Automated Email

Require a login to opt-out?

Wednesday, November 18, 2009 by Al Iverson

If you're wondering if it's OK to require that recipients must log into your website before they can unsubscribe from your emails, the answer to that is no-- it's prohibited under US Federal law.

The FTC explicitly clarified this in the May 2008 CAN-SPAM Rule Update. It's on page 104, near the bottom.

Here's what it says:

Section 316.5 Prohibition on charging a fee or imposing other requirements on recipients who wish to opt out. Neither a sender nor any person acting on behalf of a sender may require that any recipient pay any fee, provide any information other than the recipient's electronic mail address and opt-out preferences, or take any other steps except sending a reply electronic mail message or visiting a single Internet Web page, in order to: (a) Use a return electronic mail address or other Internet-based mechanism, required by 15 U.S.C. 7704(a)(3), to submit a request not to receive future commercial electronic mail messages from a sender; or (b) Have such a request honored as required by 15 U.S.C. 7704(a)(3)(B) and (a)(4).

What does that mean? Read carefully: Senders are not allowed to require recipients to "provide any information other than the recipient's electronic mail address and opt-out preferences." That means you can't require them to login to your website before continuing on to a preference center or other page. The only thing a recipient has to give you is their email address, and the opt-out preference. (i.e. do you want to opt-out from all messages, or would you like to opt-out only from certain specific lists.) The law prohibits any requirement that the recipient "take any other steps except sending a reply electronic mail message or visiting a single Internet Web page" when unsubscribing -- meaning it's not OK for it to take five clicks for somebody to unsubscribe. Interact with one page means the unsubscribe link takes them to a web page, where they are either unsubscribed automatically, or push some button on that web page to complete the unsubscribe process. (That would be interacting with that single web page.)

For more information on CAN-SPAM, visit our CAN-SPAM Information Center at http://canspam.etdeliverability.com/

Drip Model Marketing– Is that a leaky faucet or your email marketing software?

Tuesday, November 10, 2009 by Kristeen Hudson

Phrases like “drip campaign”, “automated email drip”, “drip email program”, and “drip email” are thrown around ExactTarget a lot. This is because ExactTarget is in the business of sending email, especially automated email drips. However, everyone may not understand what a drip campaign is. Let me tell you a little bit about the basics of drip marketing.

Drip marketing comes from the phrase drip irrigation, which is where crops are watered in small amounts over a long period of time. This same concept is applied to marketing and is called drip model marketing. Customers or potential customers are given small amounts of information over a long period of time.

The idea behind a drip campaign is that it takes between 3 and 30 impressions of a brand to make it sink in. When creating a drip campaign its important to have a consistent brand with varying messages to help develop the reputation of your company.

Drip emails are the most common type of drip communication, however there are other ways to communicate in a drip campaign. Some other options are - voice messages, SMS messaging, and direct mail.

Drip model marketing is a good way to help avoid always trying to sell a product and a good excuse to provide content that will engage subscribers. Think of this as a great way to nurture your potential clients. Drip marketing can be used for business to consumer or business to business email marketing solutions.

The good news is ExactTarget is one of the best email marketing software providers for creating automated email integration. To learn more about ExactTarget checkout their website.

Real Email Threat #3: Lax Permission

Tuesday, November 3, 2009 by Morgan Stewart

The issue of permission presents one of the greatest threats to the future of email marketing. According to data shared by Julie Katz at Connections ’09, consumers want greater control over email. They want control over SPAM, they want to be able to unsubscribe from email more easily, and they want greater control over the frequency of commercial email coming to their inboxes.

In both 2008 and 2009 we asked consumers to indicate how acceptable it was for them to be contacted via email for “Promotional messages (i.e., sale, special offers) from companies whom you regularly conduct business, but have not specifically asked for ongoing information.” As we outlined in the 2009 Channel Preference Study, consumers’ attitude toward non-permission communications from known companies is souring quickly. In 2009, 50% of consumers considered these messages with unacceptable, nearly doubled from 26% in 2008. The belief that marketers can send email to their customers based on a ‘prior existing relationship’—the premise for email appends—is dead. Customers don’t want the practice to continue.

