Database Marketing

Time for some Email Marketing Spring Cleaning

Friday, March 12, 2010 by Shelly Griffin

Maybe I am just a little too happy about the warmer weather... but I can smell Spring in the air. The snow has finally all melted, the birds are chirping, the days are getting warmer. Yes, Spring is in the air. Granted my happiness may be a tad premature. As the saying goes: if you don't like the weather in Indiana just wait 10 minutes. We could easily have more snow during the month of March. Whatever the case, I am going with it.

Spring is also the time to think about Spring cleaning. I am one of those weird people that actually looks forward to spring cleaning. I like the idea of starting fresh. Doing the deep cleaning and organizing. Open up the windows and let the fresh air into the house.

It's also a perfect time to do some email marketing spring cleaning... use a little elbow grease to scrub your subscriber database. Take the tooth brush and get down in the cracks. Are there subscribers that have stopped opening your emails? Maybe it's time to segment those to a different list and change the way in which you communicate with that group. It may be time to verify the frequency that your subscribers want to be communicated with, along with the content that they wish to receive.

I'm also of the belief that if something hasn't been used in a year, it needs to go. Donate it, throw it away, sell it - whatever the case it has to leave the house. Take the same approach to your emails. Design not working for you? Not seeing the open rate you expect or the open rate has declined over time? Then it is probably time to toss your email design and start fresh. Clean out the cobwebs. Review our Email Design Tips of the Week for some email design spring cleaning inspiration!

The other thing I LOVE about spring is the garden catalogs! You get to dream and plan all the beautiful plants that you can add to your garden this year. Check out what's new. With your email marketing program, there are all types of resources and ideas out there that you can peruse with wonderment and anticipation... maybe it is time to incorporate Twitter into your email marketing program.

All this talk of spring and sunshine... I think I'll go for a walk outside!

Email Domain Alamedanet.net Retired

Monday, March 1, 2010 by Al Iverson

Residents of Alameda, California-based AlamedaNet, Alameda Power & Telecom's internet service have been transitioned from alamedanet.net email addresses over to comcast.net addresses, as the alamedanet.net email domain has been retired as of December 15, 2009.

It isn't possible to convert email addresses in a blanket manner from one domain to the other, as there are certain to be username collisions between the new domains. Meaning, somebody could be bob@domain1 and he can't become bob@domain2, because somebody else already has the username "bob." Also, anti-spam groups regularly point out that consent to send email is tied to specific email addresses -- meaning, it is not kosher to change someone's email address in your database without their explicit consent.

As this domain has been retired, we'll be adding it to our "List Detective" filter shortly, preventing any further email messages to any address at that domain.

B2B Contact Databases Are Poor List Growth Sources

Friday, February 26, 2010 by Al Iverson

This morning, I took one of the numerous bits of B2B spam that I received, and I replied to the sender. This time around, it was a staffing services company, looking to help me with all of my staffing needs. He's ready and willing to help me with all of my staffing needs in the aerospace, transportation, and defense verticals, just to name a few.

In my reply, I asked him where he got my email address. "Through the company website," he replied. That's odd, I thought. My email address isn't published on our website. So I replied, saying exactly that. He replied with, "Have you ever heard of Zoominfo?" Sure, I've heard of Zoominfo. I've previously blogged here that it's a bad idea to grow your list by working with companies like Zoominfo, Jigsaw and Netprospex.

Why? Let's use me as an example. If this guy really did get my email address from Zoominfo, he bought a useless record. I'm not a hiring manager, I don't buy from spam, and I spend a lot of time tracking spam and spammers. I can't be the only one in that Zoominfo contact database who has no interest in receiving exciting, valuable unsolicited offers for help with my staffing needs.

After I informed the guy that if he bought my address from Zoominfo, he ought to try to get his money back, he changed his story. Now he's quoting my online bio at me as if this is somehow proof of an opt-in (buh?), and saying he's going to report me for harassment.

So, it's hard to say if this data really came from Zoominfo or not, as this guy keeps changing his story. But I get an awful lot of B2B spam, and people have to be getting my email address from somewhere. What do you think, dear reader?

Domains by Proxy: A good idea?

Monday, December 28, 2009 by Al Iverson

Is it a good idea to mask ownership of your domain?

Services like Domains by Proxy allow you to mask (hide) the true owner of a domain name. In my opinion, the legitimate business case for doing so is questionable. Wikipedia suggests that it's a good way to block “unsolicited contacts from third parties.” I don't think that's true-- I think a legitimate business is going to have contact info on their website, making it possible to contact them with postal advertising or regarding legal issues, regardless of uses of a domain masking service. And if you're worried about spam, use a unique email address that is well spam filtered, and isn't your primary email address.

