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
Susan Prater, vice
president of integrated marketing at ChannelNet. Susan recently
joined ChannelNet and has held many roles in interactive marketing
and branding at Ford, Owens Corning, Masco Cabinetry, and her
marketing consultancy, Seven Pillars Marketing. Susan is passionate
about leveraging...
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If you spend much time in our 3sixty community, you will see that a
common suggestion is to offer better ways of searching for
information within our products: Emails, Templates, Subscribers,
Users, etc. One way we have addressed this is with our new search
feature in the Interactive Marketing Hub Calendar. The Calendar
search feature, released along with the launch of the IMH in
October of last year, lets you search for past and future email
sends by taking your search word (or words) and returning any
calendar entries that contain it in its name or description
The IMH Calendar is a...
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With over 50 breakout
sessions during Connections 2011, interactive marketers had access to
hundreds of actionable ideas, proven strategies and success stories
in every room. One of the highlights for me was a session that
examined international email marketing campaigns.
Here are five of the great ideas fellow marketers shared with their
peers.
1. Make training easy. Sean Mattson of
Hitachi Data Systems stressed that robust
training is a key. When rolling out a global email marketing
initiative, Mattson found the best training tool was to create
short video clips to build a robust library...
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Do you need a few
ideas on what you can do now to improve your email marketing
program? Look no further; here are a few suggestions to get your
current email marketing campaign out of it’s comfort zone.
-
Brush up on Subject Line Best Practices - The
subject line is arguably the most important part of your email
because it's what causes the reader to open the email or not. It's
never to late to go back to the basics, and review
subject line best practices.
-
Make Template Changes – Take a look at your
current email template and find the weak points (low CTR, rendering
problems, etc.). Design a new...
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Each week, marketers from around the world join the ExactTarget
Nexus partner ecosystem on Twitter for a conversation about trends
and best practices in the interactive marketing industry. We
call it the Nexus Café. You are welcome to join us
for #NexusCafe every
Thursday from 11am - 12pm EST to discuss emerging topics and trends
from across the digital marketing world.
Last week we tweeted with Chris Studabaker (@cstudabaker)
about Creative Email Design (full
tweet transcript). Chris is a Supervising Consultant,
Design Solutions and leads ExactTarget’s Design Solutions team. His
passion for...
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Happy Holidays from everyone
on the ExactTarget Design Solutions team! To end the year with a
bang, we’re highlighting our ten (okay, a few more than ten) most
useful interactive marketing tips from 2010.
-
The 6 Stages of Subscriber Experience
Performance-driven design is the foundation on which emails are
created.
-
Email + Video
Take 1 and Take 2
These posts discuss support, delivery methods, benefits and the
concerns of using video in email.
-
The Design Center on 3sixty
The Design Center is an all-inclusive design resource to view and
download our latest design whitepapers, template source...
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This holiday season, you’ll most likely be sending out emails to
your subscribers featuring discounts, coupons, and other seasonal
promotions. But rather than leaving your subscribers to delete your
email or act on their own accord, providing a personalized Landing
Page where you can keep them oriented, accentuate your call to
action, and capture a greater conversion rate. As a consumer
myself, I also appreciate that personalized Landing Pages allow me
to save time (and patience!) printing online coupons.
Instead of printing off an entire email, a Landing Page
allows subscribers to simply...
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We already know that writing HTML for email poses its own set of
unique challenges, and rendering can change without warning as
there are no universal email standards. We have a quick update for
email rending for Gmail in both Internet Explorer and Firefox. The
fix below will show you how to modify your HTML to ensure flawless
rendering!
Recent Change in Gmail Rendering
If you’ve started seeing an extra space underneath your images in
Gmail like the screen shot below, keep reading. Gmail in both
Internet Explorer and Firefox can now add extra pixels of space
below your images. This can...
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Thanks to everyone who was able to attend “Designing For Your
Subscribers: Tips and Tricks to Increase Email Marketing ROI” last
week. We had an excellent turnout and plenty of great questions. If
you weren’t able to attend the session, don’t worry! You can watch
a
recording of the one-hour webinar on 3sixty.
