This is one in a series of columns exploring the examples and trends highlighted in The Best of the Email Swipe File.

IVCi

Type: Promotional email
Send date: Q2 2013
Subject line: IVCi conversation

“While most emails work best as HTML emails, we’ve found that drip emails are the most successful when they’re in a rich text format, which makes them appear as though they’re a one-to-one communication between a sales rep and a prospect. This email from IVCi is short, conversational, and includes a personalized signature to enhance the impression that the email is coming directly from a sales rep.”
—Mathe...

This is a guest blog post for ExactTarget by Raquel Richardson, and a follow-up to her post earlier this month. Raquel is the founder of Silver Square, a marketing firm that helps clients market with their story and home of the Story Standards Guide. Learn more about how your can market with a story in her latest book, Marketing With A Story, due out June 2013.

Our clients consistently have similar challenges within their business. Some relate to financial reasons and some to sales. Most of these challenges can be solved with their company’s story. We have developed and proven a process to help...

If you’ve recently implemented a marketing automation system, or are thinking about doing so in the near future, then you’re probably ready to start dazzling your email recipients with highly targeted email communications, measuring and reporting on marketing campaign effectiveness, and automating tedious manual tasks like lead assignment. But first, let’s go through a few marketing automation dos and don’t — you don’t want to risk jumping in too quickly now, do you?

Before we get to all the great things you can and should be doing with your marketing automation system, let’s get a few of...

Regardless of how long you’ve been using (or not using) a marketing automation tool, you should always be on the lookout for ways to improve your marketing efforts—whether it’s by implementing drip campaigns, exploring the wonders of dynamic content, or creating highly targeted email campaigns for specific audiences. The point is, there are always new and exciting things to try, especially with all of the extra time that you free up by implementing an automation system in the first place.

But how do you know what the next step is?

The best way to make sure that you’re always progressing...

When it comes to email marketing in the B2B space, one of the hottest new trends is drip-nurturing campaigns created with marketing automation. With the adoption of marketing automation reaching as high as 76% in the most progressive industries, it is easy to see why nurturing is the new “black”. So let's look at one of the biggest mistakes people make when creating lead nurturing emails.

First, let's talk about what a nurturing program actually is. Whatever term you use--drip-nurturing, lead nurturing, email nurturing, etc.--a nurturing campaign is an email program that executes automatically...

If you’ve mastered marketing automation 101, and even tackled our 9 steps to go beyond the marketing automation basics, then you’re ready for a few of our expert tips. At this point, you should be delivering highly relevant and dynamic email content, sending out drip emails to nurture prospects over time, and managing your social profiles using real-time and scheduled posts.

Sound about right? If so, then read on to find out how you can continue to improve your marketing automation efforts with these 8 steps, inspired by the Mastering the Art of Marketing Automation eBook:

1. Don’t get lazy. At...

Mastered the basics of marketing automation? If the answer is yes, I'm guessing you've already begun reaping the rewards of your initial automation efforts. I'm also surmising that your CRM system is busy collecting plenty of customer and prospect data, and you're actively engaged on multiple social channels. At this point, you might even have a little extra time in your schedule to dive into your RSS feed, or take a longer smoothie break.

You're off to a good start.

That being said, there's always more to learn about the complex clockwork of marketing automation. Take your knowledge to the...

Marketing automation is the intersection of many useful features and functions. It's a proven fact that marketing automation software gives marketers full visibility into aspects of the sales cycle that were previously a mystery. But the sheer number of buttons and tools can seem daunting if they're not old-hat to you just yet.

As you begin to build an effective marketing automation program, you can begin to gain a holistic view of your marketing activities. From there, you can streamline traditionally manual processes (like customer segmentation, email marketing, and campaign management).

Start ...

As a kid my favorite question was "Why?" I'd ask my mother and father a hundred times a day, "Why this", and "Why that"?

They were good parents and would indulge my mindless questions. I never stopped asking questions, and as a marketer you should never stop asking that most important question: "Why?"

Marketing automation is a recent phenomenon and has made huge waves. Clicz.com reported 76% of the worlds largest SaaS companies are using marketing automation, and among these are some of the biggest brands in the world. The question you should ask yourself, is "Why?" Why are so many comapnies...