I guess if you're a one man shop, working from home, and you register a domain for your business, maybe you're concerned about people knowing your home address. But domain masking isn't the only method of addressing this. The UPS Store (and the USPS) runs a brisk business in PO boxes and/or PMB postal addresses for exactly this kind of use.

And what's the down side to using a domain masking service?

You look like a spammer. Wow, really? Yes, really. It's that simple. A lot of the people that use these services seem to be spammers. I don't have data on this; only anecdotes. But I can tell you that, unfortunately, that based on my personal experience, there is a strong correlation between “likely to send unwanted or unsolicited mail” and “who owns their domain is hidden behind Domains by Proxy.” Sad, but true. Thank spammers for ruining another part of the internet for the rest of us.

Why do spammers do this? Lots of spammers register large numbers of domains. From dozens to hundreds (or even more). If they made their ownership of these domains publicly, easily found via the internet's WHOIS databases, anti-spam groups like Spamhaus would be able to track them much easier. It's not much of a deterrent, but it's enough of one to be very common in spammer circles.

And there might be legal risk as well. Read about this 9th Circuit opinion in USA v. Kilbride, (9th Cir., 2009) as reported by Mickey Chandler over on Spamtacular. The court found that use of a service that masks who owns a domain (like, in my opinion, Domains by Proxy) counts as material falsification under the US Federal anti-spam law, CAN-SPAM.

The jury is out on whether or not this is likely to be used against other bad actors in the email space, but why risk it? If you're a legitimate business, show the world that you are one by having your domain registration accurately reflect that you own every domain you use.

Winning Strategies for Growing Your Email Subscriber Database

Friday, December 11, 2009 by Joel Book

Lary Stucker of FreshClicks.net just posted my guest blog, Winning Strategies for Growing Your Email Subscriber Database on his Marketing and Analytics Strategies blog.

You can also check out Lary’s guest post on the ExactTarget blog,
4 Ways to Use Analytics to Improve Your Email Campaigns.

We would love to hear feedback from you. You can post a comment below, or let @ExactTarget and @LaryStucker know what you think on twitter.

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.

5 Tips for Mobile Coupon Success

Tuesday, November 24, 2009 by Joel Book

Thinking about using mobile coupons? If you are, here are 5 things you absolutely must know about planning and managing a successful mobile coupon strategy.

1. Make the Offer Relevant to the Consumer. “Opt-in mobile marketing has an enormous potential if done responsibly and is specifically focused on the stores/restaurants that matter to each consumer,” said Alistair Goodman CEO of 1020 Placecast.

A recent study conducted by Harris Interactive of more than 2,000 adults measured cell phone owner preference levels and receptivity for opt-in mobile marketing messages from brick-and-mortar businesses. The study revealed that 51% of cell phone-owning men ages 18-34, and 34% of women in the same age group were interested in receiving opt-in shopping alerts on their cell phones.

The ability to deliver mobile coupons that “personalize offers” to the profile, needs or purchase history of the consumer is a huge advantage for marketers because it drives traffic to stores. But like all things in database marketing, the key is having the right customer data and the right mobile marketing technology to deliver relevant and timely communications.

2. Integrate “Front End” and “Back End” Systems. One of the cardinal sins (and death traps) of any direct marketing campaign is not having your back-end systems and processes in place to properly redeem coupons and capture customer data.

Integrating your “front-end” POS coupon scanning technology with your “back-end” marketing database, CRM, call center, and customer communications software -- such as email -- is an absolute must.

One company on the leading edge of systems integration is Cellfire, a San Jose based mobile couponing service provider. Cellfire has begun matching store loyalty card numbers with mobile phone applications in an effort to solve some of the back- and front-end IT integration problems, according to August Trometer, co creator at Yowza, which provides location-based coupons for the iPhone.

Cellfire’s software application lets customers scan mobile coupons directly from their phones at checkout. The company is currently working with Kroger in Dallas, as well as JCPenney in the Houston area.

Starbucks has also announced that it has begun using Cellfire’s application to test a mobile payment option that lets people buy products by swiping an on-screen barcode that is scanned similar to a plastic Starbucks Card. Sixteen West Coast Starbucks stores are participating in the test.

3. Use Smart POS Technology. Today’s smart phones are wonderful tools for delivering mobile coupons to consumers. But everything can fall apart if your POS technology cannot read the barcode and accept the coupon.

JCPenney has begun testing a new system from Cellfire at Houston area stores that lets customers scan mobile coupons directly from their phones at checkout.

The program, launched in late September at 16 JCPenney locations, is enabled through new imaging scanners installed at registers that can read the "2D" barcode coupons and save sales clerks from having to manually enter promotional codes for coupons.

"These mobile coupons are the ultimate in customer convenience, because there's no need to clip or carry around a printed coupon, and they can be instantly scanned from a cell phone. It's another way we're innovating to enhance the customer's shopping experience," said Mike Boylson, executive vice president and chief marketing officer for JCPenney, in a statement.

