It is estimated that 30% of email lists turnover (become inactive) per year. Simply divide 30% by 12 months, and you will realize that upwards of 3% of your list could be deprecating each month. Sadly, a list generated from an event last week will already have some invalid email addresses. That means you need to update your email lists before you enter them into your marketing automation or email sending platform—so that you don’t negatively affect your email deliverability rate and compromise your sender reputation.

So how do you clean up lists before you load them? The best way is use an email validation service. They are easy and inexpensive (usually between .005 and .008 cents per email), and the best way to maintain the quality of the lists going into your email systems—or to validate a list you haven’t emailed in awhile (it happens!).

How to Interpret the Results of Email Validation Services

About nine different email validation services are available, and they all do approximately the same thing. They vary in their ease of loading data and understanding their reports. Here’s the ones we’re aware of in no particular order:

• Kickbox
• Snov.io
• ZeroBounce
• NeverBounce
• FindThatLead
• BriteVerify (by Validity)
• Bounceless
• Voila Norbert
• Hunter.io

The two we’re most familiar with and like a lot are NeverBounce and BritevBerify (by Validity). Once you load your list into either of these tools, you’ll almost instantly get a report showing the quality of the list. The report shows in a dashboard that gives you an idea of the list overall health, and then each email address is given a value. NeverBounce and BriteVerify have slightly different values, so we’ll talk about them separately:

NeverBounce

The dashboard report for NeverBounce looks like the image below (Figure 1). It gives you an overall report of how many emails were Valid, Accept All (Unverifiable), Unknown, Disposable, and Invalid. We explain what those values mean below.

Figure 1.

NeverBounce report dashboard.

BriteVerify (by Validity):

The dashboard report for BriteVerify looks like the image below (Figure 2). It gives you an overall report of how many emails were Valid, Invalid, Unknown or Accept All. The values are very similar but a bit simpler than NeverBounce, which we like because quite frankly the extra detail in NeverBounce results isn’t that useful. We will explain what those values mean below.

Figure 2.

Briteverify report dashboard.

What the Deliverability Values Mean for Both NeverBounce and BriteVerify

When you get your list back from either of these services an “email status” column will be added to the list giving each email a deliverability value. When we first starting using the tools, the values seemed a little confusing to us and frankly hard to get clarity from their websites, so we’ll put a definition for the values for you below to save you time and aggravation. This will guide you on which emails to keep and which ones to think about not sending … or sending very carefully.

• Valid
• A valid email address has been verified as a real email that is currently accepting mail.
• SAFE—These emails exist and have been verified for safe sending.

• Invalid
• An invalid email address has been verified as a bad recipient address that does not exist or is not accepting mail. Invalid emails will result in a bounce.
• DON’T SEND—These emails do not exist and are not safe for sending.

• Disposable
• Disposable emails are temporary accounts used to avoid using a real personal account during a sign-up process. Common providers of disposable emails include Mailinator, Guerilla Mail, AirMail, and 10 Minute Mail.
• DON’T SEND—These emails are fake or temporary emails and are not safe for sending.

• Accept All (Unverifiable)
• This is also known as a “catch all”. This is a domain-wide setting where all emails on this domain will be reported as an “accept all”. There is no definitive way to determine whether this email is valid or invalid.
• An accept all address is commonly used in small businesses to ensure a company receives any email that has been sent to them, regardless of typos. Additionally, these are also found in larger government, medical and educational organizations. Oftentimes these are in fact valid emails. However some organizations may utilize this setting as a security feature to prevent unsolicited emails.
• SAFE—If you have a dedicated email server with your own IPs, accept all emails may be safe for sending dependent on the overall health of your list.
• DON’T SEND—If you use a third party email provider that requires a bounce rate below 4%, these emails are not safe for sending.

• Unknown
• We are unable to definitively determine this email’s status. This email appears to be OK, however the domain and/or server is not responding to our requests. This may be due to an issue with their internal network or expired domain names. Unknown addresses are checked up to 75 times before this result code is given.
• SAFE—If you have a dedicated email server with your own IPs, unknown emails are normally safe for sending.
• DON’T SEND—If you use a third party email provider that requires a bounce rate below 4%, these emails are not safe for sending.

