1 to 1 Email Marketing Solutions Company

There’s nothing quite like a classic combo. Dinner and a movie. Burgers and fries. Opt-ins and SMS? Yes, please.

Many consumers have long associated the act of opting-in as something to be done by email, for email. But today’s cross-channel world doesn’t just include email. Companies and organizations could find big success in acquiring new customers by adding a mobile component with SMS (short message service). There are two great approaches to this strategy:

1. Email opt-in via SMS
This one is a quick addition to reinforce the presence of your email campaigns, as well as how easy you’ve made it...

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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...

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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....

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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...

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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 –...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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 app work with ExactTarget?
BP: We have partnered with ExactTarget and SocialPages to make it easy for customers to develop fully-branded contests and promotions that tie together cross-channel marketing efforts.

SM: Can you share an example campaign?
BP: I can share two!...

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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...

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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...

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Thanks for the interest and excitement around the launch of SocialEngage.  Hundreds of CoTweet users have already signed up for the free trial and are up and running.  As we get closer to the Feb. 15 sunset date of the free edition of CoTweet, I wanted to answer some of the four most commonly asked questions that have come up about the differences between CoTweet and SocialEngage.  Here’s a quick recap:
 
What happened to CoTweet?
SocialEngage is the Enterprise Edition of CoTweet with a bunch of new features. We are sunsetting the free edition of CoTweet.
 
How is SocialEngage different from the...

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It just dawned on me that it has been 15 years since I sent my first email campaign. It was 1996, the Web was no longer new, but email marketing was just beginning to emerge as a discipline. To 1996 email recipients, email still had that new car smell--promotional emails were even marveled at. In 2011 this is difficult to imagine. Though email is no longer new, getting subscribers to marvel, ooh and ah at your emails takes a bit more effort, testing, know-how and discipline. The first step is getting to the inbox, and no one knows better how to do that than our partners Return Path.

Return Path...Read More »

Each week, marketers from around the world join the ExactTarget Nexus partner ecosystem on Twitter for a conversation about trends and best practices in the interactive marketing industry.  We call the virtual coffee chat the Nexus Café.

Last week we had the opportunity to speak with Tim Kopp, ExactTarget’s Chief Marketing Officer, on corporate marketing strategy.  In an ever-changing digital marketing environment, Tim shared his thoughts on developing an effective marketing strategy and making adaptations to position for changes in the marketplace.  A summary of the conversation is below:

@ET... Read More »

I remember nearly 20 years ago when I first heard the phrase, "Imagine your brand were at a cocktail party. What would it wear and who would it talk to?" It sounded so smart and sophisticated. It made me want to be a brand guy. (Today it stimulates my gag reflex, but that's another story).

We've already got sticks. Introducing a new "carat." And a new tool.

Brands do have personalities. We as humans love to project personalities on inanimate objects. It helps us relate, on terms we can understand. Projecting a personality onto something, however, doesn't make it human. At least for now, social...

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Not that long ago while working for a web analytics company, I went on a joint sales call with our founder Peter McCormick who was a partner of mine at the time. While neither of us were technically sales people, here we were in the boardroom of a Fortune 100 client pitching the benefits of a lead nurture campaign. For their part the client had very realistic expectations, after all they had believed most of what they had been told by their vendors.

The client wanted three basic things:

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Have you ever read Why We Buy; The Science of Shopping by Paco Underhill? Underhill’s company, Envirosell, specializes in retail marketing solutions. In the book, there's a chapter titled “Shoppers Move Like People” that contains humorous narratives about basic mistakes in retail environments’ “usability” that seem to ignore human limitations.

For example, we humans only have two hands, so there’s only so much we can carry while shopping. So retailers would greatly benefit from scattering shopping baskets throughout the store – not just two feet from the entrance – to overcome this limitation....Read More »

CRM, Web Analytics, and Email Marketing are each powerful tools to better understand your audience. Put them all together and tada! you’ve got a powerful one-to-one marketing engine. When sales and marketing technologies are integrated, marketers can identify the effectiveness of their website copy, whitepapers, webinars, and other online efforts through conversion rates. Enhanced prospect segmentation and targeting results in increased personalization, targeted relevancy, and deeper visibility into conversion rates and campaign return.

So where do you reside on the marketing integration... Read More »

ExactTarget's Design Solutions team is getting geared up for the best Connections yet! We’ve been planning sessions, compiling handouts, helping with some rockin’ demos and designing buttons. We're here to make sure you learn all that you can about how to improve your interactive campaigns through strategic design.


Our Top Ten Conference Design-Musts:

1. Design Booth Buttons

   Back by popular demand, make sure to drop by to grab a few of these.
2. Design Booth
   
Your fearless designers and their leader - Chris, Kristina, Andrea, Anna, Tana and Justine – are waiting to chat about all things design in the...

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