4. Use Bar-coded Coupons to Track Customer Purchase Data. Using bar-coded coupons to capture the identity of the customer making the purchase, the promotional code, and the amount of the transaction is smart marketing. And we are about to see an explosion in the use of bar-coded coupons in the US.

Barcodes save time and eliminate errors in data entry. And for marketers focused on using customer purchase data to model customer product preferences and predict future product interests, bar coded coupons provide an ideal method for capturing the data needed for predictive modeling and offer targeting.

The key to using bar-coded mobile coupons is to use standard, familiar SMS, MMS and WAP technologies to deliver a scanable bar-coded message to consumers’ mobile phones.

Water Wheel Car Wash in California, uses mobile coupon technology from OzNet Systems, is to provide mobile coupons for their customers. The company sends bar-coded coupons to their customer’s mobile phones eliminating the need for customers to print out paper coupons therefore reducing waste. To get their mobile coupon, all customers have to do is Text WATERWHEEL to 84045. Customers can choose which product and coupon they desire from any location.

“We are a small business and we have to be conservative about our marketing dollars. As a small business you always have to be looking for something different,” says second generation Water Wheel Car Wash Owner, Alex Naber.

Users of the system can also pull an electronic report showing exactly how effective their marketing campaign has been.

5. Use Mobile Email Rendering Software. According to Len Shneyder of Pivotal Veracity, "The mobile smart phone market is evolving at a rapid tempo. Because the cost of smart phones, the most robust and powerful of the mobile market, is falling almost as quickly as the companies are innovating, the rate of adoption is skyrocketing. More powerful handsets mean more people accessing email on their mobile devices. More varied devices means there are more challenges for email marketers than ever to getting email to render correctly. "

For mobile coupon campaigns to be successful, you must have the right software to ensure your coupon offer and barcode appear the same regardless of whether the consumer is receiving the mobile coupon on smart phones from Blackberry, iPhone, or Palm.

What should you do? Check out eDesign Optimizer and the Design Guide from Pivotal Veracity. These design tools and guidelines will enable you to verify that your links and images work, validate your code, and visually ensure that your mobile email and coupons appear the same regardless of the mobile phone your customer uses.

The Takeaway

Jordan Cohen from Pivotal Veracity says it best, "What we are witnessing in the mobile space is unprecedented. Having the web in the palm of your hand is in demand like no other technology in human history, and it is fueling the biggest revolution in computing in at least 15 years. I've said it before, and now will say it again: The time to adopt a mobile email marketing strategy is now. Blink one or two more times and your competitors might just leave you in the dust."

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.)

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: Best Practices for Utilizing ExactTarget's SOAP APIs

Wednesday, October 14, 2009 by Amanda Cross

We've got a rather thin crowd for the Best Practices for Utilizing ExactTarget's SOAP APIs session. Apparently everyone is already implementing the API in the best possible way...or think they are :)

Manager of the Product Specialist department Dale McCrory returns to the stage for this presentation and starts the session by asking people what topics they would like to see covered today. The first question was on documentation.

YAY! I love when people care about the documentation!

Web Service API Documentation
Dale brings up http://wiki.memberlandingpages.com to demonstrate all of the wonderful web service API documentation that's available there. He takes the group through a technical article on asynchronous processing, the CREATE method, an object, and a property. Bryan Wade, the embedded expert at ExactTarget and emcee of the session, asks how many people in the room have been to the wiki before, and about half of the room had already visited. I think the rest will visit before too long.

Content Management
The second question is about content management and best practices for it. Dale pulls up the AMPscript page in the documentation wiki to find the HTTPGet() function. This function performs a get call against a URL and brings back the content. This tool can be used to interact with an outside system in include the content in the emails.

AMPscript also support XSLT now, so you can interact with ExactTarget with you XML content. The BuildRowSetFromXML() function extends this capability.

Slide Presentation
With the two questions addressed, Bryan prods Dale to get back to the slideshow. The slides cover:

Security
Reliability
Robustness
Flexibility
Messaging content
Stats retrieval - tracking events

Security
Standards-based SOAP security to support authentication

All calls transmit over an SSL connection. The API supports two forms of security:

Plain text username token. This is what everyone's using right now.
X509 certificate encryption for the username token will be available in the 135 release.

.NET, Java, and PHP work the best with our security. Perl is OK. Ruby, ColdFusion, and ASP have troubles dealing with it because they don't deal well with the standards-based security.

Reliability
In this section, we're talking about synchronous versus asynchronous API processing again. Asynchronous processing adds all calls to a queue to be processed when the system is ready, which prevents API calls from being lost if the server is unavailable for any reason.