Do you have data on email clients that consumer subscribers
tend to use?
While data is available, your mileage may vary. Each audience will
be different, and you may see dramatically different segments in
your list or even between lists, as we saw in the webinar.
Fingerprintpublishes an...
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Recently,
our Design Solutions team launched the
Design Center on
3sixty. Within 3sixty
University, the
Design Center is an all-inclusive design resource to view and
download our latest design whitepapers, template source codes,
custom button collections and more! An extensive list of frequently
asked design questions and HTML troubleshooting tips are also
available, ranging in topics from preview pane dimensions to CSS
support in email.
We invite you to
visit, explore and gather inspiration for your next email
campaign. We will continue to add and update features, so be sure
to visit often...
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With the 135 release
on November 6th,
iLab is rolling out new and exciting products and user
interface updates. Not only does iLab let you be one of the
firsts to adopt these products and features, we allow you to do so
for free!!
New to iLab are the user interface
updates
Save Email as a Template and Streamlined Content Creation
Tools. Save Email as a Template allows clients to quickly
leverage their polished emails by creating reusable templates.
Streamlined Content Creation Tools will simplify the ways in which
templates, surveys and emails are created while maintaining the
perfect...
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As we touch on this issue time and time again, HTML for email can
be very different than HTML for websites. Here are a few tips to
get started, and for coding veterans, some thoughts to freshen your
perspective.
Coding HTML for a
Custom Template or an HTML Paste Email
The creative is done, copy is approved – time to start coding and
testing for proper rendering! Since the rendering of the email is
crucial to ensuring the subscriber has a positive experience, it’s
important to choose the appropriate editor to achieve that result.
Many popular WYSIWYG editors such as Dreamweaver and FrontPage...
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This week, we’re going to tackle a commonly asked
question:
Why does my email look broken when forwarded?If you forward an HTML email using the forward button in your email
program, it will often break the code, making the design display
incorrectly for the recipient of the forward. Instead, use the
“forward to a friend” link built into the email, if one is
available. Using this link will send a clean email out of
ExactTarget, and give you the option to type a personal message
above the email. This link is either a button or text link
marketers commonly place either in the top or bottom of...
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How organized is your ExactTarget
portfolio? Is it A. one folder full of images and documents from
your entire life within ExactTarget or B. multiple folders
categorized by campaign type, month and year that are easy to
understand and navigate. If you answered B, congratulations, you
are on the right track! If you answered A, let me make a few
recommendations…
Start by creating a folder for each year. Within that, create a
subfolder for each type of email campaign you send. If you send
each campaign frequently, organizing these campaigns by month is
also a great idea.
One of the requirements of...
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Written by Tana Babcock
Often, the Design Team is approached by customers who need their
images resized to fit their newly designed template. Because most
templates are created with width constraints, it’s important for
whoever builds the email to stay true to those guidelines. Not
everyone has access to Photoshop, and so keeping within these
guidelines can be difficult when you don’t have the right tools to
make necessary edits. A nice online tool for image editing is
Adobe
Photoshop Express. In order to get started you will need to
sign up for a free account.
Today I’m working with a...
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Let’s be frank…designers are great. They wear the coolest
clothes, carry the coolest gadgets, and fill their next generation
iPods with only the coolest of tunes. Granted, their spelling
could use some work – but I’m willing to forgive that as long as
they keep me on the invitation list to their exclusive
parties.
That said, when dealing with designers on certain email projects, I
have been reminded of the old saying:
To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a
nail.
Or, to put it in design terms:
To a designer with Photoshop, everything looks like a canvas to be
filled.
The truth with...
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Question: How can I save time when testing my email
designs?
Answer: We’ve all heard about how important
testing is when it comes to the design and layout of emails.
But the reality is that in order to benefit from design testing,
there’s a large amount of time that must be invested.
Unfortunately, the commitment required to successfully test design
discourages many marketers from doing it.
I’ve got good news, though. There are features in
ExactTarget that help you save some time in your testing
process.
Whether you’re performing a simple A/B split test or a complex
multivariate test, you...
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