The “accept all” and “unknown” emails are the two grey areas marketers struggle with the most because they can make up 10 to 15% of any given database validation effort. We’re often asked our opinion on what to do with those. The easy answer is don’t send them. The nuanced answer is you can try sending them little by little by breaking them into small bits such that if they all bounced your undeliverability rate for that email campaign would not exceed 10%. That takes some reverse math to figure out how big of an overall good deliverable email list to mix your questionable emails into. You have to decide whether it’s worth the effort and risk.

With email list verification tools like we’ve discussed here you can overcome email list churn and improve your deliverability. You might even be able to revive some lists that may have laid dormant during the pandemic and start emailing like a champ again. The tools are out there. Go for it!

by Laurie Beasley

Need help with your email lists or email marketing? Contact us.

The post How to Use Email Validation Services—and Understand their Results appeared first on Beasley Direct and Online Marketing.

About Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc.

Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc., is known for bringing the latest marketing strategies to online and direct marketing. Beasley provides services in inbound and outbound marketing including:  content creation, email marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), print advertising, social media advertising, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, Amazon Marketing Services (AMS), website design, media planning/public relations, direct mail marketing, lead generation and nurture campaigns, and database management. Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc., helps clients in both B2B and B2C marketing and is privately held and headquartered in the Silicon Valley suburb of Morgan Hill, California. For more information, go to www.BeasleyDirect.com .

About Silicon Valley Business Journal

The Silicon Valley Business Journal is the local version of the American City Business Journals (ACBJ), which is the largest publisher of metropolitan business newsweeklies in the United States, with 43 business publications across the country reaching more than 3.6 million readers each week. They also offer specialty publications for sports fans, sports business readers and classic car enthusiasts.

Is your Digital Marketing initiative failing? Beasley’s professional marketing team can help. Start with a free SEO audit of your company’s website. Sign up here.

By Laurie B. Beasley

The post Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc., Places 14th in Silicon Valley Business Journal List of Largest Advertising, Marketing and PR Agencies appeared first on Beasley Direct and Online Marketing.

A marketing automation audit is an objective third-party evaluation of your Marketo and/or Pardot (Salesforce Marketing Cloud) instance. The purpose is to know how well they are working with your salesforce automation software to achieve your lead and sales pipeline goals. Marketing automation audits can reveal many aspects of underutilization or lack of staff training that, when fixed, can make a radical improvement in your company sales pipeline and measurement. Remember, marketing automation audits aren’t just for the marketing department’s benefit. It’s for the sales department too. It’s your best first line of defense to diagnose and troubleshoot lead quality, and fix scoring and reporting issues.

We recently completed audits for two companies and found two completely different sets of results and issues. Surprisingly, a major tech company using Marketo for six years was using fewer features and functions than most companies that have used it for only 12 months. We began to train their staff on new features to organize, segment and track campaigns. And with further analysis of the data, we found we could save them $60,000 per year on their Marketo contract renewal through some pretty simple data cleanup. Wow!

And for the other audit—a smaller healthcare device company that was using Pardot for three years—we found a surprisingly organized set up. However it was paired with an inexperienced demand generation specialist in desperate need of training. The result was management’s unfulfilled desire to score and nurture new leads. We set out to fix these things immediately.

Changes that can precipitate a marketing automation audit

Many company changes can precipitate the need for a marketing automation audit. The following are five of the most common we come across.

Five good reasons to initiate a marketing automation audit:

• 3-6 months prior to renewal of your Pardot or Marketo instance (and for major MarTech tools)—to review structure and costs
• A top admin leaves (or high turnover in demand gen staff)—to smooth out transition period
• New CMO and/or Director of Demand Gen – to give a good analysis of the current install and what needs to change
• Need to benchmark progress (i.e. have follow-up audits every 6-12 months)
• Need an objective way to separate operational issues from sales & marketing issues

The value of an objective 3rd party audit can be in several areas and often pays for itself in cost savings with renewals:

• Helps budgeting and planning for:
• MarTech stack
• Demand gen staff & vendors
• Training and organizational alignment
• Helps uncover hidden issues such as:
• Missing MarTech tools
• Underutilized or incorrectly utilized features
• Lead leakage / loss and bottlenecks
• Data that can be eliminated (and thus not included in renewal)
• Helps analyze the meaning of the findings
• View data with fresh eyes to point out obvious patterns
• Share relevant “lessons learned” from other orgs

The four major areas marketing automation audits cover

A marketing automation audit typically covers four critical areas of analysis: contact management, data health, governance and campaign management. We will explore each of these areas below.