Other benefits include:

The fact that you get a sub-second response to the fact that the call has been received.
You have multiple options to receive results: HTTP post, Email, and the RETRIEVE API call.
The ConversationID concept that's used with asynch API processing allows you to resend the same call without worrying that it will actually be processed twice if the system had already queued the request.

Question from the floor: sounds like we need to improve our XML API documentation. That product hasn't been enhanced for quite a while, so the doc has gotten a little stale. There's an item for my to-do list.

Robustness
Dale quotes Wikipedia: "Robustness is the quality of being able to withstand stresses, pressures, or changes in procedure or circumstance."

Triggered sends represent the quickest way to get an email sent from the ExactTarget system. Key points help decide whether to use user-initiated (list-based) sends or triggered sends:

How do you want to aggregate tracking?
List based sends aggregate tracking by job. Triggered sends aggregate tracking over a time period when the triggered send was running.
How will email content be made available to the ExactTarget system?
How are unsubscribes managed?
List based sends record unsubs at the list level, or at the All Subscribers level. If a person unsubscribes from a triggered send, they can be unsubscribed from all triggered sends.
How large are your lists?
If you have 1.5 million subscribers, you should start with list based. If you are sending individual messages in response to customer activity, triggered sends are the way to go.

You can keep your subscriber information in lists or data extensions. To help you decide:

Are attribute sets going to be the same for all sends?
If so, you can use lists because you set up attributes for all lists together. If you need different attribute sets for different subsets of clients, then you want data extensions.
Is import performance critical?
If you have 1.5 million subscribers to import, you can import them into a data extension in 10 minutes versus 1-2 hours for a list (this is an approximation...the number of attributes has a big effect on performance as well).
How will unsubscribes be managed?
Each list maintains its own unsubscribes. Data extensions maintain unsubscribes in publication lists.
Bonus point not in the slide: if you are a partner building an application, you probably want to build on lists if possible, because they cost less.

Flexibility
This topic starts with a discussion of data extensions. Data extension are

The only way to use the API to do "rich" queries of data
The way you can add relational models of data en masse or row-by-row
Very fast
Tables in our database schema that are specific to your account

The DataExtension WS API object

Allows the use of upsert
Ties to the DataExtension by CustomerKey (called "external key" in the GUI)
Allows specification of Keys and Nulls
There's also a DataExtensionObject that you can retrieve to bring back a row in the data extension.

Messaging Content
Email, images, and files, oh my!

Text-only email will be supported with 135, in addition to the HTML and HTML/Text multi-part formats.

The Portfolio object allows you to host files in ExactTarget. Images and files that you import into our system are hosted by Akamai, so when people hit these files, they are highly available and don't use your company's bandwidth.

Using AMPscript, you can attach files to your email, but you should use this feature with caution. There's a page for the documentation that's going to be published very soon that talks about best practices for attachments so that you can protect your deliverability while using this feature.

Stats Retrieval and Tracking Events
We ran out of time for the stats retrieval, so we went straight to question and answer, which went by too fast for me to keep up, especially while I"m still on this documentation cloud. :)

Permission-Based Email Marketing: SMS eNewsletter Sign-ups

Tuesday, August 18, 2009 by Kyle Schroeder

I was eating dinner this week in a local fast food restaurant in Anderson, IN and they had a giant box sitting on the counter that encouraged customers to sign-up for their email list.

Since I work for an email marketing company: they got me.

I signed up.

What was good about this?

1. Subscribers are opting-in to the communication.

2. The database is going to be subscribers who want regular communication.

How could this be improved?

1. Convert from paper to SMS. Instead of having me fill out a slip of paper with my contact information, have me opt in by text message.

2. Follow-up and engage immediately. I still have yet to receive any communication and it has been 3 days later. By the time I receive their first “welcome email”, will I still want communication?

This type of SMS campaign can be developed through the email marketing software powered by ExactTarget. SMS campaigns can instantly capture and engage subscribers by simply texting a keyword to a short code. The system replies with a confirmation text and then can ask for an email address in step 2.

You have now grabbed my cell phone number and my email address, two valuable pieces of information that can build a bigger and stronger email marketing program.

Have you considered ExactTarget?

Kyle Schroeder

Slingshot Summer Intern

10 Ridiculously Cool Ways to Sell More on Your E-Commerce Site Using Email

Monday, August 17, 2009 by Bob Ullery

A show of hands: who isn't already using email in their e-commerce environment?

Even if you raised your hand, chances are you're using at least one form of email communication on your e-commerce site; Payment Confirmation. Most payment processing platforms give the customer a receipt via pdf download, confirmation email, or print option.

