This idea came to me by way of my very own inbox. A few months ago, I got married. During the planning process, I registered on one of the many popular websites out there that require you to create an account to view their articles and resources. That site then took my information and shared it with a plethora of their partners, who sent me dedicated emails advertising their own services.

At that time, many of these offers were actually highly relevant and I wasn’t too annoyed by the influx of messages in my inbox. However now, months later, I’m still getting the occasional offer which I no longer need.

Today I unsubscribed from a particular partner and this was their unsubscribe page:

Bad Unsubscribe Page Example

This page told me a few things. It told me how I got on their list (oops, I forgot to un-check that pesky box about sharing information with valued partners), it told me when they purchased the list (let it be noted that it was actually after my wedding took place) and it had the glaring words “lead list” jumping out at me. This is not a very customer-friendly term, even to someone who works in lead management like me!

What can we learn from this?

• Be careful with public facing lists. In Pardot, you always have the option to create both an internal “name” as well as a prospect-facing “label.” Do a quick audit of your public lists (if you use a public preference center) and also check out your unsubscribe page and make sure you’re using customer-friendly terms that won’t leave the reader with a bad taste in their mouth, even if they are unsubscribing from your list.
• Be timely with your mailings. I distinctly remember that the website I registered for required me to input my wedding date. These companies can prevent themselves from becoming noise (or worse, spam!), by segmenting their mailing lists according to the date of the event.

Here’s a novel idea: Apparently you can boost your SEO by regularly posting videos on your site. A recent Search Engine Land article by Shmulik Weller underscores the importance of using video on a regular basis and across your site–not just on your homepage once in awhile. If you want to stand out from your competitors, using video for SEO can be a great differentiator.

Soon after Google acquired YouTube in 2006, it started indexing video in its search results. Weller mentions a startling statistic: Nearly 40% of Google searches include videos in the search results. More videos on your site equals more pages showing up in search results, which in turn can boost your page ranking and search traffic.

Great idea, right? Most definitely. Just be sure you follow the guidelines Weller suggests:

• Embed the video instead of using pop-ups or frames.
• Properly contextualize the video by working as many keywords as possible into its title and description.
• Include as much video metadata as possible (duration, dimensions, etc.).
• Provide links to related material (either within the site or elsewhere).
• Web syndication (distributing your videos to popular sites such as YouTube and Facebook) will help you get wider exposure.
• Video sitemaps will score additional SEO points.

Pardot partner (and Elevate presenter!) Jep Castelein of LeadSloth is hosting a free webinar next week all about content. You’ve heard us say it again and again, a truly great marketing campaign starts with killer content.

Webinar: How Content Makes Prospects Buy Faster

Content Marketing is popular, but how does it impact your lead flow? In my upcoming webinar I’ll show how you can use content to increase conversion and pipeline velocity. Or in simple words: how more of your leads become sales-ready, faster.

In just 30 minutes, you’ll learn how to:
- create more content than you ever thought possible
- map content to personas and buying stages
- link this all to your marketing automation processes

Register for the Webinar

One of the biggest challenges – whether you’re just getting started with marketing automation or digging in to a new campaign – is coming up with new and compelling content. Social Media Explorer had a helpful post with 30 questions to help you create a content strategy.

The questions are broken up in to three categories: Organizational Questions, Audience Questions and Content Questions. This technique can be used to guide content for many different channels, from Twitter to your company blog. Below are some examples from each category.

Organizational Questions

• What do you want social media to do for your organization?
• How many departments or divisions will be contributing content?

Audience Questions

• How comfortable with technology, the web and social media is your audience?
• What is your audience interested in besides your product?
• What do you ask your audiences to do? Do they do it?

Content Questions

• What general area of knowledge to we have that we can share?
• What kind of expertise or even products can we give away?
• What can we have fun with that isn’t a disconnect from our brand or industry?

Try using these questions, combined with carefully considering the different phases of your prospect’s journey through the buying cycle, to develop a more well-rounded content mix.

See all 30 Questions at Social Media Explorer

AllThingsCRM put together a handy infographic to help visualize the customer experience when it comes to seeking out help or service. Being that Pardot focuses on creating a great client experience, which means access to personalized service from reps who understand the ins and outs of your account, these statistics were interesting.

Especially notable is the fact that 94% of budget is spent on getting customers through the door while only 6% is allocated to handling customer inquiries. One of the core elements of Pardot is that being a month-to-month service, our success is heavily tied to the success of our customers. We really do believe that our product is made better by crowd-sourcing the knowledge and ideas of the innovate marketers who use Pardot (that’s you!). So if you haven’t already, speak up and be heard!

Check out the fun infographic on customer service from AllThingsCRM.

Source:Why Bad CRM Can Kill A Business

Last quarter, Pardot was happy to welcome over 50 new clients to our marketing automation community. That marks three straight quarters of over 50 new clients joining us. That translates to a LOT of new users who are just getting started with marketing automation!

Because we have so many new faces, I thought it might be helpful to share some beginner information on marketing automation. When getting started with a new marketing automation system, here are some good ways to begin.

Inventory your website. Think about pages that are valuable to you (for a possible score increase), current forms that you want to recreate and opportunities to add new forms or conversion opportunities.

Inventory your other online assets. What other forms of online marketing and lead generation do you use? Are you currently using Google Adwords, online sponsorships, other landing pages, social media, a seperate email platform? Make a list of all of your current marketing tools so that you can begin to integrate them into one, unified system within Pardot.

