A lot of marketers have seen their companies trying to embrace agile marketing, but many struggle with how to apply it in a way that adds value to team members. To help out, we worked with agile expert and MarTech contributor Stacey Ackerman to develop an e-book guide so that you can lead your agile marketing team towards better agile marketing practices.

In the book, Stacey dives into collaboration and teamwork, and explores how an agile marketing team is much more than a group of people assigned to work together. The team should have a shared purpose.

The marketing backlog process is a key component for making sure your team works on only the most important items. The guide digs into prioritization and how to optimize backlogs for clarity and shared understanding of work.

The guide is free and requires no registration.

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Most marketers are well aware of the increase in privacy regulations over their data collection activities. These laws, such as the GDPR and CCPA, are designed to protect the privacy of consumers. But they’re also causing marketing teams to shift away from strategies centered on third-party data.

“The core of the shift is really moving from targeting consumers using third-party data to knowing consumers very well,” said Giusy Buonfantino, VP of CPG Industry Solution at Google Cloud, in her MarTech presentation. She added, “Personalize experiences and do it in a way that’s privacy-centric, protecting the choices of the consumer.”

Here are some first steps brands can take to shift their third-party data strategies. Inventory third-party tags and choose first-party data replacements. Build a singular customer ID system that can scale and support active profiles. Deliver omnichannel customer experiences. Brands should focus on delivering great customer experiences across every touchpoint. This will help build consumer trust and provide marketers with relevant first-party data.

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Marketing automation platforms form the backbone of marketing operations, increasingly serving as sophisticated marketing orchestration platforms. MarTech’s “B2B Marketing Automation Platforms: A Marketer’s Guide,” examines the market for B2B marketing automation software platforms. This report includes profiles of 13 leading B2B marketing automation vendors, capabilities comparisons, pricing information, and recommended steps for evaluating and purchasing.

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DocuSign, the electronic signature platform, has had a strategic partnership with Salesforce for a number of years. That partnership will now reach into the Slack ecosystem, allowing businesses using Slack for collaboration to process, review and execute agreements within Slack itself. This will be available in 2022. Salesforce completed the acquisition of Slack in July 2021.

In addition, two DocuSign Gen services are available now in Salesforce — creation and processing of invoices in Salesforce Billing and creation and execution of agreements in Salesforce CPQ Plus. DocuSign CLM (contract lifecycle management) will be available in Salesforce Field Services in 2022.

Why we care. For marketing organizations as well as other business teams, working in an all-digital environment is increasingly the reality. If something can be automated, it will be automated. And if the number of environments that need to be accessed in order to use automated tools can be reduced, that’s a time saver.

Perhaps it will never be possible to do absolutely everything in the same platform, let alone the same dashboard, but that’s the condition to which marketing and workplace technology is aspiring.

More and more, the key to solving critical marketing and marketing ops challenges is marketing technology. But with 7,000+ solutions on the market, finding the right one for your needs can be overwhelming. MarTech makes it easy. Discover dozens of time-saving, profit-boosting solutions and the actionable tactics to effectively leverage them… all in one place, all without leaving your desk, and all for free.

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During the pandemic, email marketing budgets remained steady while marketers considered new technology to get the most out of the channel, according to a new report from email optimization company Litmus that surveyed 400 marketers.

Marketers this year are most interested in automation. Of those surveyed, 59% said expanding automation was a priority for 2021. Also, 55% are looking to boost personalization, while 35% are considering enriching customer profiles.

Privacy. This year’s iOS changes, including Apple Mail Privacy Protection, have 43% of marketers saying they will look for new ways to measure their email campaigns. Conversely, 24% say that don’t plan to make any changes. 

Also, nearly 20% of marketers will run more A/B testing as a result of the new measurement challenges, while 16% will change automation flows and 10% will message their audience about the Apple updates or privacy issues in general.

Budgets. Just because email marketing budgets didn’t increase notably thus far in the pandemic doesn’t mean there aren’t plans for them to grow in the next year. More than 40% of companies intend to up their spend in the channel in 2022.

Why we care. More optimism about 2022 will likely carry this momentum, as a good many marketers will have more options and funding to make serious changes to their email stack.

Read more here.

“If you’re a great marketer with a bad product, you will just speed up going out of business.” Gary Vaynerchuk, entrepreneur and author