The premise of this post is to offer some other ideas on how to use automated email in your e-commerce strategy. I encourage you to browse some of my best email marketing agnostic ideas, like those I covered in 7 Awesome Ways to Wow Your Customers Using Voice on Your e-commerce Site. Those are communications that could easily be sent by email, sms, or voice. They include:

Send-to-a-Friend
Dynamic Couponing (I'll revisit this one)
Shipping Alerts
Product In-Stock Notifications
Subscription Renewal Reminders

O.K. the title of the post says 11 cool ways and I totally just listed 5 of 'em, but I've already covered how to leverage those using voice, and as is the case with multi channel marketing the concepts remain the same - only the vehicle changes. So hang on, let's stick with the payment confirmation email and see if we can't add some spice to it...

6. Payment Confirmation Email
I haven't met a person yet who doesn't expect to be given a payment receipt after a purchase whether online or in-store. In fact, it's one interaction that the customer needs and values. It's not optional, a receipt must be given.

The disadvantage of a paper receipt in-store is that the interaction ends as soon as the clerk slides the boring little ticket across the counter to the customer. Black and white, OCR text with nothing interesting on it at all.

The advantage of an email receipt is that it can be dynamic and leverage real-time data so that you can upsell and cross-sell more product to a customer who has already chosen to buy from you.

I'll go more in-depth on exactly HOW to do this in future blog posts. But in a nut-shell you can pull in the customer's past browsing data from your analytic provider, marry it with the customer's recent purchase data and show them products that relate to the purchased products and/or the categories for which they have shown an interest in. All within ExactTarget.

We have productized integrations with many analytic providers including Omniture, Google Analytics, Coremetrics, WebTrends and others.

Really, you can use cross-sell/upsell & product recommendations in EVERY email you send. Why not? Some of these next ideas you could easily mix and match into any of your sends.

7. Couponing / Live Offers
Did you know that ExactTarget can render 25 different coupon types including Codabar, UPC, EAN and MSI? Well we can.

Did you also know that we can manage your coupon redemption on a global or a per subscriber scale with data provided directly from your payment system? What that means is that we can make it impossible to redeem a coupon more than once if your concerned about sharing, OR, using our social network capabilities help make a single coupon viral.

8. CRM Integration
We have productized CRM integrations with Salesforce.com and Microsoft Dynamics CRM that not only allow you to send to reports generated in the CRM platform but allow you to pull in real-time data from the CRM vendor at time-of-send. That means you can pull in purchase data or account data (past due invoices, CRM campaign data) and show content according based on the subscriber.

These integrations have exposed AMPScript functions that you can use directly in the content of your emails to CRUD your CRM data.

9. Follow Up Email Drip Campaigns
With ExactTarget, you can automatically send an email (with dynamic content, product upsells, coupons, etc) on a set number days AFTER a purchase or notable site event. Some ways to leverage this capability are to ask for product reviews, checkout feedback, or to offer a coupon or promo code to return to the site and buy something else.

10. Abandoned Shopping Cart
Another powerful automated email that your ExactTarget system can send on-the-fly is the time tested abandoned shopping cart email. It goes something like this: 'we noticed that you put the following items in your cart, but didn't checkout. Was there a problem with your checkout experience? Click here to finish your checkout with an additional 10% off all the products that were left in your cart.'

There's More
E-commerce sites are perfect candidates for black-belt database marketing because of the amount of transactional and behavioral data they collect. Do you have any ideas on how e-commerce sites can use email in their marketing strategies? Post them in the comments below or come chat with me at our Connections User Conference this fall.

One to One Marketing is My Kung Fu - and It is Strong (Thanks to Landing Pages)

Friday, August 14, 2009 by Bob Ullery

One to One Marketing Kung Fu with Landing Pages

Hey all. Today I'll be discussing how to strengthen your e-commerce kung-fu by utilizing ExactTarget's Landing Page technology.

As you might have realized from browsing some of the other posts on our blog, targeted email marketing is only part of the story. A question to ponder is: 'Why personalize a customer's email only to send them to a non-personalized web page?'.

There often seems to be a disconnect in the minds of marketers when it comes to the partnership between email and their website. If you harness the power of one to one marketing for email shouldn't your website also present content to the user in a one to one manner? You've taken meticulous care to present precise product offerings in your email (driven by analytic data, purchase data, engagement data, etc), but when a subscriber clicks through they're shown the same content as everyone else. What?

The gap is apparent, but the remedy isn't always so easy. Each site is unique in both hardware and software, and implementing a true one to one strategy with customized content isn't always an option. There could be high development costs or long production runs associated with integrating this strategy into your current site.

But what if there was a middleware that could be skinned to look exactly like your site and could serve customized content as a stand-alone page or be embedded into your existing pages? Obviously there is or I wouldn't be writing about it:

Enter ExactTarget Landing Pages.

