Email

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. 

During this week's chat, we were happy to have to have Simms Jenkins (@SimmsJenkins) founder & CEO of BrightWave Marketing (@BrightWave) join us. Tied to the launch of his second book, The New Inbox, the focus of this week's chat was around the future of email, how to truly integrate social and mobile, and what trends and disruptions are...

Here’s another great client I’ve recently had the pleasure of speaking with—Avvo, the web’s largest legal Q&A forum, directory, and marketplace. Connecting hundreds of thousands of consumers and lawyers every month, Avvo is both a B2C (consumers searching for legal assistance) and B2B business (lawyers looking to improve their online presence and lead generation).

• 16x increase in average email click-through rate
• 5...

What's the biggest challenge facing your email marketing?

If it's the quality of your email database, you're not alone. According to a new study by Econsultancy, 50% of surveyed marketers cited database quality as the biggest troublemaker in their email marketing strategies. Even more compelling, database quality has held that position three years running. So why is database quality such a big problem? 

Much like gourmet chefs working with spoiled ingredients, marketers working with outdated or unqualified databases have their chances at success handicapped from the start. If your database...

My colleages and I have dispensed a lot of deliverability tips on this blog throughout the years. But wouldn't it be nice to have the most useful nuggets of delivery-related wisdom compiled for easy reference? Well, your wish is our command.

Over the next few posts, we will, ahem, "deliver" the top ten tips to get your email campaigns to subscribers' inboxes in today's email ecosystem Let's start it off with the first two tips ...

Tip #1 - Subscriber Engagement Is Critical to Email Success
In years past, permission was seen as the key to having mail accepted. But we know things are changing. As...

Preheader text is displayed next to the subject line most commonly on mobile devices, Gmail, and Outlook (with certain notification settings). Some mobile devices (like Android) will block images by default, making preheader text even more important since this might be one of the first things that the subscriber sees before enabling images and opening your email.

What is email preheader text?

• Located above the logo or header in an email
• Seen at the top of your email design
• Some email clients will grab the first piece of code and display approximately the first 85 characters of the first HTML text...

Goodwill Industries of Central Indiana faced a common problem—not knowing who its shoppers were or how to connect with them outside of the in-store experience. The organization sought a way to collect data about its best customers—both shoppers and donors—build loyalty with a rewards program, and implement an active email marketing solution. 

Since launching the Goodwill Rewards program with ExactTarget in November 2011, Goodwill sends daily emails, including thank-you communications for donations made, member birthdays, and discount offers.

Success metrics include:

• Nearly 100,000 Goodwill...

The ExactTarget team invites you to participate in our #ETCafe Twitter chat this Thursday (and every Thursday) from 11am - 12pm ET, where we discuss emerging topics and trends from across the interactive marketing world. This virtual coffee chat is hosted directly on Twitter by @ExactTarget using the hashtag #ETCafe.

This week, we're excited to have Simms Jenkins (@SimmsJenkins) founder & CEO of BrightWave Marketing (@BrightWave). Tied to the launch of his second book, The New Inbox, this week's chat will discuss the future of email, how to truly integrate social and mobile, and what trends and...

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

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

At ExactTarget, we’re passionate about our clients—they’re some of the best brands we know, and we’re often inspired by their dedication to the work they do. And Von Maur is an excellent example! From the company’s start in the late 1800s until now, Von Maur has always put their customers first.

If you’ve visited one of the retail chain’s stores, you know what I mean—impeccable service, inviting décor, musical ambiance, and top-notch products. And while the company’s perfected their signature “above and beyond” service in stores, Von Maur wants customers to experience the same great service...

As many people do today, I subscribe to a multitude of different emails--from my favorite clothing store, magazine, daily deal site, etc.

While I was expecting my first child last year, I decided to opt-in for a number of different emails containing information, tips, and coupons related to pregnancy and parenting. With those types of emails, timing is everything. The information you send an expectant mother at 12 weeks of pregnancy is very different from the content you would send to a woman who is 32 weeks pregnant or a mother with a six-month-old at home. 

Just the other day I received an...

Interviewing our clients and hearing about their email marketing success firsthand is one of the best parts of my job at ExactTarget—especially when those stories are as compelling as First Midwest Bank’s!

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...

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

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

How can insurance companies make it...

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

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

Here's a sneak peek of the...

A client recently asked, "Are there any deliverability issues with using images hosted on third party CDN whose domain does not match the domain of the sender?"

If you're not aware, CDN means Content Delivery Network. A CDN is means of making your web pages and/or web applications load faster, by caching content on multiple servers, then requests for that content can be fulfilled by the nearest or most responsive available server. I might be oversimplifying it a bit, but in my personal experience with various CDNs, that's how they tend to work. Akamai might have been the first one-- they...

A useful update was posted today by Lili Crowley on AOL's postmaster blog indicating that they have recently tweaked their anti-spam filters. As a result, they will be issuing more CON:B1 errors for senders who exhibit "a spike in unfavorable e-mail statistics." (The CON:B1 error is defined by AOL here.) It certainly sounds like the filter change aims to increase their spam catch rate as it relates to a sender's reputation.

While mailbox providers like AOL routinely update their anti-spam defenses, it is uncommon for them to give notice to the email community of such a change. This official...

As a follow-up to my post in February about Hotmail transitioning to Outlook.com, Microsoft announced last week that the move is complete. Users who have hotmail.com addresses still get to use them on Outlook.com, but gone is the Hotmail webmail experience that millions of users worldwide have come to know over the years.

Instead, users will now be upgraded to the feature-packed Outlook.com email service, which comes with a streamlimed, modernized user interface. The Oultook.com blog post and FAQ page offer interesting and useful information about the transition process, feature changes,...

A friendly agency client of ours dropped the team a note today, explaining that when they reached out to Hotmail regarding a client's blocking issues, Hotmail's response included a recommendation that the sender enroll in the JRMP program. What is that, the client asked? Are we enrolled?

JMRP stands for "Junk Mail Reporting Program" and this is just the name Microsoft uses for their feedback loop mechanism. An ISP feedback loop, if you weren't already aware, is the mechanism by which an email is reported back to the sender (or the sender's email service provider) when an ISP user clicks the...

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

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

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

• Nearly 81% of B2C marketers send welcome emails to their new subscribers
• Nearly 87% of retail companies send welcome emails to new subscribers
• By comparison, only 70% of non-retail companies sent welcome emails

Welcome Email Series

• A quarter of B2C marketers send a...