Nevertheless, the industry continues to allow embarrassing practices like email appending and list rental. Not surprisingly, the only people that fully endorse these practices are those that profit directly from them. The rest of us squirm and manage to squeak out the words, “It can work, if you do it right.” However, few believe that it ever will be done right on a consistent basis. After all, we've been writing about this for quite a while.

There are three interrelated reasons for this. First, as I mentioned in my first post in this series, email is too easy and too cheap. It’s simply easier to do email appends and list rental incorrectly, using an opt-out model that has no regard for permission. The numbers are more impressive--and let's face it, big lists still sound better than little ones. Second, pricing models are still based on match rates and list sizes. These models favor sending to the masses, which in turn favor the opt-out model. Third, since there are still enough suckers out there who will pay to do it incorrectly, email append and list rental vendors have no incentive to change their revenue model. Given that opt-in revenue models are likely to be less lucrative, it won't change until the issue is forced.

But it may already be too late for email append and list rental companies.

While the industry has failed to police itself, two entities with the ability to make real changes have lined up with consumers. First, ISPs continue to serve the best interests of their customers by increasingly relying on reputation systems that include engagement measures such as opens and clicks to determine if messages should be routed to the spam folder (see What’s in store at the ISPs 2009-2010 from Pivotal Veracity). Second, Canadian Parliament continues to push forward Canadian Electronic Commerce Protection Bill C-27 which mandates an opt-in standard.

Comparatively, US CAN-SPAM laws are notoriously weak, making the joke that US CAN-SPAM laws say, “yes, you can spam consumers so long as they can opt-out.” Unfortunately, Unfortunately, many companies use this law to condone their continued distribution of non-permission email. In short, the US Law falls short of meeting customer expectations—again more than half of consumers believe non-permission email is unacceptable, even when it's from a known company. This doesn’t support an opt-out standard. I interpret this as, “there is no excuse for sending email without the express consent of consumers. Period.”

Interestingly, in the same comparison of opt-in promotions from 2008 to 2009, there was no change. Consumers believe permission-based email is highly acceptable. In fact, given the choice, 75% of US consumers (see the 2009 Channel Preferences Study) and 74% of UK consumers (see Strategy Meets Customer Expectations) prefer to receive permission based promotional messages through email.

It’s simply that we need to draw a hard and fast line. Opt-in permission should be the only standard by which we live. Not supporting efforts to eliminate questionable practices in our industry reflects poorly on the industry as a whole. After all, as Matt Blumberg, CEO of ReturnPath, recently wrote, “What's good for consumers is great for direct marketers. Marketing is not what it used to be, the lines between good and bad actors have been blurred, and the consumer is now in charge.” Amen!

It's time we completely honor consumers' preference for an opt-in standard. We can no longer afford to lend any support, even passively through silence, those who don't.

ExactTarget "Embeddable" Defined

Friday, October 30, 2009 by Dennis Hall

Embeddable

ěm-běd'ə-bəl

–verb (used with object)

    1. Ability to incorporate or contain as an essential part or characteristic

    2. Capacity to leverage existing code and infrastructure to save costs and accelerate speed to market

    3. Marketing automation technology from ExactTarget

Commercial Software developers and IT professionals need power, control and flexibility when it comes to managing the lifeblood of the business – INFORMATION! ExactTarget delivers on all fronts with its agile and embeddable marketing automation technology and services.

Contact your marketing automation partners at ExactTarget today to see how our technology can augment your technology stack and go to market strategy.

Email System Process Term of the Day: Asynchronous, Scheduled, and Real-Time

Tuesday, October 27, 2009 by Amanda Cross

Your email marketing messages don't have to be processed right away. Different timing is appropriate for different tasks, and in some cases the ExactTarget application gives you the control to choose how--and when--your system does its work.

Asynchronous
An asynchronous process is a process that runs “behind the scenes” while you continue to use the interface to perform other tasks. You receive an email or other alert that the process is complete so that you can view the results.

