What are the most reputable email verification vendors? How crucial is this step in email marketing?

Drip marketing (aka. drip emails, or lead nurturing) is often used by modern marketers to nurture their leads through the sales funnel. As others have mentioned the idea is to gain brand awareness and influence buyers through a regular series of targeted and relevant content or offers. Typically for top of the funnel activities you might offer something like a general whitepaper or something which describes the overall business problems that your prospects might be feeling. From there you can use a marketing automation tool to send through additional material or reminders periodically depending on how your prospects engage with you. The idea at the end of the day is to reduce that amount of direct time that a sales rep spends closing any deal by ensuring that leads have shown sufficient buying signals and are ready to purchase.

I would seriously consider launching a blog and posting content of the same type to the blog, in abundance. Then add a popup box to the blog to collect email addresses. Post daily blog posts about topics related to your blog and your newsletter. If you do this consistently, over time, you will build up traffic to your blog and also get people entering their email into your popup. This is the free way to do it...

Hello, great question here. First of all you should understand that there is no 1 way and depending on who your audience is and what you sell the answer will definitely vary. A short answer however would be - engagement. Forget about likes and follows and shares are engagement, if you want to be a successful marketer you need to see engagement as conversations. The more conversations you can build around products the more you can rely on them to follow links or follow up on a request when you do make one. With that said, social media updates should be about what your followers want to see - depending on the social media - try to avoid being too pitchy on each post. My name is Humberto Valle, I have been a strategist for about 10 years now and have helped countless of entrepreneurs and businesses thrive through creative competitive strategy and marketing and I'm the co-founder of Unthink.Me. I hope my answer helps you a bit.

Pardot is the easiest to learn and then execute. Will take your team the least amount of time to provide managed email marketing & automation services to your client. Naturally you'll want to bill fixed rates.

Use the "audience" feature on facebook and import all of your emails. Facebook will match them so that you can ran ads to promote your new startup or service to whoever has a fb profile with that email. Happy to help if you need more info