6 Stats to Sum Up The State of Digital Publishing [SlideShare]

From crumbling paywalls to the rise of ad blockers, the digital publishing industry in the midst of a turbulent time. From circulation to sales, every aspect of the business has seen dramatic changes over the past few years.

How is this affecting publishers like you? We surveyed hundreds of publishers to find answers to questions like:

• How often are publishers sending email?
• What is the leading source of revenue for publishers?
• Which sales and marketing technologies do publishers use?
• What trends are publishers placing their bets on over the next few years?

While the full results can be found in our Digital Publishing Benchmarks Report, we've also compiled some of the most important findings into these 6 takeaways—that you can't afford to miss:

6 Stats to Sum Up The State of Digital Publishing from HubSpot

Want to Learn More?

For a complete picture on the state of digital publishing, you can download our complimentary Digital Publishing Benchmarks Report by clicking on the button below.

12 Go-To Tips for Saving Your Phone's Battery Life

When it comes to preserving phone battery, people have been known to get a little crazy.

In fact, back in July, a Long Island teen actually hopped on stage at a Broadway show in an attempt to charge his cellphone using an outlet he'd spotted. And in an even stranger turn of events back in May, a New Jersey man snuck into a home and hid under a bed for three days to charge his arsenal of four cellphones.

While these situations are, in fact, a little outrageous, it's likely that you're no stranger to the slow, undeniable anxiety that comes with a low phone battery warning. What will you do? How will you get home? What if your boss calls?

To help you take control of your device usage, we've come up with a handful of helpful tips for saving battery life on your iPhone and Android devices. From disabling notifications to adjusting your display and brightness, these tips can help you hang on to your charge for just a little longer throughout the day.

Note: The menu settings may vary depending on your specific device.

12 Tips for Saving Battery Life on Your Phone

1) Disable notifications.

When you're running on low battery, turning off unnecessary notifications can help to save some of that juice. While you may want to leave your text messages or email notifications on, you can selectively disable others to avoid wasting power.

On iPhone, head to Settings > Notifications > Notification Style. From here, you can adjust the notification settings for each app by tapping into them.

On Android, go to Settings > Sound and Notification > App Notifications. Simply tap the app you want to stop, then swipe the toggle button to disable notifications.

2) Activate Low Power Mode.

Even when you aren't using your phone, there's a lot that goes on behind the scenes that can drain your battery. Turning your device on Low Power Mode or Doze for Android will help you reduce this.

On iPhone, go to Settings > Battery > and tap the toggle button to activate Low Power Mode. This setting is designed to temporarily reduce power consumption. By turning this function on, mail fetch, background app refresh, automatic downloads, and some visual effects are reduced or turned off to preserve battery life.

On Android, users can activate Doze mode. Android uses motion detection to learn if a device has been left unattended -- let's say you left your phone at your desk during a meeting. When it recognizes this, the software will back off background activity to save battery.

3) Turn off Location Services.

Believe it or not, your device keeps a pretty close eye on you. In fact, depending on your location settings, it probably knows where you are right now. While these settings can be valuable at times, they do cause your battery power to diminish, so it's best to turn them off when you don't need them.

On iPhone, go to Settings > Privacy > and tap the toggle to turn off Location Services. This service uses GPS, Bluetooth, and WiFi hot spots and tower locations to determine your location. When you don't need this functionality, turn it off.

On Android, go to Settings > Location > and then change the mode to Battery Saving.

4) Adjust background wallpaper.

Many iPhone users debate whether or not Apple's parallax effect is cool or just plain dizzying. Either way, it does suck up battery life, so it's best to turn it off when your battery is quickly draining.

To do so, visit Settings > General > Accessibility and tap the toggle to switch Reduce Motion to "on."

Similarly, Android offers the same parallax feature on some devices, but they also offer moving, live wallpaper for users looking for home screen customization. While some of the options are really neat, they do have a tendency to compromise your battery life.

To adjust your wallpaper settings on Android devices, tap and hold the Home screen to open the Add to Home menu. From here, select Wallpapers and choose from: Gallery, Live wallpapers, and Wallpapers. Note: Many people suggest setting black wallpaper on devices with an OLED screen to get more usage out of the battery.

5) Turn off Background App Refresh.

When your background applications refresh, they use up your processing power, so turning this setting off will help you to hold on to some of that life.

On iPhone, head to Settings > General > Background App Refresh.

On Android, pull down the notification bar for Settings. Then, tap the gear symbol > Data Usage under Wireless and Networks > tap the three dots on the right > Restrict Background Data.