For example, if you start an asynchronous report, the report runs while you continue working. When the report is done, you receive an email that contains the report results.

Scheduled
A scheduled process is a process that runs automatically at the time you designate. You receive an email or other alert that the process is complete so that you can view the results.

For example, if you schedule an email send to begin at 11p.m., the system begins the send at 11p.m. and can send you an email when the process completes to give details on the success of the send.

Real-Time
A real‐time process is a process that runs in the foreground of your application. You cannot
perform other tasks while the real‐time process is running. When the process is complete, the application presents the results on your screen.

Design Tip of the Week: Email Rendering in Outlook 2007

Thursday, October 22, 2009 by Andrea Smith

written by David Hoang

With the move from Outlook 2003 to 2007, Microsoft made a lot of security improvements. Along with that, however, were a number of design changes. Outlook changed its engine for rendering HTML content from Internet Explorer to Microsoft Word. Before, it essentially meant that if your code looked good in Internet Explorer, it looked good in Outlook.

However, that is not the case anymore.

This is a huge impact in the way we design emails; because of the high volume of Outlook users, particularly in the Business-to-Business realm.

Here are a few key elements to consider while designing email messages in Outlook 2007 to ensure it looks sharp.

Keep your styles in-line
Though Outlook 2007 does support embedded CSS, there are certain properties that present challenges, such as margin, line-height and float/clear. Keep your styles in-line while you are designing. In addition to being an email design best practice, using style attributes in-line will help ensure that your message renders properly.

No Animated .gif files
Animated .gif files will not function in Outlook 2007. However, there is a solution for using .gif files with Outlook 2007. Since the file will not animate, you only need to make sure the first frame makes sense; as that is what will appear in Outlook 2007.

Contain Yourself, No Floating!
Outlook 2007 does not support floating or CSS positioning in any capacity. Use standard HTML tables to contain and control the layout. This will ensure that your design elements won’t go flying all over the place!

Specify Accurate Table Widths
When using HTML tables it is important to specify accurate table widths to ensure proper display in Outlook 2007. This is especially important in table structures that contain multiple columns. For example, when you have a table cell that spans two columns, the width for that cell should equal the sum of the widths of the other two cells.

Continue Using Alt Tags
As it was in Outlook 2003, it is in 2007; images will automatically be blocked. While you’re designing your email message, keep in mind of what it will look like with images disabled. Remember that Outlook will display alt tags, but they will only appear after a default security message. For a list of acceptable tags in Outlook 2007, check out this guide on Microsoft’s website.

No Forms
Outlook 2007 disables embedded forms. If you design an email with a survey or form in the content, include a direct link (hosted from a website) to the survey for your Outlook users. Indicate clearly in your design that the form is not broken, so subscribers don’t get frustrated by trying to fill out the form.

With 2010 quickly approaching, you may be wonder if there will be any major CSS/HTML changes in Outlook 2010. Right now, don’t expect major changes.

To conclude, sticking to standard HTML table design for emails should help you effectively render emails in Outlook 2007. Be sure to read our design tips in the coming weeks for rendering tips in other email clients, including our past issue: Email Rendering in Hotmail by Anna Meier. Portions of this blog, Design Tip of the Week: Email Rendering in Outlook 2007 and more information on email rendering can be found in our white paper “Email Marketing Design: The New Essentials.”

For additional information about rendering in Outlook 2007, check out our white paper, Seven Email Marketing Design Tips for Outlook 2007.

Live Blog: Financial Services Solution Showcase

Wednesday, October 14, 2009 by Amanda Cross

We've got quite a change of pace in the ol' developer track conference room. Chris Murray of ExactTarget is the emcee for the Financial Services Solution Showcase.

He starts by introducing the first segment:

Beyond Deliverability: Consumer Choice & Control
Authentication, Privacy, and Policy
by Craig Spiezle
https://otalliance.org

The Online Trust Alliance is concerned with security in online activity, especially financial services. Spoofed email, phishing, and online exploits are a major challenge for financial organizations that operate online.

