Author: Franz Malten Buemann

Hello! I’m looking for some advice. I work in Higher Ed. Our CRM hosts contact information for individuals who relate to the University in multiple ways. Those contacts may include 5-10 valid email address! Multiple campus emails, personal, work, alumni, etc. Our users may have to email to one or the other depending on their need. Students need mail at campus email, alumni relations to a personal, etc. The kicker is that our users may need to use these emails simultaneously. That is because contacts can be in multiple categories at the same time (student and alum for example). We have really struggled to effectively use marketing automation in this environment. We need an enterprise solution to integrate to enterprise Salesforce implementation, but most tools want to leverage a single email address from CRM. We have had limited success with data extensions from Marketing Cloud, but haven’t found that scalable as it limits our use of Journey Builder and other features. Is anyone aware of another enterprise application that might meet that requirement? Marketo? Eloqua?
submitted by /u/dionisus1122 [link] [comments]

We already noted earlier this summer that Apple’s iOS 15 update is just around the corner – likely mid-September. As Apple rolls out new privacy protections for users, email service providers (like Benchmark Email) will have less data on some users. We’re excited to tackle this challenge head-on with the rest of the email marketing…
The post Your iOS 15 To-Do List from Benchmark Email appeared first on Benchmark Email.

When was the last time you gave your website a checkup? If you’ve never before audited your website, it’s been a while since you have, or you’re planning a website redesign in the near future, use this post as your go-to website audit checklist to make sure your website is primed for maximum SEO and conversion results.

Below, let’s learn what a website audit is, why it’s important, and how to use the information to improve your SEO and conversions.

Before we dive into the things you should be keeping an eye out for as you’re auditing your website, let’s review some of the benefits of doing one. Here are some of the top benefits from a marketing perspective:
1. Website Performance Optimization
Website audits usually evaluate a site not only for its content but also for its technical performance.
As a result, an audit will give you a chance to inspect the robustness of your website’s technical framework and infrastructure, assess how friendly your website is to search engines, and determine how easy it is for users to navigate and intuitively find content on your website.
2. Search Engine Optimization
By conducting a website audit, you’ll be able to identify any missed SEO opportunities and remedy any misguided or poorly executed SEO pitfalls (e.g. keyword stuffing, exact match anchor text links, etc.) throughout the content of your website.
It will also allow you to re-focus your SEO efforts on users first and search engines second. This will safeguard you from constantly chasing changes to search ranking algorithms, meaning you won’t be applying misguided practices just to show up at the top of the search engine results pages (SERPs).
3. Conversion Rate Optimization
Website audits also enable you to re-evaluate the effectiveness of your website in terms of lead generation and conversion. As a result, you’ll be able to spot any previously overlooked opportunities to convert visitors into leads so you can add relevant CTAs, as well as identify deficiencies in your landing pages so you can optimize them to boost conversions.
4. Competitive Analysis
Conducting a website audit will allow you to compare your website to your competitor’s. You can analyze how well you’re ranking against competitors for keywords and determine potential new sources of revenue.
You can use tools, like HubSpot’s website grader, to perform an audit on your competitor’s websites to gather more insights. You can learn how your competitors are attracting visitors and see how they’re garnering conversions.
Ultimately, this will help you brainstorm new tactics and strategies for your site.
5. Identify Issues
When you do a website audit, you’ll be able to find issues that are hurting your SEO and conversions. Perhaps it’s broken links, hidden content, long page load speed times, or more. Identifying these issues will help you repair issues that are diverting traffic.
As you can see, assessing both the content and technical aspects of your website will open up opportunities to drastically improve the traffic and conversions your website generates.
Now that you know what a website audit is and why you should do one, let’s look at how to conduct one.

