Recently Marketing Sherpa held their 2017 Sherpa Summit.  Marketing Sherpa Summits talk a great deal about customer-first or customer-centric marketing.  Customer-centric marketing is an approach that focuses on providing a positive customer experience throughout the buyer's journey.  This approach enhances the buyer's experience, promotes sales, and grows customer loyalty by promoting a positive customer-first environment.  Email marketing is a prime area where you can put the needs and concerns of the buyer first.  So at this year's summit, customer-centric email marketing was a big topic.

Email marketing is still a powerful tool for driving engagement and nurturing leads.  It is, however, getting more and more competitive. In addition, over time techniques evolve and best practices change.  We found an article at Hubspot, written by Sophia Bernazzani, that will bring you up to date with email marketing best practices for 2017.  The article shares some email wisdom from Hubspot Postmaster and Email Engineering Director, Tom Monaghan.  Tom spoke at Inbound last year about which email marketing strategies to keep, which to stop, and which to begin using, in order to achieve continued growth for 2017.  His set of guidelines will help you keep your email marketing efforts on track this year.

Digital marketing contains many elements including SEO, social media, content, email, and analytics.  In order to get the best return on investment or ROI, you need a comprehensive digital strategy that can bring all these elements together in the right way.  The infographic below explains what a digital marketing strategy is, why you need one, and the 7 steps to building one.

Today is National Pi Day. Not peach, blueberry or apple, but the math pi---the 3.14 or the 22/7 kind that you learned about somewhere along the way. If you are still stuck in yesteryear when math wasn't seen as a cool endeavor, math is now super cool and Pi Day is now a thing. There are a lot of great websites devoted to Pi Day, schools hold special math events and there's even a rap video about Pi.

The more you know about Pi, the more interesting it gets. Did you know everyone's birthday month and day can be found in Pi? Albert Einstein was born on March 14th? The curiosities of Pi abound and so do the stories surrounding Pi.

This combination of being global, outside of politics, intimate through personal experience of a shared education and universal truth, makes Pi a marketing goldmine. While many brands are trying to find these common grounds from which to make personal connections to individuals, it seems there are too few "safe zones" that we can utilize to connect people together.

The smart brands that can see the value of Pi Day and connect it with their brands are winning out. I have had several offers in my inbox today that all have leveraged Pi Day for special offers and a way to cut through the email clutter that now is the norm for the email user.

One of my particular favorites is from Restaurant.com who uses the snappy headline of "Pi Day Deals in Your Radius". The preview text then goes on to offer $15 certificates for only $3.14 and urges me to have Pi Day My Way.

We are now living in a digital world.  Today consumers spend a good deal of their time online.  It is where they go to search for information and products.  Consumers now research, find, and purchase on the web.  This is why organizations need a comprehensive, omni-channel, digital ecosystem.  In order for marketers to increase leads and expand their reach they need an inter-connected digital strategy that is capable of the following things:

The percentage of organizations who have adopted a marketing automation solution has risen sharply over the last few years.  Marketers are discovering that implementing marketing automation simplifies their strategies and improves the outcome of their campaigns.  For those marketers who have yet to jump on the automation bandwagon we have found an article, written by Mike Madden at Marketo, that expains a few of the benefits of marketing automation.  In the article Mike lists 3 features of marketing automation that have changed his life for the better.  These 3 features were key to allowing him to optimise his workflows, improve his productivity, and increase his ability to run marketing campaigns that scale.  In this article Mike not only lists these 3 key features but also gives specifics on why they are so life changing.