Outline your current processes. One of the best parts of marketing automation is that it can automate (naturally!) some of the previously tedious processes in your department. Create an outline or flowchart (for the visual learners) of your current processes like when and how you assign leads to sales. This will help you easily translate those processes in to automation rules and they’ll be out of your hair for good.

Create a wish list. Marketing automation is no silver bullet, but in addition to making your current assets and processes easier to manage, it can also free up time for you to try new things. So once you have a few basic ideas in place, go wild. Dream up new, better ways to streamline your lead generation. Sketch out some new landing page designs and then test them with multivariate testing.

If you logged in to your Pardot account today, you probably noticed it got a little face lift! The new Pardot dashboard includes enhanced reporting and analytics options, allowing you to click through the graph and view different data points. You can also filter by date range using the box in the upper right corner of the reporting graph.

There are lots of different marketing automation solutions out there. How did our current clients decide to go with Pardot? What made our product stand out from the rest? Here’s why our customers think we’re exceptional:

• Pardot is easy to use. Our user interface is straightforward and streamlined, not bloated with unnecessary bells and whistles that drag down performance. You don’t need an IT person to operate it, and you don’t even really have to be that tech-savvy yourself to get great results. Ease of use is the primary consideration that has most shaped our development, and we’ve designed everything with our customers’ needs in mind.

• Pardot is fast. Because it was originally built as an enterprise solution, Pardot runs significantly faster than similar applications, both on the back end and the front end. Our user interface responds quickly and smoothly and doesn’t get hung up on complex tasks; forms and landing pages load quickly so visitors to your website don’t have to wait.

• Pardot offers full functionality. Our product is robust and provides all the features you need to deploy sophisticated campaigns, but without the hype and intimidating price tag. Because we’ve reached profitablilty through organic growth, we’re more forward-thinking as a company, and our flexibility is evident in our innovative offerings. Our product is unique in supporting multiple CRMs, and we provide customers with free add-ons like LeadDeck and our iPhone app, Pardot Mobile. Our ongoing product development is primarily driven by customer input and feedback from our Idea Exchange.

• Pardot is cost-effective. We were recently ranked #1 in total cost of ownership by Forrester Research. Not only are we the most cost-effective choice out there, but we also have common-sense pricing that allows you unlimited users and doesn’t charge you more when your database expands.

• Pardot doesn’t require contracts. We offer a month-to-month service with no contract, which means you don’t renew unless you’re satisfied. We also have a transparent pricing model, so your introductory price won’t change arbitrarily.

• Pardot offers stellar services and support. This is one of the main reasons we’re able to maintain such high rates of customer satisfaction. Our services and support team is well-trained and knowledgeable and will go the extra mile to help you make the most of Pardot. Our services team will guide you through implementation, reinforcing best practices to make sure your outcome is exactly as you envision it. Our support engineers review issues the same day they are reported, and respond quickly to assist clients. Plus, we’re really nice people all around. Just ask our clients.

Our customers are a smart bunch. They did their research, and they chose Pardot over other options because Pardot best fit their needs. But they also like us because we’re not quite like the other guys, and because we truly stand by our Brand Promise. This is what makes Pardot a one-of-a-kind choice among marketing automation solutions.

A recent blog from marketing guru Seth Godin got me thinking about the concept of eating your own dog food. Dogfooding (as it is sometimes called) is when a company uses its own product internally, with the implication being that what’s good enough for the customer is good enough for the company. Originally the idea came from Alpo dog food commercials, in which spokesman Lorne Greene earnestly assured us that Alpo is so good, he feeds it to his own dogs. Since then, and one famous Microsoft memo later, the term has become common among software companies that feel it beneficial to use their own product internally.

Pardot uses our own product internally for the same basic reason our customers do: to enhance our Sales team’s efficiency and maximize ROI. Just as you do, we use Prospect Insight to identify visitors to our website, track prospect activity, and score and grade leads. Our Marketing team can then pass on the most qualified leads to our Sales team so that they concentrate their efforts accordingly, while Marketing can continue to nurture other promising prospects until they’re ready to be handed over to Sales. Prospect Insight’s real-time sales alerts help the Pardot Sales team stay constantly updated on new prospect activity, and our Marketing team uses it to manage and qualify tradeshow leads for targeted follow-up. It’s a great set of tools that suits all of our marketing automation needs.

But there are other reasons as to why we eat our own dog food here at Pardot. Using our own product:

• Synchronizes our interests with those of our customers. Customers want an oustanding product–and so do we, because we use it too!
• Helps us continually improve the product. Using PI internally makes it easy to identify possible improvements and cool new features that enhance both the user experience and the product’s overall value.
• Demonstrates, in a tangible and unambiguous way, that we stand behind our product and think it’s a good one. We could use any product but choose to use Prospect Insight because we think it’s the best marketing automation solution out there.

At Dreamforce I had the chance to attend a great session for marketing professionals on best practices in search engine marketing (SEM). Here are some of the key takeaways I jotted down:

• This of your search marketing strategy as a stereo – it is only as good as its weakest component. You may have great keywords but bad ad text or strong ads but poor landing pages. In order to get maximum results, you must work on perfecting all the different cogs of the machine.
• Set your ads to rotate. If you let Google optimize for you, your ads will be optimized by click-through rate, not based on the more valuable conversion rate or cost-per-opportunity. Give all your ads equal play time until you can collect enough data via your marketing automation reporting to determine which ads bring in the best traffic instead of just the most clicks.
• Always be sure to link to unique landing pages with content that matches your ads, rather than just linking to your homepage.