Digital Marketing Systems

Earlier this week, salesforce.com Chairman and CEO Marc Benioff and I announced that we have entered into a definitive agreement under which salesforce.com will acquire ExactTarget. The response to the announcement has been tremendous, and it’s been great seeing so many share our excitement for how ExactTarget and salesforce.com will increase the value proposition for customers of both companies and deliver the marketing platform of choice for CMOs.

Since the announcement, I have received a tremendous amount of positive feedback from our clients and partners, and I wanted to follow up and...

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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 the virtual coffee chat the ExactTarget Café. 

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In my last post, "Are you Leaving Money on the Table by Manually Merchandising Your Site?", I explained how retailers can take a staggered approach to migrate from manually merchandising their ecommerce site to using automated recommendations.

Also in this last post, I mentioned the importance of not relying on “free” ecommerce platform add-ons. Today we’ll take this idea a step further and focus on how sophisticated product recommendations engines incorporate real-time customer insights with merchant rules to create a truly personalized experience for your customers. 

#5 Way Retail Marketers...

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In my last post, "Are You Narrowing Your Shopping Experience to a Single Channel?", I explained how interacting with shoppers in the same way regardless of channel could produce a bad user experience, and that retailer may be missing out on an opportunity to personalize the user experience for the “next best offer” for a particular channel.

In this post, we'll look at how non-targeted or blast emails could be causing increased opt-outs, more un-engaged subscribers, and a poor user experience.

#3 Way Retail Marketers are Leaving Money On the Table: Sending Non-Targeted or Blast Emails

Sending the...

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Once upon a time, in an age not so long ago, marketers were schooled to create a mobile-optimized version of their website. While this approach still offers advantages over most single sites, updating content on two separate sites is inefficient—and gets old quickly.

Smartphone penetration in the U.S. has reached 55%, and tablet usage climbs daily. Does that mean you now must have a tablet-optimized site, as well?

Not if you want to keep your sanity. Enter: responsive design.

Responsive designs adapt automatically to the size of the device, meaning the same site is navigable, legible,...

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If there was ever a buzzword in business that defined an era it would have to be “Big Data.” Everywhere you look there’s another article about merging data sets to make more relevant business decisions. To kick off blogging in 2013 I plan to write a few posts about how ExactTarget’s platform helps organizations leverage other technology providers to make more sense of this term. But first, what is Big Data? IBM shares some pretty eye-opening statistics in defining this term:

Every day, we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data — so much that 90% of the data in the world today has been created in...

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During a game of trivia the other night, I decided to cheat! I pulled out my phone, and was able to find out “Silent Bob’s” real name in less than 10 seconds.

This availability of information has programmed our society to have very high expectations when it comes to the question-and-answer process. If we have a hard time finding the answer to a question, we often get frustrated and build a negative connotation with brands that make it difficult to find information we seek.  This is not a new concept, so when I went to check out some of the most prolific B2B brands, I was surprised to see how...

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Over the next several weeks, we will be sharing predictions on the future of marketing from 25 industry thought leaders. These predictions have been compiled in our new whitepaper, Inspired Marketing Predictions for 2013. Today, Ashraf Montaser of AdInfinity shares his thoughts.

True Cross-Channel Marketing Arrives

How many times have you heard the term “cross-channel” bandied about? As a marketer, the answer is probably more times than your average political candidate has been pictured kissing babies—constantly.

What is usually meant is that you can do web and social and email and offline and...

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Over the next several weeks, we will be sharing predictions on the future of marketing from 25 industry thought leaders. These predictions have been compiled in our new whitepaper, Inspired Marketing Predictions for 2013. Today, Jeff Eden of DEG Digital shares his thoughts.

The Year of “Omnichannel”

Most organizations are collecting and using data to drive sales and help decisions. However, few are truly taking advantage of the opportunities in front of them to leverage that data for successful, meaningful, sustainable engagement— usually erring by being too focused on tactics without cohesive...

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At ExactTarget, we take our clients’ feedback very seriously. While we have several channels for listening to them, from beta programs to 3sixty to Twitter, our Client Success Survey is the cornerstone of our Voice of Customer initiatives.

