1 to 1 Marketing

3sixty Live User Groups Gives Digital Marketers a Local Forum to Collaborate

Wednesday, March 3, 2010 by Amanda Berkey

ExactTarget is excited to offer 3sixty Live user group program. In the past week, ExactTarget customers from California, Ohio, Illinois, Texas, Florida, Ontario and the United Kingdom have signed up to become members or leaders in their local cities. The user group program offers a local collaboration forum for 1 to 1 marketing strategies. Go to exacttarget.com/3sixtylive to learn more about the program and register to join the user groups. We're looking for members and leaders!

As a product marketing manager at ExactTarget, I collaborate with my team all time right in our office to brainstorm solutions to everyday marketing challenges. We realize that many digital marketers using ExactTarget are working independently for their company. But you're not alone! 3sixty Live is a great opportunity to join other users in your city to share best practices and collaborate with other savvy marketers about drip marketing campaigns, CRM email integration, and social media integration. Check out our video to hear more.

Start the month with ExactTarget 3sixty (and maybe a gift....)

Monday, March 1, 2010 by Liz Farrelly

The beginning of the week always feels like a new start – a blank slate to fill with projects and meetings. The first of the month also feels that way for me…like the opportunity for success, change, and new ideas is just waiting in the next 31 days.

Since today is March 1st, I took a few moments to reflect on the state of 3sixty. And I couldn’t believe what I saw! ExactTarget 3sixty is thisclose to have 20,000 members in the site. Pretty exciting and impressive for a little closed network that we launched 18 months ago!

I couldn’t let this milestone pass without a little excitement (as is the ExactTarget way!). So, to all of you (our fabulous blog readers) a challenge. If you aren’t in 3sixty yet, get in there. Encourage your fellow co-workers and team members to create their profiles. New to ExactTarget? Login into 3sixty right now!

Why the urgency you ask? Because I will personally be sending an orange 16GB iPod nano to the 20,000 person to join ExactTarget 3sixty! That’s right – a call to all of our current clients! Sign up now, create your profile, and start using the site. Of course, the chance of winning the iPod is phenomenal, but I think that the resources for 1 to 1 marketing, email best practices, and ExactTarget tutorials (and more!) will pay off long after the iPod is loaded with all your favorite tunes.

It’s the beginning of the month – a new, fresh start. Why not kick it off like a lion?

*This contest is only open to ExactTarget customers due to the nature of ExactTarget 3sixty permissions and access.

Haiti Relief Text Campaign from Red Cross Emphasizes Convenience and Immediacy of SMS

Friday, January 15, 2010 by Amanda Berkey

According to the Mashable blog, by 5:30pm EST Jan 14, only two days after the devastating earthquake in Haiti, the Red Cross has raised an impressive $5 million dollars from their Text campaign. If you were on Twitter, Facebook, or other social media sites this week, you may have seen the outcries to donate $10 by texting "Haiti" to the shortcode 90999. If you do the quick math, that's 500,000 mobile subscribers that have used text messaging to donate to the Haitian relief efforts led by the Red Cross. The blog post also shows an SMS message flow explaining how easy it is for a mobile subscriber to text in "Haiti" and then "Yes" to confirm their donation. In two short SMS messages, a single person is able to contribute to the larger cause from anywhere!

As the product marketing manager for the SMS portfolio at ExactTarget, I'm very impressed, but not surprised by the results of this SMS campaign. When I meet with customers who are strategizing about their 1 to 1 Marketing campaigns that include email, SMS, web, and social media, we discuss the reasons that SMS messaging to communicate with your subscribers are effective.

We are in an era when people are more likely to have a mobile phone rather than a traditional land line. And mobile phones are something that people do not leave home without. Whether you have a smart phone or standard mobile phone, SMS text plans is now considered basic communication. How many times have you ditched leaving a person you were calling a voicemail to send them a simple text message? Many people outside of the business world forgo the expensive data plans to receive email and web from their phone, but gladly pay for their SMS messaging plans.

Including text messaging in your 1 to 1 marketing strategy is a powerful way to reach your audience can have huge rewards:

SMS messaging is immediate and direct: by nature of the US standard of 160 characters, text messages are short and concise. They reach the person that needs the quick information. And responding to or reading a text message takes only seconds and it doesn't require you to shift your focus too much. You can even do it in a meeting! *Wink*
Text messaging campaigns are always available when a person is interested: savvy marketers know that it takes massive effort to get a prospect engaged in their brand. Having a text campaign that a mobile subscriber can respond to a call-to-action at the emotional high of the interest, can be the difference if they ever participate or not. Let's face it, when they get back to their computer, even a geniunely interested person is likely to forget that they wanted to sign up for your program.
SMS can augment email marketing efforts: the best example of this approach is from our customer, Pier 1 Imports, who follows up with email drip marketing from new subscribers they captured from their text sweepstakes at college bookstores. Leveraging both email and text messaging for marketing campaigns can empower you to send relevant information using both messaging channels

The recent example of a non-profit organization raising donations and enabling the general public to act is proof that SMS messaging when combined with social media and email can have incredible impact and rewards. For more thoughts about getting started with Text Messaging check out our recent webinar.

Connections Extreme Makeover: Pier 1 Redesign

Wednesday, January 6, 2010 by Andrea Smith

Our previous blogs, Connections Extreme Makeover: AAA Ohio Redesign and Connections Extreme Makeover: MarketingExperiments Redesign covered the Design Solutions teams’ redesigns for AAA Ohio and MarketingExperiments. To finish up, we’d like to share our thoughts on our final redesign.

Pier 1 Imports is a retailer that focuses heavily on unique furniture, home décor and accessories. Based on our conversations with Pier 1, the bulk of their customer base falls around females in the 50-60 age range. High quality products are marketed through the channels of print, in-store collateral, web, and email. Though the use of email and web, Pier 1 uses these channels to drive brand recognition and encourage online browsing before driving the consumer to the store to make a purchase.   

With this in mind, the ExactTarget team took a very sophisticated and streamlined approach to the Creature Comforts email campaign, using warm, harmonious colors and existing brand elements to deliver value and increase engagement with the Pier 1 brand. Let’s break apart our strategy and check out the email:   

Preheader
Experience and testing tells us that this area of the email is very important, and can serve as a main driver to engagement. We deliver two strategic ways to view the email as a web page, forward the email, and connect via social media on Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace. As an added benefit, some email clients pull this teaser text into their inbox preview before the email is ever opened.   

Header
The header features the brand mark in prime email real estate and will link to the Pier 1 homepage. To the right, we’ve pulled out the three most strategic links to drive subscriber engagement based on past email performance metrics and value provided on the website. Room gallery is an important place to drive web traffic and engage the subscribers in furniture placements in different room settings. The Pier 1 Studio offers amazing design tips and ideas that will engage subscribers, and Special Values have proven to be of high interest based on past clicks and obvious savings.   

Feature
This feature uses a combination of on-brand fonts, text rendering and imagery to offer a clean look directly placed in the preview pane. This simple room shot will encourage click through to the website, focusing on a clean, simple, and sophisticated approach in line with the quality of the products offered. The design elements of line, color and quirky framing will help the Pier 1 brand stand out in the crowd.   

Body
Four products are dramatically outlined and provide a sleek way to encourage pre-shopping on the website. These products were strategically chosen from the images provided as they are highlighted in the campaign and artfully pull through the rich fall colors. Allowing subscribers to see the actual prices and pieces of furniture pulled out can help set brand expectations and encourage click through.   

Recovery Module
These three items provide even more value to the subscriber audience, giving them convenient access to savings through Pier 1 Rewards, ability to buy gift cards online, and finding a store. Metrics show that most subscribers already know where their stores are, but those that don’t can easily click through. 

 Footer
Main website navigation is important to include, but click data shows us that it does not necessarily require prime real estate in the email. Copyright, privacy, unsubscribe, and customer relations functionality are important (and some are required!) and can fall in one clean line as they are self explanatory. Disclaimers and CAN-SPAM compliant mailing address follow.

  While the results of the Makeover showed that Pier 1’s control design outperformed the redesigns in actual sales conversion, our team strove to stay true to the brand and add a new dimension to the email program that strategically reorganizes Pier 1’s offerings, allowing the true beauty and quality of the products to shine. It is highly useable and engaging, with strategic goals of boosting click-through, web traffic, and ultimately driving consumers inside the Pier 1 stores for more.

Thanks for reading some of the stories behind Extreme Makeover: The Email Design Competition! Look for more 1 to 1 marketing advice and Email Design Tips in our upcoming 2010 blogs.

NCDM 2009 Looks Like A Winner

Friday, December 4, 2009 by Joel Book

I’m really excited about the upcoming 2009 NCDM conference which kicks off Monday, December 7th in Las Vegas.

Attendance is up 20% over last year and the lineup of sessions and speakers is outstanding!

This year, the conference programming committee placed special emphasis on inviting speakers who are true practitioners of database marketing, and will share case studies of how they are using data and technology to sell and serve customers more effectively and efficiently.

For complete session details, download the NCDM 2009 conference brochure.

This year’s NCDM conference will feature several ExactTarget clients and partners.

Sean Mattson of Hitachi Data Systems will team with me to present a fantastic B-to-B marketing case study that describes how Hitachi uses email as the backbone of a global one-to-one marketing strategy that has made Hitachi Data Systems a world leader in data storage technology.

Dan Heimbrock of HyperDrive Interactive will discuss how Dreamfields Pasta has built a powerful and influential brand fan community of more than 400,000 consumers by using email marketing, social media, and word-of-mouth marketing to drive brand recognition and dramatically accelerate sales.

Augie MacCurrach of Customer Portfolios and Michael Enright of online gaming company, WorldWinner, will describe how WorldWinner uses customer playing behavior data to execute automated email programs that deliver personalized offers that keep players highly engaged.

For attendees looking for a practical and useful short course on techniques and best practices for effective email marketing, Jeanne Jennings of JeanneJennngs.com and I will be conducting a special pre-conference seminar on Monday titled Accelerating Email Marketing Performance and Profitability. It’s chock full of great examples of what to do, and how to do it right.

 If you are still on the fence about attending, I urge you to take advantage of a special offer which will save you $100 over the onsite price when you register in Las Vegas. You can also take advantage of this offer by registering online at http://bit.ly/3bq2aP. To redeem this offer, use code: ONSM when you register online.

  I hope to see you in Las Vegas for NCDM 2009, which promises to be one of the top conferences on tactics and techniques for data-drives sales and marketing.

Why does Yahoo hate me?

Thursday, December 3, 2009 by Karen Balle

Do you ever feel like you're outside in the cold, looking in on someone else's wonderful celebration? Is that what you felt like this weekend, when you looked at your Yahoo test box and saw other people's emails being delivered yet yours were delayed? It's not fair! You send good email. You get low complaints. Your users are engaged. This cannot be!

When I worked in network abuse, the department responsible for stopping spam coming out from ISPs, I hated this time of year. You pretty well work from Thanksgiving straight through to New Year’s including weekends, along with the mail admins. You do this so that people get the email they asked for and your mail servers don't turn into a burning pile of expensive slag. We would rotate who worked with a laptop on one knee and the new nephew on the other each holiday. It's not much fun and it's not very rewarding.

ISPs’ mail servers are SWAMPED on Thanksgiving weekend, close to Christmas, and immediately following Christmas. Everyone is sending right now. First priority is personal, meaningful email. One-to-one family and friend emails. Second is small mailings, usually To: a small list of people with a small list of Cc:s and a lot of traffic back and forth. After that is lower-volume regular mailing lists. Then comes highly engaged mailing lists (think hobby lists). Then marketing lists, trying to prioritize in order of how engaged their subscribers are. Scattered in all of that is trying to block a lot of spam and fighting off random Denial of Service attacks.

Everyone sends more email during the holidays, including individuals. That puts a horrible strain on the ISPs’ mail servers. It’s not that Yahoo and Hotmail and AOL don't want your recipients to get your marketing emails. It’s that their users have made it clear that their first priority right now is finding out whether or not they’re going to get to see their new niece or whether they have to wait until Christmas. After that, they’ll find out what you have in mind for savings.

Highest priority is given to email being sent from other ISPs’ outbound mail servers. Sometimes during the holidays, complaints rarely come into play with priority. If there’s not enough MTA sockets (the number of slots that you have for inbound connections) or bandwidth for the other ISPs’ outbound servers (personal email), then ESP customers, business emails, etc, have their connections deferred. It’s much more important to Jane and Joe User to find out what time everyone is meeting at Grandma’s house and who is bringing the pie than it is to find out which items are on sale at which store.

Mail servers will continue to try to deliver email for up to three days, so anything that got deferred on Thursday will keep pounding on Yahoo until Saturday. Spammers spike their volume Wednesday around midnight because all the abuse admins are away for their family gatherings. Some offers go out Thursday, but the main bulk of them hit Friday. Mailers keep on trying to send or resend because their email hasn’t been delivered yet, which causes more problems. Then you have Cyber Monday and more mail on already overloaded servers. It will be Thursday before some customers see their mail bounce and much of it will be mail that would normally be delivered.

Don't take it personally. Mail servers are at capacity right now. Annalivia Ford who wrote that fantastic poem from last week, Laura Atkins from Word to the Wise, and Mickey Chandler who is the go-to for all things related to spam law all talk more about this on their own blogs.

It's truly not that ISPs don't want to accept your email. They have limited resources and they're doing everything they can to get as much wanted email to their users as the can. Their mail servers are like the roads on the holidays. Plan ahead and expect delays.

The Next Season: Catapults 2010

Friday, November 20, 2009 by Teresa Becker

The interviews are done, "cat chats" successful, and tours have been given. The Catapult class of 2010 can breathe easy now that Finalist Night is behind them. Yesterday, over 20 top graduates from all over Indiana came together for a night away from school. After 6 hours at ExactTarget's headquarters, they all left knowing a little more about one of the fastest growing 1 to 1 marketing communications companies in the nation.

