As an email marketer, the primary promotional messaging you do
for your business is a no-brainer. Sale coming up? Send the email.
Event to RSVP for? Send the email! It’s a marching order of sorts,
one that keeps you busy week in and week out, planning for what
email is next and which subject line to use and which buttons will
drive the most clicks and...
In the mix of it all, are you missing the clear opportunities to
build out your programming to make the most of your audience and
their engagement? Use the check list below to earn a gold star on
your message strategy, or identify the programs...
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Each Thursday
at 11am EDT, marketers from around the world join the ExactTarget Nexus partner
ecosystem on Twitter for a conversation about trends and campaign
ideas across the interactive marketing industry. We call the
virtual coffee chat the Nexus Café.
Our guest for a recent #NexusCafe chat was Brian Shelton,
eCommerce & Special Projects Manager at Gilchrist & Soames. Brian
just completed a major website project at his company so content
automation was top of mind. Brian is involved in the 3sixty Live
Indianapolis user community and is a regular contributor to the
weekly #NexusCafe chat.
He...
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If you spend much time in our 3sixty community, you will see that a
common suggestion is to offer better ways of searching for
information within our products: Emails, Templates, Subscribers,
Users, etc. One way we have addressed this is with our new search
feature in the Interactive Marketing Hub Calendar. The Calendar
search feature, released along with the launch of the IMH in
October of last year, lets you search for past and future email
sends by taking your search word (or words) and returning any
calendar entries that contain it in its name or description
The IMH Calendar is a...
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We're beginning our new blog
post series of answering your follow-up questions on Canada's new
Anti-Spam Law (CASL). Today, I'll answer this question:
For financial institutions, is there always implied
consent provided the lead continues to be a
customer?
There's an allowance under the law for an assumption of
permission allowing you to mail existing customers. However, that
exemption expires after a period of time, so you've got to track
these subscribers in a way where you're able to expire them out
after a period of time. Instead of doing that, our recommendation
is to just ask for...
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As
holiday sending is starting to ramp up this year, it’s important to
maintain good deliverability to ensure your message makes it to the
inbox. Last year, ExactTarget saw
record high send volumes, which means your competition just got a
little steeper. Here are some tips to
help you make it to the inbox:
-
Optimize your subscription path—Ensure email
address accuracy with a confirmation message and only send to
subscribers who confirm. This will help
protect from spam traps, bad email addresses and increased bounces,
all of which are used to determine your fate at the ISPs.
- Evaluate list...
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With
the right marketing automation solution, you can automate both
simple and complex marketing activities with just a few clicks from
one-off to batch messaging, data movements, integrations, and
report delivery.
No matter what your industry, marketing automation can simplify
repetitive marketing tasks and drive more sophisticated uses of
your customer data. For example:
-
Financial services: Back-end operations like
account statements, low-balance alerts, and lifecycle marketing
campaigns
-
Technology: Subscription renewal programs,
interactive account reminders, and product updates
-
Manufacturing:...
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One of the key focuses of the Interactive Marketing Hub (IMH) is
User Experience. Part of a great User Experience is to make sure
that every task that our customers perform in our system can be
done as easily and efficiently as possible. This requires a deep
understanding of what our customers need to do and the problems
they are trying to solve. One of the best ways for us to gain this
understanding is for you to tell us. We need customer feedback and
have many ways for you to share your opinion: 3sixty (Ideas,
Forums, Questions), Contacting us directly (24x7 Global Services
and Premium...
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If you're a
client of ExactTarget, you definitely are. But even so, there's
some practical steps you can take to make sure you don't ever cross
that easily-blurred line of being non-CAN-SPAM
complaint.
First, what
is CAN-SPAM? CAN-SPAM is the popular name for
the U.S. law regulating commercial email that went into effect on
January 1, 2004. The real name is the Controlling the Assault of
Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act of 2003
(mouthful!).
CAN-SPAM requires that all commercial emails include a viable
Internet-based opt-out mechanism, which must be active for a
minimum of 30 days...
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ExactTarget
was named the Genesis Partner of the year at
Adobe
Omniture Summit 2011. The award was presented to ExactTarget
for it’s
integration with Omniture and our more than 400
joint clients.
Integrating ExactTarget with Omniture's SiteCatalyst and Omniture
Genesis creates a powerful solution to connect with audiences that
are otherwise untapped. Delivering relevant, timely email messages
to these market segments can result in entirely new revenue
opportunities, drive increased conversion and revenue while
automatically synchronizing your data for closed-loop reporting and
remarketing.
To...
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At ExactTarget we say that your brand is the sum of all of the
conversations about your brand. It's an accurate statement but hard
to measure. With the Interactive Marketing Hub we are providing you
with a quick way to measure your brand: your number of Subscribers
Fans and Followers. It makes sense and it's simple. If you have
read our research on Subscribers, Fans, and Followers (if you
haven't read our research go here and do
it now!), you know that each of these groups have very different
expectations and motivations for engaging with you. But there is
also overlap between the groups, so...