With thousands of responses in 2012, our clients have spoken. It’s helpful to hear about things we’re doing right. Over 2/3 of respondents agree that we:

• Are easy to do business with
• Care about our customers and partners
• Are trustworthy and innovative
• Have great Sales Consultants and Relationship Managers

More importantly, we heard about what we can do to improve....

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Our most advanced and tenured users rave about how great it is to have a real, live person talking to them. Someone who can find an answer that's personalized for their use of ExactTarget rather than a generalized scripted one. They come to us to have someone who understands not just the technology but also the industry, the nuances of email deliverability, and the importance of the fact that the report that they accidentally deleted is due in 3 hours. We have built our orange culture around empowering you, making you look like heroes and working as a team. 

How can you take this back into...

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How do you better operationalize your social media efforts to be truly effective? According to Valeria Maltoni - Brand Strategist and Author of the Conversation Agent, its critical that you integrate people and technology effectively to succeed in social medial

1. People: to give your best to customers and partners, you need the best from your teams. Social media enables you to achieve a broader strategy and purpose by activating all employees on behalf of your brand. When everyone is involved, it’s not about who anymore, it’s about how.

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The ExactTarget team invites you to participate in our #NexusCafe Twitter chat this Thursday  and every Thursday from 11am-12pm ET, where we discuss emerging topics and trends from across the interactive marketing world. The virtual coffee chat is hosted directly on Twitter, hosted by @ETNexus. Follow the #NexusCafe hashtag in your favorite Twitter application and be sure and add the hashtag to your tweet to participate. The person with the best tweets wins a Starbucks gift card! 

Our guest for this week's #NexusCafe chat is Stephanie DeWitt, Corporate Email Marketing Strategist at...

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Pointpal is an Australian and Singapore-based smartphone loyalty solution that helps consumers move from physical loyalty and stamp cards, to digital reward cards and memberships on their phone. Merchants can engage with Pointpal to build up communities of loyal consumers, offering tangible rewards for their loyalty, and engage with them in a true 360° fashion. For Pointpal, email marketing and automated email programs are a big part of their success. Pointpal recognised early on that relevancy is a critical component of success. They engaged ExactTarget for a way to send and track...

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Each Thursday at 11 a.m. 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.

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They say that “two is better than one.” But when it comes to interactive marketing, I’d have to disagree.

I think that ONE is better than two.

We’ve all heard that siloed marketing is unsustainable and a thing of the past—if you keep your interactive marketing data separate from your social, website, point of sale, and other customer data,providing a cohesive brand experience for the end consumer seems further and further away. After all, your customers don’t silo their interactionswith your brand—why should you?

So, how can you unsilo your marketing and start functioning as ONE cohesive unit? 

Sta...

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I'm under the belief that pure story-telling, personalized data, and integrated marketing systems are the pinnacle of success for any marketing professional. Or at least it should be. It is the humanization of marketing systems that defines the next generation of marketing. However, there is one thing that reigns true over all - at the end of the sales cycle we are still dealing with an individual, a human, not a business.

I was reminded of this while reading the current issue of Direct Marketing Magazine. Tim Peterson has an excellent article defining and detailing the transformation of Dell's...

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The ExactTarget Nexus team invites you to participate in our #NexusCafe Twitter chat tomorrow and every Thursday from 11am-12pm ET, where we discuss emerging topics and trends from across the interactive marketing world. The virtual coffee chat is hosted directly on Twitter, hosted by @ETNexus. Follow the #NexusCafe hashtag and be sure and add the hashtag to your tweet to participate. The person with the best tweets wins a Starbucks gift card!

For our upcoming #NexusCafe chat this week, our featured guests will be the folks from Crown Partners. The team will join us to talk about how to...

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Facebook, Twitter, Email and mobile continue to change the face of online marketing.  eMarketer Chief Executive Officer and Co-founder Geoff Ramsey fueled the conversation to more than 3,000 global marketers during his recent Connections ’11 keynote presentation.

The author of Digital Impact: The Two Secrets to Online Marketing Success,Ramsey outlined the unique challenges online marketers face in connecting with customers in today’s digital world, explaining how driving online marketing success requires two essential ingredients: Measurement and “Magnetic Content.” 

The first ingredient...

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