by: Molly Hoffmeister

The Seven Deadly Sins of Email Deliverability [CHECKLIST]

Molly Hoffmeister — May 21, 2013 — Leave a comment

The modern-day marketer has more tasks to juggle than ever before — not to mention the fifty billion best practices to keep in mind while performing each of these tasks. But if there’s one thing that today’s marketers cannot afford to lose sight of amidst the mayhem, it’s email deliverability rates.

Email deliverability may not be as fun to talk about as creative marketing strategies like social media and video marketing, but email is the heart of your online marketing efforts and the “Report as Spam” button is an ever-present threat. Even without intentionally spamming recipients, you could be making small [...]

In Email Marketing

CRM & Marketing Automation 101 [Checklist]

Molly Hoffmeister — May 14, 2013 — Leave a comment

As marketers (and particularly as those who skew towards the creative end of the spectrum), we’re perpetually fascinated by the psychology behind what we do: what motivates our audience, what grabs their interest, and how we can better reach them. But there are times in our jobs when we need to stop philosophizing and theorizing and take a more tactical, hands-on approach — and integrating your CRM with your marketing automation platform is one of those times.

Kathryn Honderd, Pardot’s Client Services Manager (and a strong advocate of to-do lists and tactical approaches), gave a webinar on this topic recently [...]

In CRM, Ideas

Where Video and Content Marketing Meet

Molly Hoffmeister — May 10, 2013 — Leave a comment

What’s the first thing you think of when you hear the term “video marketing”?

If it’s an Old Spice commercial, the Dollar Shave Club, or another viral video with millions of hits, you’re not alone. But what if we told you that video marketing doesn’t have to be hilarious and it doesn’t have to go viral? In fact, video can be an integral and inexpensive part of your content marketing strategy — and our friends Chris Savage and Ezra Fishman of Wistia showed us how in yesterday’s webinar. Let’s take another look at where video and content marketing meet.

First, consider [...]

In Content Marketing

88 Acronyms for Online Marketers

Molly Hoffmeister — May 2, 2013 — 1 Comment

We’ve all been there.

You’re sitting in a meeting and someone throws out a 3-letter acronym, and you spend the next five minutes nodding along while secretly racking your brain and searching for context clues as to what was just abbreviated.

Whether it’s social media jargon, developer speak, or SEO-related (see? we couldn’t even keep acronyms out of our explanation), the digital marketing industry is littered with enough 3, 4, and even 7-letter acronyms to make your head spin. So if you find yourself regularly jotting down letters in the margins of your meeting notes to look up later, we’ve attempted [...]

In Online Marketing

Why Marketers Can’t Afford to Ignore Usability

Molly Hoffmeister — April 25, 2013 — 1 Comment

There’s no question that the world of online marketing has become an increasingly visual place. The demand for infographics is booming, promotional emails are graphics-heavy, and websites aren’t complete without swanky animations and interactive details. For better or worse, aesthetics have become a crucial consideration in most marketing efforts — so much so that a poor choice in font style or a website that looks like it’s stuck in early 2000s could severely hurt your brand’s credibility.

But there’s one thing that should never be sacrificed for the sake of aesthetics, one factor of design that marketers cannot afford [...]

In Ideas

Is Long Content King?

Molly Hoffmeister — April 22, 2013 — 4 Comments

More than once on this blog, we’ve sung the praises of writing short, simple and to-the-point blog posts. And the case for brevity is a strong one: today’s marketers are juggling more tasks than ever before; the last thing anyone wants to do is sift through thousands of words to find the information they need.

So when we stumbled across a study by Neil Patel claiming that the longer the blog post, the better, we had to take a second look. After noticing some interesting patterns in conversion rates in an A/B test of his website’s homepage, Patel set out [...]

In Content Marketing

3 (More) Unconventional Uses of Drip Campaigns

Molly Hoffmeister — April 19, 2013 — 1 Comment

Automated drip nurturing is often one of the most alluring features of marketing automation for potential buyers, and understandably so. The concept of allowing cold leads that may otherwise have been lost to gradually educate themselves to a sales-ready state — well, it’s the perfect meeting place for email and inbound marketing.

But as we’ve talked about before, the drip marketing capabilities that marketing automation offers can be utilized for far more than just nurturing cold leads. Let’s take a look at a few ways that you can use drips to enhance the experience of your current customers.

Using Drips [...]

In Drip Campaigns

The Three Flaws with the Funnel

Molly Hoffmeister — April 11, 2013 — 3 Comments

Is the sales funnel dead?

Last quarter, Forrester and Pardot teamed up for a webinar to discuss this hotly debated question. “Actions and Outcomes that Elevate Leads to Revenue” covers a recent report from Forrester on the state of the current sales cycle, the need for a defined and optimized marketing process, and how automation can help.

The conclusion? Although the sales funnel is not dead, it has evolved into an almost unrecognizable state. Let’s take a look at three ways in which the sales funnel has evolved.

The “numbers game” is over.

Although the sales funnel may not [...]

In Ideas

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