6) Adjust display and brightness.

Ever notice that the brightness of your screen automatically adjusts to your surroundings? While it's certainly a cool feature, it can be troubling when running on low battery. To save power, we recommend you turn it off.

On iPhone, go to Settings > Display & Brightness and disable Auto-Brightness. You can adjust the brightness by sliding your finger along the brightness scale until you reach a level that works for you.

On Android, select Main Menu > Settings > Display > Brightness > and choose either Automatic Brightness or adjust manually using the sliding scale.

7) Check for software updates.

Haven't gotten around to updating your software yet? That could be the answer to your battery life woes. In fact, most software updates contain files that promote better battery life.

For example, Apple's iOS 9 release is said to include "power efficiency improvements" that -- depending on the device type -- can give users an extra hour of battery life.

To check for new updates on iPhone, go to Settings > General > Software Update.

To check for new updates on Android, Settings > About Phone > Software Update.

8) Disable automatic updates.

While helpful at times, automatic updates may be sucking up some of your data and battery life without you realizing it. Luckily, this function can be both enabled and disabled, so you can choose when you want it to come into play.

On iPhone, head to Settings > iTunes & App Store > turn the Updates toggle off. If you only want updates to occur when you're connected to WiFi, tap the Use Cellular Data toggle.

On Android, visit the Google Play Store > Settings > Auto-Update Apps > select "Do not auto-update apps."

9) Force apps to close.

When you exit an app and click into a new one, you're not truly shutting it down. In fact, the app will continue to run even when you're not in it ... unless you force it to shut down.

On iPhone, tap the home button twice to pull up a preview of your recently used apps. Swipe left to find an app you want to quit, and swipe up on the app's preview to close it.

On Android, go to Settings > Apps. From here you can select the app(s) you want to close out by tapping Force Stop. (Note: This function is not available for all apps.)

10) Adjust sync settings.

Depending on your needs, you probably don't need to have all of your apps syncing at all times. While adjusting or turning off sync for an app won't remove it from your device, it will prevent it from being kept up to date with changes you make throughout the day, which can save a lot of battery.

On iPhone, go to Settings > iCloud, then switch the toggle next to each option to turn your iCloud settings on or off.

On Android, open Settings > Accounts. In the top-right corner, tap the three dots and then check or uncheck "auto-sync data."

11) Turn on Airplane Mode.

When you're not using your phone and could use the lack of distractions, turn your phone on Airplane Mode. This setting allows you to turn off the cellular connection, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth on your phone all at once to save battery power.

On iPhone, go to Settings and switch the Airplane Mode toggle on.

On Android, open Settings > More > Airplane Mode.

12) Identify the source of the problem.

Not all apps are created equal. In fact, depending on your usage habits, some apps suck up a lot more juice than others. However, once you identify the ones hogging all of your battery, it's much easier to limit your usage strategically when you're trying to preserve power.

On iPhone, go to Settings > Battery > and scroll down to Battery Usage to view the percentage of battery used by each app during a specific time frame.

On Android, navigate to Settings > Battery to view the same breakdown of your apps and their exhausted battery power percentages.

What are your favorite tips for saving battery power on mobile devices? Share them in the comments section below.

Thanksgiving Google Doodle Features “Three Sisters” Of North American Crops: Corn, Beans & Squash

Google shared initial sketches of today's Thanksgiving Day logo created by guest Doodler Julia Cone. The post Thanksgiving Google Doodle Features “Three Sisters” Of North American Crops: Corn, Beans & Squash appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

Happy Thanksgiving from the ClickZ team!

Happy Thanksgiving from all of us here at ClickZ! With so much to be thankful for, we hope each of you has an amazing Turkey Day. Gobble gobble!

The Complete Guide to Website Push Notifications for Ecommerce

Website push notifications are clickable messages that are sent by a website to their subscribers’ browsers. They work very similarly to mobile app push notifications (notifications sent by a mobile app that land in your notification tray) except that they work on websites instead of apps and can be accessed on all devices (desktop, mobile, tablet, etc).

In this article, we’re going to take a look at website push notifications in the Ecommerce space. We’re going to discuss why Ecommerce players cannot afford to ignore website push notifications, how they work and how to optimize your push notification campaigns to deliver great results for your online store. Let’s start!