1. Run Your Website URL through a Site Audit Tool
Before you get started, you’ll want to find a website auditing tool that can help you analyze how your website is performing. When you use site audit software to run your site through, you can get specific recommendations and test how your page is performing.
2. Find Technical Errors
Once you’ve put your site through an auditing tool, you’ll want to look for technical errors. These could be related to performance, SEO, mobile, security, and more. The technical site structure and setup of your site play a large role in how well your website performs for customers.
3. Identify SEO Problems
Now, you’ll want to look at SEO-related issues so you can improve your ranking on search engines. This might mean looking at meta descriptions, reviewing image alt text, and more.
4. Analyze Design and UX
One of the things I like to look for when conducting a website audit is the user experience. How is this design working for your customers? Some software has heatmaps of what parts of your design draw the most attention and what users are reading. This type of analysis will let you know how the overall design and user experience are impacting your visitors.
5. Assess Website Content
A website audit will help you assess website content including blogs, website pages, etc. You’ll want to know how your current pages are stacking up. Ask yourself, “Is my content ranking well in search engines?” and “Is my on-page SEO and performance aligned with my traffic numbers?”
6. Generate a Checklist of All Site Issues and Recommended Fixes
Lastly, when you’re conducting a website audit, it’s important to have a place where you put a summary of all your findings. List out the site issues and recommended fixes, so that you can send that information to the appropriate teams.
Now let’s dive in even more specifically so you know what to be checking for in this website audit.
Assessments to Make When Auditing Your Website
But first, enter your website into HubSpot’s Website Grader — this will give you a general overview of your website’s strengths so you can gauge your focus on each of the assessments that follow in this article.

How’d you do? Got an idea of which website audit benefits you need the most? Here we go.
1. Website Performance Assessment
In the first part of your website audit, you should be focusing on how users navigate your website — from your homepage to blog posts, to landing pages, and any related content in between.
Make a list of the pages on your website and ask yourself the following questions to evaluate them for optimization opportunities:
Is Your Website Optimized for Maximum Usability?
The more visitors you can attract to your website, the more opportunities you’ll have to generate leads and, ultimately, customers. But only if your website performs well.
As I’m sure you can imagine, just having a website does not guarantee results. As part of determining the overall efficiency of your website, your audit should check to make sure your site is designed with your visitors in mind. The design and overall navigability of your website should correspond with what a person would come to the site to seek out, such as more information on a business-related topic, resources, product/pricing information, testimonials, etc. This will largely depend on your individual business.
The main goal here is to make it easy for people to get the information they’re looking for. As a result, you’ll likely see conversion rates improve on their own.
To audit your website for usability, consider the following:

Are all the main value propositions of our business easily accessible via our main navigations/menu items?
Do we have a simple yet intuitive website design and page layout? Make sure pages aren’t too cluttered; littered with ads, CTAs, or links; or void of internal links altogether.
Are your conversion paths and/or shopping cart or checkout processes intuitive? Are there a ton of distractions along the way that could be creating friction for your site visitors?

You might also consider doing some user testing with members of your target audience to ensure you’re effectively surfacing the content they’re looking for, and that they find it easy to navigate to the parts of your website they’re interested in.
How Is Your Website’s Overall Speed?
Are there excessive page sizes and/or long page load and server response times? Does your site go down frequently? Site speed can be impacted when image files are too large or HTML and CSS needs to be cleaned up, all of which can drastically improve your site speed.
Ultimately, fast-loading and optimized pages will lead to higher visitor engagement, retention, and conversions. To quickly check a web page’s load time, download MozBar, a toolbar by Moz that you can attach to your browser for simple page analysis every time you visit a website.
2. SEO Assessment
Optimizing the performance of your website is crucial to holding onto visitors, but the above question isn’t the only one you should be asking. You should also audit the content you’re publishing to ensure it’s actually solving your visitors’ problems.
Is Your Website Content High Quality?
As you evaluate your content for quality, think about it from your target audience’s perspective. Did this information leave me satisfied? Did it answer all of my questions? Does it give me all the resources relevant to this topic? Do I know what to do next?
Keep in mind quality content should appeal to the interests, needs, and problems of your buyer personas; be interesting and well-written, provide valuable, thorough, and detailed information about a particular topic; and leave the reader with next steps (such as calls-to-action, links to resources, etc.).
If you’re still not sure if your content is high quality, evaluate it with this checklist:” How to Tell if Your Marketing Content Is Actually Valuable.”
Is Your Website Search Engine Optimized?
Make sure all your web pages are following on-page SEO best practices. To audit your content for on-page SEO, conduct a keyword analysis in which you do the following:

Consult your analytics to review keyword performance. Which keywords are giving you the biggest gains in traffic and leads?
Assess how well you’re factoring keyword performance into your content strategy. How much relevant content are you adding to your website to target those keywords?
Review basic on-page SEO elements like URLs, page titles, meta description, and copy. Make sure keywords are included where relevant.

