1 to 1 Email Marketing Solution

Goodwill Industries of Central Indiana faced a common problem—not knowing who its shoppers were or how to connect with them outside of the in-store experience. The organization sought a way to collect data about its best customers—both shoppers and donors—build loyalty with a rewards program, and implement an active email marketing solution. 

Since launching the Goodwill Rewards program with ExactTarget in November 2011, Goodwill sends daily emails, including thank-you communications for donations made, member birthdays, and discount offers.

Success metrics include:

• Nearly 100,000 Goodwill...

In my last post, "Are you Leaving Money on the Table by Sending Non-Targeted or Blast Emails?", I explained that sending the same offer to your entire database could actually be hurting your sales efforts and causing you to leave money on the table.

In this post, we will shift gears to focus on your merchandising strategy. By utilizing a "crawl, walk, run" strategy that leverages automation, you can actually increase AOV, boost your conversion rate, and provide your shoppers with an overall better shopping experience.

#4 Way Retail Marketers are Leaving Money On the Table: Manually Merchandising...

As a follow-up to the article I wrote for ClickZ the other day, I wanted to talk a bit more about the use of technology and the adoption of best practices in large B2B organizations.

My research for the ClickZ article looked at B2B companies on the Fortune 500* and their adoption of modern marketing tools. But when you look at the raw data, it becomes clear that there are three easy lessons for any B2B marketer.

Lesson 1: Technology is only the beginning

When adopting radical new technologies, the technology itself is often only part of the story. The other part is a shift in thinking or action....

You may remember my recent post wherein I mentioned that a client had a rather unique problem with Gmail delivery; their ability to get ExactTarget-served mail to the inbox ultimately seemed to be negatively impacted by mail being sent by them OUTSIDE of ExactTarget. In response, a reader asked, "How does one ensure that 3rd party affiliates are not pulling you down? Would a redirect protect the parent domain name?"

I'm not entirely sure that you can work with third party affiliates and ensure that their activities referencing your brand and domain won't have any impact on your core mailing...

During a game of trivia the other night, I decided to cheat! I pulled out my phone, and was able to find out “Silent Bob’s” real name in less than 10 seconds.

This availability of information has programmed our society to have very high expectations when it comes to the question-and-answer process. If we have a hard time finding the answer to a question, we often get frustrated and build a negative connotation with brands that make it difficult to find information we seek.  This is not a new concept, so when I went to check out some of the most prolific B2B brands, I was surprised to see how...

This week at the Mobile Marketing Association’s forum in San Francisco, leading marketing pioneers will discuss the power of a mobile strategy and how it can support and strengthen your existing marketing channels. ExactTarget is excited to be part of this event, as we are eager to announce the launch of our new mobile marketing solutions—MobileConnect redefined and MobilePush. These solutions will let you manage every aspect of mobile—SMS, push messaging, mobile email, couponing, and more—from one easy-to-use interface. We will be celebrating this launch at the MobilePush Launch Party.

By...

The margin for error in Marketing has become razor thin. Here are five "MegaTrends" that underscore why marketing professionals need to be at the top of their game in 2013.    

MegaTrend #1: Customers are More Informed, More Influential, and Less Patient

Today’s customers are better connected, more informed, and more technically savvy than even 3-5 years ago. They have considerably more access to information to make smarter purchase decisions. They are much less patient with brands that do not deliver the information and offers they want. And they are much more vocal in expressing satisfaction –...

For retailers, it has always been important to engage customers and prospects through personalized communications that help them make buying decisions—without chasing them away. But to be successful in a landscape where data is everywhere—from Point-of-Sale (POS) to email, Twitter, and Foursquare—you might be struggling to connect the dots and communicate with each of your customers as individuals.

This week I’ll be sharing three quick wins you can implement today to solve the interactive marketing challenges that have traditionally left retailers puzzled.

Challenge #1: No common view of...

ExactTarget’s first release of 2013 is now live! We’re constantly hard at work behind the scenes to deliver new features, improvements, and enhancements across all product lines. Here are three things that went live with this release that you could benefit from (or might just find interesting):

1. Distributed Sending = Empowerment

ExactTarget Distributed Sending is an easy-to-use application accessed via the Interactive Marketing Hub. It delivers an email marketing solution where corporate can provide email templates, images/logos, subscriber lists, and more for local marketers to use.

