They say that the week after a holiday is always iffy, but we have to say that this one wasn’t bad. We put together some exciting proposals for clients, worked on fun projects, and even had some fun in the office. We hope your past week was A-OK, too!

And with the week coming quickly to a close, we have a helpful and educational roundup for you. This Friday, Our Favorite Headlines include some practical ways to make sure your marketing is working, a checklist for more email clickthroughs, and some recent developments in the world of digital marketing.

Check them out now. Oh, and happy Friday the 13th!

The Takeaway: This is a gentle-but-firm reminder that you can and should be measuring pretty much everything you do to market your business. As you define your marketing objectives, develop a strategy, and build a tactical plan, make sure you build in the tools to track whether each tactic is successful or not. Those tools will look different from channel to channel, as columnist Amanda Ponzar shares, but that doesn’t make one any less valuable than another. Having tracking in place will help you justify your costs, understand what drives people to take action, and avoid wasting money on things that simply don’t work.

The Takeaway: This is an excellent resource for anyone who uses email as a way to drive business. Whatever your email strategy, it’s very likely that you want people to do something with each email. If that’s the case, use this checklist the next time you create an email.

The Takeaway: We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: Print isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. If even the most digital of all the digital brands (read: Facebook and Google) are using print to engage their audiences, do you think maybe you should, too? It’s true that print can be expensive to produce, but that only means you should be very strategic with how you use it.

The Takeaway: If you feel like the only result of GDPR was a barrage of “We’ve changed our privacy policy” emails and cookie-use notices, you may be right. Okay, that isn’t the only result; it turns out that one of the most surprising outcomes of the new regulation was a growth – not a decline – in ad retargeting.

One of the most insightful takeaways from this article is that, “when properly informed, a majority of users have shown a willingness to opt in.” The point? It turns out that as long as businesses are truly transparent about how they use data, people don’t mind them using it all that much.