Mathieu Hannouz

I read an interesting article in the Washington Post associated with the Consumer Electronics Show, “Privacy rights activists worry about potential abuse of high-tech devices featured at CES event” that examined privacy concerns being raised in light of increasingly high-tech homes and gadgets – can you imagine your refrigerator, stove or washing machine being connected to the internet?  It’s not a concept that is all that far away.  As a result, privacy advocates warn that consumers must be diligent about understanding what real-time data and personal information could be collected and shared with third parties, like utility companies…and quite possibly marketers.

I recently read a research report from Gartner’s Kimberly Collins that examined “Five Ways Social Media Will Revolutionize Marketing.¹” It caused me to reflect on how social media has quickly matured into a robust and pervasive technology that has fundamentally changed the way people and brands communicate.

But as relatively mature and robust as social media has become, we still see brands struggling to develop strategies and best practices that take advantage of the power that social media introduces.

In Gartner’s analysis, the firm estimates that “through 2015, 75% of marketing organizations will view social media as simply another channel annoying customers and failing to deliver significant value to the CMO’s strategy.”

This stat says to me that a majority of brands do not fully understand the marketing and communications potential that social media presents to them, and that these brands need to learn how to better use...

Transparency, awareness and engagement.  In social marketing, these words take on additional meaning as B2B marketers examine the value of social media and how it supports interactions with prospects and revenue generation across the customer lifecycle.  These were also recurring themes throughout a FOCUS roundtable that I recently participated on: “Social Media and Social Marketing Across the Funnel.”

I joined respected industry influencers Carlos Hidalgo from The Annuitas Group (@cahidalgo) and Kathleen Schaub of TrellisOne (...

Your email infrastructure can often mean the difference between poor and great deliverability.  As the key link to Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and corporate mail servers, it helps eliminate potential bottlenecks, keeping the floodgates open for your email messages. Good infrastructure also automates many technical aspects of email deliverability, reducing marketing’s dependence on IT.

But let’s be clear: infrastructure isn’t the end-all, be-all of email deliverability.  On the contrary, nearly every aspect of email marketing contributes to messages reaching the inbox—or not.  One area that’s often overlooked, yet very manageable is the message itself.  Below are seven key elements of email messages, with best practices that marketers can easily implement to improve deliverability: