cross-channel marketing Archives - Social Email Marketing

Marketing automation lead scoring whiteboard session — Mac McConnell, partner and founder of BlueBird Strategies. Video by the Marketing Automation Software Guide.

Email marketing is increasingly becoming integrated in a cross-channel and event-driven marketing strategy. As readers of this blog will now, I’m a firm believer in customer-centric holistic marketing. OK, I know that’s a few expensive words in one sentence but that’s how I call it.

When you talk about cross-channel marketing, integration and email you’re really talking about marketing automation. And when you’re talking about marketing automation, you’re really talking about lead management in many cases.

One of the topics when it comes down to lead management is obviously lead nurturing (and boy, am I glad content is crucial in it, if not I would be out of a job). And when you talk about lead nurturing, you inevitably have to talk about lead scoring.

Defining the entry points of your funnel, attributing scores to them and your leads or prospects (yes, terminology still depends a lot on who you’re talking to) and lead scoring through the funnel is simply a must when you want to work in a customer-centric, data-driven and holistic way (oops, again expensive words).

I posted a text about the rise of performance based online advertising a while ago on my personal blog but, given all the recent positive reports about the growth of online display advertising, I am going to post it here in an adapted and more elaborated way.

Because I don’t know if the rise of the online display ad spend and also of performance-based advertising is good or bad news in a social media world. So, please read and comment away.

When the Internet rose as a “commercial” medium, everything was about the ‘almighty click’. At last a medium that was measurable and had an immediate impact. Internet was seen as the new direct marketing. Email was broadcasting, banners were meant to generate traffic, click, click, click.

Later, research companies – not coincidentally often sponsored by online publishers – made lots of effort to prove that online advertising also has a significant impact on a variety of brand parameters. And of course it does. Everything a brand does has an impact on the brand.

Online advertising is mainstream now and new data from, among others IAB and Econsultancy, show that search, PPC and display ad budgets are on the rise.