I hope you already know that email marketing is THE most cost-effective marketing tool you have access to. If you don't, here's the deal: for 10 years in a row, email marketing has generated the highest ROI for marketers.

For every $1 spent, email marketing generates a return on investment of $38!

If you're not seeing this kind of success, though, I'm willing to bet I already know what you are and aren't doing...

Our office is located on Bannister Lake in the town of Halifax, Virginia. Last summer someone abandoned a poor little duck on the lake; he she (we found out it's a girl!) would come around when we kayaked, but would never come close. This past January we had a snowstorm of about 10" and the temperature was close to 0; we were able to find him her hiding in brush - covered in ice and snow, and frantic with hunger. We started feeding him her off of the dock, and he she started coming back every evening at 5pm to eat.

When we're not there by 5, we can hear him her quacking all the way up at the office (one of the secrets to whether a duck is a girl or boy? the girls are LOUDER! lol). Our office is at the top of a tall hill, and today we saw his her little white head bobbing around at the top of the hill so we took the hint and went out to feed him her.

Once he'd she'd had enough, he she waddled back down the hill and swam away :) I hate that somebody was cold enough to abandon him her, but we sure do get a lot of joy from having him her around!

Did you know that there's a way you can actually know everything an individual visitor does on your website?

If you use Google Analytics or similar, no doubt you know information like how many visitors come to your site, the countries they're from, and how many times each page is visited. That's nice to know, but in reality it doesn't really tell you much.

[Bonus at end of post - 9 FREE easy-to-use tools to create your own Lead Magnets.]

Just imagine getting up on a Monday morning after enjoying a relaxing weekend and finding several great qualified leads in your inbox to start the week off with.

What a difference that would make in the levels of success and frustration you experience!

If you're like most people, though, you either:

1. have no leads in your inbox (this is most common), or
2. leads that haven't begun to be qualified and you have to spend a lot of time on, most of it wasted because they weren't a good fit to begin with.

This article was originally written for LinkedIn Pulse.

[Bonus at end of post - download this list in a PDF.]

Most people think that automated marketing just means email marketing, but nothing could be further from the truth. To illustrate the difference, here are a few ways you could be using automated marketing right now.