Craig said that government regulations are likely to come about in the next few weeks as a result of the identity theft incidents that we've heard of recently. Craig said that the United States is actually behind other parts of the world in consumer production.

Craig discussed extended validation certificates. In order to get one of these certificates, the business must prove that it's registered with a local tax authority. While this can't verify that the business has good business practices, but it does require that the business be a real business. When a business has this certificate, it turns the address bar in your browser green when you visit their site. If the address bar isn't green, you know that it's a spoofed site.

He continued to talk about the business value of authentication. Not only does this help protect your business from being spoofed, but also improves your deliverability.

Of the top 100 financial institutions in North America, only 43% have protections in place for consumers.

Craig talked about the problem with unsubscribe: an unsubscribe link in the footer of the email is required by CAN-SPAM, but consumers are warned not to click links in emails they don't want for fear that they'll alert spammers that they're a real person. An unsubscribe header allow ISPs to render an unsubscribe link in their client so that people can unsubscribe without clicking the "report as spam" link and degrading your reputation. About this time, someone from ExactTarget piped up to mention that ExactTarget email already does this automatically.

Addressing Email Security Concerns
Matt Burton - GMAC/Ally Bank

Matt talked about Ally bank and the fact that its customers were receiving more spoof emails that were pretending to be from Ally as they were receiving from the real bank.

Ally Bank, like many places, would love for there to be a "silver bullet" that would solve the problem, but in fact the best way to protect consumers is with a combination of proactive monitoring, excellent deliverability of your legit content, and customer education.

Governance, while unpopular, is critical. If your company has multiple business units, ALL of them have to have successful security.

Some financial institutions do not include links in their emails, instead telling consumers to go to the website. This is problematic because it requires more copy and results in fewer site hits. Also, this doesn't prevent phishing emails from including links in their emails.

Security tools, such as ISP Phish Blocking and Certified Mail, are available to help prevent risk and increase confidence in your message respectively.

Education of consumers can be tricky. Sending emails that tells customers how to tell whether your email is real might make it look like you're a spoofer trying to set them up to trust fraudulent email in the future. Better to just remain consistent in your sending so that consumers become accustomed to your style and learn to identify spoofs on their own.

To wrap up, Matt recommended proactive risk diminuation rather than waiting for a problem happens and only responding then.

Technology Solution
e-statements at Nationwide
Brian Jaffe - Nationwide Insurance

Nationwide was facing a "statement challenge"--sending statements to customers on email. The address this issue, they created an elegant solution.

Governance - As part of this process, they codified their program for sending emails.
Preference management - allow customers to specify their preferences. Brian recommends double opt in.
Billing format - recreate view of paper statement
Send mode - bulk or single send. You probably batch up your bills, but some might do individual sends.
Data preparation - attributes or data extensions? what is the unique subscriber key? You need to understand your extremes (what happens if you have an extremely large amount of data?) and your data-display issues.
Deliverability - decisions about IP and Domain. Learn from your deliverability team!
Feedback - decisions about bounce management, reply management. If people unsubscribe and then try to sign up, you could have technical problems sending emails. Make sure you understand how your unsubscribes are managed. And be ready to monitor replies, even if you tell people not to reply to a message.
Inserting marketing messages into transactional emails - CAN-SPAM does allow you include marketing messages into your transactional emails under certain circumstances.

Paperless statements can create issues. For example, what if customers call in saying that they never received their statement. Customer service needs to be able to access tracking to see whether the subscriber ever opened the email and have other strategies to deal with these complaints. Customer service needs to be able to resend statements.

Nationwide includes quite a bit of personal information in their emails so that subscribers know that the email must be legit, since a phishing scam wouldn't have access to so much personal information. Watch out for links to log-in pages, since phishing emails like to send very similar emails that direct to their own "login page."

Having a protocol to deal with bounces is wise. In their case, if a subscriber soft-bounces, they put the subscriber back into the paper stream for one cycle and try paperless again for the next cycle. If they run into a hard-bounce, they put the subscriber back into the paper stream indefinitely until the subscriber re-enrolls themselves in the paperless process.

