Good morning!

Today we have 8 tips from Kinsta, a provider of premium managed WordPress hosting, to optimize your WordPress site’s performance.

These tips are worth a read as the faster your website is, the higher your chances are to engage with new visitors and potential customers.

We also have a case study that shows how BBQ Guys, an online-only grill retailer, leveraged Vertebrae’s interactive 3D and AR commerce solutions to inspire consumer confidence and drive unprecedented engagement, sales, and satisfaction.

Who are the most influential leaders in marketing technology?

With the Oscars just around the corner, we thought we’d get into the act as well!

We want to recognize the most influential people in marketing technology and need your help doing it.

Is it Adobe’s Ann Lewnes, Salesforce’s Stephanie Buscemi, or is Scott Brinker still the tech industry’s most prominent figure?

We couldn’t think of a better jury than you, our loyal readers.

So please take our survey here and let us know who are your top 5 picks, along with a very short description why?

Feel free to nominate yourself. All responses are anonymous and we will be writing up the results over the next couple of weeks.

Also ICYMI:

• Dataseat – a London-based tech startup, helping mobile app advertisers to manage programmatic media buying in-house – has launched with its first seed round of funding of £1.75m through Play Ventures, Backed.vc and SAATCHiNVEST.
• Funnel, the Stockholm-based startup that offers technology to help businesses prepare — or make “business-ready” — their marketing data for better reporting and analysis, has closed $47 million in Series B funding.
• Leading enterprise SEO platform Botify, announced a first-of-its-kind partnership with Bing to bring speed, efficiency, and accuracy to the crawling and indexing of large websites.
• Phunware, a fully-integrated enterprise cloud platform for mobile that provides products, solutions, data and services for brands worldwide, announced the release of new user engagement and retention features that allow brands to view real-time user activity data within its Multiscreen as a Service (MaaS) platform.
• Omnisend, a leading provider of omnichannel marketing automation for ecommerce, is amplifying its global footprint with a strategic expansion in North America.