It is hard to believe how many small businesses try to collect their customers’ email addresses and social networking contact information during face to face contact at their retail outlets, only to realize that all their time and effort results in nothing more than a hard bouncing email and non-existent Facebook account.

There are five primary ways to glean a customer’s contact data in any other way than having the customer directly key that info into an online subscription form… and each and every one of them is a fool’s errand:

I’ve already complained about Liberty Mutual’s poor email marketing practices via my platform here at Benchmark Email. I wasn’t going to pile on with their latest error, but I’m simply too mad not to. I just received an email from my car insurance agent, and it’s possible that there’s steam shooting from my ears like a cartoon.

Many non-profit organizations work at a glacial pace due to the necessity of having the slightest action approved by layers of administration. But if you have the control over your group’s online fundraising, you should consider applying these top seven actions to boost your totals. Don’t write a memo and place these actions on a list that will be considered by the board six months from now, cut through the internal red tape and implement them today!

Ez Texting is a web-based SMS Marketing service. Our business is actually very similar to Benchmark, except we do for text messaging what they do for email. Like most SaaS offerings, our customers sign up on their own. We don’t have an old fashioned sales team. What we do have is a team of Community Managers who help our customers get the most out of our service. We had a few goals in mind when we ramped up our customer onboarding efforts:

Let’s pretend you have found yourself in this situation:

You have a sales promotion for the month of November that you want to make available to everyone who signed up for your mailing list in the month of October. Since October 31 is Halloween, you figure no one will be signing up because they will be busy with festivities. Therefore, you decide to send out your email blast on October 30 to get things going.