End users...

ExactTarget has a larger-than-ever team focused on leading the market in our Voice of Customer efforts. A major initiative this year is to further enhance how we "close the loop" with clients after they fill out our annual Client Success Survey. 

As a company with roots in email marketing, it may not be surprising that a large part of this strategy involves triggering targeted emails to teams across our organization when survey responses come in. These emails have proven to be instrumental in not only quickly informing about what are clients are saying, but also spurring action.

Here are some of...

Each Thursday at 11am EST, marketers from around the world join the ExactTarget user community on Twitter for a conversation about trends and campaign ideas across the interactive marketing industry. We call this virtual coffee chat ExactTarget Café.

Our guest for a recent #ETCafe chat was Peter Chase (@peterrchase), Executive Vice President at Scribe Software Corporation. During the chat Peter shared his insights into leveraging data to drive more successful campaigns. This was Peter’s and his team's first time on the chat and we had some amazing conversation!

Here's a recap from our...

Moments ago we announced the completion of two incredibly strategic acquisitions - marketing automation provider Pardot and Web personalization provider iGoDigital. These transformational additions to the ExactTarget family broaden our suite of digital marketing products with B-to-B Marketing Automation and expanded Web capabilities that include predictive analytics.

Let me share a little more on each of these great new additions.

Pardot - In talking with clients around the world, it became clear that the marketers are hungry for a lead nurturing solution that integrates with their broader...

I had the chance to sit down with Ben Pickering, CEO of Strutta to discuss Facebook Marketing Best Practices and Strutta!

SM: So what exactly is Strutta? 
BP: Strutta is software that helps marketers create, build and launch promotions on Facebook. Our tools are self-service and allow brands to build and engage their audience through social media, identify top influencers and measure campaign effectiveness.

SM: That sounds impressive! Does your platform work with ExactTarget?
BP: We have partnered with ExactTarget and SocialPages to make it easy for customers to develop fully-branded contests and...

So what's all the hype with mobile email lately? First, let's start fresh in our approach. Try not to refer to any email message as "mobile" - your audience will likely view a message on desktops, tablets and mobile devices. Unless there is a specific use case for a mobile-only email, it's best to approach optimization considerations that focus on overall experience, respecting all environments.



*These statistics represent industry averages, and results for individual audiences may have more or less for any particular email client. iPhone can commonly range up to 30-40%, Android is often in the...

Ah yes, the wonderful world of reengagement. It’s easy to think that once a subscriber provides you with their email address, they’re yours for life! But in reality, they could un-engage and start ignoring your communications at any moment.

Subscribers stop engaging for a number of reasons—message volume, frequency, irrelevancy, etc. But many retailers are sitting back and watching this happen, without adjusting their programs to reengage these subscribers. In fact, many marketers continue sending the same messages at the same frequency to lists where more than 50% of the subscribers haven’t...

I'm at the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) annual forum in New York and couldn't be more excited to share that our new mobile software ExactTarget MobileConnect is here. Talking to mobile industry veterans, top brands and agencies about our newproduct is simply amazing.

ExactTarget MobileConnect is a mobile messaging solution that helps marketers to create, target, send and track SMS campaigns. What really sets MobileConnect apart from other mobile marketing solutions out there is that it seamlessly integrates with our cross-channel messaging platform, the Interactive Marketing Hub, to...

In June ExactTarget will be at 4 Cloudforce events!  We have been an AppExchange partner for over 6 years and have 1200+ clients who use the ExactTarget for Salesforce.com integration to manage and send personalized email communications to their prospects and customers and get close-looped reporting on the performance of their campaigns.

Join ExactTarget at:

Cloudforce Toronto Jun 6, 2012 | Allstream Centre | Toronto, Canada

• ​ Keynote with special guests from leading companies
•  12 specialized breakout sessions
• 50+ live demos of the latest technologies
•  Networking with 1,000+ peers and experts
• Con...