Consumer Email Marketing

As we head into the busy summer travel season, travel brands will be looking for ways to connect with consumers. Of course, brands are constantly chided to avoid over-communicating with their opted-in subscribers. Even after consumers have subscribed to your brand's email or chosen to "like' you on Facebook, your brand's connection with them remains tenuous, because they can break off the relationship at any time.

A major temptation for some brands is to over-communicate with customers, inundating them with offers, deals, product news, and just about anything else that marketers believe could...

Facebook poses unique opportunities—and challenges—for marketers. It’s an inherently social channel where consumers are open to interacting with brands. But because consumers typically think of Facebook as their “personal” space, marketers have to tread lightly with hard-sell messages.

To complicate this balancing act further, consumers have a variety of reasons for “liking” a brand. Overall, however, consumers’ top reasons for becoming Facebook fans are similar to their reasons for subscribing to email. These statistics from ExactTarget's 2013 Global Executive Summary tell the story:

• For...

Marketers have some pretty bad habits.

From sending the occasional unqualified lead to sales to not segmenting email lists properly, there are little things we do everyday that we know we could be doing better. 

However, like the millions that make and break New Year's resolutions each year, we find ways to convince ourselves that these little slips are OK, that no real harm can come of them, or that nobody will notice. Unfortunately for the imperfect marketer, these excuses provide less protection for us every year.

We are operating in an age of marketing where more is expected of us than ever...

Whether you're just getting started with mobile optimization or you're a pro and need some tips to share with your colleagues, here are our top mobile design resources for email.

Report: Designing for the Mobile Inbox
Get strategic and practical advice to help you deliver content that’s easy to consume on any device in this new report on mobile optimization.

Case Study: CareerBuilder's Responsive Email Design Results
Learn how CareerBuilder optimized their email design and saw increases of more than 20% in click-through and more than 15% in open rates.

Quick Guide: Design Tips: Mobile + Email
This...

According to a recent survey by Accenture, US home and auto insurance customers are choosing digital sources for insurance quotes and other related information more than ever before. While 76% of consumers prefer to set up and pay for their insurance policies in person with an agent, 58% indicated a preference for doing so via the Web. (Respondents were allowed to choose more than one answer.)

If consumers are seeking digital outlets and want to work directly with an agent, then why not make insurance agents’ jobs easier and give them the necessary tools?

How can insurance companies make it...

What does it take to build targeted emails that move from capturing customer attention to ensuring lifetime retention? Chances are, you already know a thing or two about lifecycle marketing. But let’s do a quick recap:

Marketers understand the challenges of limited time and resources that often compete with increased expectations. That's why we created this free lifecycle marketing how-to poster—considering all the lifecycle programs you could execute and providing you with strategic recommendations that will immediately impact your business, one step at a time.

Here's a sneak peek of the...

Download the case study now

Currently, a stunning 43% of all email opens occur on mobile devices, quickly overshadowing desktop opens (32%) and webmail opens (25%). Data from Litmus shows us that this percentage is up 38% in the last year alone. Basically, subscribers continue to use viewing environments that include many screen sizes:

• iPhone, Android, and tablets (mobile devices)
• Installed email programs like Outlook and Apple Mail (desktop)
• Email accessed through a web browser like Gmail and Yahoo! Mail (webmail)

This means that by a growing majority, subscribers are tapping and swiping instead...

You’ve all read the stats and seen the infographics: consumers are awash with technology, and mobility is leading the charge. Many marketers already have mobile marketing strategies in place--but for those who don’t, now is the time to prioritise. It’s no longer a matter of just being mobile-friendly. You have to think mobile first.

Remember, you’re up close and personal

Consider how you use your phone. You keep it in a special case, use it to take and store personal photos and communicate with loved ones. You work with it. You play with it. Heck, most of us even sleep with it! The smartphone...

The first thing most aspiring marketers learn is the importance of identifying and subsequently engaging those beautiful people called “the audience” no matter where they live online. This lesson gains wholehearted acceptance from everyone in the marketing world. However, the execution becomes complicated, and soon we all learn that feeding something like a blog everyday just simply isn’t enough.

We must put ourselves on the customer's online path.

Think goals first, campaigns second and tactics third.

What’s the goal? Always start there. That’s what the university lecturer taught you a long time...

It’s amazing to think that just a little over two decades ago, consumers had only two options to communicate across long distances: telephone and mail. In today’s mobile, post-PC world, consumers have countless ways to communicate with each other.