Nationwide's solution is based on the ExactTarget SOAP API. Their OMS (outbound messaging service) is a middleware layer of abstraction that actually sits behind their firewall. Between the OMS and ExactTarget much communication occurs to get the statements out to subscribers.

The content of the eStatement itself uses AMPscript to build the bill by parsing concatenated attributes and dynamically displaying content in appropriate data tables.

Michael Murdza (ExactTarget) took us through the technical aspect of the eStatement data flow. A sophisticated decision tree weave through the Nationwide database and ExactTarget application, using XML, AMPscript, and API calls.

And then the presentation wrapped up, and everyone started getting ready for the evening entertainment. I've really enjoyed live blogging the technology track for everyone today, and I hope you've enjoyed reading as much as I've enjoyed writing it. See you between the lines :)

Live Blog: Automation Event Triggered Sends Using SOAP API

Wednesday, October 14, 2009 by Amanda Cross

The developer track continues with Automation Event Triggered Sends Using SOAP API.

Between sessions, the intrepid staff of the Westin brought in several more chairs, effectively ensuring that no one will be sitting on the floor this time. There wouldn't be room, even if they wanted to.

Ana Ng plays over the PA system while we wait for the session to start, and with a minute to go it switches to Particle Man as the room fills up. You can tell that we're gearing up for the They Might be Giants concert tonight, after the Second City performance. Indeed, I'm already wearing my wristband :)

Automation Event Triggered Sends Using SOAP API
ExactTarget Product Specialist Manager and general super brain, Dale McCrory beings the presentation by asking how many people in the crowd have used triggered sends before. This feature is one of the most powerfully compelling and commonly implemented functionalities available in the SOAP API. Triggered emails are perfect for things like password reminders, order confirmations, and welcome emails. You can also use them together with Web Collect forms, Reply Mail Management, and other parts of the ExactTarget system that automatically send response emails to subscribers.

He continues by talking about send classifications: marketing and transactional, and the differences between then. Basically, marketing messages are subject to CAN-SPAM regulation, while transactional messages are not, since they're might actually be required to be sent to subscribers, such as receipts.

Dale puts some code up on the screen to show the anatomy of a triggered send call. He talks about how the template, content, and all the look-and-feel stuff about the email are created within the application and are controllable by marketers. The API then references the triggered send definition using the external key and doesn't have to bother with actually creating the content of the email using the API.

Next, Dale moved in to the difference between synchronous and asynchronous API. A synchronous API call goes to the server, which responds. If the server is unavailable, there's no response, and it's on the ExactTarget customer's shoulders to retry. Asynchronous calls, on the other hand, are queued up, so even if they can't be processed right away, they will get processed when the server is available. He recommends that people starting new triggered send initiatives use asynchronous API, unless development is so constrained that synchronous is all there's time for.

High priority API calls can be processed immediately, even if one of the servers is unavailable, by using our multiple data centers. There are limitations on emails that can be sent this way (they can't contain info from data extensions...stuff like that) and it incurs an additional cost per send.

Dale ran a little short of time, but he'll be presenting again later in the day.

Intuit's Notifications Service Engine: A practical approach to facilitating customer notifications
Next Intuit's Gary Rittinger directed everyone to http://connect.intuit.com to check out the implementation that he'll be talking about.

His purpose is to provide Intuit's infrastructure and offerings the ability to send, monitor, and manage the notifications they send to customers in a consistent and reliable way. To do this, Gary uses triggered sends to send welcome emails, order confirmation, shipping conversation, and other transactional messages.

Intuit finds that it's difficult to get consistent programming from across its organization, so it uses "application adapters" to normalize the input. They're using ExactTarget accounts to let each product manager get in and see the status of email sends.

As a result of implementing ExactTarget, Intuit enjoys:

Better transparency into notifications deliverability.
Reduced cost and increased efficiency of customer notifications.
Improved enterprise SOA adoption through standard web service technologies.
Fewer of redundant apps that served the same purpose.
Improve governance and compliance.

