Photo credit: Images_of_Money. I’m cheap. There. said it. Some people don’t like the word  cheap. They’d rather be  frugal or  thrifty. Not me. Those are $2 words when a ten-cent word like  cheap fits me just fine. don’t spend money on anything unless I think it’s important. more and more, I think this is how we need to approach marketing. Gone are the days of big marketing budgets. don’t advise clients to spend lots of money–certainly not on advertising, but not on anything else either, unless they know why it is important. Or heavy advertising. MORE >>

You strive to improve the performance of your email marketing. You test exhaustively. You pore over every benchmark and research study. Subject lines, call to action, offer, design, images. You examine everything in your bid for more opens, more clicks, more leads and more sales. These recent statistics and anecdotes point to a clear way to increase email open and click rates, but read on before you decide to test these approaches. Personalizing email subject lines dramatically increased open rates, according to this post from Eloqua. Saying Thank You improves open rates and click rates. MORE >>

On days when I have nothing else to be cranky about, I sometimes fuss at how business-to-business software vendors hijacked the term “marketing automation” despite its long and relatively honorable history describing systems for consumer marketing. Oracle ’s recent agreement to purchase Eloqua reinflamed that wound, since much of the commentary ignored Oracle’s extensive existing suite of consumer marketing systems. More productively, the deal also shifted discussion from components within a marketing suite to where marketing systems fit within the larger world of unified customer management. MORE >>

Heatmaps are great for analyzing the behavior of your visitors. They can lead to insights you can’t find using other methods, which can greatly increase your conversion rate. Heatmaps are roughly divided between mousetracking heatmaps and eyetracking heatmaps. The big majority of companies use mousetracking heatmaps because of it’s price effectiveness. Let’s look into key findings from different heatmap tests. One of the main differences between mouse- and eyetracking heatmaps is that when using mouse tracking, you are getting data from your actual visitors. Next, some findings: 1. vs. 1.7 MORE >>

One of the biggest complaints about LinkedIn is that it takes too much time. Here are three things you can do, in ten minutes or less a week, to begin to engage with your connections on LinkedIn. Answer invitations to connect and reply to direct messages. It’s to your advantage to connect strategically to more quality people. When someone asks you to connect, ignore them if you don’t know them or accept the invitation. Send a message thanking those you accept for the invitation. Reply promptly to messages on LinkedIn. These are like emails, but from people you have pre-approved! MORE >>