Why use Website Push Notifications

A brief look at the communication channels for Ecommerce

Ecommerce businesses use a variety of ways to grow their traffic i.e. new visitors, as well as engage with their existing traffic i.e. the folks who have already visited your website. These include exploring various communication channels – email, social media, SMS, push notifications (both websites and apps); it also involves employing these channels in different kinds of campaigns to reach and engage users. Let us take a brief look at each of these channels and try to understand where they prove useful.

Email

Email is most commonly used to deliver curated product suggestions, advertise upcoming sales and discount offers, ask for product reviews, recover abandoned carts, deliver transactional information such as order confirmation, tracking details etc.

The main advantage of email marketing is that it has a wide reach – a study by The Radicati Group reveals that there are currently 2.6 billion email users, which means that more than 1 out of 3 people have an email account. Another very important advantage is that an email stays in the inbox, accessible anytime, unlike social media messages and notifications, which are harder to access later (or even impossible). This is particularly useful for delivering important information like order and tracking details.

Where email marketing misses out, however, is the ability to deliver time-sensitive information. According to Zipstripe, the average time for email recipients to view an email message is 6.4 hours. This means that email is not effective for sending time-bound emails, such as coupons with a tight redemption period, or important actionable information such as “Your package is out for delivery”.

Social Media

Social media networks (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram) work better than email marketing when it comes to delivering short-time offers and discounts since people spend more time on social media websites than on any other online activity. So, what’s the problem? It’s the problem of engagement – only 0.07% of your Facebook audience interacts with your posts and the figure is 0.03% for Twitter. What this means is that social media is not very effective for messages designed to achieve a specific purpose in a specific time, since so few of your audience will actually react to that message. Instead, social media is better employed as a means to establish your brand and build a relationship with your audience.

SMS

SMS is effective if you want your user to read your message very quickly – 90% of SMS messages are read within the first 3 minutes. This makes it useful for communicating important business-information like “Your cab is arriving” or “Your item will be delivered today”.

SMS should not be used for information that the user will need to access later, such as receipts. SMS messages are difficult to search later on. Another disadvantage of SMS messages is that they can only contain a maximum of 160 characters, which drastically limits the kind of communications you can have through SMS.

Push Notifications (Mobile apps)

Push notifications is the default way by which mobile apps communicate. It scores over email for promotional content in that it delivers messages in real-time and it has also reported higher response rates compared to email (Open rates for push notifications are 50 percent higher than for email, and click rates are up to twice as high, according to this survey).

It is tempting to think of app push notifications and SMS as the same but they have crucial differences – the opt-in/opt-out options in app push notifications give the user greater control over what kind of messages he/she wants to receive. SMS on the other hand, often comes unsolicited and it is harder for the user to disable. Because of this, SMS is often perceived to be a lower messaging medium.

Where does Website Push Notifications fit into the picture

Website push notifications fit into a very unique spot in this entire spectrum. It differs from mobile app push notifications in that while app push notifications are limited to mobile devices and tablets, website push notifications also covers desktops. Desktop usage still accounts for 42% of total internet time. Web push notifications deliver the power of real-time push notifications to this 42% of internet users.

Another point which makes website push notifications very important for Ecommerce is the cost factor. Building a quality app is an expensive affair and sometimes the ROI can be difficult to justify. In fact, for small and medium sized companies, mobile websites may reach more people than mobile apps do. This makes website push notifications more critical since it gives businesses the ability to send push notifications without investing in an app.

All in all, it can be seen that website push notifications is an important channel for Ecommerce since it gives websites the power of instant communication via websites and that too on all devices, be it desktop mobile or tablet.

How do Website Push Notifications work

By default, whenever you install a mobile app, you give the app the permission to send you push notifications on your device. Websites, however, have to explicitly take permission from their users to send them push messages. This is how website push notifications work:

1. The first step is getting opt-in from visitors. As soon as someone arrives on a website, an opt-in box is triggered. If the visitor clicks on “Allow”, he/she is added to your subscriber list.

Opt-in modal box
2. As soon as a ‘visitor’ becomes a ‘subscriber’, you can send them push notifications from your website. The title message and the text message are customizable within certain character limits and a URL has to be specified. These notifications will arrive in real-time even if the browser is not open at that point of time. Clicking on the notification will take the subscriber to the URL specified.

How the notifications look

Optimizing Push Notifications

Now that we’ve established the importance of push notifications and how they work, it’s time to take a look into how to optimize your push notifications to drive more sales from your existing subscribers. This section is divided into the following subsections – writing great push notification copy, when to send a push notification, how frequently should you send push notifications, using segmentation to send personalized notifications and, lastly, what metrics to track.

