A/B testing sounds a lot more fancy than it is. In reality, several tools make testing your marketing techniques very simple and very, very useful these days.
One of the things we highly recommend testing as soon as possible are your email marketing subject lines. Email marketing is one of our favorite (and most effective) digital marketing channels for both B2B and B2C organizations.
So why not constantly be improving it?
If you were an investor, would you spend money on a lot of different stocks or put your funds into several different companies then not track the results? Sounds crazy, right? You want to see how your investments are doing. You may do well in some areas and poorly in others, but you want that data.
So why on earth would you spend money on different marketing channels and not track those results? And then wouldn’t you spend time reviewing what you tracked and optimize your investments going forward?
Tracking and testing is just as important for marketing as it is for investing your personal money. Here’s a guideline for getting started or improving your existing processes.
Exothermic is the leader in self-reliance brand marketing, but we like to share our wisdom with the world. Here are the top stories we’ve identified this week in our markets:
If helping people prepare for the wilderness and the unknowable future is exciting for you, check out the Survivalism Jobs on the Exothermic job board.
This week, we’ve highlighted jobs from The North Face, one of the biggest 
outdoors companies in the US. They specialize in outerwear, fleece, coats, shirts, footwear, and equipment such as backpacks, tents, and sleeping bags. You’ve probably heard of ’em. They’re hiring an Apparel Designer, a Product Director, an Assistant Photography & Video Producer and an Ecommerce Content Manager in their Alameda, CA headquarters as well as a Customer Service Representative in Appleton, WI.
So we’ve talked about the importance of adding forms to your site but doing them well is a whole ‘nother story. Here are some tips on the best practices for your site’s forms in 2017.
Fewer, specific questions are better. It’s easy to want to ask people all of the things beforehand but think about your own experiences – are you likely to fill out a form that asks for too many things?
No. You’re going to click away or be perturbed that this company wants so much information from you, like your email address and phone number and social security number and blood type.
For a small business and sometimes even really large businesses, forms are an afterthought or overlooked.
Web forms, however, are one of the most important components of your website. They are the vessel for which people can get information to you, whether it’s about a purchase or a question or anything in between. It’s a simpler method of communication that’s often overlooked.
But it shouldn’t be.
Exothermic is the leader in self-reliance brand marketing, but we like to share our wisdom with the world. Here are the top stories we’ve identified this week in our markets:
that can incorporate all the parameters for tick population sizes could actually tell you something useful about disease risk. And that’s exactly what Goudarz Molaei is building right now.
If helping people prepare for the wilderness and the unknowable future is exciting for you, check out the Survivalism Jobs on the Exothermic job board.
This week, we’ve highlighted jobs from Bass Pro Shops, one of the leading 
outdoors companies in the US. Founded in 1972, a majority of the job listings are for their Springfield, Missouri office and also include roles for the White River Marine Group, the largest manufacturer of boats in the world (by volume). They’re seeking a Senior Copywriter, a Merchandising Assistant for Product Development, a Human Resources Manager and a Stock Photo Database Coordinator.
Marketing automation is a relatively newer, shinier thing for smaller businesses. It’s the process of automating repetitive tasks, like email campaigns or lead notifications.
For example, every time someone signs up for your email list, it would be nice to send them a welcome email, right? Marketing automation enables you to create a template email so that the system you’re using does that for you.
So, this would help you out rather than you getting a message every time someone new signs up and you having to write something new or copy and paste an old message you sent to the last sign-up. Or even worse, getting no message every time someone new signs up and you having to manually check the system.
The biggest problem with marketing automation is that it’s too big and too expensive for most small to medium sized businesses. Until now. Hatchbuck, a marketing automation and CRM tool, is our current go-to recommendation for marketing automation.
Even though it has a pretty stupid name.
When it comes to marketing, most people have assumed it is like a magical black box – marketing goes in, and business results may or may not come out.
During the age of reliance on TV ads and print ads, where measuring your ad spend was a very nebulous experience, it makes sense. It’s very hard to gauge the effectiveness of a TV ad when you don’t know how many people truly saw it, how it influenced their buying decisions, whether it stayed on their mind or not…any of those variables.
Fortunately, digital marketing makes things a lot more clear for marketers and business owners alike. And you wouldn’t put money in the stock market or invest in a company without keeping tabs on their performance, now would you? So why would you put money in a Facebook ad or two and not record those results alongside your website’s traffic?
Everyone who’s engaging in marketing should be tracking and measuring their metrics. The question is – how do you determine what to track?