Today, on the Ask Me About Email Marketing podcast, we're covering a hot topic in Digital Marketing – influencers. It seems like 2016 is the year of content curation and influencer marketing. Most annual predictions posts claimed these two areas of focus as important trends to watch.

There are many ways that brands, businesses, and entrepreneurs are using influencers to help grow their subscriber base and capture the attention of new prospects.

To get to the bottom of this concept of influencer marketing, which honestly is not very new, I roped our CMO, Erik Harbison, into the recording booth for a conversation. In this episode, we discussed influencer, advocate, and referral marketing, and how you can leverage these to expand your reach and enhance your email marketing.

Here are a few things you'll learn in this episode:

• What is influencer marketing?
• What's the difference between influencers and advocates?
• How do you find influencers and advocates?
• How can you activate influencers and advocates?

Here are the links mentioned in this episode:

• Yelp
• Quora
• Extole
• Influitive

What do you think about influencer and advocate marketing? Ready to ask a question? Visit aweber.com/podcast to drop us a line!

What's the future of digital marketing?

Over 3000 like-minded marketers convened in San Diego last week at the Traffic and Conversion Summit to discover the answer. The host of the summit, Digital Marketer, educated the crowd on what's working today, and where they believe the industry is heading.

The content was enlightening and inspiring. Luckily, podcast hosting service Buzzsprout had a mobile recording studio on hand to capture some audio. I took to the booth with my colleague Meghan Nesta to dish out the main themes that we knew email marketers could benefit from hearing.

Check out the episode below:

In this episode, you'll learn:

• Why you shouldn't propose to cold traffic on your first date.
• How to build relational equity with your subscribers.
• How generic lead magnets could be hurting your lead quality.
• Why its not always about you (but always about your customer.)

Special shout outs to Buzzsprout and Digital Marketer, keep being awesome!

Want to be on the podcast? Visit aweber.com/podcast to learn more.

Back again with another fresh episode of the Ask Me About Email Marketing podcast, the show where we're talking about all things email marketing and no questions are off limits.

For today's episode, we're stepping into the world of Jay Moore, one of our email marketing experts who has been working at AWeber for 8 years! Jay has seen the industry evolve quite a bit over the past decade and is has plenty of knowledge to drop. In this episode you'll learn:

• What major changes have impacted email marketing over the years.
• How to convert casual subscribers into loyal paying customers?

Here are a few tips that Jay mentioned:

• Set solid expectations for subscribers. Let them know what types of messages you'll be sending.
• People are more likely to invest in people and brands that they trust. Use email marketing as a way to establish a strong rapport with subscribers, and work to build trust before blindly pushing what you are selling.
• Subscribers are going to be asking, "What's in it for me?" If your emails are not providing value, they'll catch on.
• Not all subscribers are likely to convert from an email. Rather than drive subscribes directly to checkout, offer them other opportunities to learn more about your products and services. This could be done by directing subscribers to videos, live webinars, or more detailed content, like a guide.

Want to be on the show?

Visit http://aweber.com/podcast to record your question, and we'll match the best questions with the best experts.