One of the highlights for the current Catapults was at the end of the night where we kicked back, relaxed, and shared stories about our first year here. Yes, there were some embarrassing moments and lessons learned... just ask Isaac...

It's amazing to look back over a year and to realize how much we've learned about the industry - The inner workings of SMS, Voice, Landing Pages, Email... it was all a foreign concept a year ago.

Out of all of the very talented and deserving potential Catapults that we met yesterday, we will be extending offers to have the chance to work at the leading B2B Email Marketing company.

We are excited to bring on board the next class of Catapults who will represent ExactTarget!

The Nightmare Before Christmas

Friday, October 23, 2009 by Karen Balle

When my nephew was much younger, we watched The Nightmare Before Christmas together on VHS until the tape broke. He even thought his name was Jack the Pumpkin King! The soundtrack will be stuck in my head for the rest of my life.

Not only is this one of the best movies of all time, but it's a wonderful commentary on the state of email marketing during the holiday season. I don't just mean that trying to get email delivered is a nightmare starting around Halloween or that marketers find themselves in somewhat different situations than they're used to during the rest of the year. The flow of the movie and the soundtrack fit with how email marketing happens during the holiday season. It happens every year.

There's a dramatic uptick in all email marketing, be it legitimate email marketing or spam, that starts when the weather gets cold. Some years, it triples or quadruples normal email volume. And that means slower mail servers, more filters, more complaints, and slower response times. It also means overworked, cranky mail and abuse admins. I know. I've been one of those cranky abuse admins.

The rules surrounding email deliverability, which are confusing enough, get more complicated during this time of year. It feels like every company you have ever driven past and every partner of theirs is vying for your attention. There are a lot of little things that you can do, from holiday ramp-up strategies to promoting special holiday-only marketing campaigns that draw customers in.

I'll leave you for now with this very important thought.

Engagement is more important than ever. If you don't get the attention of your recipients, you'll find your email in the spam folder or blocked during your most crucial sales period.

As I've been writing this, the song "Making Christmas" has been running through my head. It makes me want to ask which mindset do you have for your email campaigns, going into this holiday season?

"Snakes and mice get wrapped up so nice with spider legs and pretty bows.
It's ours this time."
(Your focus is on your ideas of what your recipients should want. You reach years back into your subscriber database. You send out email to people who didn't give you permission.)

Or
"This thing will never make a present. It's been dead now for much too long.
Try something fresher, something pleasant."
(Your focus is on what your customers are really interested in. You're interested in actively engaged subscribers rather than the number of subscribers on your list. You use dynamic content to create a one-to-one experience for your customers.)

Delivering Relevant News

Tuesday, October 20, 2009 by Lisa White

The majority of people in the US prefer television as their source of news, followed by daily newspaper, radio and online sources. Even though it is currently being beat by other news sources, a study found that US adults currently get close to 15% of the their news from online sources, which is an increase from 12.7% the previous year.

It would be interesting to see if more targeted email marketing would help give the internet the edge over tv and radio as a news provider. Online news providers can target their audience geographically to give subscribers local news that is relevant to them. Moreover, they can target the subscribers by preferences to give them easier access to stories that align with their interests. The power of one to one marketing would allow for subscribers to receive news that is personalized particularly for them.

Create, Execute, and Optimize Your One-to-One Marketing.

Wednesday, October 14, 2009 by Kevin Nuest

This is a live blog from the Strategy session at Connections 09

Panelists:
Carrie Jensen of ExactTarget
Dela Quist of Alchemy Worx
Chris Murray of ExactTarget

8:42 - Chris Murray of ExactTarget says “Make Time for Strategy.

8:43 – How to get started:
1.    Where are you now?
2.    Where do you want to go?
3.    How will you get there?

8:44 – Assess, analys, and audit where you are now.

8:45 – Make sure you are focusing on Deliverability and getting into the inbox. If you don’t know where you stand with the ISPs then you are in trouble.

8:46 – Survey your customers and ask them if they think you are sending them emails too often.

8:47 - How sophisticated are you? Are you a batch and blast or do you have a true one-to-one marketing campaign. How relevant are you?

8:49 – Define your goals. Set SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Realistic, and Timely)

8:50 – Solidify the specific segments and targets you are going after. Make sure you communicated with these audiences in their preferred channel.

8:51 – Ask yourself, how do I keep the customers engaged once I have them?

8:53 – On a whiteboard, layout your target segments across the top of the board and develop campaigns down the side that will go to each segment.

8:55 – Don’t forget to look at the “end-to-end.” Make sure the subscribers has a cohesive experience from the time you obtain them as a subscriber all the way through their life cycle.

8:56 – Dela says that he faces the same problem you do, “No matter how hard you try and what you do, numbers always seem to be going down.”

9:00 – You are looking at the wrong metrics. Opens and clicks are the final score but has nothing to do with the customers.

9:01 – Dela looks at open reach. At the end of a campaign, if a subscriber opens at least one email then they are counted in the open reach.

9:02 – Also track the frequency that subscribers are interacting with your campaigns.

9:03 – Open reach and open rate tactics and strategy are very different.

9:04 – Let you subscribers know what is coming next in your campaign. If you are going to send them a spring email, let them know so they can begin to anticipate it.

9:06 – In 12 months there are over 73,000 ways a subscriber can interact with your campaign. For each email, a subscriber can open an email, not open, open once, click…

9:09 – Don’t compare yourself to the Amazons of the world. Don’t beat yourself up trying to get the same level of customer interaction from your emails as Amazon has had success doing.

1-to-1 Marketing and Beyond: Success Stories

Wednesday, October 14, 2009 by Amanda Cross

When you hear The World Society for the Protection of Animals you probably don't think of a standard B2C with a targeted marketing message. Even so, this group has achieved a 50% increase in online donations with the power of 1-to-1 marketing tools, specifically dynamic content through ExactTarget.

Meanwhile, Motorcycle Superstore realized double-digit increases in open rates as a result of integrating online browsing and purchase data into their email marketing decisions. In this case, the ExactTarget tool driving the relevant message to the customer was the integration with Webtrends.

In another case, the online photo book publisher, Inkubook, announces that email marketing through ExactTarget drove more than 60% of its first year revenue. While PetPlace.com went from zero to $1 million in online sales in less than 12 months with the help of ExactTarget email campaigns.

It doesn't matter whether you're selling sidecars or gathering signatures on a petition, people are more likely to hear your message when you're saying something that's important to them. Using the tools that help you send a more customized messages not only create more fertile ground for conversions, but also create more fertile ground for building a lasting relationship.

The Success of Behavioral Targeting: Earning Consumer Trust

Friday, October 9, 2009 by Caitilin Landrigan

A recent study performed by the Annenberg School for Communication, University of California Berkeley School of Law, and the Annenberg Public Policy Center reports that Americans believe marketers should not advertise to them based on preferences and behavioral data…But why? In a marketplace of abundant information and almost innumerable and varied products, why don’t consumers desire some assistance to narrow down their selection? Why don’t people appreciate that marketers want to provide them with relevant advertising? If I am going to see advertisements on a website…and there is no question that I will…I would much rather see advertisements that pertain to my interests. Wouldn’t you?

The Annenberg/Berkeley study reports that 66% of Americans do not want to see website ads that are tailored to their interests. This sounds discouraging, but I believe the information provided by this study offers valuable insight for marketers seeking to capitalize on relevant, 1 to 1 marketing efforts. This study’s stats highlight consumers’ desire for control and trust—observations that can inform behavioral web and email marketing strategy.

Advertising preference is not the only metric this study provides, as eMarketer’s article “Behavioral Targeting Misses Mark” points-out. There are several other, seemingly contradictory metrics this study reports that can help us solve this puzzle. For example, close to 50% of Americans would like websites to give them discounts specific to their interests. Hmmm…So you don’t want to see the ads, but you do want the coupons presented in those ads? Puzzling…let’s dig deeper.

eMarketer highlights another Annenberg/Berkeley metric: 67% of all Americans feel that they have “lost control over how their personal information is collected and used by companies,” and at the same time 54% of Americans believe that “existing laws and organizational practices provide a reasonable level of protection for consumer privacy.”

This issue is one of trust, not necessarily the failure of behavioral marketing. Consumers like discounts, but people feel as if they have lost control over their personal information, and no one likes to feel like they have lost control. As a Catapult at ExactTarget, I spent two days in Chicago with fellow Catapults, interviewing people on their marketing preferences. Overwhelmingly, people expressed that they felt their personal information was abused by spammers and companies they had no relationship with. Yes, there are “reasonable” laws regarding consumer privacy, but consumers ask, “Why do I get so much spam?!” “How did they get my email address? My phone number?”

When asked how they felt about tracking on “websites in general,” people stated that they felt behavioral tracking was creepy and “Big Brother-like.” On the flipside, when given a concrete example, like Amazon.com’s personalized product recommendations that appear when browsing the website, interviewees’ tone changed: “Yes, I find that helpful, but they don’t send me a million emails after I buy something and pester me all the time. And, I have a relationship with them.”

Lesson learned: people want to feel safe, respected, and protected. Amazon.com is not scary, because they have a trustworthy reputation. As marketers, we cannot neglect that relationships are the foundation for business. Leverage your landing pages, emails, voicemails, and SMS organically to build trust with clients, at point of sale, for example. In your emails, provide a reminder of how clients signed-up. Provide a link in your emails to a page on your website that explains how you use subscriber information. Perhaps you should only advertise on trusted websites. Finally, don’t be abusive: be cognizant of email frequency and content.

