What’s Working in Marketing

The economy has been harsh for much of the last year and a half. In the last quarter, we can describe it as sluggish, at best. But 2009 was a banner year for digital marketing. The Internet and e-marketing tools allow us to reach out and engage prospects and customers efficiently and at lower cost [...]

We’re still recovering from the ISA Marketing & Sales Summit in Boston last week. It was the 4th annual event and, I think, the best ever. We had a great group of speakers from the automation industry, and engaged senior-level attendees from marketing and sales. It was 3 days of interesting conversations and idea exchange. [...]

We’re marketing gurus…not masters of world economics. But we know what to watch for when it comes to the ups and downs in our industry. We’ve heard a lot of talk that the economy is picking itself back up off the floor. And we are seeing some good news in manufacturers’ financials. So if our [...]

The news is filled with depressing details about layoffs. So we thought we’d share a bit of uplifting data from the manufacturing sector. The industry turnaround may be coming faster than many anticipated.
We talked with Vance VanDoren, Consulting Editor at Control Engineering Magazine and manager of the IntegratorGuide.com web site. Vance shared some interesting [...]

We get this question from clients all the time — What are the typical numbers for e-mail open rates and click throughs?
Typically, we look for open rates in the 30+% range and click-throughs in the 5-20% range. The way to make that happen? Always look for ways to improve performance: content that better addresses recipient [...]

New data from monster mail house Epsilon on e-mail open and click-through rates. We, too, are seeing a slow but steady decline in numbers as people’s in-boxes become weighted down with clutter and spam filters become more aggressive. But our clients’ averages are higher than those below. We look for open rates around 30+% and [...]

Our November enews article, “The Measurability of Marketing ROI,” started a spirited discussion on Prentis Hall’s Industrial Marketing Practitioner discussion list.

The Economist Intelligence Unit has released a new survey of CMO’s, “Future Tense: The Global CMO.” Most of the conclusions will be no surprise to readers here: balance global brand awareness with local market relevance, adopt new media and integrate, develop new skills and partnerships, champion innovation. But I found one key finding of the [...]

Move over Google, looks like trouble is brewing. A new start-up launched today called Cuil, promises to index more web pages at a time than Google and present more information back in a friendlier format than we’ve seen to date. This is what happens when smart, former Google employees get together with other [...]

An article in Chief Marketer today highlights what we’ve known for some time now — your web site home page no longer has the prominence in your marketing program that it used to. But that’s not a bad thing as home pages are often catch-all pages that try to be everything to everyone. A [...]