Gary recounted the ease and smoothness of putting this process in place. He commented that they've recently been moved from the Indy data center to the Las Vegas data center--one of the first customer to be live sending out of that data center--and the move took only 90 seconds. He also said that rolling out the process took only a couple weeks.

During the Q&A, Bryan Wade (the emcee) is talking up the documentation wiki and the API content that's available on it. This is a topic near and dear to my heart <3

Electronic Marketing Term of the Day: Content Syndication

Friday, October 9, 2009 by Amanda Cross

Content syndication is when you get some or all of your email content from an external source. For example, you might grab a product description for a marketing email promoting that product from your corporate website.

Content syndication is sometimes referred to as HTTPGet, after the command you use in the email itself to tell the system to get something from an HTTP site. Content syndication is also, more colloquially, called "screen scraping."

Content syndication is a simple form of email automation in that it allows you to systematically reuse content from your website in your emails. Content syndication has long been available in the ExactTarget application, but now it is available to be powered by AMPscript, our dynamic scripting language that powers some of the most sophisticated automatic email in the world.

Canadian anti-spam bill far from a done deal

Thursday, October 8, 2009 by Al Iverson

Michael Geist, Internet Law Columnist for the Toronto Star says that the current Canadian anti-spam legislation under consideration in Parliment is under attack. On bill C-27 – the Electronic Commerce Protection Act, he reports: "Although support for anti-spam legislation would seemingly be uncontroversial, various business groups have mounted a spirited attack against the bill, claiming requirements to obtain user consent before sending commercial email will create new barriers to doing business online."

Read the whole story here. (H/T: Box of Meat)

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.

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.

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.

Design Tip of the Week: Email Rendering in Hotmail

Friday, September 25, 2009 by Anna Meier

We know by now that all email clients are not created equal. Your email campaign will not render the same in Outlook 2007 as it does in Yahoo, Gmail or Lotus Notes. This week we’re focusing on email rendering in Hotmail. Look for design tips for other email clients in weeks to come. Below are six important topics to consider when building your email campaign in order to create the best experience possible for Hotmail subscribers.

Preview Pane
Hotmail users have the option of viewing their email in a vertical or horizontal preview pane. Be sure to consider the content of your top left email real estate to ensure your primary message is received. Read Considering the Preview Pane for more information.

Image Blocking - Alt Tags
Images are blocked by default in Hotmail. Hotmail also uses gray rectangles in place of blocked images and does not display “alt” tags. While there is no way to force Hotmail to display “alt” tags, we recommend including them for other email clients that do render them when images are blocked by default.

Images
When a subscriber uses a Firefox browser to view email in Hotmail, the subscriber may see extra white space under images, severely impacting email rendering. Avoid this problem by placing a “display: block” style in image tags: <img src=“image.jpg” style=“display: block;”>. This workaround could potentially cause rendering issues with other email clients, so be certain to test.

*View in Hotmail with images on and off.

Links
Hotmail automatically displays all links without an underline, and the underline only appears when the mouse hovers over a link. If underlined links are desired, you will need to set the “text-decoration” property to underline with inline CSS in the <a> tag of every individual link. For instructions, read last week’s Design Tip of the Week.

Non-Black Default Font Color
Hotmail will set any text without a specific font color to dark gray. To ensure colors maintain brand standards and display as intended, assign a specific color (even if it’s black) to all text in your message.

Avoid Forms
Hotmail will render forms properly, but disables the submit button—so forms will not function as intended. Encourage subscribers to view the email as a webpage or drive them to a website where the form can be rendered properly.

Be sure to read our design tips in the coming weeks for rendering tips in other email clients. Portions of this blog, Design Tip of the Week: Email Rendering in Hotmail, and more information on email rendering can be found in our whitepaper “Email Marketing Design: The New Essentials”.

Decision 2009: Email Testing and Optimization

Tuesday, September 15, 2009 by Colby Cavanaugh

Here at ExactTarget, we love the idea of testing and optimizing emails. Not only are you striving to provide the best email content you possibly can to your subscribers – but you’re giving them a vote on what that content is!