Landing pages are an easy way to spin up dynamic behavioral and/or profile driven web pages tailored to the individual. Often these can be spun up by marketers without involving their IT crew, and since they function as middleware you can consider them platform agnostic.

They can leverage the same Dynamic Content and AMPScript driven content areas that you already use in your emails, including those pre-created and stored in the system. You can even drag and drop them into the page when creating it just like when you create your emails in ExactTarget.

There's also a new(er) Smart Capture tool designed specifically for landing pages. With it, you can easily create forms that talk directly to your ExactTarget data, and optionally, your Microsoft Dynamics CRM or Salesforce.com data as well. You can visually create forms that add users to lists, send triggered emails, modify data extensions, and many other tasks. All of the HTML and required AMPScript is generated for you. All you have to do is drag and drop it into your page.

Landing pages can harness ExactTarget Live Content including Live Offers. With Live Offers, you can serve generic or subscriber specific promotional codes AND track the redemption of those codes so that they can/can't be shared or expire after a certain time.

ExactTarget has a productized Google Ad Manager integration that can also be leveraged within landing pages as well. Integrations like this help bridge the gap between your real site and your landing pages. You could show the same ads on your landing pages that you do on your site, simply by dragging them in, while your impression and click tracking stays intact. This integration can even show different ads based on profile attributes. Talk about a value ad to your advertisers! Real targeting!

Landing Pages as Mini-Apps

The beauty behind landing pages is that the entire ExactTarget platform is at your disposal. Think of a landing page as a mini application that can do almost anything that you can manually do in the system. Not only can you customize layout and content on-the-fly based on who the subscriber is, but using AMPScript and data extensions you could:

Create an out-of-stock reminder system
Interact with a user using SMS and/or Voice
Create a CMS application
Create a shopping cart with checkout system
Develop a user commenting system

Use your imagination. Literally, you could build nearly anything that you could on your own server. Data extensions are the databases and AMPScript is the programming language. Programs are the cron jobs that run your interactions.

Flexibility

The true power behind landing pages is that they can stand alone or be embedded via an iframe into your current site. I've even created AMPScript-only landing pages that I'll ping via ajax to do some processing for me and are completely hidden to everyone else. It's a way other than our API to do some really robust tasks and is useful when used client-side.

FYI, I built the ExactTarget Extensions Network entirely on Landing Pages.

Kung Fu
Like I said in the title of this post 'One to One Marketing is My Kung Fu - and It is Strong'. Now your Kung Fu can be strong too by using landing pages to bridge the gap between your emails and website to reach true one to one marketing nirvana.

--------------

Follow me on Twitter: @bobbr

Weather Delays, Travel, & SMS Notices

Tuesday, August 4, 2009 by Kyle Schroeder

I hate it when events get rained out or planes get delayed because of bad weather. What’s even worse is when I drive all the way there and don’t find out about the delay until I’ve already wasted an hour of driving and $10 in gas money.

Those in the travel industry have a real opportunity to take advantage of the power of SMS campaigns to connect with their customers in a relevant way. From weather updates to checking frequent flyer mile balances, SMS campaigns can be a way to cut through the clutter and build a subscriber database that is engaged.

The Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra uses ET’s SMS campaigns to notify ticket holders of changes in events and to allow audience members the chance to vote on the final song of the night. Airport & Plane

Airlines could update travelers on ticket information, boarding times, and weather delays.

I know that when I travel, I take my cell phone (but, honestly, I take it everywhere). To be engaged with text message updates with relevant information can come in handy alongside of a powerful email marketing software, such as the one ExactTarget has to offer.

Kyle Schroeder

Slingshot Summer Intern

Aptera Software Overhauls Email Marketing Strategy and Increases Lead Production

Wednesday, July 29, 2009 by Joel Book

Aptera Software is a great example of how a small B-to-B marketer can produce big results by using email for lead generation and brand building. After overhauling its email strategy, Aptera is consistently generating open rates of 30% and click through rates of 10%.

As a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, Aptera specializes in custom software development and website design. The company serves clients in Healthcare, Manufacturing, Financial Services, and Retail segments and is fast gaining a reputation for its innovative solutions.

Recently, I had the opportunity to talk with Aptera’s co-founder, TK Herman and Brooke Francesi, who heads up email marketing for company. One of the things that impresses me about Aptera’s email strategy is their “less is more” philosophy regarding the size of their email subscriber database. As Francesi points out, “We’ve learned that it is far better to have a smaller list of highly engaged subscribers who want to hear from us than it is to have a big list of people who are passive.” As evidence of this commitment to list quality, Aptera’s list of subscribers for its quarterly newsletter is a lean 2,600. And the list of subscribers for Aptera’s monthly newsletter for users of Aptera Scorecard, a web-based firm management tool designed to meet the needs of a variety of Professional Services firms, is 15,000.

