7 Pros and Cons of Email Marketing with Marketfish

Posted on July 24, 2012 by Ryan

Our intern, Mikayla Chicquette, is back with another blog post. This time she dives into the benefits of using the Marketfish platform over traditional list marketing methods. Keep reading to find out more about how the Marketfish platform helps you overcome these common acquisition email marketing challenges.

1. Con: Isn’t email marketing dead?

Pro: Many people believe that email marketing is dying due to social networking. But email is still an important part of our day-to-day lives. Even social networks send email!

Email is a much more reliable and professional method of communicating and marketing to your target audience. It may be easy to send a tweet to all of your followers announcing your 50% off sale, but if they’re more focused on tweeting their friends about how their dog is chasing its tail, or about the latest celebrity breakup, your very important message will be drowned out.

Plus, email marketing campaigns through Marketfish’s record purchase and list rental marketplace allow you to gain new customers that were not yet followers of your social networking profiles. With a professional and polished email campaign, you can grab your readers’ attention long enough to get them interested in what you have to say. Once your email campaign is out the door, feel free to remind them throughout the day of your products or services with tweets and Facebook messages on your own.

2. Con: Doesn’t lead generation take forever?
Pro: With list rental or record purchasing through the Marketfish platform, you can search millions of records to find your target audience in real-time. It only takes 30 minutes to build and deploy a complete campaign!

3. Con: I have no idea what to write for my campaign.
Pro: First, figure out why you’re writing the campaign, and who you’re targeting. Content ideas will come swimming to you after you answer those questions. If you’re still stumped, we have several posts to help you along the way, check them out here, here, and here. Now get creative!

4. Con: I cannot find an email template that works for my brand, what now?
Pro: Marketfish Creative Solutions is a full-service creative team that can help you build effective email marketing creatives. They’ll even design and build your landing pages, and help you develop a successful lead generation strategy. If you’re interested, contact Marketfish Creative Solutions today!

5. Con: I want the ability to send multiple campaigns.
Pro: Marketfish now offers the ability to purchase over 50 million B2B records that you can use to send multiple email marketing campaigns, without re-renting lists. Head on over to our post and learn more about how you can use this feature.

6. Con: I want to send postal campaigns instead of/as well as email campaigns.
Pro: Marketfish allows you to rent records for sending email and/or postal campaigns, as well as purchase records for launching email, postal or teleprospecting campaigns. Just choose the option that works best for you. Be sure to test and refine your campaigns so you can continually improve performance.

7. Con: I don’t understand why I should use Marketfish instead of going the traditional route, or using another company.
Pro: The conventional method of list marketing could take several weeks and tons of paperwork before your campaign even reaches your target audience. Save yourself the headache and check out The Marketfish “Why” to see that Marketfish was created for clients just like you.

As you can see, Marketfish offers a number of cutting-edge solutions to common list marketing challenges. If you’re curious about the Marketfish platform, and want to know more, just set up a free account today.

P.S. If you found this post helpful, please share it with your colleagues or leave a comment.

The Marketfish “Why”

Posted on July 18, 2012 by Ryan

I’d like introduce Marketfish’s new intern, Mikayla Chicquette. She recently graduated high school, and will attend Widener University in the fall. She is going to study Business and Creative Writing, and hopes to pursue a career in publishing, as well as self-publishing her own stories. She loves that Marketfish challenges and pushes the list marketing industry to greater heights by providing a simple solution to complex problems.

This is the first of many posts from Mikayla. So, sit back, enjoy, and be sure to leave a comment.

The Golden Circle

Redefine the way you think about your company, from the inside out, not the outside in.

“Why” is the purpose of a company or individual, their path or destiny, the vision and passion that drives that company or individual forward. “Why” is not the result or even the product. It’s the underlying purpose that informs every action an organization or individual takes.

“Why” is a very important question that most companies forget to ask, but Marketfish CEO Dave Scott, a former Chief Marketing Officer, asked himself this question. And Marketfish was born from the answer.

He understood the difficulties of lead generation and list marketing using the conventional methods (paperwork, time, blood, sweat and tears, back and forth communications with list brokers, more time, and more blood, sweat and tears). He decided that the industry needed to embrace technology if it hoped to change for the better.

Dave Scott took the list marketing industry, turned it on its head, shook out the junk, and rewired the system for success (using orange and blue wires, of course). He re-envisioned list marketing as simple, transparent, efficient, and effective; thus, Marketfish had their “why.”

With the help of the Marketfish team, Dave Scott is well on his way towards changing the list marketing industry forever.

So why use Marketfish? The Marketfish platform was designed to streamline list marketing and lead generation for businesses just like you. Take a look at this chart to see how we compare to traditional list marketing methods.

You can see that the difference is striking, and we’ve done that for you. Because, as a client, your needs are our first priority. That’s why our mission is to help you hook just the marketing list you need…and throw the others back.