To help you conduct an on-page SEO audit of your content, read the “Step-by-Step Guide to Flawless On-Page SEO,” which also includes a free downloadable on-page SEO template to keep you on track.
3. Conversion Rate Assessment
While high-quality, search engine optimized content is a great way to boost your traffic numbers, it’s what happens once those visitors are on your website that really counts. Unless of course, you don’t care about conversions (ha!).
Is Your Website Optimized for Lead Generation and Conversions?
This is where optimized calls-to-action (CTAs), marketing offers, and landing pages play a major role in the performance of your website. Not only do they offer you opportunities to capture visitors’ information so you can follow up with leads, but they also keep your visitors engaged with your content and your brand.
To audit your website for maximum conversion potential, ask yourself the following questions:

How many marketing offers do I have in my content arsenal to gate behind landing pages?
Do I have a variety of marketing offers that appeal to all my different buyer personas?
Do I have any landing pages/conversion forms on my website to begin with?

How optimized are those landing pages?
Do I have conversion opportunities for visitors in varying stages of the funnel?
Am I using calls-to-action effectively? Am I missing opportunities to include calls to action on various pages of my website?

To learn more about CTA selection, check out our post, ” How to Select the Right CTA for Every Page on Your Website.”
4. Technical Assessment
Once you’ve addressed the three primary goals of a website audit, it’s time to loop in a developer or someone from your IT department for a technical evaluation. You could also hire an outside agency — just be sure to do your homework first.
Keep in mind that there may be some carry-over from the three assessments above — website performance, SEO, and conversion rate. The technical evaluation, however, addresses all three to maximize the user experience (UX).
Here’s what you should be looking for in the technical assessment stage of your website audit …
Is Your Website Design Responsive?
Does your website have a responsive design? Meaning, is it a mobile-friendly website? The usage of smartphones to access the internet is only growing. As of 2017, mobile devices account for half of all web page views worldwide. As a result, websites must be compatible with that growing demand.
For more on mobile compatibility, check out our “Ultimate Cheat Sheet for Mastering Mobile Marketing.”
Is Your Website Error Message Free?
Are response code errors popping up all over your website where there shouldn’t be any? Calling out 302-, 404-, and 500-level response codes can be useful to tell users that something’s wrong.
However, having this happen is also an indication that someone isn’t cleaning up broken links and, as a result, leading users to dead ends. Find those error messages and clean up your broken links. Tools like Google’s Webmaster Tools or Xenu’s Link Sleuth can be very helpful for this.
Are Your Website URLs Optimized?
Does your site have URLs of excessive length due to keyword stuffing? Do they contain session IDs and/or include tons of dynamic parameters? In some cases, these URLs are difficult for search engines to index and result in lower clickthrough rates from search results.
Does Your Website Have Too Much Flash or JavaScript?
Identify areas of your navigation that are entirely Flash or JavaScript. Search engines have challenges reading and accessing these, which could prevent your site from getting indexed.
Furthermore, these elements present problems from a usability perspective. Visitors are often looking for a very specific piece of information when visiting your site; if they have to sit through a 10-second visual introduction before they can find your hours of operation, you’re going to have a pretty frustrated visitor on your hands.
Is Your Site Structure Optimized for Search Engines?
We already talked about site structure as it relates to accessing content and usability for users, but it’s also important to make sure your site structure is optimal for search engines. If pages on your site are not internally linked to other pages on your site, those pages are less likely to be indexed.
Are You Defining How Your Web Pages Are Crawled and Indexed by Search Engines?
This can be done through various methods that include everything from robots files and tags to sitemaps. These measures are a way for you to guide search engines toward your website’s most useful content.
Robots Files or Tags
The robots meta tag lets you utilize a granular, page-specific approach to controlling how an individual page should be indexed and served to users in search results. These tags should sit in the <head> section of a given page.
The robots.txt file, on the other hand, is a text file that allows you to specify how you would like your site to be crawled. Before crawling a website, search engine crawlers will generally request the robots.txt file from a server. Within the robots.txt file, you can include sections for specific (or all) crawlers with instructions (“directives”) that let them know which parts should or should not be crawled.
Public and XML Sitemaps
Your website should also have public and XML Sitemap files. The public sitemap is one that users can access to review the pages of your site, like the index of a book.
The XML Sitemap is for search engines to review pages that get added to your site, all in one place. The usual location of a sitemap.xml file is www.domainname.com/sitemap.xml. The XML Sitemap is something every website should have; it offers an opportunity to tell Google and the other search engines what pages on your site you want to be crawled and indexed.
While search engines don’t guarantee they will abide by your sitemap, anecdotal evidence has proven time and time again that XML Sitemaps help provide insurance that your pages are found, and found faster — especially if your sitemap(s) dynamically update your new web pages.
Are You Defining Canonicalization of Content?
The canonicalization of your website content is the final major technical consideration to make. To gain more control over how your URLs appear in search results, and to minimize issues related to duplicate content, it’s recommended that you pick a canonical (preferred) URL as the preferred version of the page.
You can indicate your preference to Google in a number of ways. One such way is to set the Canonical Tag (rel=”canonical”) in an HTTP header of a page. Be sure to have someone check that the Canonical Tag is properly implemented across the site by making sure it points to the correct page, and that every page doesn’t point to the homepage.
Website Auditing Checklist
Now, before you get started, you might consider using this basic website auditing checklist to ensure you review all the necessary elements of your site’s performance, SEO, mobile, and security issues.

