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Despite increased marketing opportunities on social media, email still outperforms social media when it comes to nurturing sales leads and converting them into paying customers. According to one study email is up to six times more effective than social media. But not just any old email will do. To get the most out of your emails, think beyond just open rates and consider how your marketing emails can engage your customer and create dollars-and-cents results. Here are a few ideas to get you started.

If you’re looking for cat memes, personality quizzes, and old high school friends, you know Facebook is the virtual place to go. But did you know many people are also using it for business?

In HubSpot’s new State of Inbound 2017 report, 74% of survey respondents said they use Facebook for professional purposes—not that far off from the 78% who said they use LinkedIn for professional reasons.

Facebook reports 1.28 billion daily active users. That means hundreds of millions of people are doing something work related on Facebook every single day. But what is it they’re doing, exactly? And how are they reaching other individuals relevant to their businesses or professions? There are several ways to engage with strangers, visitors, leads, customers, and promoters. There are also ways to stay connected with colleagues and others in your industry who want to network or share valuable ideas and information. Here are some of the ways Facebook users take advantage of the platform’s features to get down to business:

1. Personal Connections

The lines between the personal and the professional has been blurred not only among platforms but across profile types and the types of connections we make.

Clients and colleagues send “friend” requests on Facebook, and individuals share professional content from their personal profiles. The content users share from personal accounts represents a mix of their interests—from posts that are just for fun to sharing articles about their companies or industries in general.

How many times have you sent an email that you felt should have elicited a response, yet instead, crickets were chirping? What happened to those emails—did they fall down a well, waiting for Lassie to find them?

Even if you’re not battling unresolved issues from all the childhood party invitations “lost in the mail,” no one likes feeling left out. Last week social media was abuzz with bright lights and shiny objects from Integrated Systems Europe (ISE) in Amsterdam. If you were unable to attend, it was hard to shake FoMO (fear of missing out) syndrome.

To support those who wanted to be there but couldn’t, we’ve assembled the best of ISE resources in this blog. So order up a stroopwafel or crack open a Heineken and immerse yourself in the ISE experience.

Content creation is the process of conjuring up material. Somehow. Some way. When you’re in a constant state of production, you need a constant stream of ideas. Where will those ideas come from, and—maybe more crucial—how do you keep your ideas fresh? 

What do you mean, you didn't get my email?

Back in the day, before there were options for email testing like Email on Acid or Litmus, if you wanted to test your email in multiple clients, you had to do it the hard way. You would send it to various team members and ask them to open it on their assorted smart phones or computers. This was necessary to test emails across all operating systems  and email clients. What renders propertly in Windows might not render on a Mac, and what looks good in Outlook might look awful in Gmail, and then there's smart phones... you get the idea. 

And nothing was so frustrating as waiting for a screenshot or feedback from someone, only to find out they never got the email. Or maybe they had, but it went straight to their spam folder.

Here's how you can prevent your emails from ending up in the junk folder, or never getting delivered at all:

Turning browsers into buyers is key to any sales organization’s success, and an eye-catching, well-worded, well-placed call-to-action (CTA) is one of the best ways to do it. A CTA is a button on your website that a visitor clicks to claim an offer. But first, they provide a variety of targeted information that you can use to guide them further down the path to becoming a customer. It’s the very definition of a win-win.

But for any of it to work, visitors to your website, blog, or other online property have to click on the CTA in the first place. Follow these five simple steps to make sure they do.

Admittedly, I wasn’t a super early adopter of social media. I’ve since warmed to Facebook—it did just make me a nice video to celebrate our 8-year anniversary. I see clear opportunities to use social networks like Twitter and LinkedIn for business marketing purposes, but my own personal engagement has been limited. (Apologies to my Twitter followers.) Coming off this pretty heated campaign season has me thinking about the increasingly blurring lines between professional and personal contacts.

LinkedIn has built-in clarity for how it should be used—it’s a professional network. But if you maintain only one account for Twitter and Facebook, you may feel like it’s time to establish some boundaries. I started accepting friend requests from clients and professional contacts on Facebook a couple of years ago. My Twitter account @Jane_Pivot is pretty business-focused. I’ve wanted to follow some feeds that are of personal interest to me but have so far refrained. I don’t want you to judge my taste (or lack thereof) in music.

There are many reasons a company may choose to rebrand. If a company wants to change its image or simply maintained the same ownership and look for a number of years, outdated imagery may need to be replaced with modern images, packaging, logos—even name—etc. The rebranding of the company can be permanent, or it can be for a set period of time.

Using Constant Contact is like riding a bike with training wheels. You probably won’t crash but you won’t get anywhere very fast either. When the rest of technical marketers are driving cars with built-in GPS, exceptional fuel economy, and full in-dashboard diagnostic systems, you can bet they’ll get to the party where all the technology buyers are well before you do.