In the process of building a business, it is easy to forget the “why.” But we strive to never let that happen. Gaining clients and investors that understand and support our “why” certainly helps, and we’re grateful for all who embrace the Marketfish vision.

If you believe in the “why,” please contact Marketfish today at mschicquette@marketfish.com with any comments and a subject line starting with ‘I Believe Why’.

To truly understand the Marketfish “why,” check out our video that dives deeper into the differences between the conventional method and the Marketfish method of list marketing.

For more about why a company’s “why” is important? Check out Simon Sinek on TED Talks.

Thoughts on Repurposing Old Lead Gen Offers

Posted on July 3, 2012 by Ryan

HubSpot recently published an interesting post on their blog: “How to Promote Your Old Lead Gen Offers So They Feel Brand New.” They make more than a few compelling points for us hardworking marketers.

We all know that it takes some serious time and effort to pull together an engaging offer. Throw in the associated collateral and content, and you’ve got a pretty significant undertaking. So it makes sense to get as much mileage out of that offer as possible.

The aim of HubSpot’s post is to help you do just that. Here’s a brief summary of what they said, plus some additional thoughts from the Marketfish perspective.

A shiny new wrapper. For the email marketers out there, this is essentially segmentation. Tailor your original offer to the needs of the segments in your house file. You might find that when you have your head down creating new content, you end up with ideas for fresh, highly targeted offers.

Spread the word. The tweets or Facebook posts you use to share your offer with the world, only work once. That is, unless you enjoy irritating your followers and fans. So, create new tweets and posts to get the word out with each subsequent repurposing of your offer. You should also experiment with scheduling your tweets and posts. Always track performance, and use that data to inform your future social media activities.

Write about it. If you want to promote your offer with your blog, just write more posts. Blogging regularly is great for SEO, especially if you’re linking to landing pages hosted on your domain.

Slice and dice that list. If you want to repurpose your offer via email, segmentation of your list by some common attribute (for example, industry), along with segment specific content, is the way to go. I’m not going to go much deeper with this one, as we’ve written about it in great detail. Just take a look at our posts here, here, and here.

Hopefully this quick summary, along with the full text of the HubSpot post, gives you some ideas for repurposing your old offers in new and effective ways.

P.S. I encourage you to read the original HubSpot post, and if you enjoyed our brief summary, please comment and share with your colleagues.

Why’s Your Whitepaper So Boring?

Posted on June 13, 2012 by Ryan

As a member of Marketfish’s content creation team, I read a dizzying amount of whitepapers, case studies, and research reports. I’m always digging into the competition, generating ideas, and frankly, looking to expand my knowledge base. And that’s where whitepapers excel – imparting knowledge in a pseudo-promotional way.

No one knows everything, and we’re never too old to explore a new perspective, look at a concept in a novel way, or gain a little tidbit of wisdom during the course of our day. All this adds up to the potential boost a well-oiled whitepaper producing machine can deliver to your lead generation efforts. I’m far from the first person to write these words, but the issue is that many whitepapers, are dull, dry, boring, and sleep inducing. It doesn’t have to be that way!

Clever Title and Cover – No matter what the old adage says, we all judge a book by its cover. Keep that in mind when writing your whitepaper’s title and designing its cover. Attention spans are shorter than ever, so it’s vital to make an immediate impact. Put as much thought and time into your cover and title as possible. It’ll make the difference between a download and a deleted email.

Engaging Design – Don’t design a vanilla whitepaper; that’s a major turnoff. Create a unique design. Use your brand colors, and organize the information in an intuitive, engaging way. Bullets and images can help tell your story. Just remember to keep the look clean and uncluttered. It shouldn’t be a struggle to digest your content.

Charts and Images – Charts and images are vital to the success of your whitepaper. They break up your text and add color and life to your content. Plus, they deliver what should be useful information in a clear way. They’re also helpful for condensing what would otherwise result in a complex and lengthy paragraph.

Relevant Statistics – Stats add a certain measure of validity to your whitepaper. This is especially true if you’re sourcing your stats from an independent third party. Even if the research and stats you cite are proprietary, they can still be useful. But if you go that route, add a link to your original research so that curious readers can review your research methodology.

Conversational and Always Delivering Value – Whitepapers don’t need to take the same tone as your 11^th grade history teacher, unless you had an awesome 11^th grade history teacher. Try to write conversationally. Engage the reader on all fronts with questions, wit, and wordplay. Just don’t lose focus. Your whitepaper should always communicate information that’s relevant and useful to the reader.

Hopefully you found these tips helpful. The goal here is to get you to rethink your whitepaper development approach. Marketing is changing. You need to delight and entertain leads if you want them to engage with your brand. Just stay focused on your goals and with a little effort, the rest will fall into place.

P.S. If you enjoyed this post, please share!