After visiting your website, making a purchase, or stumbling across your company’s blog, a customer has signed up to receive email from you. For a marketer, this is the most fragile, difficult relationship to maintain, and one wrong step can end in tragedy with your electronic correspondence in the spam folder.

This Litmus infographic provides a closer look at engagement filtering behaviors for Gmail and Hotmail, reasons why subscribers become disengaged with email, and tips for increasing engagement.

Ifbyphone is a leader in voice-based marketing automation. Systems like Ifbyphone can assist organizations to manage and measure voice leads, automate responses to phone inquiries and close the loop between online and offline leads. Ifbyphone has put together this informative infographic on the evolution of marketing automation:

Michael works for Edelman Digital as the Senior Vice President of Social Business Planning.  Basically, he helps clients transform their organizations to be more open, collaborative and socially proficient; with the end result of creating shared value with employees, partners and customers.

Over the last decade and prior to Edelman,  he worked for some pretty big companies like Hewlett Packard, Yahoo for a second and most recently, Intel. Very early on in his career, his role was very focused on search and direct marketing. He saw the light and haven’t turned back since.

Join us in the DK New Media office or tune in to the live show for a great conversation on social business!

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• Content Creation: Learn how to create Blogs, Podcasts and Video channels, improve the look, quality and sound of your content, refine your writing skills, and discover the latest audio and video production tools, tips and techniques.
• Distribution: Learn how to reach a larger audience and build a dynamic, engaged community around your content using social networks like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, audio and video sharing sites like iTunes, YouTube and others, leveraging social bookmarking, keywords, SEO, Search Marketing, widgets, syndication and networks.
• Monetization: Learn all the expert strategies for monetizing your content with direct advertising, ad networks, contextual ads, affiliate programs, sponsorship, paid content, syndication and much more.
• Networking: There is only one event where you can meet, learn and collaborate with thousands of new media content creators who are just as passionate as you are. But you’ll also network with real potential sponsors, from small business owners to Fortune 500 execs, who are looking to meet with content creators like you for serious business.

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Here are the free results of our EyeQuant demo… I’m quite happy with where the attention is being placed on our home page!

What separates EyeQuant from other services is the fact that it just takes a few minutes to get the results. The results also come in 3 different maps:

• The attention map shows which areas of your screenshot garner the most, medium or least attention, respectively. Particularly eye-catching areas are colored in a rich red, average areas are marked yellow, the weakest areas of your screenshot will show up in green to blue. Transparent areas generate no attention at all.
• The perception map provides the quickest overview of your web page’s attentional thrust: it shows at a glance what users will perceive in the first 3 seconds of their visit. Based on a calculation of the highest visual acuity and an average distance from the screen, the transparent areas of the perception map are the ones your users will see within this crucial orientation phase.
• The Regions of Interest feature provides EyeQuant’s most detailed results. It enables you to define 10 regions on your screenshot, for which EyeQuant will calculate a percentage value, e. g. +45% or -23%. The value indicates how much more (or less) salient an area is compared to the screenshot’s average.

Costs of the service is good, with 5 Analyses for $199/mo US or 50 for $449. There’s also enterprise pricing available and the interface is available in both German and English. EyeQuant also has an API and reseller package available!

Wow – that’s quite an honor… especially having my name alongside this list of amazingly talented marketers:

• Michael Brito – Follow @Britopian
• Paul Gillin – Follow @pgillin
• Adam Metz – Follow @theMetz
• Ann Handley – Follow @MarketingProfs
• C.C. Chapman – Follow @cc_chapman
• Chris Brogan – Follow @ChrisBrogan
• Cindy King – Follow @CindyKing
• Michael Stelzner – Follow @Mike_Stelzner
• Guy Kawasaki – Follow @GuyKawasaki.
• Jeff Bullas – Follow @JeffBullas
• Mari Smith – Follow @MariSmith
• Neal Schaffer – Follow @NealSchaffer
• Pam Moore – Follow @PamMktgNut
• Frank Reed – Follow @FrankReed
• Maya Grinberg – Follow @Papayamaya
• Kipp Bodnar – Follow @kippbodnar
• Dan Zarrella – Follow @DanZarrella

NOTE: I would add friend and colleague Chad Politt from Kuno Creative to the list as well! Follow @CPollittIU

If you’re interested in downloading the whitepaper, here’s an overview from the Marketo landing page:

Companies seeking to take advantage of all ways of reaching and connecting with prospective buyers need to go beyond inbound marketing. This white paper takes a look at how to incorporate inbound marketing into a larger group of marketing tactics that amplify the impact of inbound marketing activities.

The inbound marketing white paper covers:

• Inbound Marketing 101 – tips and techniques to get started
• Expanding visibility and reach with SEO and social
• How to avoid common inbound marketing mistakes
• Checklist for amplifying inbound and identifying additional promotional opportunities
• The ideal marketing mix including outbound and marketing automation

Got any other inbound marketing folks that you’d recommend? Please comment!