I encourage you to check out our whitepapers on building quality lists direct marketing channel preferences. Use our List Growth Advisor for custom recommendations on how to responsibly grow your subscriber lists so that you can leverage subscriber data respectfully and effectively. Behavioral tracking does not have to "miss the mark."

User engagement. What does it mean?

Friday, October 9, 2009 by Karen Balle

Al Iverson and I spend a lot of time talking about user engagement. It's been around for a very long time, but it's now a standard for inbox delivery. How do you define engagement? Quality over quantity. Targeted email marketing. True one to one communication. But what does it really mean to you? How does it make for a more effective email marketing campaign? If permission is king, engagement is emperor.

How do you create an effective marketing campaign that keeps your customers coming back in the age of DVRs, satellite radio, and short attention spans? How do you get your customers to pay attention? This is vital now for inbox delivery. Yahoo has started measuring whether or not your recipients are spending time reading your email, whether they're looking for you in the spam folder, how vital you are to their daily lives.

I found a gentleman today who gets what it means to really engage with your customers. You can visit Bob Gilbreath over at Marketing with Meaning and download a chapter of his book, The Next Evolution of Marketing: Connect with Your Customers by Marketing with Meaning.

He gets it. This concept of engagement, and he calls it meaning. Marketing now, whether it is effective offline or effective email marketing, can no longer be interruptive to your customers' lives. Your communications with them need to be not only permission-based but need to add some value to their daily lives.

When you create email campaigns, what do you do to add value? How do your targeted email marketing campaigns add to your recipients daily lives? What do you put in your marketing campaign or to your email newsletter that drives your recipients to want to spend time with your company?

Email Design Tip of the Week: Designer’s Top Ten Countdown to Connections

Wednesday, October 7, 2009 by Kristina Schott

Connections is less than a week away, and the Design Solutions team is anxiously awaiting the fanfare, fun, and finale. Here's how to make the most of ten designerly highlights of Connections from the Design Solutions team.

10. Grab some Design Solutions Schwag at the Design Solutions booth in the Expo Hall. No boring pens or notepads here; we're outfitted with fun, unique, pilfer-worthy schwag and design resources.

9. Mingle in the Expo Hall: Dig up plenty of those business cards, pop a tic tac, and practice being a social butterfly in the Expo Hall. You have something in common with everyone here, so introduce yourself to a lonely stranger and start dropping some one-to-one marketing buzzwords.
8. Check out the evening Reception at The IMA: the galleries, sprawling gardens and grounds, set the stage for artful fun. Bring your camera for a photo op at the iconic LOVE sculpture.

7. See Kelly Mooney, keynote speaker; your brand will benefit from the insights of her book, "The Open Brand: When Push Comes to Pull in a Web-Made World."

6. Rock out with They Might be Giants at the historic Murat Centre. Don't forget to pack your dancing shoes for this one; do a little studying beforehand by listening to the 30-second previews on iTunes. You'll end up buying it.

5. Attend the Designed by Success panel; we can't wait to see all the examples that Email Data Source has pulled together. Get a seat in the front row to absorb as much design karma from Lisa Harmon as possible.

4. Video in email is a favorite topic of conversation lately; whether you love it, hate it, or just want to know the emerging best practices for video in email, come sit in on the Video in Email Panel, featuring a talented member of the Design Solutions team.

3. Get some expert advice from a Design Consultant at the Design Solutions Booth in the Expo Hall. The team is offering free Email Critiques. We can't wait to see what you're creating!

2. Malcolm Gladwell

1. Extreme Makeover, the Email Design Competition; see three incredible teams' redesigns for three clients, vote for your favorite, and watch the dramatic reveal!

Designer's Top Ten Countdown to Connections

Email + Surveys

Wednesday, October 7, 2009 by Scott Roth

At ExactTarget, we often talk about honoring subscriber preferences in regards to permission, frequency, content and channel. In my last post on Email + Web Analytics I wrote about the value that web analytics brings to the table by allowing you to sense behavior and then respond with appropriate offers.

Here's my buzz-word free advice for today. Instead of just observing behavior and reacting, why not also ask your subscribers what they are looking for? It may seem like a no-brainer, but not that many people do it, or do it well. This is where preference centers, lead capture forms, and surveys come into play. By leveraging surveys both on your website and within emails, you can gradually accumulate more and more information about your subscribers that will help you target them with more timely and relevant one-to-one communications.

One of our certified ExactTarget Extensions Network survey partners is SurveyGizmo. SurveyGizmo provides a seamless integration to include intelligent surveys in your emails, leverage existing subscriber data in surveys, and automatically update ExactTarget subscriber records with survey responses.