1. Contact Management

Goals

• To troubleshoot known issues in Pardot/Marketo to salesforce automation transfer of leads or values
• To identify inconsistencies or gaps in current lead management
• To define standards and rules for form creation and back end processing
• To document Pardot/Marketo to salesforce automation sync (current state and post-fix)
• Document any 3rd party connection synch processes

Focus

• Use of forms (type, consistency)
• Form field capture, and back end form processing (hidden fields, UTMs etc)
• Lead routing workflows and salesforce integration
• Lead statuses triggered or converting as expected
• Lead scoring (document profile / behavior score system)
• Review Prospect, Account, and Opportunity field mapping
• Review use of progressive profiling
• Review Pardot tagging strategy

2. Data Health and Gap Analysis

Goals

• To capture current state and provide a benchmark for judging data health e.g.
• Active database
• Marketable database
• To define standards and rules for field mapping
• Make initial recommendations for data normalization (e.g. US, United States, USA should all be US)
• Make initial recommendation for list segmentation

Focus

• Database size
• Marketable %
• Unresponsive data / junk data / duplication
• # and % of unsubscribed
• # and % of opted in contacts (with opt in date)
• # of fields, default / custom fields, field values, and field type
• Audit lists (document, size, last used)
• % of duplicate records
• CANSPAM, GDPR, etc. validation and recommendation
• Create list of top 20 values in each field to support normalization

3. Usage and Governance

Goals

• To recommend new standards if necessary
• To ensure compliance with data privacy rules&emdash;as appropriate by region/country, etc…
• To apply more controls as to Pardot/Marketo usage
• Verify email deliverability

Focus

• Review Naming convention and folder hierarchy
• Check for Explicit opt in management
• Review Current users and permission levels
• Review and recommend tag normalization
• Document and recommend archiving of lists, templates, forms, campaigns, etc…
• Test deliverability to ensure the domain is not identified by Spam blockers
• Inventory and review all email and landing page assets

4. Campaign and Nurture

Goals

• To identify what ‘clean out’ efforts are needed
• To make it easier to see what’s active or not
• To support better practices around template use

Focus

• Document a full list of all Pardot/Marketo assets: forms, landing pages, templates, campaigns, and engagement streams
• Current status of all assets (archived, draft, active, not in use)
• % of duplicate records
• Troubleshoot email and landing page templates

An audit will result in a report on each of these areas and a set of observations for good findings and areas that need fixing.

Small changes often yield big results. Big changes yield even bigger results

Every marketing automation audit we’ve conducted has yielded a different set of issues and the fixes needed. We often rank the fixes needed in order of priority and help the client to determine the tradeoffs or benefits gained for investing in them. Even small data cleanups can yield big cost savings, and significantly improve lead quality. Bigger investments in fixing nurture streams and lead scoring can yield big results in ushering better leads filling the pipeline – something that will surely warm the heart of marketing and sales alike. Because the marketing automation audit isn’t just for marketing, it’s for sales too. They have a vested in interest in what is being pushed over to the salesforce automation system, and a marketing automation audit is your best first defense to ensure better quality leads get there.

Need a marketing automation audit? Contact us for a free consultation.

By Laurie B. Beasley

The post Five Good Reasons to Get an Objective Third Party Audit of Your Marketing Automation System appeared first on Beasley Direct and Online Marketing.

We are happy to announce the partnership between Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc., and The B2B Marketing Expo California for 2019.  We hope that this partnership will bring about the alignment of professionals passionate about direct marketing, online marketing and B2B Marketing as well as highlight our focus on more educational opportunities for marketing in California.