Copywriting for Push Notifications

Since push notifications impose character limits on the title as well as the message, the copywriting becomes that much more important since you have to squeeze your message into a small package while still retaining its effectiveness.

Whenever you are writing the title and message text for a push notification, the most important thing to keep in mind is that the purpose of the copy is to get subscribers to click. For that, your copy needs to, above all, provide some value to the subscriber. People will only click on the notification if they find it valuable.

Here are a few tips you can follow:

• Be clear in what you are saying – Your subscribers have busy schedules and do not have time for vague messages. Do not test their patience by making them think. A clear message will have a greater click rate by the very virtue of the fact that it is action-oriented. In a fight between “Have you read Jeffrey Archer’s latest?” and “Jeffrey Archer’s latest novel available for purchase”, I’ll always go for the latter because it is clearer in its message as opposed to the former.
• Be crisp in your copy – Different platforms have different character limits for push notifications but all of them fall in the range of 40-120 characters. Thus, it is very important for you to be very concise in what you are saying. This often means that you need to identify the one most important value proposition of your message and let that shine through in the notification copy.
• Use scarcity to create urgency – According to Dr. Robert Cialdini, author of Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, we are more motivated by the idea of potential loss than of potential gain. That is, if we find that an opportunity is closing, we want it that much more. This is also known as FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out).
  You can use this psychological principle when you write your push notification copy. For example, if you have a sale coming up for your online store, try sending a push notification that says something like, “Flash Sale! 12 hours only”.
• Use Social Proof – IBM’s marketing slogan in the 80s, “No one ever got fired for buying IBM”, is one of the most powerful marketing phrase ever created. This is one of the most powerful examples of social proof, where the company used the tendency of people to go along the established route.
  In push notifications, social proof can be used to increase click rate. For example, you can write something like, “4000 marketers have already registered for this event” if you want people to register for an event or “This post has more than 1000 Twitter shares” if you want subscribers to click through to a blog post.
  Keep in mind, though, that this is not the 80s and internet users have access to all the information they need on their fingertips. Thus, it is important to not go overboard with claims and only write stuff that is credible.

When to send Push Notifications

Website Push Notifications, by their very nature, require an instant response on the part of the receiver. This makes timing all the more important. A classic mistake when sending push notifications is not take into account the time zone your subscribers are located in. To fix this, you need to have a clear understanding of how your subscribers are spread around the globe and be very particular that each time zone receives the message at an appropriate time. It’s definitely more complicated than sending out a notification in a single batch, but that’s the kind of effort that is required in this highly-personalized environment. For example, you don’t want to end up this notification when the stars are twinkling, do you?

A wrong time to send this notification

Another thing that you need to consider is that different kinds of notifications work at different times of the day. If you are sending a promotional message, you want your users to be in a restful state of mind so that they have the mental bandwidth to check out your offer. Choosing to send something funny and light-hearted? Go for the afternoon, when people are feeling bored in the office and want something to crack them up.

How Frequently to Send

Probably the most important thing to consider as you scale up your push notification campaigns is the frequency of your messages. Since push notifications is a high-engagement communication channel, you need to be really careful not to inundate your subscribers with more notifications that they can handle.

Since website push notifications is a fairly new technology, there is no data out there on optimal frequency. At this stage, you need to carefully monitor your click rates, time on page, bounce rate and opt-outs after every push notification to find out which frequency works best for your audience.

Using Segmentation to Send Personalized Notifications

As Ecommerce marketers, personalized messages are nothing new for us. We all know that they work. However, it is doubly critical to not follow the spray-and-pray approach when it comes to website push notifications, simply because opting-out is so easy and there is no way for you to get those unsubscribers back, unless they change their settings. For example, this guy is totally opting-out after receiving this notification.

A poorly personalized push notification

Ecommerce players, therefore, need to categorize their subscribers into different buckets that are as narrowly defined as possible. One way of doing this is to ask subscribers for preferences at the time of opting-in. Another very effective way is to go for behavioral segmentation i.e. putting subscribers into different segments based on their on-page activities like type of pages viewed, number of views of a particular page etc. For example, if I’ve been checking out books in the spy thriller genre lately, the store should mark me as someone who’s interested in the genre and send me a notification whenever something new is published in that category.

What Metrics to Track

The most immediate metric that comes to mind when thinking website push notifications is click rate. This is how many people clicked on the notification as a percentage of the number of people to whom that notification was delivered.

