In Chicago, there’s a famous restaurant called Alinea. It’s one of only a handful of restaurants in America that have earned the coveted 3-star Michelin rating, making it one of the best restaurants in the world. But if you ask people who’ve dined there what makes it unique, most will tell you that, somehow, it’s not just the food.
Alinea is an experience.
You know what hurts? Spending roughly three weeks (or more) shepherding an email from ideation to deployment … only to realize later that an error made it all the way through to your customers’ inboxes.
I know this feeling all too well — I’ve made a few dingers myself over the years. And while none of the mishaps resulted in an apology email, they all still haunt me.
Email has seemingly been on the brink of extinction for about a decade now. Over the past few years alone, email has been called “dead,” “not dead, evolving,” and even “dead, again.” But as you can likely tell by the steady stream of messages still flowing into your inbox every day, not to mention the ones you write and send yourself, email continues to keep on keeping on.
When marketers like us create landing pages, write email copy, or design call-to-action buttons, it can be tempting to use our intuition to predict what will make people click and convert.
Marketers spend a lot of time drafting poignant email copy, designing wonderfully branded email templates, and crafting succinct and enticing email subject lines that get open and click-through rates skyrocketing.
But before hitting send, have you considered whether your subscribers will even get the opportunity to read your email?
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Inbound is no longer something entirely foreign to marketing teams: Globally, three out of four marketers prioritize an inbound approach.
This means that brands are producing content at an accelerated rate, and in order to remain competitive, you need to consistently produce something that is compelling enough to generate a ton of shares.
Before the days of neon lights and marquee signs, business owners had to get creative when it came to advertising their establishments. In fact, wine bars in ancient Rome used to hang bunches of vine leaves outside their door as a nod to the God of Wine, Bacchus. And when weather conditions left them with a short supply of vine leaves, barkeeps turned to bushes — inns called Bush, or Bull & Bush, still exist today.
Most marketers and brand strategists understand the dangers of brand inconsistency: without a well-defined logo, color scheme, and brand voice, your brand won’t stand out in consumers’ minds. And if consumers can’t remember your brand, you haven’t a chance against competitors.
The internet is swarming with tips, tricks, and suggestions about how to design beautiful emails. And while a lot of marketers seem to understand the basics — personalize the copy, make the call-to-action pop, segment your list, etc. — many still overlook an important component of effective email marketing: emails also need to have visual appeal.
We’ve all heard how important it is to make a good first impression. Show up late for a job interview? That’s a bad first impression. Eat a ton of garlic and forget to brush your teeth right before a first date? Also a bad first impression. Go to meet your significant others’ parents for the first time dressed in Crocs and sweatpants? That might also result in a bad first impression (depending on prevailing fashion sensibilities).
When I first started editing articles for HubSpot’s Marketing Blog, I didn’t quite realize how much time each one would take.
Depending on length, topic, author, and other variables, it can take anywhere from twenty minutes to an entire afternoon to edit a single blog post.
Often times, the greatest challenge marketers face when creating content isn’t the actual writing, publishing, or promoting. Instead, it’s the other related tasks — brainstorming, scheduling, and coordinating moving parts — that wind up causing us stress.
This is where tools like Trello come in.
I’ve done a lot of dumb things as a writer. But that’s okay. Mistakes are the best way to learn, right?
When we make a mistake once, we usually don’t make it again. And the less time we have to spend correcting our mistakes, the more time we have to actually get things done.
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