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Websites
have evolved so much since the inception of the World Wide Web. I
recall first receiving a book on HTML for my 13th birthday and
being incredibly excited to begin making my first Web pages. (Note:
for those asking why I was coding HTML at age 13, I often ask
myself the same question.) Back then, you had your website
published on something like Geocities, Angelfire, or some other
free provider who was willing to take on the expense of hosting
while displaying horrific ads to monetise their business model.
Only if you were serious did you have a domain!
Fast forward to now, where RSS is...
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Not that long ago while working for a web
analytics company, I went on a joint sales call with our founder
Peter McCormick who was a partner of mine at the time. While
neither of us were technically sales people, here we were in the
boardroom of a Fortune 100 client pitching the benefits of a lead
nurture campaign. For their part the client had very realistic
expectations, after all they had believed
most of what they
had been told by their vendors.
The client wanted three basic things:
1) to track and measure traffic on
their web site,
2) automatically trigger an event when a site visitor...
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Cable
internet provider Road Runner is alive and kicking. They're
still out there, they're still a huge inbound mail receiver, and
they're still hosting a whole bunch of mail boxes.
But, remember, these domains are no longer valid domains for Road
Runner users: jam.rr.com, midsouth.rr.com, mn.rr.com,
se.rr.com, sport.rr.com, swfla.rr.com, ucwphilly.rr.com and
houston.rr.com. As I mentioned way back in 2008, all
email
service at those domains was retired by Road Runner, usually
because they sold some given market to another cable provider, such
as Comcast.
Addresses at these "dead domains" will...
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Last week, Amanda Cross, Manager of
Documentation,
talked about her small documentation team and their work. I am
the Automation Engineer on that team. While the team is small,
ExactTarget really leverages the work effort of each team member.
This allows us to produce a lot of
content.
Certainly, one important factor is that each
team member is a good writer with plenty of training and
experience. Then, our methodology is built around ideas of
minimalism: writers write only what is needed. You shouldn’t find
any “fluff” in our docs. Also, writers have good access to
knowledge sources so they...
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Most likely, you’re a marketer – not a programmer. Yet, some
interactive marketing providers’ tools treat you like you are,
making you waste time and energy trying to sort out the technical
details. And if you’re struggling to secure time, resources, and
internal IT support in an effort to extend your messages across the
web, there’s an easier way to get things done.
Ok – ready to cut microsite creation time down to less than five
minutes? Done. With ExactTarget’s incredibly user-friendly landing
page marketing technology, you can easily create coupons, special
promotions, or other types of...
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Since my daughter was born over a year ago, I’ve wanted to create a
digital photo book to recap some of her special moments. I’ve
always enjoyed the concept of scrapbooking, but I’ve never been
good at completing one. It’s just too time consuming to have to do
everything manually. That’s why a digital photo book is so
appealing. You can easily select your layouts, drag-and-drop
photos, and wa-la – you’re done!
I’ve been researching lots of different
sites to try to find the best deal on a photo book. But nothing
could compare to the deal I found a few weeks ago on Groupon:
$10 for a 20-Page...
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If you are wondering why your links have been suspiciously changing
colors in Yahoo! Mail recently, we have the answer for you! Better
yet, we have a solution that will restore the desired styles to
your links.
First, a quick explanation. Due to some recent changes in the way
Yahoo! Mail highlights links, all
<a
href="http:..."></a> tags will show as blue
(specifically, #366388), regardless of any
style="color:
#xxxxxx" properties you may have in the
<a> tag or any containers (such as the three
header links and the four navbar links in Figure 1 below). You will
see that it does not affect any...
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A
year ago, I opened my email and found an offer from
KeyBank for a
free iPod Nano. All you had to do was open a NEW checking account,
make two automatic deposits, and buy something (ANYTHING!) with
your debit card. Skeptical, I went to the bank and asked a lot of
questions. After answering all of my questions, I signed up for a
new account and fulfilled my obligations. Two months later I
received a shiny new iPod Nano! Fast forward 6 months. I open up my
email to find a new offer from KeyBank offering a Garmin for anyone
who signs up for a NEW checking account. Since I already had an
account,...
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Looking to increase your email marketing ROI and take your emails
from "ehh" to "AHH"? Whether you're a beginner or seasoned
retailer, below are a few key ingredients to optimize your email
marketing programs.
Personalize
By
personalize I don't mean adding your subscriber's first
name in your email. We all know email can do that. Instead,
personalize the content you present to your subscribers based on
their chosen interests, purchase history, location and behavior. By
doing this your message will automatically be more relevant and
engaging to your subscribers. Read our
recent blog post for
more...
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As I sat in my usual seats across from the fastest cars in the
field at the
Indianapolis 500Sunday, I felt my pulse quicken as we went through the traditional
pre-race festivities. Only one thing beats "God Bless
America" by Florence Henderson, the military salute, "Back Home
Again in Indiana" with Jim Nabors and the balloon launch... the
flying start. The flying start of the Indianapolis 500 is
truly a sight to see. My favorite 500 memory is of a time
when my dad convinced a "yellow shirt" (track worker) to let
us stand in Stand E's stairwell (in the heart of turn 1) for the
flying start....
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