Beasley Direct and Online Marketing will be partnering with The B2B Marketing Expo, October 2 and 3, 2019 in Los Angeles, CA.  The company president, Laurie Beasley, will be speaking on October 2, right after the keynote address on the topic “Meeting Maker Marketing Campaigns: How to Connect Sales with Anyone”.  Beasley Direct will also be exhibiting both days.

Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc., is a full-service agency focused on lead generation and creating sales opportunities. Offering a range of problem solving services, it helps businesses get more leads and sales all while helping to measure the results and implement better methods.

Beasley was founded as a direct mail agency in the early 1990s, focused on lead generation for high tech marketers. At the time, database segmentation was the next big thing. They’ve grown beyond direct mail marketing and evolved over the years to include SEO & PPC services, email marketing, and multichannel marketing, always learning and never losing sight of the goal: deliver superior results for their clients at an excellent ROI.

Today, the organization has grown to utilize direct marketing and internet marketing to help most businesses get new leads or customers. Above all, Beasley Direct and Online Marketing is filled with a team of professionals who love what they do. Beasley Direct and Online Marketing has been recognized for their marketing efforts in multiple industry fronts and fosters a collaborative community within its membership. It is sponsored by organizations like The Direct Marketing Association of Northern California and the NorCal Business Marketing Association.

“I am thrilled to partner with The B2B Marketing Expo. Having taught direct and online marketing certification courses my whole career, I’m a big believer in continuing education. Conferences like The B2B Marketing Expo are a great place to continue your learning with new ideas, different approaches, and new service providers who can help you achieve your marketing goals more efficiently,” says Laurie Beasley, President, Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc.

B2B Marketing Expo

The team behind The B2B Marketing Expo California recognize that direct marketing continues to be essential to industry success and is also a key component to a rapidly evolving part of marketing, regardless of sector. We know how important it is for our community to remain at the forefront of the latest developments and practices and partnering with Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc., is how we are assured that we’re staying ahead in the industry.

“We understand the kind of challenges businesses have in reaching out to their customers, especially when it comes to getting that personal touch in direct communication,” notes The B2B Expo Marketing Director Milen Guergov. “It’s great to see that Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc., is the kind of partner that we know will be able to give companies that edge in reaching out to new leads and making better connections with existing customers. They have so much to offer when it comes to the marketing world.”

We look forward to supporting Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc., with the organization’s ongoing objectives and welcoming its members and associates to our event.

Get Free Tickets

If you would like to find out more about Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc., please take a look here. If you would like to register for a free ticket for The B2B Marketing Expo California, you can do so right here.

The post Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc., Partnering with The B2B Marketing Expo appeared first on Beasley Direct and Online Marketing.

When you search Google on the phrase “Integrating your CRM with Google Ads,” about 2.8 million results are offered. Obviously, this is a common integration issue. Having an integration checklist will help you plan your process before starting (which is the reason I wrote this blog). I hope my checklist will save you time, money and create ROI for you in the long run.

For the sake of giving examples, we’ll use Marketo as our representative Marketing Automation Platform (MAP), and explain how it connects to SalesForce (our CRM). These are not the only choices in the market, but they will serve to illustrate common opportunities and challenges.

Integration Checklist Questions

We list here a series of questions we will explore in the following sections. You might want to jot down answers to these questions first before we review each in detail.

1. Do you have a separate Marketing Automation Platform (MAP) and Customer Relationship Management system (CRM)?
2. Do your MAP and CRM systems have a clean, well-documented connection/interface?
3. Is there a direct connection to the CRM from Google Ads?
4. Are the forms on your site native to the MAP/CRM or do they pre-date it?
5. Is your campaign naming convention consistent between the MAP, CRM and Google Ads?
6. What elements do you wish to track across the three platforms?
7. How long is your sales cycle in both time and number of touches to a closed deal?
8. Do you have steps in your sales qualification process that are manual, requiring a human to make a judgement call?
9. Will there be multiple touches before the MQL is handed off to the sales team?
10. How many people will own this process?

Here are Additional Details on each Question and what they Imply

1. Do you have a separate MAP and CRM?

Some CRMs have great marketing automation built into their infrastructure and do not need the addition of a MAP. Often though, companies start with a MAP and eventually move to a full-blown CRM.

