Email Advertising

Earlier today, salesforce.com announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire ExactTarget. This is exciting news for the entire ExactTarget family!

Since our founding, we’ve been laser focused on helping marketers leverage data to create more relevant and effective digital marketing, and today’s announcement creates even more opportunity to execute on that vision with our clients and partners around the world. The combination of ExactTarget’s industry-leading marketing automation and campaign management capabilities with salesforce.com’s leading social marketing...

I'm excited to start a new series on the ExactTarget blog centered around the hottest digital marketing stories and trends of the past week. We will publish a new list at the beginning of every week. Just to be clear, this is a blatant rip-off of the BBC series. 

1. The Power Behind Waze and Mapping: Waze was on the tip of many tongues last week with rumored bids from Apple and Google. Why is there so much buzz about Waze? The company, which initially launched in Israel, provides crowd-sourced information. Users can wave their hands over their mobile device while driving to vocally report...

While the potential to generate high-quality leads through webinars has become more widely recognized over the past few years, the importance of pre- and post-webinar promotion is often underemphasized. Marketers can certainly accelerate their lead conversions using webinars, but without a promotional strategy in place, the webinars that they’ve worked so hard to create will just fall flat.

Here’s a quick rule of thumb when it comes to webinar promotions: to keep your hard work from going to waste, plan to start promoting four to six weeks before the actual date of the webinar. After the...

Has customer service fallen by the wayside at your brand headquarters? Consider this: “A dissatisfied customer will tell between 9-15 people about their experience. Around 13% of dissatisfied customers tell more than 20 people. Happy customers who get their issue resolved tell about 4–6 people about their experience.” (Numbers via the White House Office of Consumer Affairs.)

In case those numbers weren't enough to reiterate the importance of excellent customer service, check out some reinforcing statistics:

• 92% of people say they trust recommendations from friends and family.
• 70% of people report...

It should come as no surprise that traditional advertising is no longer as trusted by consumers as it was in the Mad Men era. Today’s consumers are more skeptical than ever. Less than 50% of consumers worldwide trust TV advertising. So what do people trust? 92% of consumers around the world say they trust word-of-mouth recommendations from friends and family over all other forms of advertising.

Brands are embracing new strategies and technologies, which allow them to connect and engage with customers in social channels. The most innovative brands are shifting their strategies from traditional...

Over the next several weeks, we will be sharing guest articles from experts in the realm of content marketing. This week, Josh Miles writes.

Josh Miles is principal and founder of Miles Design, a branding firm specializing in branding and website design for professional services and software firms. Josh is the author of the new Content Marketing Institute book Bold Brand: The New Rules for Differentiating, Branding, and Marketing Your Professional Services Firm.

“It will look like you guys are on everywhere, even if you’re not.”

Our media buyer always had a way of helping our clients make the...

The human race has used storytelling to persuade, share our history, and convey information for the entire length of our existence—since before the written word came about.

When you consider the breadth of companies whose profits depend on storytelling, you see that this hasn’t changed in 2013: movies are more popular than ever. YouTube reached the one-billion-monthly-users milestone in March of this year. (By comparison, Twitter has 200 million monthly active users) And though digital formats are eating into the profits of traditional books, the reading industry as a whole is stronger...

I'm so glad that Uberflip just posted this infographic on the current state of content. I just got done speaking on a panel yesterday, and content was the buzzword for the day.

As marketing changes and consumers are more empowered by the internet, marketers have to learn a new game: content creation. Content is something we all consume--and in large amounts! We are more connected than ever before, and consuming content the entire time. In fact, a study in the UK reveals that we are in front of a screen for 12 hours a day! 

With a captive audience, instant publishing platforms (blogs, Twitter,...

When Seth Godin introduced the concept of permission marketing in 1999, it was a big idea: ask customers to accept marketing messages from you. Looking at the best uses of mobile, I believe we are at a new crossroads; one where customers request marketing messages.

