Douglas Karr's Articles on Martech Zone
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Sales Enablement, Automation, and Performance
Accelerating Your Pipeline with Automated Lead Generation
Few companies have the sales power to call on every prospect available. That means that it’s often left to chance or a gut feeling on which prospects that you should spend the most time with. More often than not, this spells disaster for companies. They spend time on prospects that will never convert while they may have leads that are…
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Advertising Technology
Scout: A Service for Sending Postcards for $1 Each
Scout is a simple service that does one thing – it allows you to send 4×6, full-color postcards customized by you. You supply your own front and back images, provide a list of addresses (we can help you build it or you can do it yourself), and they’ll print a beautiful postcard and then mail it to any number of…
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E-commerce and Retail
Repricing: How Amazon Repricing Works and How Long It Takes
Amazon reported that merchants selling on its marketplace accounted for 45% of units sold in the second quarter of 2015, up from 41% the year before. With millions of sellers selling billions of products in a commerce site like Amazon, sellers benefit from adjusting their pricing so they’re both competitive and can still maintain profits. Repricing is the strategy of…
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Analytics & Testing
The Myth of Attribution
One of the slides that I discuss in virtually every conversation I have with businesses is one that I call the myth of attribution. In any system of measurement, we prefer boolean and discrete rules of behavior. If this, then that. It’s a problem, though, because that’s not how purchase decisions are made. It doesn’t matter if you’re a consumer…
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Content Marketing
MainWP: Centrally Manage Your WordPress Sites
The great folks at Automattic have been closely integrating centralized WordPress management through their Jetpack plugin. I’ve already run into one issue with it, though, losing all of my past Jetpack analytics when my site somehow got disconnected and a staging site was connected instead. It was quite a bummer – and I’m thankful that I have Google Analytics also…
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Content Marketing
WittyParrot: Knowledge Automation for Sales and Marketing Communications
In a report from the McKinsey Global Institute, The social economy: Unlocking value and productivity through social technologies, researchers found that the average knowledge worker wasted 28 hours per month searching and recreating documents. Only 10% of documents at a company were in a useful format. And up to 80% of sales and marketing collateral was never even used. Marketers…
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Email Marketing & Automation
How to Reverse Plummeting Email Engagement Rates
It’s quite a surprise to most companies when they find out that 60% of subscribers in the average email list are dormant. For a company with 20,000 email subscribers, that’s 12,000 emails that have dropped off. The vast majority of email marketers are petrified at dropping a single subscriber off of their list. The effort it required to get these…
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Content Marketing
Blitz: Performance and Load Testing from the Cloud
It’s tough coming up with an analogy for the load put on a web server so here goes. Imagine you’re a web server and your visitors are cans of tomatoes. If you have one or two cans of food, you can carry them pretty easy. Pile a few hundred in your arms and none of the food can get where…
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Content Marketing
We’ve Moved Hosts… You May Want To As Well
I’ll be honest that I’m incredibly disappointed right now. When managed WordPress hosting hit the market and some friends of mine launched their company, I couldn’t have been happier. As an agency, I was tired of running into issue after issue with web hosts who would pass off any problem with WordPress on to us. With Managed WordPress hosting, our…
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Email Marketing & Automation
The 3 Dimensions of a Balanced Email Marketing Strategy
Many marketers focus their strategy for email marketing simply on output productivity and the performance of the email. This misses some enormous dimensions that are impacting the overall success of your company to compete against an inbox that’s piled high for your subscribers’ attention. There are 3 dimensions to any analysis that is executed after an email marketing campaign: Email…
