Wouldn’t it be great if you could figure out today what your marketing plan should look like in six months? Crystal balls don’t exactly grow on trees, so we’ve asked two industry experts—Jordan Ayan, president of SubscriberMail, and Joel Book, director of eMarketing Education at ExactTarget—to weigh in on what’s coming in 2008. Here’s what they said.

1) More CRM integration, especially with software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings.
2) Increased use of automated tools.
3) Closer alignment of marketing elements.
4) Using rich video with e-mail marketing.

Read the complete article on BtoBOnline.

The customer is very much on the minds of leading marketing executives these days. Across numerous research initiatives undertaken by the CMO Council, marketers collectively indicate they are spending more time and resources than ever before on understanding and engaging with their customers, including increased investments in customer communities, CRM systems and processes, and customer intelligence and analytics. The CMO Council has been a champion of these efforts, advocating a more disciplined, measurable and integrated approach to marketing, anchored by greater knowledge and more meaningful interaction with customers and customer markets. Now we believe it is time for a new measure of marketing performance – called customer affinity – that looks beyond old brand metrics to support marketing in its critical role of building customer-centric businesses. Register to download the free Executive Summary or purchase the full report from the CMO Council's Customer Affinity Website.

[Note: CMP was an underwriter for this CMO Council study.]

Question: What is the best way to optimize search marketing for international markets?

Answer: As the evolution of the Internet continues, b-to-b marketers are reaching a crossroads in determining what tactics have worked in the past to attract traffic to their sites versus what approaches will work in the future. According to Internet World Stats, two-thirds of global Internet users are non-English speakers. This growing volume of search activity means that marketing opportunities will continue to evolve on both regional and global levels.

So how can b-to-b marketers capitalize on this trend? Is the answer as simple as translating all Web pages to the targeted country's language?

Translation is one component of optimizing for international markets, but it's in no way the end-all answer. A word-for-word translation of a Web site is ambiguous. Instead, Web sites should be translated according to concepts. A simple translation does not take into account cultures, customs and preferences specific to various countries. Additionally, a simple translation loses targeted keywords. Read the complete article on BtoBOnline.

Answer: Addressing e-mail received while out of the office for extended periods of time can be one of the most frustrating phenomena in business today.

People subscribe to receive e-mail communications that are relevant and useful to them in their day-to-day jobs, but when those messages stack up in the in-box for whatever reason, the recipients don’t reap the benefits of those communications. And what do they do with all of those messages? They sort by “from name,” highlight and delete.

And depending on the volume, they may potentially be annoyed with the organization that sent the e-mail, which could be detrimental to future interaction. Read the complete article on BtoBOnline.

Permission-based b-to-b e-mail lists are the highest-priced list category for the third straight year, according to the Fall 2007 List Price Index released by Worldata, a list management company.
The average price of permission-based b-to-b e-mail lists is $275 per thousand in the current quarter, down $2 from the fourth quarter of 2006. Read the complete article on BtoBOnline.