Omniture Test&Target gives marketers a platform for testing creative elements across their web properties. It provides tools to perform A/B testing or more complex multivariate tests (MVT) on your website – allowing you to test creative elements, target specific segments, and automatically optimize content. ExactTarget is now able to integrate this technology into its own messaging capabilities, meaning YOU can do the same with your email sends! This integration allows marketers to optimize long-running or recurring campaigns based on subscriber response. The testing platform can now be part of a multichannel marketing campaign, designed to test the best performing creative across email and web site offers.

The great part about this technology? Ideas for your email content can come from anywhere – and you don’t have to argue internally about whether or not to include them. Instead, you can choose to test different ideas and allow your subscribers to decide! (For those of you who experience heated debates over “red button” vs. “green button” - you know what I’m talking about…)

Getting started is easy - come up with a few simple hypotheses about single sends or recurring sends (ideas that you think could have an impact on performance) and try them out in the context of your email. It doesn’t have to be a huge project, involving all creative elements across all campaigns. Start small, think big.

You know what else is easy? Sampling the integration! If you’re an existing ExactTarget customer who also uses Omniture Test&Target for your website, check out our Innovations Lab listing on ExactTarget 3Sixty. We’re currently offering a limited beta test of the integration for those who want to give it a try and who would be willing to share their experiences in the form of a use case or customer story. Check out 3Sixty for more information!

How Can I Link ExactTarget with My Web Analytics Provider?

Tuesday, September 15, 2009 by Dawn DeVirgilio

When looking for ways to drive successful email campaigns, clients often ask us, “What are the ways ExtactTarget can integrate with my web analytics provider?”

They’re in luck! By leveraging existing technology, ExactTarget is able to offer customized integrations through partnerships with leading analytics vendors.

Thanks to these partnerships, there are three ways for ExactTarget to integrate with your web analytics provider:

Web Analytics Connector
The Web Analytics Connector allows you to send information to your web analytics tool through links in the ExactTarget email application. If you are currently using a web analytics system, your web analytics tool stores the URL used to call individual pages whenever your website is displayed in a browser. To connect this data with ExactTarget, you can include attributes in the target URL of the links in your emails. For example, if you included a campaign ID in the target URL of your links, you could identify the web traffic generated by that campaign.

Exporting Tracking Data
A second way to integrate is by exporting tracking data from ExactTarget into your web analytics package. By extracting email tracking data - such as opens, clicks and bounces - and pushing the data back to your analytics package, you capture a 360-degree snapshot of email performance. Both link performance and overall email performance data can be extracted from ExactTarget. These extractions allow you to assess the impact of email campaigns with online activity, where you can facilitate data exchange to consolidate reporting.

Automating a Behavior Marketing Campaign
Segmenting messages based on email and web analytics data is possible through our third form of integration. ExactTarget has the capability to automate a behavior marketing campaign for you, which begins with importing web behavior data into the ExactTarget application. (Typically, the data you will be importing will relate to products viewed, products purchased and cart abandonment information.) This data can be queried to allow deeper segmentation, thereby allowing you to create more personalized and targeted email. By automating the daily feeds of individual web data to trigger emails, you ensure timely, relevant emails to your subscribers.

For more information on how you can integrate ExactTarget with your web analytics provider, contact us via email at info@exacttarget.com or at 1.866.558.9834.

Till next time,
Patty Rayl

It Pays to Be Like Mike

Friday, September 4, 2009 by Joel Book

Mike’s Express Carwash is a chain of 37 carwashes located across Indiana and Ohio. They recently announced that their email marketing program had enabled the company to boost online sales in June by more than 60 percent over June 2008 totals.

Email gives us a way to reward our loyal customers,” said Sally Grant, marketing director of Mike’s Express Carwash. “We’ve also been able to build a great list of highly-engaged customers and send them special offers and discounts to thank them for their loyalty and drive increased sales.”

What I really like about Mike’s is how they invite the customer to become an email subscriber.

