There are things I both love and hate about being a project manager on the interactive side of things. Unlike my project managing friends in the “traditional” side of the marketing, I don’t have set in stone delivery dates and the projects I work on never go press, so I can fix a typo or a wrong date quickly, easily and inexpensively. On the counter side of that, the projects I work on do not have set in stone delivery dates, and there’s the temptation to always tweak one more thing just because you can.

The team at Hubspot is doing it right.  No question.  A B2B company that is generating more than 60,000 leads and a million visitors just through their website every month certainly knows some things about content marketing.   HubSpot’s Senior Vice President of Sales and Services, Mark Roberge, sat down with Forbes Magazine and shared 11 of their secrets.

We’ve all been there. We send an email blast and the very first question our clients or bosses ask us is, “Who all opened it?”  or if they’re savvy, “Who all clicked on it?”  It’s a question as old as marketing, and now, thanks to technology, we can answer that.  But let’s face it, it’s led to a new heartier (and harder) question “Why didn’t they click on it?”

We have stock pile of answers:  “The offer wasn’t strong enough.”  “They’re not at this stage in the buy cycle.”  “No one opens emails on a Friday at 4:30.” But the truth is, we don’t know.  We can test, we can try, but we don’t know.  I think that’s why “How a Simple Email Can Give You Critical Insight Into Your Recipients' Behavior” resonated with me.  

I am, admittedly, a survey taker. Send me one, and I'm in. I'll admit, the offer can be weak if the information being gathered is interesting to me. So what made this blog post interesting to me isn't that people took the survey, but that it means they are not ALWAYS ignoring your emails.

As someone who bridges the gap between strategy, analytics and implementation on a day-to-day basis, I love the idea of figuring out why.  The fact that the survey email asking why people don’t engage with the emails had a record breaking engagement is the kind of nugget I latch on to.  For me, it’s proof that people don’t MIND hearing from you, but they will ignore you when you are not interesting.

What I think this post is missing is more of the “what do you do with this knowledge.”  Sure, if the majority of people say, “Your emails are too long.” then maybe you shorten your next email; or if they say, “there are too many,” you stretch them out.  But I start to picture a world of nurturing paths customized to their answers. Talk about leveraging the power of marketing automation.