You can learn more about SurveyGizmo by visiting their listing on the ExactTarget Extensions Network.

Or, if you are going to be in Indianapolis for Connections on Tuesday, October 13th you can stop by their user meet-up happy hour from 5:00-7:00. Click here for more information.

Get Personal: One-to-One Marketing with Personalized Product Recommendations

Friday, October 2, 2009 by Joel Book

An article in the October issue of Internet Retailer, observes that “although the Internet makes it possible to personalize offers to shoppers, most e-retailers and other online businesses are failing to optimize web site content to improve the chances that shoppers will become buyers.”

Mike Chertudi, vice president of demand and online marketing for Omniture notes, “The majority of businesses aren’t optimizing their on-site conversion,” Omniture has teamed with Marketing Experiments to conduct the 2009 Online Conversion Benchmark Survey. The purpose of the survey, which began in June, is to help online marketers better understand best practices in onsite conversion, and know how they compare to their peers. Data is being compiled from more than 1,000 companies, of which more than half are retailers. Among the findings as of late August: About 80% of retailers don’t present personalized content based on shoppers’ interests suggested by analytics and clickstream data.

One-to-One Merchandising Works for Motorcycle Superstore

Proving that personalized product recommendations work, Motorcycle Superstore saw a 21.7% revenue increase in the first week after launching an email campaign on September 21st that incorporated personalized product recommendations.

Motorcycle Superstore uses behavioral data -- gathered with WebTrends technology combined with its e-mail marketing application from ExactTarget -- to send email messages with personalized product recommendations. These items appear as “Your Picks” in the lower part of the email and are based on the customer’s website visiting habits over the previous two weeks.

Commenting on the power of data-driven offer personalization, Erick Barney, vice president of marketing at Motorcycle Superstore, says “I believe this feature is so effective because rather than guessing at a handful of products to appeal to our entire customer base, we can merchandise products directly related to each customer’s historical interaction with our store.” Motorcycle Superstore is No. 223 in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide.

Learn more about combining precision one-to-one communications and comprehensive web analytics by integrating ExactTarget and Webtrends.

The Power of the ExactTarget Platform

Thursday, October 1, 2009 by Amanda Cross

Integrations with partner products is one of the things that makes ExactTarget so dynamic and powerful. Centralizing your electronic marketing software to work with your CRM, CMS, analytics, or other packages lets you accomplish more with less time, energy, and money.

Here's just a few of the new integrations available:

SeeWhy
SeeWhy, creator of the Abandonment Tracker Pro web analytics service, is now offering an integration with ExactTarget. This integration intends to optimize real-time email follow-up campaigns that can convert up to 50% of website abandoners to customers.

XMPie
XMPie, who offers "One-to-One-in-One" is now incorporating ExactTarget email service into its PersonalEffect Cross-Media and e-Media products.

Printable Technologies
Printable Technologies Inc., provider of web-to-print and marketing personalization solutions, has integrated ExactTarget email capabilities into their product MarcomCentral.

You can see many more available integrations on the Integrated Partners page on our website. Categories of integration include, but are not limited to:

Content Management System Partners
CRM Partners
Deliverability Partners
Survey Partners
Web Analytics Partners

Huge Opportunity for Travel Industry to Leverage Social Media

Monday, September 28, 2009 by Blaine Cooper-Surma

With the third quarter coming to a close, and the holiday season approaching, it's about that time to begin making holiday vacation arrangements. Personally, every year I travel to Florida to spend the holidays with my family. So how am I getting down to the beautiful, sunny weather this year? When it comes to planning my trips, I always purchase my flights online - quickly and painlessly.

There certainly is a buzz right now around social media in the marketing world. eMarketer.com recently published the results of one of their surveys that analyzed the percentage of internet users that have been influenced by social media in making their travel/vacation decisions. eMarketer found that 23 percent of respondents, who happen to be U.S. internet users, have been somewhat or significantly influenced by social media when it comes to making travel/vacation decisions.

Although just less than a quarter of these people noted the effectiveness of social media in influencing their decisions, this still is an enormous audience that travel companies are reaching. As I've already pointed out, I fall into the 23 percent of people that have made or changed travel plans due to some sort of social media. A month or so ago I noticed an ad on Twitter that boasted cheap flights to Orlando, and within minutes had scheduled a trip across the country. I see this as a huge opportunity for the travel industry to offer travel deals that are specific to Facebook and Twitter, as both of these social networking platforms have such an enormous user base.