Website Audit Example
To pull all this together, I decided to run a website audit on one of my favorite bloggers, Christina Galbato.
This website is performing well. SEO and Mobile are scoring very highly. The main areas for improvement for this site would be performance and security.

You might be asking yourself, “What does that mean?” Well, let’s dive in a little deeper.
In each section, the website grader will let you know what you’re doing well and what you could improve on. See the SEO section below.

Then, the grader gives overall recommendations to improve your site overall. As you can see in the example, you’ll see a table to compare your current site to the recommendations.

Conducting a Website Audit
It’s important to establish an audit framework early on. Ask yourself questions ideally centered around gauging “How am I doing?” These questions may also include things like, “How does this compare to others, especially my competitors?”
Editor’s note: This post was originally published in April 2018 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

In an era where more than 50% of small enterprises fail in their first year, having a clear, defined, and well-thought-out business plan is a crucial first step for setting up a business for long-term success.
The business plan is an undeniably critical component to getting any company off the ground. It’s key to securing financing, documenting your business model, outlining your financial projections, and turning that nugget of a business idea into a reality.
Business plans are a required tool for all entrepreneurs, business owners, business acquirers, and even business school students. But … what exactly is a business plan?
In this post, we’ll explain what a business plan is, the reasons why you’d need one, identify different types of business plans, and what you should include in yours.

Business Plan Template [Download Now]

Working on your business plan? Try using our Business Plan Template. Pre-filled with the sections a great business plan needs, the template will give aspiring entrepreneurs a feel for what a business plan is, what should be in it, and how it can be used to establish and grow a business from the ground up.
Purposes of a Business Plan
Chances are, someone drafting a business plan will be doing so for one or more of the following reasons:
1. Securing financing from investors.
Since its contents revolve around how businesses succeed, break-even, and turn a profit, a business plan is used as a tool for sourcing capital. This document is an entrepreneur’s way of showing potential investors or lenders how their capital will be put to work and how it will help the business thrive.
All banks, investors, and venture capital firms will want to see a business plan before handing over their money, and investors typically expect a 10% ROI or more from the capital they invest in a business.
Therefore, these investors need to know if – and when – they’ll be making their money back (and then some). Additionally, they’ll want to read about the process and strategy for how the business will reach those financial goals, which is where the context provided by sales, marketing, and operations plans come into play.
2. Documenting a company’s strategy and goals.
A business plan should leave no stone unturned.
Business plans can span dozens or even hundreds of pages, affording their drafters the opportunity to explain what a business’ goals are and how the business will achieve them.

