Digital marketing is a cost effective way to promote and grow your organization.  With so many consumers online these days, it's important to have a strong presence there.  The infographic below is a simple guide for successful online marketing.

Welcome emails can be used for more than just a friendly greeting.  Organizations can use this type of email as an opportunity to guide subscribers into their world.  They can be used to set expectations, provide education, highlight services and product features, or point out discounts and offers.  Welcome emails set the stage for what a customer can expect from an organization.  They also outperform promotional mailings. Welcome emails have 4 times higher open rates and 5 times higher click-through rates than promotional emails.  Yet close to 70% of marketers are still not incorporating them into their customer aquistition program.  Our partner Bluehornet, has created a guide of best practices for building a welcome email campaign.  Download "A Digital Marketers Guide-Welcome Email Campaign" and learn about the benefits of using welcome emails to help increase your digital marketing success and grow your organization.

If your organization is accumulating a growing list of leads with email addresses, it's probably time to take a look at marketing tools that will ensure effective digital interactions with those leads.  There are many options available for marketing software tools.  Before you start looking at vendors and software platforms, you might want to begin with a basic question.  What is the difference between email marketing and marketing automation?  Yes, they are two different things.  Both email marketing and marketing automation use email as the primary channel to communicate and engage with your audience.  However, email software only tracks the actions taken by recipients of your email.  Marketing automation software moniters every digital interaction a lead has with your organization.  Aleksandr Peterson at Act-On has written an article in which he breaks down the differences between these two types of software systems in much greater detail.  This article is a good resource to help you decide which system will best meet your needs.

Email is one of the most powerful tools you can use to reach consumers.  According to research by The Radicati Group, there are over 2.6 billion email users today.  By the end of 2019 that number is expected to increase to over 2.9 billion or over 1/3 of the world's population.  In addition, email is the preferred channel for brand communication among consumers.  Email also delivers a higher return on investment than any other digital marketing channel because with email you are targeting people who have opted in to receive your communications.  This is why it is so important to invest time and resources into enhancing your email to be the very best they can be.  Our partner, Litmus, has recently published "The Ultimate Guide To Email Optimization & Troubleshooting".  This guide is a comprehensive look at optimizing every part of the email creation process.  It lays out the steps needed to create email campaigns that your audience will want to engage with.

If you're a non-profit organization, you are in the business of not making profits.  So how do you do more with less and still innovate to attract and retain donors?  And what lessons can be learned from the non-profit world by everyone else?  Our partner Adestra has produced a webinar, What Can NOT Making A Profit Teach Us?-Lessons for us all from the non-profit industry, that is now available for download.  Ryan Phelan and Tristam Jones talk about non-profits and what the rest of us can learn from them. They examine case studies and give examples from non-profits.  We wanted to share the webinar with you because it delivers great data points on email benchmarking and some really good tips on how to get people to feel more emotionally attatched via email.