Let’s face it: gaining and retaining customers can often feel like a delicate negotiation process. What is the right mix between what you’ll give in the way of offers and discounts to what your customers gain through their interactions with you?

However, retailers will have more than just price in their bargaining arsenals. In this post, we explore the benefits of using an abandoned cart program to recapture lost revenue.

#1 Way Retail Marketers are Leaving Money On the Table: Not Having an Abandoned Cart Strategy

Our Retail Touchpoints Exposed data found that only 22 percent of retailers on the...

I was doing some consulting recently for a company and they asked a great question, so I wanted to share it (and the solution, of course).

We were discussing sales enablement drip programs, and how to help sales keep up with more prospects over a long sales cycle. We discussed putting in place some very specific drip programs which would come from the sales reps. They loved the concept, but wondered what would happen if a prospect got an automated email and a "real" email from the sales rep in the same day?

This is a great question, and one that not enough marketers ask themselves. If you don't...

50 years ago we only had a few media outlets: print, television, radio, and maybe one or two others. Now it seems we have a new media outlet everyday. Case in point: just the other day Twitter released Vine.

Vine, for those of you late to the party, is a 6 second video loop. Imagine Instagram for video, meets Twitter. Twitter calls it, “The best way to see and share life in motion." The 6 second lenth is the key here. Sally Hogshead states that with the increased volume of content these days, we only have 9 seconds to reach someone with our message. Putting constraints on the length of video...

If a company is serious about video marketing, they might need the services of Wistia, a fast-growing online video hosting company.

Wistia hosts videos for companies so that prospects don't have to leave the site to view it or watch ads. By using Wistia, marketers get analytics on user behavior and interactivity with the video. If the video was a hit, and most people watched it straight through, perhaps the company will produce another one like it. If it wasn't successful, it's time to come up with a new concept.

And so it begins again. The Consumer Electronics Show is currently running in Las Vegas and is full of technological advances and surprises. This year’s show boasts over 155,000 attendees and more than 3,000 exhibitors.

We know many of you are already at CES, and are looking to make the most of this crazy technology show. Whether you are exhibiting or just attending, it is important to remember some digital marketing guidelines to help make the most of your networking. So here are some quick tips on how to leverage mobile, social, and email to maximize your experience.

1. Create Twitter Lists to...

At ExactTarget, we are fortunate to have some of the most sophisticated interactive marketers from around the world as our clients. The programs they create and execute to drive results within their organizations are nothing short of inspiring. Whether it is Feeding Your Kids Foundation improving eating behaviors of 9,000 families from 85 countries with a new email and SMS campaign, or Flagstar Bank tripling their wholesale customer service survey responses since January with a 7-part email drip campaign, our clients make a measurable impact around the world with their interactive marketing...

It is important to understand the value of automation within your email marketing strategy. Take Oovie for example, we wrote about their automation strategy this summer. Oovie experienced a 30% increase in sales using integrated and automated email marketing. Automation is extremely important to the health of any marketing strategy and it can be used to drive significant increases in revenue. 

Why is automation important? Routine and time-intensive tasks like data movement, segmentation, and messaging programs become easy with “set it and forget it” functionality. The right marketing automation...

Welcome emails are the best opportunity to solidify your relationship with a new subscriber. This type of email marketing tends to record higher open and click-through rates than any other emails, and are sent to your most captive audience. Remember that at the time the welcome email sends, you’ve just been invited into the subscriber’s world, and they want to hear from you—as long as your content is relevant. The stakes are high! So... how do we build an effective onboarding strategy for our subscribers, fans, and followers?

It is pretty simple. Align your onboarding program goals with your...

If you’re like most retailers, you struggle with cart abandonment. And whether you’ve had a cart abandonment program running for years, or are just considering the idea, almost everyone can be doing it better.

In analyzing research gathered for Retail Touchpoints Exposed, we found that most retailers (over 70%) don’t have cart abandonment programs running at all. This is a huge missed opportunity! But, even among those retailers that have active campaigns, many are missing the mark in a number of ways, including:

• Timing—Waiting too long or not long enough to send a communication. Timing should...