Customers are invited to participate in the email campaign when they purchase a car wash. Every receipt includes a unique offer code and provides a link to the survey site (www.talktomikes.com). Customers log on to the Website, enter the unique receipt code and their email address and then complete a two-question survey. Once the survey is submitted, the data is immediately sent to ExactTarget’s Application Program Interface (API) which automatically triggers an email to the customer that includes a bar-coded coupon for a free car wash. To prevent multiple uses of the same coupon, the company uses ExactTarget’s Live Content feature to automatically generate a new bar-code for every coupon. Data from each coupon barcode is automatically uploaded to Mike’s Express’ point of sale system to ensure the code is only recognized once.

Does this email opt-in strategy work? You bet it does!

In August, Mike’s Car Wash ran a “Back To School” campaign that offered customers a free carwash in exchange for completing an online customer satisfaction survey and subscribing to its email marketing program. The 10-day campaign added more than 40,000 new customers to the company’s email subscriber list!

You Can Be Like Mike

Whether it’s implementing Triggered Email Promotions based on POS Customer Data Capture, or using SMS text messaging to capture new email subscribers, marketers like Mike’s Car Wash are proving that email marketing is smart. And successful email marketing begins with a well-planned subscriber acquisition strategy.

If you want to be like Mike, gives us a call. We'll be happy to help.

Email is Still Communication King, but Social Media is No Jester

Thursday, September 3, 2009 by Blaine Cooper-Surma

In 2003, with the introduction of MySpace, the way we communicate with one another drastically changed.

Last year, MarketingSherpa ran a survey to help it better understand society’s perception of social media regarding its role in marketing communications. What did these marketing experts discover, you ask? They found that 97 percent of respondents use social media platforms, like MySpace, Linkedin, Twitter, and Facebook as complimentary marketing mediums to the current communication king – email.

So why are email service providers like ExactTarget not threatened with the rise in social media usage? The answer is simple. Email, as a means of communication, allows social networking sites to send relevant information to its users. Social media enterprises have realized the convenience and effectiveness of email – hence the reason you receive an automated email when someone posts on you Facebook wall or sends you a Linkedin connection request. Essentially, your personal email account funnels all activity that occurs throughout your numerous social media accounts into one location. For this reason, email isn't going anywhere – at least anytime soon.

So where does ExactTarget fit in this picture? We fully understand the importance of social media and its ability to expand the reach of your email marketing campaign. For example, another resource that should be added to your marketing arsenal, as a means of facilitating subscriber list growth, is the social forward feature.

In the past few years social media has emerged as an effective tool in the marketing world, however, we agree with the 97 percent that still find email is the primary means of marketing communication.

Just because everything is different doesn't mean anything has changed. – Irene Peter

Virtual Voice Tour: Using Voice Marketing to Sell Your Home

Thursday, August 27, 2009 by Kevin Nuest

My wife and I are currently beginning the process of buying a house. Right now it consists of driving very slowly past any house that has a For Sale sign in the yard.

As we were creepily driving past a house last night, I notice that the For Sale sign for this property was different. At the top of the sign it said “Virtual Voice Tour. Code #302” and it had a number to call. Of course I called it immediately as we sat parked outside of the house. We listened to the listing agent tell us all about this home via an automated voice message. I could picture the home in my head: the fireplace, three bedrooms, two bathrooms. Then the listing agent dropped the bomb of the price of the home and I hung up the phone.

Even though we were in a neighborhood that was a little too expensive for us, the Virtual Voice Tour was awesome. Why don’t more realtor agents do this? With ExactTarget’s Voice Messaging functionality it only takes a moment to record and setup these virtual voice tour messages. With just a little more work, a realtor could ask a potential buyer to text their email address to a short code before they listen to the virtual voice tour. The best part, all this can be done on the same One to One Marketing Platform.

Just like that, a realtor has captured a potential buyers phone number and email address. Check out our One-to-One Marketing Field Guild to learn more about Voice Message Marketing or use our Text is Next: Marketing with SMS whitepaper to get a SMS Marketing Campaign going today!

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