To show potential investors that they’ve addressed every question and thought through every possible scenario, entrepreneurs should thoroughly explain their marketing, sales, and operations strategies – from acquiring a physical location for the business to explaining a tactical approach for marketing penetration.

To show potential investors that they’ve addressed every question and thought through every possible scenario, entrepreneurs should thoroughly explain their marketing, sales, and operations strategies – from acquiring a physical location for the business to explaining a tactical approach for marketing penetration.
These explanations should ultimately lead to a business’ break-even point supported by a sales forecast and financial projections, with the business plan writer being able to speak to the why behind anything outlined in the plan.
3. Legitimizing a business idea.
Everyone’s got a great idea for a company – until they put pen to paper and realize that it’s not exactly feasible.
A business plan is an aspiring entrepreneur’s way to prove that a business idea is actually worth pursuing.
As entrepreneurs document their go-to-market process, capital needs, and expected return on investment, entrepreneurs likely come across a few hiccups that will make them second guess their strategies and metrics – and that’s exactly what the business plan is for.
It ensures an entrepreneur’s ducks are in a row before bringing their business idea to the world and reassures the readers that whoever wrote the plan is serious about the idea, having put hours into thinking of the business idea, fleshing out growth tactics, and calculating financial projections.
4. Getting an A in your business class.
Speaking from personal experience, there’s a chance you’re here to get business plan ideas for your Business 101 class project.
If that’s the case, might we suggest checking out this post on How to Write a Business Plan – providing a section-by-section guide on creating your plan?

1. Business Plan Subtitle
Every great business plan starts with a captivating title and subtitle. You’ll want to make it clear that the document is, in fact, a business plan, but the subtitle can help tell the story of your business in just a short sentence.
2. Executive Summary
Although this is the last part of the business plan that you’ll write, it’s the first section (and maybe the only section) that stakeholders will read. The executive summary of a business plan sets the stage for the rest of the document. It includes your company’s mission or vision statement, value proposition, and long-term goals.
3. Company Description
This brief part of your business plan will detail your business name, years in operation, key offerings, and positioning statement. You might even add core values or a short history of the company. The company description’s role in a business plan is to introduce your business to the reader in a compelling and concise way.
4. The Business Opportunity
The business opportunity should convince investors that your organization meets the needs of the market in a way that no other company can. This section explains the specific problem your business solves within the marketplace and how it solves them. It will include your value proposition as well as some high level information about your target market.
5. Competitive Analysis
Just about every industry has more than one player in the market. Even if your business owns the majority of the market share in your industry or your business concept is the first of its kind, you still have competition. In the competitive analysis section, you’ll take an objective look at the industry landscape to determine where your business fits. A SWOT analysis is an organized way to format this section.
6. Target Market
Who are the core customers of your business and why? The target market portion of your business plan outlines this in detail. The target market should explain the demographics, psychographics, behavioristics, and geographics of the ideal customer.
7. Marketing Plan
Marketing is expansive, and it’ll be tempting to cover every type of marketing possible, but a brief overview of how you’ll market your unique value proposition to your target audience, followed by a tactical plan will suffice. Think broadly and narrow down from there: Will you focus on a slow-and-steady play where you make an upfront investment in organic customer acquisition? Or will you generate lots of quick customers using a pay-to-play advertising strategy? This kind of information should guide the marketing plan section of your business plan.
8. Financial Summary
Money doesn’t grow on trees and even the most digital, sustainable businesses have expenses. Outlining a financial summary of where your business is currently and where you’d like it to be in the future will substantiate this section. Consider including any monetary information that will give potential investors a glimpse into the financial health of your business. Assets, liabilities, expenses, debt, investments, revenue, and more are all fair game here.
9. Team
So, you’ve outlined some great goals, the business opportunity is valid, and the industry is ready for what you have to offer. Who’s responsible for turning all this high-level talk into results? The “team” section of your business plan answers that question by providing an overview of the roles responsible for each goal. Don’t worry if you don’t have every team member on board yet, knowing what roles to hire for is helpful as you seek funding from investors.
10. Funding Requirements
Remember that one of the goals of a business plan is to secure funding from investors, so you’ll need to include funding requirements you’d like them to fulfill. The amount your business needs, for what reasons, and for how long will meet the requirement for this section.
Types of Business Plans
There’s no one size fits all business plan as there are several types of businesses in the market today. From startups with just one founder to historic household names that need to stay competitive, every type of business needs a business plan that’s tailored to its needs. Below are a few of the most common types of business plans. For even more examples, check out these 11 sample business plans to help you write your own.
1. Startup Business Plan
As one of the most common types of business plans, a startup business plan is used for brand new business ideas. This plan is used to lay the foundation for the eventual success of a business.
The biggest challenge with the startup business plan is that it’s written completely from scratch. Startup business plans typically reference existing industry data and explain unique business strategies and go-to-market plans.
2. Business Acquisition Plan
Believe it or not, investors use business plans to acquire existing businesses, too — not just new businesses.
A business plan for an existing company will explain how an acquisition will change its operating model, what will stay the same under new ownership, and why things will change or stay the same. Additionally, the business plan should speak to what the current state of the business is and why it’s up for sale.
For example, if someone is purchasing a failing business, the business plan should explain why the business is being purchased and what the new owner will do to turn the business around, referencing previous business metrics, sales projections after the acquisition, and a justification for those projections.
3. Business Repositioning Plan
When a business wants to avoid acquisition, reposition its brand, or try something new, CEOs or owners will develop a business repositioning plan.
This plan will:

