From wine labels and book covers to blind dates, the truth is, it’s human nature to judge something at first sight. It may not always be accurate, or fair, but it happens. Many people often choose a wine based on how much we like the label. Of course, books are judged by their cover, hence the reason for the commonly applied adage telling us not to. And you know what they say about making a good first impression on a date. The same initial judgement is true for emails. The subject line—the first impression for emails—greatly affects whether that email will be opened and read. It’s the wine label, book cover, and first impression for an email that offers the opportunity to get your recipient to pay attention and act.
 
Marketing automation has achieved mass adoption across B2C and B2B organizations with an average of 51% of companies using various marketing automation technologies. Today, there are more than 200 different marketing automation platforms available for small to medium, mid-market, and enterprise businesses. They range from industry leaders such as Marketo, Hubspot, and Pardot, to smaller email service providers such as Mailchimp and Constant Contact which have automation features added to their existing offerings.
 
At Zion & Zion, we use photo editing apps to add creativity and flair to lower-resolution images for projects like social media posts. With that said, there are so many photo editing apps in the marketplace these days. Deciding on the best one for your needs can be a daunting task. After researching and testing dozens of the most popular apps, I’ve narrowed down that list to my top five. I based my decisions mostly on two criteria: 1) ease of use, and 2) advanced editing and creative filtering options.
 
Front-end development has changed a lot over the years. User interfaces (UI) have evolved from a simple template with text and buttons, to animations and colors which pull the user’s attention and gives the site the flexibility to behave in different ways. As a developer, sometimes I need tools that are meant for specific situations, but in other instances, I need more code flexibility to provide the best experience possible to end users that will be managing content and settings. In this article, I’ll talk about a front-end framework that’s flexible and useful for processing dynamic information, Vue JS.
 
If you’re looking for people to blame for the often-confusing generational tags, look no further than William Strauss and Neil Howe. They pioneered the concept of generational cycles and coined the term Millennials in their seminal 1991 book, Generations: The History of America’s Future, 1584 to 2069. Strauss and Howe theorized that people who grow up under similar circumstances often share the same characteristics relating to attitudes and behaviors such as work ethic, respect for authority, spending habits, technology adoption, and patience. If you’re a Baby Boomer, you’ll act one way. But if you’re a Millennial, you’ll behave differently. Well, that’s the idea anyway.
 
Today, the youngest Baby Boomer is 53 and the oldest is 72. This wide-spanning group has witnessed and shaped almost every major event of the past century. While they may be aging, they still have more buying power than any other demographic, and there are no signs of them slowing down. Baby Boomers are defined as the group born immediately following World War II, from mid-1946 continuing thru mid-1964.
 
Low hanging fruit is probably one of the most overused terms in marketing today, right after ecosphere and disrupter. But what is low hanging fruit and why is it important to your overall marketing strategy? The dictionary deems low hanging fruit as “the obvious or easy thing that can be most readily done or dealt with in achieving success or progress towards an objective.” In marketing speak, this is your core target audience that’s already engaged with your brand and needs little convincing to convert (i.e. the holy grail for what your business is trying to accomplish).
 
As one of the Zion & Zion team members that has been trained at the Stanford d.school’s intense Design Thinking program, I always look for ways to incorporate this new model of thinking in my everyday work with clients. Design Thinking encourages you to look at problems from a different perspective, usually from that of your end customer. Design Thinking pushes you into new territory by coming at a problem from a wide variety of angles, some of which you may have never thought without a Design Thinking approach.