The Pros and Cons of Front-End Editing and Modular Content in WordPress
With the imaginations of so many developers trained in WordPress, just about every aspect of its functionality is under scrutiny, and that’s especially true of the functionality used to create and edit content. That same scrutiny has given rise to a number of front-end editing plug-ins...
The Internal Project, or, How to Be Your Own Best Client
The differences between internal vs external projects represent a very real distinction. We recently had a great opportunity to experience this first hand. In rebuilding our internal project management/internal communication/site administration system, we learned very clearly that a complex project with no one but yourselves as the client can lead to a very different set of challenges to overcome.
How to Comply with Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL)
The new Canadian Anti-Spam law will have impacts on all marketers, whether you are based in Canada or not. If any of your contacts are opening mail while in Canada, then there are a few changes you'll want to make to help ensure compliance with the new law.
Is Purchasing Email Lists a Good Idea?
Let me start by saying that there’s no web marketing topic I’ve done more of an about-face on than that of purchasing email addresses. I used to be decidedly and vocally against list purchases because I thought it was bad practice. I thought it was spam, I thought it wasn’t compliant with the CAN-SPAM Act, and for years and years I just figured it was the wrong way of doing business. So, what changed my mind? The short answer is experience and basic math. Allow me to explain.
Casual Fridays: The Agency Homepage
In this episode Chris and Mark talk about homepages, with a specific focus on the evolution and future of our homepage, and the way agencies have evolved their homepages as well. This is a nice companion piece to Chris's article on the same topic.
Four Steps to a Better Agency Homepage
Over the years, there are few aspects of a website that I've come to think about as differently as I have the homepage. What should a homepage do? How should it look? How much information should it contain? These are questions I've answered very differently, sometimes depending on who is asking — and what kind of homepage we're talking about — and sometimes simply depending upon what I've seen work and not work. There are many things we loved to stick on home pages that never worked, just as there are many things that have worked whose time has passed. So here's my latest thinking on this...
Designing CTA Form Fields for a Better User Experience
The design of form fields may not be the most exciting aesthetic challenge around, but making sure that your CTAs are designed to maximize their clarity and usability may have a larger impact on your bottom line that you might think. We'll go over some common user experience pitfalls that come up with the humble form field rectangle.
Producing Content for Marketing Automation
Quality content and marketing automation go together like peanut butter and jelly, like bows and arrows, like gin and tonic, like — you get the idea. Hopefully this isn’t really news to many of you, especially not to our clients who are already following the Newfangled model and using content to fuel their marketing automation activities. What I want to talk about today is the role of content in that equation, as it specifically relates to marketing automation. In doing so, I want to focus on the content opportunities and requirements that go beyond the usual “3000-words-per-month” recommendations.
How Long Does the Typical Agency Website Last?
At some point in the sales process, each of our potential clients eventually asks the same thing: how long does the typical marketing website last? The answer, which we’ve referenced many times elsewhere in our writing, is three to five years. Today, though, I want to spend some time explaining why exactly we expect the typical marketing website to last that long. There are three reasons we’ve settled on the three-to-five-year timeframe, and all of them have to do with the pace of change.
How to Use Salesforce Campaigns to Measure the Impact of Your Marketing Efforts
If you’re using Salesforce to track your sales activity, and the activities of your leads and contacts, then you should definitely be utilizing Salesforce’s Campaign functionality. There are two main reasons to do this: First, it’s an easy way to collect information about the various ways you’ve interacted with a prospect over time, which will then be available to you at a glance when you view that prospect’s Salesforce record. Second, you can tie marketing to actual revenue, so you can see which marketing efforts are giving the most back to you in terms of sales. Here's how to get started.