Content & Message

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  Growing Your Email Marketing List: Better Built Than Bought

  It’s tempting to turbocharge your email marketing efforts by buying lists to quickly extend your reach, but for most businesses this is a misguided approach. My latest column for Biznology has been published. In it, I lay out the problems you’ll face in buying names, the regulatory issues you’ll run into, and outline ways to…MORE >

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  How to Write Copy for Marketing Success

  Whether you’re hiring a copywriter or writing copy in-house, your approach and philosophy will have nearly as big an impact on your success as the words you ultimately put on the page or screen. Most importantly, your approach to copywriting has to be broader than writing engaging prose. As obvious as it sounds, your copy…MORE >

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  Effective Content Marketing Across Channels

  In baseball, there’s an old-timey expression – “hit ‘em where they ain’t” – which serves as advice to a player about to step up to bat. The goal is to hit the ball where the defensive players aren’t. This is about the worst advice in the world for content marketers, unless we turn it on its head….MORE >

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  Your Prospects Just Don’t Care

  Your prospects don’t care about you. They don’t even care about what you do. They care about what you can do for them. I am fond of saying this to, well, anyone who will listen. (I believe it’s the phrase on which my now-16-year-old daughter perfected her eye roll.) It’s because of this that you…MORE >

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  Is your marketing focus internal or external?

  You can head over to the Biznology site right now for my most recent article, Is your marketing focus internal or external? Not sure whether your focus is internal or external? A quick count of the “yous” and “yours” on your site vs. the number of times you use me, we, and our is a pretty…MORE >

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  Readability and Usability in Content Marketing

  Readability shouldn’t be just about Flesch-Kincaid scores. Also factoring in are design, layout and user experience. Key among these is an approach that creates a clear differentiation between content and navigation. Other visual cues that will have an impact on how well your site engages visitors are how you create and highlight links, how well…MORE >

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  Experience vs. Expedience in Digital Marketing

  My latest piece for Target Marketing Magazine is up on that site. This time around, we look at how to find the balance between creating a great user experience and not getting in the way of those user who want to get to the info they need quickly and without marketing fluff. Experience vs. Expedience…MORE >

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  Tips on Keeping Subscriber Engagement Up and Spam Complaints Down

  One of the best reports on email marketing, spam and subscriber retention I’ve seen, the Litmus/Fluent report is worth reading in full. It’s not even that long – 25 pages – and has lots of pretty pictures. But if you’re looking for a summary here are a few key points. And here’s the link in case…MORE >

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  Effective Audience Segmentation for Digital Marketing

  My most recent article on effective audience segmentation for digital marketing is available on the Target Marketing website. If you’re looking to move your segmentation beyond, “We sell this product to these customers and that product to these other customers,” you may find the segmentation ideas worth investigating. They include Industry Customer Size Client Role…MORE >

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  Is Your Website a Conversation or a Presentation?

  Almost everyone would prefer an interesting conversation over a long-winded lecture. So it makes sense that you should try to make you website more conversational and less of a one-way presentation. That’s not just true for your writing style, but also for the way you choose to engage with your audience, the options you offer for…MORE >