However, just focusing on this one metric can lead your analysis astray. Instead, you should strongly focus on the business goals you deem most important, which in this case would be sales (primary goal) and visits to checkout page, add to cart (secondary goals). Tag your notification links with the proper UTM parameters and then sift through the data in Google Analytics and other analytics tools you are using to find out how many people arriving on your website via push notifications are actually performing the above actions. This is the only way that you will be able to determine whether website push notifications are working for you or not.

That’s it! This covers almost everything you need to know as you start with website push notifications for your online store. Just remember – keep listening to what your audience is trying to say and keep iterating on the basis of that!

About the Author: Anand Kansal works at PushCrew, a tool that enables websites to send push notifications on desktops, mobiles and tablets. He tweets about push notifications and online marketing in general at @PushCrewHQ.

4 Strategies to Help Maintain Lead Quality in Your Database

When you first implemented inbound marketing for your business, you knew that you were building a system that utilized high quality content to help generate high quality leads from your website. Flashes of the film Field of Dreams probably kept running through your head as you optimized your website for conversions and started pumping out blogs and offers at a regular basis.

If you build it, they will come.

And boy did they! Inbound marketing has proven time and time again to be an extremely successful philosophy that can help generate leads for businesses through online sources. Sadly, though, few people will tell you that not all of those leads are quality.

Alongside your actual business prospects who will fill out forms on your website are vendors looking to sell you something, competitors looking to read your content and foreign marketers just looking to read what you have to offer, among others. None of these people will ever become customers yet they will take up as much, if not more space in your database doing absolutely nothing for you, and that might be more of a problem than you think.

The Cost of Bad Leads

Depending on what type of marketing database, sales CRM or email marketing tools you’re using, you could be paying a premium to house and market to these contacts. Database limits and cost-per-send rates aren’t to be taken lightly, as they can lead to a business throwing away thousands of dollars a year.

Outside of cost, a database filled with suspect leads can also skew marketing metrics and negatively affect sales follow up to actual qualified leads. With that in mind, I’ve put together a list of 4 different tricks I continue to use in my campaigns to help maintain a clean database filled with only qualified leads.

1) Have Your Forms be the First Line of Defense

The first and probably best way to ensure a clean database is to establish rules and triggers connected to your forms to help you either keep low quality leads out altogether or sort them after the fact. Email form field rules and additional form fields asking for qualifying information are some great options.

Email Form Fields

Often times in B2B campaigns, you can tell if a lead is legitimate or not based on what kind of email address they provide. Competitors may use their personal email addresses to mask their true identity while vendors and others might use blacklisted addresses linked heavily with spam. If you face this regularly, block them from submitting your forms by comparing their email domains against a list of free, spammy email providers alongside your own list of providers. Not only will this help collect relevant email addresses from qualified leads for your sales team but it will also keep out the unqualified people who may be unwilling or unable to provide their real email addresses.

Additional Form Fields

Not all forms can be set up to automatically determine if a lead is qualified and has the right intentions on the same page and that’s ok. People are smart and will often times do whatever it takes to submit a form on your website for one reason or another.

When it comes to dealing with these people, don’t fight them too hard with multiple safeguards like CAPTCHA fields (not always a bad idea though) and other filtering mechanisms, but instead looks to collect seemingly generic information that only you know to be a qualifier or disqualifier for your business.

Items such as geographic information, company size and industry can help you quickly understand if the person submitting the form is qualified as a potential sales prospect quickly based on where and who your company is looking to work with.

2) Corral the Ones That Slip Through

As I alluded to above, people are smart and are sooner or later going to successfully submit a form on your website to read your content and that’s ok. You haven’t lost just because someone was able to provide a real email and select the right form field.

In fact, they have played straight into your hands! Now that you’ve collected their information and have stored it (temporarily) in your database, it will be easy to quickly review if they are or are not meant to take up your precious storage space both using automated and manual techniques.

List Creation

When it comes to keeping a clean database, establishing smart lists to uncover and track unqualified leads in your database is key. Based on who your business is targeting and where you are looking to do business, there are a number of simple rules you can establish to quickly pull in a list of potentially unqualified leads currently in your database.

If you are an American business looking to only work within the states, establishing a list that tracks any and all leads with known IP addresses outside the US can quickly show you foreign contacts who you will never do business with.

If you collected qualifying information in your forms, you can create lists to track any answers that disqualify a lead as well. Once you’ve established a list or lists that track all of these disqualifying factors, you can easily clean your database with a simple click (after reviewing the list thoroughly, of course).