Acknowledge the current state of the company.
State a vision for the future of the company.
Explain why the business should (or must) be repositioned.
Outline a process for how the company will adjust.

Companies planning for a business reposition do so – proactively or retroactively – due to a shift in market trends and customer needs. For example, Pizza Hut announced a plan to drastically overhaul its brand, as it sees the need to shift from dine-in to delivery – a decision resulting from observing years of industry and company trends and acknowledging the need to reposition itself for the future of its sector.
4. Expansion Business Plan
Expanding a successful business venture into another location typically requires a business plan, as the project may focus on a new target market and demand more capital.
Fortunately, an expansion business plan isn’t like a startup business plan in that it starts from scratch. Instead, this type of plan references sales, revenue, and successes from existing locations. However, as great as a reference as these points can be, it’s important to not be too reliant on them since it’s still a new business that could succeed or fail for a myriad of reasons.
Getting Started With Your Business Plan
At the end of the day, a business plan is simply an explanation of a business idea and why it will be successful. The more detail and thought you put into it, the more successful your plan – and the business it outlines – will be.
When writing your business plan, you’ll benefit from extensive research, feedback from your team or board of directors, and a solid template to organize your thoughts. If you need one of these, download HubSpot’s Free Business Plan Template below to get started.
Editor’s note: This post was originally published in August 2020 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

The Lightning Component modern framework is a User Interface framework to develop dynamic web apps for mobile and desktop devices. As is the case with each release, the latest Winter’22 release is packed with rich features including, the newly added Lightning Component features! Currently, the Winter’22 release is available under
The post Top 5 Lightning Component Gems of Salesforce Winter’22 Release! appeared first on Automation Champion.

We’re thrilled to launch Email Academy — a new on-demand learning platform designed to give marketers of all skill levels the skills they need to stay sharp and stay ahead in an ever-evolving email marketing world.
Being a “customer-centric” company may sound like an overplayed cliché, but at Campaign Monitor, we really mean it. We absolutely love our customers. 
We’re constantly learning from and inspired by what they do. And, as a team, we’re all geared towards their success — doing whatever we can to help them achieve their goals, whatever they may be.
And that’s why, today, we’re excited to announce the launch of Email Academy, a free online resource for marketers to level up their email marketing skills.
In the ever-evolving world of email marketing, it’s important to constantly sharpen your skills and keep them up to date. And Email Academy is designed to do just that. 
Whether marketing is your full-time job, or one of the many hats you wear, Email Academy is here to equip you with the tools you need to grow in your career, build your business, and become a more effective marketer.
Here are some of the in-demand email marketing skills you can look forward to learning in Email Academy.