They have similar options when it comes to communicating with brands. The question is, how do consumers determine the proper channel for their communication needs? The decision appears to boil down to six factors:

CONTENT: Is this a marketing message?
As we document throughout the Channel Preference Survey, consumers are much more selective about the...

Chances are you don’t wear the same kinds of clothing today as you did when you were a teenager. And much like wardrobes, the channel preferences of consumers evolve and mature with age. Without major life responsibilities (e.g,. a job, a spouse, a mortgage), teens have lots of time on their hands to communicate (and dress) as they please.

Teens are more likely than any other age group to use text messaging, Facebook, and Twitter. They are also more likely to communicate through a greater number of channels on a daily basis, picking the right channel based on speed, convenience, and privacy.

When...

ExactTarget has a passion for bringing marketers and consumers closer. And we’ve gathered the industry’s top thought leaders and interactive gurus for the second annual ExactTarget CONNECT Global Tour.

Marketers from across Canada will have the opportunity to meet, inspire, educate, and empower the future generation of digital marketing on June 12, 2013, at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre. This full-day gathering will include break-out sessions complete with leading-edge research, networking opportunities, and advice for guiding engaged digital marketing campaigns.

Leading the keynote...

There’s no doubt that today’s consumers are mobile. They’re constantly on-the-go, sending and receiving communications of all types, and they’ve come to expect that information be (literally) in-hand at all times. Consumers in the UK and around the globe are no longer sitting at their computers searching for information—instead, they expect information to be available all around them. At the same time, they expect that information to be relevant to their lives.

The hyper-connected consumer expects brands of all sizes and industries to start meeting them where they are. It also provides new...

I had the pleasure of interviewing DJ Waldow, CEO of Waldow Social, a couple of weeks ago about email, social, and everything digital marketing. He is a friend and author of The Rebel's Guide to Email Marketing. Needless to say, he is knowledgeable. Period.

Today's inspired video is about auto-responders and email marketing messages. DJ recently went to Cabo (jealous) and set his out-of-office email to reply on behalf of his inbox. We all do this. We go on vacation and set our out-of-office reply to let everyone in the world know we are out of touch. However, DJ noticed a funny thing when...

Picasso is credited with saying, “Good artists copy. Great artists steal.” To the best of my knowledge, he wasn’t a kleptomaniac—instead, he knew that artists need outside sources of inspiration. Whether they draw that inspiration from Mother Nature, Michelangelo, or Apple, great artists study the masters and use that success to create their own new and original ideas.

When you’re tackling a new digital marketing program—a website, a landing page, an email, a Facebook page, an app—take off your marketing hat and just wear your consumer hat for a while. Think about the sites and digital...

One of the most powerful capabilities of email marketing is that it enables small brands to “level the playing field” with bigger competitors and produce AMAZING RESULTS.

And one of the best examples I can point to of how a small CPG (consumer packaged goods) brand is using Email as the backbone of its digital marketing strategy is Dreamfields. With the help of its digital marketing agency, HyperDrive Interactive, this small but very savvy marketer of low-carb pasta is using email marketing to fuel sales and energize a growing community of “Dreamfields Brand Fans” who happily recommend...

As I write this, 93% of UK online consumers are email subscribers and 40% of these subscribers are opening, reading and responding to email on their mobile phones or tablets. If you think these statistics suggest UK consumers prefer email above all channels for receiving offers and information from brands, you are absolutely correct!

A new report from eMarketer confirms why more marketing budget is flowing to permission-based email and why email has become “The Linchpin” of integrated digital marketing strategies.

Among the key findings in the report are these:

• Econsultancy and Adestra’s Email...

Over the past few years, I've come to realize that my time here at Pardot has been nothing short of amazing. I love to watch our engineers take customer feedback and use it to develop new features. Just the other day, we rolled out a brand new feature that opens up a lot of doors for marketing and sales--an integration with UserVoice that will allow marketing and sales to identify both happy and unhappy consumers instantly, and apply business rules to these situations.

UserVoice is an application used by over 16,000 companies to help track suggestions and feedback from their users. At Pardot,...

Digital channels have revolutionized the way we communicate with our customers. We’re all in hot pursuit of new and innovative ways to effectively deliver the right messages, through the right channels, at the right time.

At ExactTarget, we recognize that creating and maintaining relationships with consumers requires more than clever writing and glossy marketing materials. To truly connect with customers, marketers need to understand both consumer behaviors and motivations. That’s why we went straight to the source and asked consumers how they view and use each unique communication medium.

Five...