If you do not have an integrated MAP/CRM connection, budget additional time and resources to connect the two. This often can be a major hurdle in launching your campaigns. One of Beasley Direct and Online Marketing’s (BDOM) clients ran into this issue and an additional 6 weeks of development time was required to launch the campaigns.

2. Do your MAP and CRM systems have a clean, well-documented connection?

Both Marketo and SalesForce have invested time and money into creating these connections at the API level. Take advantage of this and use what’s there instead of trying to recreate the wheel.

Be sure to test the connection between the MAP and CRM before launch. In spite of having off-the-shelf solutions, BDOM has found allocating time and budget for running initial tests is key to long-term campaign and larger marketing initiative success.

3. Is there a direct connection to the CRM from Google Ads?

Is it one way or two way? Being able to send sales data back to Google Ads will make a much more efficient campaign over time. BDOM has found that where this exists the integration process is easier, and we are able to see a much more detailed view of what’s happening from click to meeting to closed sale. Be sure to spend time familiarizing both your marketing team and sales team with what results say. Having your sales team understand results goes a long way towards getting them to take online leads seriously as they allocate limited time to what they view as the best prospects.

4. Are the forms on your site native to the MAP/CRM or do they pre-date it?

It will save you time and lots of effort if you bite the bullet and convert all your forms to the native version offered by your MAP. This is probably the biggest source of frustration and delay when going through this process.

One of our clients chose to have a hybrid approach with new forms being built in Marketo and older forms being “imported” into the system. While they were able to make this work, it required additional development time when a new campaign would target the marketing collateral associated with an older “imported” form.

Spend the time and effort up front to convert older forms to your MAP. It will allow your team to be more agile and effective for future campaigns.

5. What elements do you wish to track across the three platforms?

Make sure your SalesForce campaign fields match your Google Ads fields. Also, importing your cost data into SalesForce can make your ROI much clearer at a glance.

This comes back to the idea of managing your resources effectively. We all have limited budget to drive traffic to our site, whether from paid search or email outreach. Being able to understand which traffic is driving the best leads and how much those leads are costing your company will allow your team to make better decisions on which campaigns are performing best. It also cuts down on the number of “poor” leads your sales team needs to shepherd from marketing qualified to sales qualified.

Your sales team has limited time to devote to qualifying marketing leads and will begin discounting them over time if poor leads are being sent because they appear to be “affordable.”

6. Is your campaign naming convention consistent between the MAP, CRM and Google Ads?

Keeping the naming convention consistent from the start will cut down on significant data issues. It’s easier to match them up at the outset of your integration process than going back to retrofit the data later.

One key field that needs to be included in SalesForce is the “gclid” field. This is the container that Google Ads uses to transmit all the campaign, ad group, ad, search term, targeting and cost info into a nice little package that SalesForce can decode.

7. How long is your sales cycle in both time and number of touches to a closed deal?

The more touches needed, the more you need to make sure you’re getting a clean, two-way data stream between Google Ads and your MAP/CRM.

Our team spent a lot of time and effort ensuring we are able to follow the lead stream with our clients to understand what is working. Having good, two-way communication between the eventual sale and the click that drove it is key. This can be the area in which a well-connected MAP/CRM solution pays for itself, giving the marketing team the data they need to focus on the best source of high-quality leads for the sales team.

8. Do you have steps in your sales qualification process that are manual, requiring a human to make a judgement call?

This is known as shifting a lead from an MQL (marketing qualified lead) to a SQL (sales qualified lead).

BDOM will sit down with our client’s marketing and sales teams at the beginning of any new engagement and ask how they qualify the lead, what makes for a good SQL vs. an MQL and what history the two sides have. This will often result in a better understanding on both sides and better long term buy-in to a process that may not be turnkey.

9. Will there be multiple touches before the MQL is handed off to the sales team?

Be sure that these are used to score the lead and it transmits to your CRM when the lead is transferred.

This again is a key step for getting sales and marketing on the same page in understanding the process and developing trust with the quality of the leads as they go through the pipeline.