Large social media platforms also have the ability to use 1 to 1 marketing techniques by pulling travel locations from user info in order to provide users with more relevant content - for example, if I lived in Anchorage, Alaska, it is likely that I would be interested in going on vacation somewhere a little bit more like Key West. Once the user has purchased the trip, travel sites like Expedia.com send a confirmation email that contains the travel itinerary and purchase information. In addition, travel companies have the ability to take this one step further by instituting an SMS campaign that sends customers an SMS message letting them know if their flight is on time - I know this is something that many frequent travelers appreciate and certainly take advantage of.

As soon as you've identified your 23 percent and have built your subscriber list, you are now able to send automated email messages that every-so-often offer your subscribers different travel deals and opportunities. As I pointed out in my last post, email marketing is still the best internet marketing channel and is sure to be around for a good while longer.

To see another example of how social media has benefitted personal travel arrangements, check out Liz's post.

Email Marketing: Can you afford to let price be your bottom line?

Monday, September 28, 2009 by Caitilin Landrigan

In these rough economic times, it’s crucial for companies to deliver a high ROI on marketing, points out eMarketer's "Online Helps Marketer's do More with Less." eMarketer notes that senior management is paying closer attention to “each dollar spent” on marketing and heightening accountability standards. Moreover, 43% of surveyed senior management stated that they view marketing as an investment.

We all know that email can deliver a high ROI compared with traditional media marketing. However, some ESPs are just plain cheap. When selecting your ESP, you should expect more than a bundle of emails at the lowest CPM to blast. Partnering with an ESP is an investment, and conversations with your provider should be about the value and customer experience you expect, in addition to the technology. You want the most bang for every buck you spend, not simply the most emails. You want your ESP to provide you with the best email marketing resources, to be your partner in business. Why? Because there is a lot more to digital marketing than getting your message out the door. Your message needs to be relevant. Emails need to make it to the inbox, to engage subscribers, to be shared virally, to drive ROI.

As an ExactTarget customer, you have more at your fingertips than the emails you send from your account. ExactTarget considers itself your partner and ally. We care about your business and want your 1 to 1 marketing strategy to succeed. We will work with you to make you look like a hero to your clients. Knowledgeable and responsive Customer Support Services are available 24-7 for questions and concerns. ExactTarget Services professionals are available to guide you through complex integrations and consult with you on deliverability and best practices. On 3sixty, our online community, you will find resources and tutorials that provide you with a means to communicate your ideas to other marketers and to our developers so that they can create the tools you need to succeed.

Even more importantly, ExactTarget values your partnership so much so that we assign you a personal point of contact. How many ESPs provide a personal contact ...regardless of the size of your account…for free?! Your voice matters, and your relationship manager is your representative to the company. The RM team is just as excited about your marketing plans as you, and they are eager to help you reach your business goals. Call them to introduce yourself! Speak strategy with them as you are considering what ExactTarget technology you will use. Share your successes with them; they would love to show-off your marketing savvy in a press release or place you in the spotlight at our annual Connections conference. I encourage you to take full advantage of ExactTarget’s value. Cash-in on your investment and experience the power of an email marketing business partnership that delivers.

Marketers Moving More Budget to Email Marketing

Friday, September 25, 2009 by Joel Book

Two recent studies provide compelling evidence that marketers are turning to digital marketing – and specifically email marketing – to improve marketing effectiveness.

According to the “2009 ANA/MMA Marketing Accountability Survey” from the Association of National Advertisers and Marketing Management Analytics, “The No. 1 strategy for marketers who wanted to improve effectiveness without spending more, according to the June 2009 poll, was shifting from traditional to digital media. More than one-half of respondents also reported shifting spending away from brand-building initiatives, and 38% were putting more spending into lower-cost media.”

Tactics Used by US Marketers to Improve Marketing Effectiveness

Change in Marketing Spending for Select Media in 2009

And as more marketers shift to digital media, the tactic that is seeing the largest increase in spending is email.

According to the “2009 Media Survey Results & Analysis” study conducted by Round2, “40% of US Marketers reported that they had increased spending on email marketing in 2009.

What This Means for Marketers

Increased dependency on email marketing means three things:

1. Email is no longer optional. It has firmly established itself as the #1 tactic for 1to1 marketing. And email has become the “go to” tactic for word-of-mouth marketing as brands empower email subscribers to “share” email messages and offers with their friends on Facebook, their followers on Twitter, and their connections on LinkedIn.

2. Email marketing will become more sophisticated as marketers move aggressively to integrate email with other tactics and technologies – like CRM, SMS, POS, Websites, and Social Networks -- that are used to keep customers connected to the brand. The cornerstones of effective email marketing will be Integration, Automation and Optimization.

3. ESP (Email Service Provider) selection will become a more strategic decision. Marketers must evaluate and select an ESP by their ability to provide “industrial strength” application functionality plus consulting services including 1to1 marketing strategy, email and landing page design, email deliverability, and application integration.

The ExactTarget Blog

Follow Us On...

Recent Entries

Authors

Categories