Both Herman and Francesi are quick to point out that, in addition to keeping their email subscriber list clean, the other big keys to their success in B-to-B email marketing are engaging content and engaging design. As TK Herman says, “If you provide information that is of value to the subscriber, and deliver that content in a newsletter that is attractive, you’ll generate response.”

Karen Bannan of BtoB Magazine recently interviewed Brooke Francesi about how Aptera re-tooled its email strategy after switching to ExactTarget for its email campaign application in early 2008. You can read the full article at BtoB Online.

Best Practices for Successful BtoB Email Marketing – Use Paid Search to Attract Email Subscribers

Friday, July 24, 2009 by Joel Book

No matter where I speak, one of the most frequently asked questions I receive is, “What tactics work best for building my email subscriber database?” In fact, in ExactTarget’s 2009 Email List Growth Study, email list growth is ranked #3 by marketers in their list of top priorities for improving email marketing performance in 2009.

Considering the fact that email list attrition averages 25% per year, BtoB marketers need to stay focused on constantly replenishing their email subscriber database. And to attract quality email subscribers, the one tactic you cannot afford to overlook is Paid Search.

Earlier this week, Chris Dawkins, founder and CEO of search engine optimization company Trace Media Marketing, had an excellent article in BtoB Online in which he discussed best practices for using PPC (Pay Per Click) or paid search in combination with SEO (Search Engine Optimization) or natural search to attract visitors to your website or landing page.

One of the reasons I’m a big proponent of using paid search is because it allows you to fine-tune your SEO strategy. As Dawkins points out in his article, “testing various keywords and phrases with paid search can be beneficial to your SEO efforts. For example, you can figure out quickly which keywords convert to leads or sales. As your SEO campaign starts delivering traffic, you can back off a little from your paid campaign and focus more on SEO.”

Paid search also allows marketers to lead prospective email subscribers to the desired landing page where they can be invited to subscribe and identify their needs and interests – data that can be used to deliver email content that is relevant and timely.

Still think search is an option? Think again. Forrester Research, in their recently released “U.S. Interactive Marketing Forecast, 2009–2014,” says search marketing spending will total $31.5 billion by 2014 as more marketing budget shifts to interactive media.

How to track opt-ins?

Friday, June 19, 2009 by Al Iverson

A client wrote me in response to a previous blog post on spam complaints, asking about the best way to track how people opt-in. That's a good, but complicated question. It might be too detailed for a blog post, but here are my thoughts on the topic. (Feel free to contact me if you have any specific questions.)

If you're using an online method of list signup, track all the variables you request from the person. Name, address, phone number, whatever. Also, make sure you track the IP address they signed up from. If you're really technology savvy, track browser information (Firefox on Linux, for example). All of this data will help prove to ExactTarget that the person opted-in, if there is ever a spam complaint issue.

If recipients opt-in to your mailings when ordering a product or service from you, the transaction details are important. Obviously we're not going to ask you to provide the person's credit card number, but the rest of the details (what was ordered and when, with details) helps to make the case. I used to work for an e-commerce service provider, and that data was always excellent protection against spam allegations.

If the signup method is an offline signup method like a paper form, record all that information obtained via the paper form. I'd recommend recording it in something like an Excel file or Access database. On the (unlikely) chance somebody would ever sue you for spam, you probably should keep those paper forms, too. Make sure you record the date that the form was filled out.

You don't have to actually upload all of this extra information into ExactTarget. It can amount to a lot of data, and if you're not actually using it for segmentation or personalization, I wouldn't bother. The important thing is that you keep this data somewhere that you can access, in the event that we contact you about a spam complaint. Keep it in an Excel file, an Access database, text file, your CRM system, or some place similar.

Keep in mind that we're going to ask you for this info only in unique situations. We're not asking you to pull this information and send it to us for every single spam complaint received back from an ISP, for example. We have a process wherein specific complaints are escalated when the potential for a broader spam issue is observed, and that's when we're going to reach out.

And thank you everyone who has helped us resolve a spam complaint issue by providing this information upon request. As I've mentioned before, there's a direct tie between resolving these issues and getting your mail delivered. I'm very appreciative of how helpful our clients are in working with us to ensure their deliverability isn't negatively impacted by a spam issue.

Effective List Growth Webinar

Tuesday, June 9, 2009 by Morgan Stewart

Tamara Gielen, founder of the Email Marketers' Club, and I will be presenting highlights from the 2009 List Growth Study in an upcoming webinar Effective List Growth: Insights from the 2009 List Growth Study. If you have already downloaded the whitepaper, you know that it is full of charts and analysis of current trends in email list growth. Believe it or not, less than one half of the charts we created from the study made it into the final whitepaper.