10. How many people will own this process?

Is it just one person or are you splitting the work among different people and teams? Getting the multiple parties involved at the outset to discuss goals and possible issues is vital to having a successful process. Be aware that different team members will have different goals for the integration. Some may not want to do the work required and will need to be convinced of the final result’s value.

The ins and outs of the process will be very dependent on planning details before any steps are taken. Like any project, a road map with clear responsibilities will make your integration much more successful.

Additional links that can help you get started.

Link Salesforce and Google Ads accounts
https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/7538740

Import conversions from Salesforce
https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/6299296#setup_steps

Google Ads Integration Questions? | Marketo Marketing Nation
https://nation.marketo.com/thread/44948-google-adwords-workings

Google Ads Integration: Optimize Ads Using Marketo Offline Conversion Data
https://www.marketo.com/cheat-sheets/google-adwords-integration-optimize-ads-using-marketo-offline-conversion-data/

Do you need assistance integrating your Marketing Automation Platform and CRM with Google Ads? We can help. Request a free consultation here.

For digital marketing case studies, go here.

By John Thyfault
Vice President of Search and Social Media Marketing
Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc.

The post 10 Steps to Integrate Marketing Automation Platforms and CRMs with Google Ads appeared first on Beasley Direct and Online Marketing.

Laurie Beasley, President of Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc., will be teaching live online demand generation fundamentals workshop for the Direct Marketing Association of Northern California.

Enroll in the recorded online workshop here.

This course takes a fresh approach to demand generation, by helping you set goals with the Sales department, manage the touch points for lead qualification and optimize your communication channels for maximum success.

The pressure for B2B marketers is on. Modern B2B buyers have an increasing tendency and capacity to research purchasing decisions online long before they engage with Sales. They are empowered with information, and winning over modern B2B buyers requires organizations to revolutionize their marketing approach. To compound the problem, Sales teams demand higher quality “sales-ready” leads to hit their numbers. It can take 7 to 13+ big touches to generate a qualified sales opportunity. The marketer is on the hook to manage and deliver the sales qualified leads, and this session will help you deliver. Learn more.

About the DMAnc (www.DMAnc.org)

The DMA of Northern California was formed to educate, inform and provide networking opportunities for Direct and Online Marketing professionals in the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond.

We hold monthly luncheon meetings, workshops, periodic half-day seminars, and provide opportunity for the best in learning and job networking in the Northern California marketing community.

About Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc.

Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc., is known for bringing the latest marketing strategies to online and direct marketing. We provide services in inbound and outbound marketing including: content creation, email marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), print advertising, social media advertising, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, Amazon Marketing Services (AMS), website design, media planning/public relations, direct mail marketing, lead generation and nurture campaigns, and database management. We help clients in both B2B and B2C marketing and are privately held and headquartered in the Silicon Valley suburb of Morgan Hill, California. For more information, go here.

Get a FREE Lead Funnel Audit. Learn more here.

The post Join Laurie Beasley, President of Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc., in a Live Online Demand Generation and Lead Conversion Fundamentals Workshop appeared first on Beasley Direct and Online Marketing.

Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc., a full service direct and online marketing agency, is announcing that it placed 18^th in the Silicon Valley Business Journal List of Largest Advertising, Marketing and PR Agencies.  The list is updated yearly and ranked by the quantity of local full-time employees. If the list had been ranked by overall employees (both local and nationwide) Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc., would have been ranked much higher on the list.  Every year the Business Journal surveys local agencies and creates the ranked list. The list is available free to Business Journal subscribers, and for a fee to non-Business Journal subscribers, and you can purchase it here.

About Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc.

Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc., is known for bringing the latest marketing strategies to online and direct marketing. Beasley provides services in inbound and outbound marketing including:  content creation, email marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), print advertising, social media advertising, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, Amazon Marketing Services (AMS), website design, media planning/public relations, direct mail marketing, lead generation and nurture campaigns, and database management. Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc., helps clients in both B2B and B2C marketing and is privately held and headquartered in the Silicon Valley suburb of Morgan Hill, California. For more information, go to www.BeasleyDirect.com.