Recently, Delivra published How to Make Your Email Marketing Mobile Friendly, a resource that offers 2012 mobile trends, statistics, and recommendations on how to get your email marketing ready for your on-the-go audience.

The whitepaper discusses three critical components for mobile email success and the tactics needed to employ such a strategy.

• Where is your audience reading email?
• Are you creating content for mobile readers?
• Is your email design mobile friendly?

For the answer to these questions and to ensure your emails are coming into the mobile age, download the How to Make Your Email Marketing Mobile Friendly whitepaper.

80% of consumers find reading marketing emails on their mobile less easy than on a PC. Are you creating emails that your audience is able to easily read and respond to on their mobile device? If not, it’s likely being moved to the trash. Don’t let that happen!

Mobile payments have moved from science fiction to reality, providing ease of payment, increased security, and efficient tracking using a device most of us carry around already. The result? The number of merchants accepting mobile payments is exploding, many of these new users trying out mobile commerce for the first time.

Here’s another look at the opportunities and trending statistics on Mobile Payments.

via: Mobile Payment Trends [Infographic]

The new culture of immediate information through social media, apps and web browsing phones is allowing people to gain access to information more quickly than ever before, and the latest Pew Research sheds an immediate light on just that. It also represents a huge opportunity for inbound marketers.

The infographic highlights the present cultural and technological shift to constant connectivity and information gathering being the norm. It should also be a signal to marketers that mobile marketing is not an option anymore, but a necessity in order to reach those connected via phones. Whether it’s solving a problem, choosing a restaurant, or being social on Facebook, more and more people are relying on their phones.

VideoInfographs produced this fantastic video infographic for Balihoo, a provider of local marketing automation technology and services to national brands with local marketing needs.

Local search is not limited to people entering geographic terms in the search field. Remember that recent advances in search algorithms utilize your social network to rank and display relevant results. It’s not a surprise that the majority of your social network is adjacent to you geographically – so of course local business results are going to rise to the top. Not only that, with or without a geographic keyword, Google is utilizing your geographic location to adjust results you’re getting.

Kudos to MDG Advertising on a fantastic video infographic.

The majority of data we spread is stupid.

I did it just the other day. I sent an email off to great friend and respected marketer Jascha Kaykas-Wolff at Mindjet pointing out some new data that said that Facebook social readers were crashing and burning. Of course, a little deeper look found that readership may be down, but engagement is up. And ultimately, it looks as though the issue may just be that poorly implemented social readers are dying, but great content is doing well. Jascha, thankfully, sent back that article.

When you’re driving a car, it’s pretty amazing all of the things we do to get where we’re going. We know where to start and where to finish, we observe the progress moving forward, we glance periodically in our rear view mirror, we check the side mirrors and even look out for our blind spot once in a while. We have two hands on the steering wheel, a foot applied to the brake or the gas… and sometimes another on the clutch. Wouldn’t it be great if we were that dextrous, cautious, inquisitive and responsive when we used information we discovered on the Internet?

Nope. We’re not. We see something that piques our interest – however stupid – and we just pass it on. Retweet. Share. Like. +1. Woohoo!

No less than once a week, I’m looking up something too good to be true on Snopes and emailing back the person that the crap he’s distributing isn’t true in the least sense (sorry Dad!). When people want to believe what’s in a clip of text, a soundbite, or a video – they never dig a little deeper, they just tweet it, post it, or email it to all of their friends. Stupidity may be distributed more efficiently on the information superhighway than anything of value.

Reality television is the epitome of this. If you’ve never seen the Charlie Brooker show on how reality television production works, it’s amazing (and horrifying):

Reality television is akin to how we dysfunctionally share information. We clip, copy, paste and publish. Sharing is too easy.

Even on the Internet, you’re reading a fictional story developed utilizing real-world clips of text, audio and video. Doing a shallow analysis on Facebook social readers is a great example. The original article may not have purposely misled people… but they happened across a sample of data that was a powerful display of information. It was pretty simple to write the story around the graphic. Thankfully, others dug a little deeper and identified some important findings beyond the original story. That doesn’t happen often enough, though.

We see these same mistakes every day with marketers. They neglect to look left, right, behind… nor do they know where they were, nor are they paying attention to where they are going. If you’re only focusing on where are, you could let a pothole thwart all your efforts because you detour around. What appears to be a terrible route may be the very solution you need to break through.

Of course, we see it even worse in politics. Every political ad is a soundbite taken out of context and reduced to some extreme position that’s easy to despise. Politicians depend on great editing. It’s unfortunate. Their audience deserves more.

In a world of snippets, screenshots and soundbites… it’s much easier to pass on stupidity than intelligence. It’s your job as a reader (even on this blog) to take a deeper look. It’s my job and responsibility as a blogger to look all directions before I encourage you to step on the gas or brake and detour. Journalists, bloggers, media outlets and even opinionated analysts need to get much more dextrous and begin using all their faculties to fully inform the public.

I’m just not optimistic there are too many around that can or are willing to accomplish that. Stupid is shared a lot easier. Don’t believe me? Try sharing a carefully written, intelligent post. Then post a funny cat picture. Which one performed better?