Design Triggered Email

When people talk about the basic elements of a successful email marketing campaign, there are a lot of facets to consider—responsive design, relevant messaging, personalization, pertinent send time, and beyond. But one facet of a successful email campaign that many marketers regrettably overlook is deliverability. After all, no matter how great the email, if it doesn’t reach the inbox, it can’t be effective.

Which brings us to Sky Angel.

Sky Angel came to ExactTarget in 2007 after experiencing deliverability issues sending emails from their internal servers. As a faith and family television...

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Join Kristina Huffman, Design Practice Lead, as she discusses and answers seven common questions about responsive email design:

What is responsive email?
Responsive design is a set of techniques in web design and development used to adapt a website to be readable on any screen and/or platform on which it's displayed. These techniques are being repurposed for emails. A responsive layout uses a piece of CSS3 code called a media query to detect the pixel size of the screen on which that email is opened. Based on the screen size detected, multiple stylesheets may be triggered to alter the layout and...

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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 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.

It was no suprise to us that Australians are leading the world in their adoption of technology and in partiular how they connect with brands on mobile devices. The...

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Today’s retail landscape is more challenging than ever. Data is everywhere—from Point-of-Sale (POS) to email, Twitter, and Foursquare—but it’s only useful if retailers can find a way to connect the dots and communicate with each customer as an individual.

Managing all this data and using it to create a unified, 360-degree view of each customer may seem like a daunting task. But this week I’m sharing three quick wins retailers can implement immediately to solve your most pressing interactive marketing challenges.

Challenge #3: Disconnected online and offline experiences

Quick Win #3: Capture...

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ExactTarget has a larger-than-ever team focused on leading the market in our Voice of Customer efforts. A major initiative this year is to further enhance how we "close the loop" with clients after they fill out our annual Client Success Survey. 

As a company with roots in email marketing, it may not be surprising that a large part of this strategy involves triggering targeted emails to teams across our organization when survey responses come in. These emails have proven to be instrumental in not only quickly informing about what are clients are saying, but also spurring action.

Here are some of...

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Happy Birthday to SMS! On this day 20 years ago, Neil Papworth sent the phrase “Merry Christmas” from his computer to the Orbitel 901 handset of Vodafone’s Richard Jarvis, and so began the great SMS race.

According to the Wall Street Journal, “In the developing world, where smartphone penetration is low, SMS remains a key technology, enabling mobile money transfers, the sending of alerts on weather and planting advice for farmers, and distribution of health information for consumers. Globally, SMS traffic is continuing to grow and stood at 7.4 trillion messages in 2011, up 44% from the year...

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Each Thursday at 11am EST, marketers from around the world join the ExactTarget user community on Twitter for a conversation about trends and campaign ideas across the interactive marketing industry. We call this virtual coffee chat the ExactTarget Café. 

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Ah yes, the wonderful world of reengagement. It’s easy to think that once a subscriber provides you with their email address, they’re yours for life! But in reality, they could un-engage and start ignoring your communications at any moment.

Subscribers stop engaging for a number of reasons—message volume, frequency, irrelevancy, etc. But many retailers are sitting back and watching this happen, without adjusting their programs to reengage these subscribers. In fact, many marketers continue sending the same messages at the same frequency to lists where more than 50% of the subscribers haven’t...

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You are in the final stages of choosing ExactTarget as you new email service provider (ESP) and the realization that the task of either migrating your existing campaigns, or integrating a new ESP into your back-end system comes into focus. Whether you are using the services provided by ExactTarget or a consulting partner, here are the top 5 tips that we give clients to ease the burden on your team at the same time as speeding up the implementation. 

1. Define your marketing objectives and goals
   
   Prior to engaging with your assigned services team or partner agency, it is critical that you have...

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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 Jeremy Mayes, account executive at PPC Associates. Jeremy has over 15 years of direct marketing experience with a passion for search engine marketing. We discussed fundamentals and insights for maximizing your pay-per-click campaigns. Here's a summary of our discussion:

@ETNexus Q1: What are some...

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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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First it was Black Friday. Then, Cyber Monday became as common as fruitcake jokes during the holiday season. Now, get ready for Green Monday.

But, what the heck is Green Monday? The term was actually coined by eBay to describe its best sales day in December, and is designated as the second Monday in December. The main significance is that Green Monday signals the last chance for shoppers to receive online orders with regular ground shipping. ComScore reported $954 million was spent online on Green Monday in 2010. This represented the second largest day of online spending in the 2010 season,...

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In the last post of our series, we’ll explore the vast array of message types and the formats they take on. View my previous posts to learn more about Contact Strategy Development and Message Personalities.

MESSAGE TYPES
A successful contact strategy will be a thoughtful combination of the message types needed to meet unique business goals and subscriber needs. Which make sense for your brand?

Newsletters News / Editorial Feed Welcome / Opt-In Profile Updates / Preferences Promotions / Cross-Sell Retail Promotions Rewards Coupons

Reengagement / Retention Subscription Confirmations Alerts /...

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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.

We hosted guest, RapidBuyr, a B2B daily deals site for small-to-medium businesses. They offer discounted offerings for software, hardware, web development and design services, IT outsourcing, events, SaaS offerings, and more. During our #NexusCafe Twitter chat, the RapidBuyr team and our chat participants discussed strategies for...Read More »

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 the #NexusCafe Twitter chat was Jeff Rohrs, VP of Marketing at ExactTarget and the coauthor of the ExactTarget Subscribers, Fans, and Followers research series. He joined us to share how digital marketers can leverage mobile in their overall campaign mix. Participants shared their insights and experiences with mobile as a...Read More »

As marketers, it's difficult to push engaging, relevant, timely content in every single email you send. When you start to see those open and click rates dip, it may be time to wake them up with a re-engagement campaign.

After pouring through various marketing email examples, we've compiled a few of the reoccurring tactics marketers use to get a subscriber's attention.

Education:
The main message of this tactic is to encourage subscribers to make the most of their subscription. Give instructions on how subscribers can get the most value from your emails. Unengagement may mean they have a lack of...Read More »