About the Silicon Valley Business Journal

The Silicon Valley Business Journal is the local version of the American City Business Journals (ACBJ), which is the largest publisher of metropolitan business newsweeklies in the United States, with 43 business publications across the country reaching more than 3.6 million readers each week. They also offer specialty publications for sports fans, sports business readers and classic car enthusiasts.

Learn about our Free SEO Audit offer.

The post Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc., Places 18th in Silicon Valley Business Journal List of Largest Advertising, Marketing and PR Agencies appeared first on Beasley Direct and Online Marketing.

GDPR is a new, comprehensive data protection law in the EU that updates existing laws to strengthen the protection of personal data in light of rapid technological developments, increased globalization, and more complex international flows of personal data. It replaces the patchwork of national data protection laws currently in place with a single set of rules, directly enforceable in each EU member state. It will begin to be enforced May 25, 2018.

While the current EU legislation (the 1995 EU Data Protection Directive) governs entities within the EU, the territorial scope of the GDPR is far wider. It will also apply to non-EU businesses who:

a) market their products to people in the EU, or who
b) monitor the behavior of people in the EU.

In other words, even if you’re based outside of the EU but you control or process the data of EU citizens, the GDPR will apply to you.

What is the GDPR?

The GDPR regulates the “processing,” which includes the collection, storage, transfer or use, of personal data about EU individuals. Any organization that processes personal data of EU individuals, including tracking their online activities, is within the scope of the law, regardless of whether the organization has a physical presence in the EU or not. Importantly, under the GDPR, the concept of “personal data” is very broad and covers any information relating to an identified or identifiable individual (also called a “data subject”).

The GDPR provides more privacy rights to EU individuals and places significant obligations on organizations regarding data collection. Some of the key principles are:

1. Transparency on how data will be used and what it will be used for.
2. Ensuring that the data collected is used only for the purposes explicitly specified at the time of collection.
3. Limiting the data collection to what is necessary to serve the purpose for which it is collected.
4. Ensuring the data is accurate.
5. Storing the data for only as long as necessary within its intended purpose.
6. Prevention against unauthorized use or accidental loss of the data through deployment of appropriate security measures.

What is the Penalty?

Under the GDPR, authorities can fine organizations up to the greater of €20 million or 4% of a company’s annual global revenue, based on the seriousness of the breach and damages incurred.

How Specifically Do You Comply?

GDPR compliance will involve several steps of updating your marketing operations at all touchpoints with customers.  You will need to update your privacy policy, add data collection fields to your forms, update your subscription center, and ensure data is secure, etc.  Hubspot provides a helpful checklist (get documentation here).

We’ve compiled links to several marketing automation platforms’ documentation for GDPR compliance. We have found that most of the platforms provide specific shortcuts to implement changes to form fields and data maintenance.

We found this guide from Marketo especially helpful, even if you’re not a Marketo user. It provides specific examples of fields to add to your forms (get documentation here).

Anybody using the Salesforce Marketing Cloud has multiple touchpoints and products within the cloud to update. They provide comprehensive documentation (get documentation here).

Here’s a guide provided by Oracle Marketing Cloud (get documentation here).

Here’s a guide provided by IBM Watson (get documentation here).

If You Need Help Updating Your Marketing Automation Platform for GDPR Compliance, Contact Us

If you need help with updating your marketing automation platform for GDPR compliance, we can help. We help clients manage their campaigns on several email platforms. Contact us for a free consultation!

The post GDPR Compliance is Coming to Marketers in the US: Are You Ready? appeared first on Beasley Direct and Online Marketing.

Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc., a Northern California-based full service direct and online marketing agency, has been appointed as a demand generation and marketing consulting agency for Frank, Rimerman Consulting, a business systems consulting division of Frank, Rimerman + Co. LLP, one of the largest locally owned CPA firms in California.  The initial work will focus on the following: analyzing the sales lead funnel and recommending demand generation campaigns, executing email campaigns on the Pardot marketing automation system, and content creation.

About Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc.

Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc., is known for bringing the latest marketing strategies to online and direct marketing. Beasley provides services in inbound and outbound marketing including:  content creation, email marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), print advertising, social media advertising, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, website design, direct mail marketing, lead generation and nurture campaigns, and database management. Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc., helps clients in both B2B and B2C marketing and is privately held and headquartered in the Silicon Valley suburb of Morgan Hill, California.

