Blogging is not easy, especially for B2B companies.  Blogging provides a way to market new ideas, products, services, etc. The blog on your site is merely a container for the full articles that you provide links to in your email marketing.  

If you think writting your blog is hard, getting subscribers is even harder.  Here are 3 tips to help increase the number of people that sign-up for your email that contains links to your full blog articles.

Local marketing includes several different Internet and mobile marketing tactics.  This article summarizes the list of local marketing initiatives.  People in general want to belong to something and want to be treated special.  Local marketing gives that customer the idea that your brand is part of the community vs. being a “chain.”  People today associate the word “chain” with national or the opposite of being local.

Email subscribers who have come through an advanced sign-up or welcome program can have email open rates more than 40 percent and up to a 10 percent increase in response rates. Correctly managing your email opt-in process is very important to a successful welcome program. When done correctly, it will increase response rates, enhance your brand reputation, and even increase the possibility of customers becoming evangelists for your brand.

For a successful email welcome program, follow these five steps:

1. Make sign-up easy and obvious. Don't make people search your site for a place to enter their email address. Make it clear and concise and above the fold (for the average screen size and resolution). Be descriptive in the language used at this stage. Incentivize: think about including an offer; however, I would recommend testing the effectiveness of this.

2. Capture simple data at the first stage. Ask quick and relevant data capture questions at first. Avoid long-winded, irrelevant (boring) questions. Always ask yourself why you are asking for this data and how you are going to use it? Personalization? Analysis? Or "just because it might be interesting"?

Moms are buying more than just household products.  They control 65% of all computer and technology purchases and 75% of all car-buying decisions and more than 7 million moms are running business out of their home.

Here are five recommendations on how to help improve your email engagement:

Cut back on the number of images in your emails. When you load messages down with lots of images you increase the chances that a subscriber will click over to the Web version—where your email analytics can no longer track their movements.  You need a few images with a brief amount of text.  Just enough so they understand and become interested in taking the next step.

To make sure you're sending each group the right message, it's important to first determine who's who.  The following are three ways you can determine who your loyal customers are:

Loyal customers frequently click through, read or watch your content and make purchases. Brand loyalists won't respond to every message you send; they're likely to become familiar with your campaigns and buy when they know they'll get the best deal. Loyal customers won’t always wait for a special or coupon though.

They connect with your company on social networks. Brand loyalists "follow" you on Twitter, "like" you on Facebook and recommend your products or services to others in their networks. Remember, in those environments, they'll also try to talk with you, so be sure to respond.

Inactive subscribers frustrate those handling email marketing because we don't know what went wrong. Reasons they ignore us include realizing our product or service isn't a good fit, waiting patiently for more relevant content, just wanted a chance to win or fuming over bad customer service.

So, how can you deal effectively with inactives? Here’s a four-step strategy:

Forrester found that the average score for B2B campaigns actually dropped since its last review in 2006. So, in this column, let's review some tips on you can improve your email campaigns before Forrester's next review.

1. Enhance your message

You can have the best email list in the world, but if you don't nail the message, very few will engage. Coordinating your subject line, email header, content, offer and call to action is the key to maximizing your open and click-through rates.

They forget the big picture, the only thing that really matters: Will the e-mail be effective? Will it engage people enough to get them to open it and take the action we want them to take?