Email courses for beginners
If you’re new to email marketing, or need to brush up on some basics, we have three different courses designed specifically for you. These courses are a great launching point for anyone early in their marketing career.
Email marketing fundamentals
In this course, you’ll cover all the basics of email marketing. Expect to walk away with a firm understanding of why email marketing is important, what the main types of marketing emails are, and how to understand your audience.
Email design basics
Design is essential to running effective email campaigns, and this course will help you get started. Learn design best practices for sending emails that are on-brand, effective, and meet accessibility standards.
Subscriber data management
Data management is a hot topic in the digital marketing world, and one that nobody can afford to ignore. Enroll in this course and learn how to manage subscriber data, how to grow and maintain your list, and best practices for segmenting audiences.
Advanced email courses
If there’s one thing we’ve learned from our time in the email marketing world, it’s the importance of continually learning and developing new skills. With that in mind, if you’re an experienced email marketer looking to upskill, have some amazing course options for you.
List growth tactics
Growth is the objective of almost every marketer. In this course, we’ll cover best practices for growing your subscriber list in a reliable, scalable, and ethical way.
Email personalization tactics
The days of batch-and-blast email sends are over. Learn how to send relevant, personalized emails that your subscribers will engage with.
Email data and reporting
Having trouble measuring the success of your email campaigns? Enroll in this course to learn all about the industry-standard email metrics, how to interpret them in the context of a campaign, and tactics for improving your email metrics over time.
Email automation and triggers
Timing is everything in email marketing, and automation is the key to making sure you’re reaching your subscribers with the right message at the right time. This course will cover standard automation journeys and how to build them.
Deliverability best practices
Deliverability may feel like the underbelly of the email marketing world, but it’s incredibly important. In this course, you’ll learn about what deliverability is, why it matters more than you think, and best practices to follow to make sure you don’t run into deliverability issues with your marketing campaigns.
Become an early Email Academy graduate
Whether you’re looking to land a job in email marketing, level up your skills and get promoted, or simply want to grow your business, Email Academy is the perfect place to start. This free course will teach you the relevant, in-demand skills you need to get started in email marketing today.
And don’t forget to show people what you’ve learned! After completing a course, you’ll receive a certification to let current or prospective employers know that you have the skills to get the job done.
Thank you, and happy learning!
Ros de Vries, Customer Experience Programs Manager at Campaign Monitor
Sign up for Email Academy for free today!
The post Introducing Email Academy — a Free Learning Platform for Marketers appeared first on Campaign Monitor.

You don’t want to waste time simply guessing what a prospect or customer wants and needs from your business or how they’ll react to a certain marketing campaign or strategy that you plan to implement.
Rather, you can turn to the process of data-driven marketing to make informed decisions that are based on real data to ensure your marketing efforts are relevant to prospect and customer interests and behaviors.
Now you might be thinking about the fact that your business has a large volume of complex data that are dispersed across multiple sources — this is where data mapping comes in handy.

Data Mapping
Data mapping is a key part of data management and data integration. That’s because it ensures you’re looking at and considering all of your data and doing so accurately — in other words, data mapping is what allows you to integrate your data from multiple sources.
In this blog post, we’ll talk more about what data mapping is, why it’s useful, data mapping techniques, and data mapping tools.
What is data mapping?
Data mapping is the process of matching data fields or elements from a source, or sources, to their related data fields in another destination — it’s how you establish relationships between data models that are in different sources or systems. Data mapping software and tools automatically match data fields from one data source to another for you.
Data mapping allows you to organize, distill, analyze, and understand vast amounts of data that live in various locations so you can draw conclusions and insights.
Why is data mapping useful?
Here are some more reasons why data mapping is both useful and necessary:

Integrate, transform, and migrate data as well as create data warehouses easily.
Establish direct relationships between your data across multiple sources at once.
Ensure your data is high quality and accurate (data mapping software can automatically flag inconsistencies and data that isn’t high quality or accurate).
Identify real-time trends and share data reports with team members both easily and efficiently.
Ensure you’re getting the most out of your data and applying insights and learnings appropriately.
Use data mapping software to simplify (and automate much of) the process of code-free data mapping.