About Frank, Rimerman Consulting

Frank, Rimerman Consulting (FRC) is the business systems consulting division of Frank, Rimerman + Co. LLP, one of the largest locally owned accounting and business consulting firms in California with offices in Palo Alto, San Francisco, San Jose, and St. Helena.  FRC serves a growing list of clients globally,  delivering SaaS Corporate Performance Management (CPM), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solutions and value-added consulting services to organizations of all sizes. With deep finance, technology, and industry expertise, FRC helps clients gain operational and cost efficiencies.

Press contacts:

Laurie Beasley
President, Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc.
lbeasley@beasleydirect.com
408-782-0046 x21

Steve Wolford
Partner, Consulting Group
swolford@frankrimermanconsulting.com
408-535-8071

Learn more about Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc., demand generation services here.

The post Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc., is Appointed as Demand Generation and Marketing Automation Consulting Agency for Frank, Rimerman Consulting appeared first on Beasley Direct and Online Marketing.

The dissatisfaction came in three major areas:

1. Lack of customer/technical support.
2. Complexity of the product for new team members to learn.
3. And, a lack of adaptation to mobile/responsive email templates.

I’d like to explore all three of these complaint areas for a few minutes. But first a disclaimer that I will compare the complaints I’ve catalogued across all email sending platforms whether they be an ESP or an MA platform. I will not get into the differences between using an ESP vs. MA. That’s for another time.

Lack of customer/technical support was the major complaint of 2017

Many email sending platforms, like IBM Watson and Salesforce Marketing Cloud (which contains both ExactTarget and Pardot), have removed the option to call in to talk to a live customer or technical support person when you have a problem. You are asked to either fill out a support ticket or interact with a community. That puts the onus on you to frame your question just right, or you’ll get a bogus answer from either. The community usually responds within 24 hours, however you could be left hanging with a big problem for several hours until someone does answer. I predict that email sending platforms that do offer live, 24/7 customer/technical support, like the relative newcomer, Adestra, will begin to steal market share from the other ESPs.

The inability to quickly onboard new email marketing team members was the second major complaint of 2017

I noticed my clients taking a critical eye to the time/complexity it takes to train new email marketing automation team members. Training time is a real cost to the company and affects the ability to quickly replace or expand staff. Some Marketing Automation platforms are so sophisticated and complex, like Oracle Responsys, that you’re almost forced to outsource the usage of it, or at least recruit very specifically for talent with experience using it — which is a limited talent pool. I see clients opting for less complex marketing automation tools, such as Pardot or Hubspot, which have reasonably good training and on-boarding programs and seem to be easier for newbies to learn. They are also more economical for those who don’t need all of the Oracle-like sophisticated features, and who need more basic campaign setup, scoring and nurturing.

I also envision more outsourcing of email marketing operations to agencies, like Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc., because the labor market will become increasingly more constrained and finding talent (even worldwide) will become more difficult.

You’d think all email sending and marketing automation platforms would support mobile/responsive design. They don’t.

The third major complaint we heard was with platforms not supporting responsive design very well. We’ve re-designed most of our client’s emails to be mobile/responsive, however not all of their email systems have adapted perfectly well to the demands this places on the email sending platform. For instance for one client, their Constant Contact email system would not allow us to drop in a new two-column email template that would re-stack into one column on mobile. Constant Contact does have hard-coded templates that do re-stack, but the client didn’t like any of them. The inability to use your own email creative is very frustrating. We wound up moving the email template over to Vertical Response to test it, just to make sure it wasn’t our code. It worked perfectly there.

With 2018 there will be big changes to market share for email sending and marketing automation platforms. We envision Adestra will steal market share from IBM Watson and ExactTarget (part of IBM Marketing Cloud) because of their live 24/7 support. We project Pardot and Hubspot to supplant Marketo and Oracle for their easier training and staffing. And, tools like Constant Contact will need to up their game or be replaced by upper tier tools who fully support responsive design.

If you need helping choosing or running your Email Sending or Marketing Automation platforms, we can help. Contact us today.

Read about creating email templates here.

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