Hi folks,

I’ll be at this year’s Marketo Summit with the team at Perkuto.com. If you’re interested in other sessions I recommend, please visit the Perkuto Blog.

In the meantime, here is my rough schedule if you would like to meet and discuss just about anything I may go to different sessions, so no guarantees here. If you would like to meet up, find me at a session, at the Perkuto booth, or you can tweet me @jdavidhill. I accept invitations to In-N-Out at any time

April 6:

3pm: Marketo Certification Exam @ Hilton – yes, each year we have to do this.

7pm: Dinner

April 7:

1pm – 5pm – Partner Sessions @ Hilton

8pm: Dinner

April 8: The Big Day!

• 8am: Create Gorgeous Dashboards with fellow Champion Pierce Ujainwalla
• 10am: Lead Lifecycle Management for the Complex Sale with two masters – Eric Hollebone and Rhoan Morgan.
• 11:50pm-12:20pm – Josh at the Champion Help Desk – Ask me anything!
• 12:30p: General Session – Hillary and Phil.
• 3:30p: Build a High Performance, High Velocity, Lead Generating B2B Machine with Bryan Sample.
• 4:30p: Converting Trial Users to Paying Customers with Ed Masson – very curious how he’s built a freemium model.
• 5:30p: Marketing Nation Expo Happy Hour
• 7:30p: Gala!

April 9: The Second Big Day!

• 9am: Beth Comstock’s Keynote – hear from the top CMO.
• 12:30 – 1:00p – Josh at Champion Help Desk. Ask me anything!
• 1pm: More Efficient, More Zen – Your Dream Marketing Team with Alexandre Pelletier of Perkuto
• 2pm: Advanced Nurturing with Cheryl Chavez of Marketo.
• 3pm: How to Take Intelligent Lead Nurturing to the Next Level with Champion Edward Unthank.

Which sessions are you attending? Tell us here!

I am excited to announce that today I join marketing automation consultancy Perkuto, as their Marketo Practice Lead. Many of you may know Perkuto’s co-founders: Alexandre Pelletier and Youcef Bouayad who have been long time members of the Marketo and Salesforce Communities.

Over the past few years, you have come to know me through my contributions to the Marketo Community or through this website. A few of you are my clients and friends. I am very grateful to you for your continued support and interest in my work. Believe me when I say that I learn at least as much from you as I share here.

I will continue to write for this site as well as for Perkuto’s blog. On my blog, I will always share my latest tips and tricks for Marketo as well as more on demand generation. At Perkuto, expect to see very exciting announcements about RSS feeds and more Marketo help.

Why did I decide to join Perkuto?

Alex and I have been friends for the past couple of years and I was flattered when he approached me about joining his team. I have great respect for Alex’s skills with Marketo (he was customer 163 and I was 800 or so). Alex’s deep Salesforce and Revenue Cycle Analytics knowledge means I can offer clients the full range of Marketo features. With co-founder Youcef, we add deep process implementation knowledge. And with Perkuto’s team, ranging from analytics to developers, we can create new services as well as build unique systems just for your business.

In essence, joining Perkuto allows me to offer a complete package of marketing automation and demand generation services – much more than I could do as a one-man band. I am looking forward to learning from the team and working with our clients. And if you are one of my current clients, you will be able to draw on much deeper resources.

If I haven’t convinced you Perkuto is the right consultancy for you, then let me offer a few key points:

• Perkuto’s focus is to simplify the way you generate revenue. It’s not about generating more leads, it’s about efficiently managing leads to revenue.

• Perkuto is the only marketing automation agency to also offer Launchpoint products.

• Perkuto’s team is bilingual in English and French, so we can easily work with your teams in Canada, US, and Europe.

• Perkuto now offers an end-to-end Marketo implementation service from planning through managed services. This is not just about marketing operations, it’s about revenue.

• Perkuto is also qualified to implement, customize, and manage Salesforce.com.

That’s it for my announcement and the big pitch. I’ve got some great Marketo content coming up this month, so stay subscribed.

I came across a question about auto-subscribing leads to a company blog. I was very surprised at the question this late in the game. Here it is, without names:

Is it appropriate, best practice to auto subscribe leads to your company blog then give them the option to unsubscribe or is it better to introduce the blog in an offer email and let them subscribe?

I naturally said this is not a good idea and that the marketer should invite currently opted in leads to sign up for the blog. This is what I got back:

…but I’m being pushed by my manager and our VP of marketing that said it is “best practice” to subscribe them and let them unsubscribe on their own.

If your executives believe email “best practices” are to violate several countries’ laws and get fined $16,000 per email, then yes, they are right.

Update: in the US, a reader reminded me CANSPAM is still “opt-out” which means the writer could have done this as long as there was unsubscribe option that could be honored within 10 days. The caveat is that this is not a best practice anymore. I know that some marketers have instead asked their email list to opt-in to blog posts. In the US, this may be legal enough with US emails, however, it should be done once and it would be a best practice to not email non explicitly opted-in email addresses again. Remember that Spam filters and blacklists punish faster than the government.

A better way is to treat people with the Golden Rule (and obeying the law).

You must tell people what they are agreeing to up front. You will get far more unsubscribes and complaints if you just start emailing people who never requested it. I’ve been there with management insisting it’s ok.

It’s not.

My understanding of the anti-spam laws in US, Canada, and EU (and I’m not a lawyer and this post is not legal advice) is to use opted-in emails. Here are some best practices:

• You can email any customer in regard to their account, order, or if they made a request that implies a repsonse (like registering for a webinar).
• Your forms MUST be “opt in” and cannot “default check the box”. That’s explicitly wrong in Canada and EU now, so if you are doing business there and have a US website, you should consider your form setup.
• If someone did not opt in, do not send them an email. (exceptions above, but be very careful here).
• If they opted in thinking they were going to receive an invitation to webinars only, then don’t send them blog posts.
• You can send your list a one time email to opt in to stuff (if your data is sketchy), but do not do it again.
• You must have an easy unsubscribe link. Best practice is to offer an “Unsubscribe Now” link and a “Subscription Management” link.
• Yes, it is illegal to subscribe someone to anything that they have to explicitly requested in certain countries. The fine in the US for continuing to email someone after an unsubscribe is $16,000 per incident.
• Always do the thing you would want someone to do to you. If I thought email practices were annoying on another website site, I would not do that to my subscribers.

The above is summary of various countries’ laws, so I would urge you to ask appropriate counsel for any local variations for the jurisdictions in which you operate. If you look for privacy laws and subscription management on Community, you’ll find more laws and more ways to operationalize them. Marketo wrote several articles and a module to handle EU Privacy and Cookie Directives. You can look up CANSPAM and Email Deliverability to find out more.

Are you putting together a Spam compliance workflow? Do you need some help? Let us know below!

And if you like what I’m doing here, check out my new Facebook Page. Yes, I joined the rest of the planet.

[Updated: January 6, 2018 – removed bad links]