The AV Marketer

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.

We have a few people over 40 on our team, and I’m happy to say I’m one of them. So when I saw this article titled, “Three-day working week 'optimal for over-40s,'” I was intrigued but also wary because ageism is widespread in business. Essentially, the article described a study of workers over 40, in which they were scored on mental tasks. Researchers looked at accuracy, brain stimulation, stress, exhaustion, etc. They concluded that the optimal workweek for those over 40 is somewhere between 25 to 35 hours a week, though work quality seems to decline slightly after 25 hours.

Every once in a while I see excellent posts on Facebook from some of the newsfeeds that I like—Ars Technica and Digital Trends, for example, and there are times when I will go as far as to take these posts and create a blog based on the content. Recently, while I was out doing a few things, this one popped up from a good friend, the Managing Partner of a known AV industry communications and content creation firm (who likes to pose some interesting "challenges" for me):

So I decided to take a stab at this one (actually, I can hardly resist) —call it a bit "off-the-beaten technology path" blog thesis...

I assume that if you are reading this blog that you know I have been a Pivot employee for a month now. If you missed that tidbit of exciting news, you can read about my first week at Pivot or you can read the Pivot press release that describes my position and value to the team.

Periscope turned one year old in March. If you do not know what Periscope is, it is a live streaming video mobile app. Periscope allows you to become your own broadcasting station as you stream video and audio to any viewers who join your live broadcast.

Like a tree crashing in the forest, if your product drops and no one shares it on social media, it’s like it never happened. You may get some sales through standard means, but to really count now, you need a strong social media presence.