Never forget that digital messages rendered on mobile devices are personal and intrusive. On the Advertising Aggravation Continuum (shown below), they are most comparable to telemarketing. We all know what happened to that traditional marketing channel and the impact on brands that abused it.

In the middle of the continuum, people...

Advertising Age magazine recently announced the opening for their annual cover competition. Creatives under the age of 30 from all over the world are invited to to design an original cover for the June 10th issue of Ad Age, the prize being a trip to the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. The brief for this contest is to present what encapsulates the meaning of creativity in the year 2013, which opens the door to use one's imagination to highlight individual thoughts and beliefs.

Several points can be made about what Ad Age's contest says about the importance of content...

One of the most powerful capabilities of email marketing is that it enables small brands to “level the playing field” with bigger competitors and produce AMAZING RESULTS.

And one of the best examples I can point to of how a small CPG (consumer packaged goods) brand is using Email as the backbone of its digital marketing strategy is Dreamfields. With the help of its digital marketing agency, HyperDrive Interactive, this small but very savvy marketer of low-carb pasta is using email marketing to fuel sales and energize a growing community of “Dreamfields Brand Fans” who happily recommend...

As I write this, 93% of UK online consumers are email subscribers and 40% of these subscribers are opening, reading and responding to email on their mobile phones or tablets. If you think these statistics suggest UK consumers prefer email above all channels for receiving offers and information from brands, you are absolutely correct!

A new report from eMarketer confirms why more marketing budget is flowing to permission-based email and why email has become “The Linchpin” of integrated digital marketing strategies.

Among the key findings in the report are these:

• Econsultancy and Adestra’s Email...

As brands become more social and customers become the social mouthpiece of brands, the intersection of advertising and word-of-mouth recommendations is now online. Traditional advertising methods fade into the background as customers are more wary of brand promises and, instead, turn to their friends and family when making a purchase.

Like any marketer curious about the numbers that back up such claims, I was interested to hear Jay Baer (of Convince and Convert) and Greg Shove (of SocialChorus) discuss the stats in their webinar The Influence Triangle: How to Leverage 3 Types of Brand Fans to...

I’m not a big fan of country music.

I don’t mean to alienate anyone due to personal preferences, and I’m sure we can find common interests even if country is the only genre on your iPod, but country tunes are just not my favorite tunes to hear.

That being said, one of my closest friends loves country music. We were recently at a restaurant that was playing a country song called “Where I Come From.” I was poking fun at the whole situation because I’d recently heard a completely different country song also called “Where I Come From.”

Lo and behold, there are two country songs with the exact...

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,...

In the digital industry, it’s easy to talk about the fall of traditional advertising. While these sources certainly aren’t disappearing forever as many like to suggest, they are most certainly evolving. The Associated Press has long been linked with the print industry. The nonprofit news agency that has worked to fill newspapers is now adapting to the new digital world. In an ironic twist, this longtime print powerhouse is now asking: Are You Adapting?

This video points to the 2012 London Olympics as the tipping point in the sporting world’s digital evolution. We may not have noticed it while...

Viral Marketing: A marketing phenomenon that facilitates and encourages people to pass along a marketing message. Similar to the way a virus infiltrates its host to spread, this marketing tactic has been used for years through a variety of different mediums.

But more recently, the internet has allowed for viral marketing to be a much more low-cost/high-effect strategy. Videos like Gangam Style and The Harlem Shake have multiplied through YouTube like wildfire, having great impact on sales for these musicians in turn. But these stories came at audiences so hard and so fast, can they actually...

The difference between doing email appends right and doing them wrong involves changing one significant step… the outbound message.  Instead of the outbound message containing a link to opt-out, the outbound email marketing message should have registration as the primary call to action. This approach to email appends is called "opt-in" email append.

ExactTarget was one of the early proponents of this approach and we have now real life experience with this approach under our belts.  Opt-in email appends have been very successful in delivering highly responsive subscribers without the headaches...