Manual Trimming

While smart lists will help you quickly wrangle and delete any contacts with measurable values, there are others still that may require more of a manual process when it comes to keeping a clean database. Form submissions with names (Test Test) and phone numbers (123456789) are solid indicators that a lead in unqualified and not work the space to house their obviously fake information.

While you may be able to set up rules to catch some of this, there are too many different ways that people can submit false information to effectively automate the review process so instead, rely on your experience and eye for these submissions as they come into your database. Set yourself up to receive email notifications once a form is submitted and spend time daily or weekly reviewing them to see if any are clearly fake. From there, you can manually delete them from your database without much effort.

3) Monitor Engagement

While it can be very easy to tell the difference between a potential business opportunity and a vendor or competitor, it can be much more difficult to tell whether or not a seemingly qualified lead is actively engaged with your content in a positive manner. Whether through engagement with your emails or through specific, negative actions on your website, there are signs that can be monitored to tell if leads are truly qualified.

Email Marketing Review

While marketers always crave engagement with their emails, not all actions are always a good thing. Contacts looking to unsubscribe from your lists still must open and click through the original email, so keeping an eye on what links are being clicked on a regular basis is always a good idea. Identify those that are unsubscribing from your communications, placing your emails in their junk folders, or are having your emails bounce on a regular basis. This information can be used to establish a list of people no longer engaging with your content.

After reviewing this list (potentially with your sales team), delete those who you believe are no longer qualified to be in your database before then establishing a plan of attack to legally target those who your sales team still believes to be opportunities.

Negative Website Activities

While normally connected with an unqualified or fake submission, there are some cases where a seemingly qualified lead can perform specific actions on your website that may raise some red flags. Multiple conversions on any and all offers on your website, while not always a bad thing, can often point to a contact trying to collect anything and everything you’ve written for less than noble purposes.

Tracking people who convert on multiple forms via a smart list or keeping an eye on any large amounts of conversions at one time via notification emails should allow you to see when someone is going on a “download spree” and give you the opportunity to remove them from your system once they’ve stopped.

4) Stay Connected with Your Sales Team’s Funnel

Even truly qualified leads will need to leave your marketing database at one point or another. Either they go through the entire sales process and become a customer (and are added to the CRM), speak with your sales team but decide to go elsewhere (and are then sent to the CRM for future contact) or they “go dark.”

For those who do go dark, it can be tough to know where to put them within your marketing database and sales CRM. On one hand, your sales team can’t be wasting their time trying to continually contact people who won’t respond, but on the other hand you can’t necessarily market to these people in the same way you would a new prospect.

When faced with this dilemma, work with your sales team to create a custom nurturing campaign that can take these “recycled” leads who have gone dark and slowly send them customized content to bring them back into the sales cycle. If successful, you can bring back old prospects who may have just needed more time. If unsuccessful, you have a list of people who have shown to be disengaged and not worth keeping as a contact.

Now of course, this strategy can differ depending on your sales team’s philosophy on when to give up on leads, but it still allows you to at least start the conversation around how long is too long for a disengaged lead to stay in a full database.

The Bottom Line

Whether you’re a mature inbound campaign or just implementing your first blog post and offer, a clean and consistently scrubbed database is paramount to the overall success of a campaign when it comes to providing ROI. The benefits of keeping that database clean go far beyond keeping your superior sane-- they can help your campaign save money on software and storage while improving overall lead to customer conversion rates.

While not the easiest (or sexiest) job within digital marketing, if you use any or all of the four steps listed above, your “cleaning time” can be significantly shortened and made smarter. That's a movement that you, your sales team and your company can get behind.

Mo' Mustaches, Mo' Growth: The Rise of the Movember Movement [Podcast]

It all began as a bet in a bar.

Let's round up a group of people and see who can grow the best mustache in just 30 days.

Twelve years later, this bet has blossomed into Movember: More than five million people all over the world have joined the movement to raise awareness and funds to benefit men's health initiatives.

These five million people are having a huge impact, too: Since 2003, they've has raised almost $650 million.

How'd this bet turn into a globally successful movement? In this episode of The Growth Show, we sit down with Mark Hedstrom, U.S. Country Director at the Movember Foundation, to learn the nonprofit's secrets to growth.

Some episode highlights include:

• How Movember manages to recruit people all over the world to join its movement
• What the Movember Foundation does the 11 other months of the year
• How Movember plans to get more women involved
• Mark's tips for growing a really sweet 'stache

Click the play button below to listen to this episode in your browser, or subscribe on iTunes to download episodes directly to your phone:

Check out the latest recaps of The Growth Show episodes by clicking here.