Are you wondering how to avoid spam filters? After all, a critical element of inbound marketing is being able to reach customers and prospects via email marketing messages on an ongoing basis so you can establish a relationship and nurture trust.

Especially if you've received permission from your visitors and prospects to do so (aka permission-based marketing). They've opted-in and want to hear from you.

Imagine how vexing, though, to have permission to send emails only to have all of your messages banished to the junk or spam folder without even the glimmer of an opportunity to connect with that person!

How important is it for you to build trust and cooperation? Aren't both an ongoing commitment you make to everyone your business touches?

And yet that commitment can become overwhelming. Nowadays, you need to be always-on, constantly figuring out how to develop and nurture ongoing relationships across tools and platforms that are forever in flux. Don't forget those critical in-real-life interactions!

Enter Simon Sinek who, during INBOUND 14, focused on the very topic of how to build trust and cooperation in an inbound marketing world.

If you're a business marketer and wondering about email marketing best practices, here are 119 facts worth exploring captured in an infographic.

Email remains particularly effective. Yes, that's right. Email hasn't disappeared and isn't about to. Think of all the applications and social networks which depend on email for verification, interaction [think notifications] and even as reminders to return to individual networks.

From a business perspective, emails are the most valuable customer asset available - when obtained legitimately and respected - for engagement, loyalty, relationship building and even sales.

Did you know that consumers who make purchases through marketing emails wind up spending 138% more than those who don't receive email offers?

In nature, clusters of fruit, flowers, plants, ice crystals, even constellations stand out. The individual units take on more importance by being associated or grouped with like-units.

The same goes for content. In fact, content topic clusters represent a better way to organize your website content so it stands out, given changes in search behavior. 

According to the definition Google kindly offered me (see image below), a cluster is "a group of similar things or people positioned or occurring closely together." The term has application in astronomy, linguistics, chemistry.... and also inbound marketing. The concepts that matter here are similarity and grouping.

Have you heard about pillar content (also called cornerstone content)? Are you wondering how it helps you get found in search and what it takes to develop content pillars for your own website?

Let's explore.

Imagine needing to connect a Hubspot form with PayPal so people registering for a training event can pay. What do you do? Luckily, there's DepositFix, the new HubSpot payment integration that Denis Lunev has developed.