Data Mapping Examples
A business like Amazon may use data mapping to accurately target you. They do this by pulling insights from your browsing habits, reviews, purchase history, and time on page. They can then pull and connect that data to/with data from other sources such as demographic information.
By combining these types of data sources, Amazon has the necessary information to target you with certain products and personalize your shopping experience in a number of ways (e.g. based on challenges you may be facing, geographic location, experience level, interests, education, nationality, age, and more).
Let’s consider another data mapping example — say you work for a TV network and you’re looking to organize TV shows on the network, actors who appear on the network, and actors within a show that appears on the network. The sharing of data between the three sources may look something like this:

Data Mapping Techniques
Within data mapping, there are three main techniques that are used — manual mapping, semi-automated mapping, and automated mapping. Let’s talk about what each of these techniques entails.
1. Manual Data Mapping
Manual data mapping requires professional coders and data mappers — IT will code and map your data sources. Although this is a heavy lift and requires professional help, it allows you to fully control and customize your maps.
2. Semi-automated Data Mapping
Semi-automated data mapping (or schema mapping) requires some coding knowledge and means your team will be moving between both manual and automated data mapping processes (hence the name of this technique).
Data mapping software creates a connection between the data sources and then an IT professional reviews those connections and makes manual adjustments as needed.
3. Automated Data Mapping
Automated data mapping means a tool will take care of all aspects of the data mapping process for you, making it an ideal option, if you are not/ don’t have access to a coder. This type of software will typically allow for drag-and-drop mapping. You just need to learn how to use the tool (and pay for it).
Speaking of the tools that will automate the process of data mapping for you, let’s review some of your options next.

Data Mapping Tools
Data mapping tools and software make the process of data mapping —including visualizing and interpreting your data — easier. There’s no code needed, they often have a drag-and-drop user interface (UI), and you can implement them on your team no matter your level of technical experience. Many data mapping tools also have the ability to help you with other data management tasks such as data migration.
1. Bloomi

Price: Free 30-day trial; contact for a quote.
Bloomi, which is owned by Dell, is an iPaaS solution — that’s both cloud-native and scalable — that connects both cloud and on-premise data and applications. Design cloud-based integrations, which the tool refers to as Atoms. Then, you can begin transferring data between the cloud and your on-premise apps.
Bloomi’s data mapping functionality translates electronic data interchange (EDI) for you. The tool has a drag-and-drop UI that makes data mapping easy as well as a library of available connectors so you can establish integrations quickly.
2. Tableau

Price: Free 30-day trial; $12-$70/ user/ mo.
Tableau is a visual analytics and business intelligence platform with data management and data mapping tools. Whether your data is in spreadsheets, Apache Hadoop, databases, the cloud, etc., the platform allows you to connect and begin visualizing your data in seconds without code.
Tableau regularly populates your most recent data (on a schedule that you can adjust). The drag-and-drop interface is easy to use and smart dashboards allow for effective data visualization. Lastly, you can easily share your data maps and dashboards with your team via mobile device for easy alignment and access.
3. Astera

Price: Free 14-day trial; contact for a quote.
Astera is an enterprise data management software that uses visual interfaces to convert, map, and validate data structures for you without the need for code.
You’re able to use the tool’s drag-and-drop feature to create, debug, and manage complex data integration tasks. Astera also natively connects to a variety of database providers including SQL Server, Oracle, and DB2.
To ensure your data is of the highest quality, there’s built-in data cleansing, data profiling, and data quality options — and to improve accuracy, there are built-in transformations that remove duplicate records, complete missing information, and get rid of redundant data. You’ll get flagged and receive emails if and when your data records don’t meet the high-quality data standards.
Use Data Mapping on Your Team
Data mapping has the power to ensure your marketing team and business as a whole get the most out of your data. It also helps you maintain high-quality data and automate the processes of data integration, transfer, migration, and more. Determine which technique you’ll use and if you need a tool to get started with data mapping on your team.