Author:Mambo Media

With the holiday weekend approaching, some of our readers may have some surely well-deserved down-time to catch up on their reading. Despite the emergence of new media consumption platforms every day, I still find myself drawn to blogs. My preferred method of consumption is via the Feedly platform on my mobile phone. Feedly does a great job of transforming RSS feeds from your favorite domains into a photograph and quick summation for each article. I have created a folder specifically for my favorite digital marketing feeds and overtime, have narrowed down to a few tried and true that I’d like to share with you this 4^th of July.

Has your marketing team developed a true inbound marketing strategy? Are your email marketing efforts giving you the ROI you hoped for? Does your content speak to each of your buyer personas throughout their entire buyer’s journey?

If any or all of these questions speak to you, it might be time to embrace inbound marketing and consider how marketing automation platforms like Marketo or HubSpot can lead to more qualified leads, higher conversion rates and – yes – even the holy grail of increased revenue.

You’ve implemented a Marketing Automation platform, developed personas, mapped the buyer’s journey and established measurable goals for your campaign. You’re ready to go, right? Well, not necessarily.

When developing a marketing automation strategy, the following items are keys to your success:

#1 Contacts

The key question is how “clean” is your email list? It’s not the quantity that counts, it’s the quality! Does your marketing automation software remove emails that have previously had a “hard bounce”? A hard bounce is an email address that permanently fails to send.