Paul

What Email Marketing Metrics Miss

In email marketing, clicks tend to dominate the reporting and analysis. It’s easy to compare the click rate from one email blast to another and use the data to make decisions about content, distribution frequency, list segmenting, and other issues. But can relying on click data instead of the most important metric lead to bad decision-making?

Exhibit at Trade Shows – Or Not?

Deciding whether to exhibit at your key trade shows, scale back, or ditch in-person events entirely? Ask these 10 questions to help decide whether exhibiting at trade shows makes sense.

Stellar Service Gets the Sale

We now have to consider delivering stellar service a selling point that has become just as important as the benefits of buying the latest machine or new technology – especially as people seem grateful for barely adequate customer service.

Operating Manuals: An Overlooked Marketing Opportunity

Clearly, most manufacturers understand the importance of a first impression to begin the sales process. Yet what happens after the sale when it’s time to run the new machine and the new customer opens the operating manual?

Are these outdated advertising techniques killing your response?

Material Handling & Logistics magazine recently posted this gallery of full-page ads from the 1960s and three key differences from today’s advertising immediately jumped out. See what they are and how you can use the design elements of the 60s to develop effective creative today.

How to adjust B2B advertising for viewing on phones

Digital magazines are getting more views than ever so the value of the B2B advertising space has increased accordingly but it hardly matters if the ad’s look and message fail to translate to the phone. To get advertising noticed on a small screen, consider these practical ideas you and your ad agency can implement today.

Beware Your E-Commerce Return Policy

Big companies like Amazon.com can absorb returned items without much consequence. But for small businesses on Shopify, Squarespace, Wix or another e-commerce platform, every sale calls for a celebration and every return a funeral. These examples and considerations offer help in developing an e-commerce return policy that works for your store.

Before Generating Sales Leads, Get Your Ducks In A Row

Most sales and marketing pros focus on generating sales leads. “Just get people to the Website!” or “Just make the phones ring and our sales people can take it from there,” are common demands of marketing teams. Then the advertising and PR hit the magazines, the PPC keyword ad program tops the search results, the companion direct mail – email drops. Did the campaign work?
This company will never know for sure because the free download and contact form on their Web site weren’t working. Just how many hot prospects submitted the form and never heard back they’ll never know. In the zeal to take an aggressive approach to boosting sales, it’s easy to overlook the importance of having the back end setup to handle the response.

Here are five back end items to consider before launching your new lead generation program:

Tradeshows Reach Same People as Trademags, Btw

Tradeshows were thought to be dead circa 2002 yet nobody told the thousands of manufacturers and distributors that continue to invest in exhibit space. In fact, tradeshow attendance has been impressively strong for years. But it struck me as rather odd that some of the industrial marketing professionals who make sure to budget handsomely to exhibit at a few key tradeshows every year bristle at the idea of advertising in the key trade magazines that reach the exact same people they’re trying to reach at the tradeshows.