During the webinar, we will provide actionable strategies, examples, and tips for growing and nurturing your most precious asset--your subscriber database! We'll also have a time for Q&A. If you have a question you would like to submit in advance, leave a comment or send me an email at mstewart(at)exacttarget(dot)com.

Register here!

Details

When:
Tuesday, June 23, 2009 2:00 pm EST

Presenters:
     Tamara Gielen, Founder, Email Marketers' Club
     Morgan Stewart, Director of Research, ExactTarget

Duration:
     1 hour

Description:
Join ExactTarget’s Morgan Stewart and Tamara Gielen, founder of the Email Marketer’s Club, as they present highlights from the 2009 Email List Growth Study whitepaper. Get the inside scoop on developing a successful list growth strategy with examples and insights from experienced B2B and B2C marketers. You’ll learn:

Keys to developing a sustainable list growth strategy
How to find the right subscribers for your list
The hot new tactics you should consider trying in 2009
What both B2B and B2C email marketers around the world consider the best list growth strategies
Which list growth tactics you should approach with caution

If you’re ready to create a successful, compliant, ROI-producing list growth strategy, be sure to attend this information-packed webinar. Sign up today!

Permission Failure: Exchanging Business Cards

Wednesday, May 27, 2009 by Al Iverson

I received a B2B spam email today. That’s not too remarkable. I get anywhere from four to eight of them a day. The volume is irritating enough that I log them, and I always reply and ask where they got my email address from. (Some day, I might even “out” some of the worst offenders, highlighting their lack of permission for the whole world to see. And to shine an uncomfortable spotlight on those awful “business contact database” selling companies, who sell B2B lists.)

This time, I got a reply back to my query. The sender indicated that I gave them a business card at a conference.

Okay, so it’s somebody I’ve actually met. That’s fine, that’s good. I give out a lot of business cards at conferences. People always want my business card, and often ask me if it’s okay to email me a deliverability question or two at some point in the future. Time permitting, I welcome deliverability questions via email, and answer as many as I can.

But, just because I gave you my email address, how does that mean that I wanted to be subscribed to your company’s newsletter? A competitor company, even. Think of how poorly considered this is, on multiple levels. Wanted mail is well delivered mail. Did I want this mail? No, I didn’t ask for it, and I didn’t expect it. Also, do you think it’s wise to obtain competitor email addresses at conferences and sign them up for your newsletter? Do you really want to broadcast what you’re doing, directly to your competitors?

The real issue here is the logical leap (or lack of one) from “you may have my contact information” to “please send me your newsletter.” I stated the former by handing over my card. I did not state or even imply the latter. So how does somebody make the logical leap from contact info to permission? I’m not seeing it, because there’s a step missing: Asking me if I wanted to receive your newsletter. That’s what permission is all about. Ask, don’t assume.

In this case, the guy assumed. And that assumption was a bad one, and it colored my opinion of him, and his company’s permission practices, accordingly.

I’m sure somebody somewhere will take a different point of view and suggest that gosh, this email was really targeted (or should have just been targeted a little better), and then it would have been fine. That’s untrue. “Properly targeted” spam is still spam, and the proof is in the spam complaints. Send mail to people who don’t want it, even if it’s on topic, and it garners spam complaints. It’s that simple.

In this case, I know I wasn’t the only person who received this mailing, and I know that some of the other recipients were similarly unhappy about it. I guess I’m not alone in thinking that a business card exchange doesn’t equate with opt-in permission.

Hidden but Engaged Subscribers

Wednesday, April 22, 2009 by Chip House

We have worked with a number of customers on understanding which segments of their email database are most engaged and why. As I've mentioned previously, often the unengaged portion not only are a drag to your ROI, but they can cause deliverability issues. Subscriber segments that joined your opt-in database over a year ago, but haven't opened or clicked, could be especially problematic since there is a direct correlation between complaint rates and age (time since opt-in). When complaint rates go up, deliverability rates go down.

However, the solution is not as simple as cutting or reopting subscribers in after 6 or 12 months. It could be that drastic, especially if your deliverability reputation is already in the tank. But, your actions could be as simple as reducing frequency, changing content, or finding the "hidden but engaged" segments I recently wrote about in the Email Experience blog.

As I wrote there, here's what I recommend:
"First, rather than automatically re-opting in unengaged subscribers or discarding them from your list, try reducing frequency. A recent test of ours showed we were able to get 4 times the number of subscribers to reengage by reducing from weekly to monthly mailings when compared to sending a single re-optin campaign.

Second, entice your offline-only shoppers to use a coupon or other tracking code that will help them identify themselves.

Finally, provide a number of ways that recipients can share their emails with their friends – either standard viral links or via new technologies allowing sharing with social networks."

For the latter, you might want to try our new Social Forward solution we're introducing to our customers via our Innovations Lab on May 1st, and will be rolling out in our summer release.

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