Email Hub

Summer is heating up here at our Indianapolis headquarters, and our May product release delivered a few new features with plenty of sizzle over the weekend. Whether aimed to save you time, optimize your marketing efforts, or just make our interface easier to navigate, we think you’ll really like these new enhancements.

And don’t forget—we have free training on product release features via 3sixty. It’s interactive, and takes less than 30 minutes.

1. It’s Here! Send to Multiple Data Extensions
This long-requested new feature gives you the ability to save time by sending to a large data set in one...

ExactTarget’s April 2013 product release, the largest set of new features and applications we’ve had yet this year, has landed. This one packs a punch with lots of enhancements focused on a better user experience, easier access to data, and even free Academy training lessons for several items.

Improving your experience: Re-imagined start page, email approvals to maintain control and consistency

Show of hands—who wants a great user experience that helps save time? How about easy-to-read information? Glad we’re on the same page.

• You asked, we delivered. Our re-imagined and redesigned Email Start...

ExactTarget has a passion for bringing marketers and consumers closer. And we’ve gathered the industry’s top thought leaders and interactive gurus for the second annual ExactTarget CONNECT Global Tour.

Marketers from across Canada will have the opportunity to meet, inspire, educate, and empower the future generation of digital marketing on June 12, 2013, at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre. This full-day gathering will include break-out sessions complete with leading-edge research, networking opportunities, and advice for guiding engaged digital marketing campaigns.

Leading the keynote...

ExactTarget has a passion for bringing marketers and consumers closer. And we’ve gathered the industry’s top thought leaders and interactive gurus for the second annual ExactTarget CONNECT Global Tour.

Marketers from across Canada will have the opportunity to meet, inspire, educate and empower the future generation of digital marketing on June 12, 2013 at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre. The full-day gathering will include break-out sessions complete with leading-edge research, networking opportunities and advice for guiding engaged digital marketing campaigns.

Leading the keynote...

There’s a big difference between a first-class flight and a pedi-cab ride. Similarly, there are many differences between an ROI-optimized digital marketing strategy and a half-baked, unprofitable one. As a travel and hospitality brand, you’re tasked with creating a seamless booking process for your customers—or else you might miss that narrow window of time when they’re most likely to convert.

Our own Jeff Rohrs recently shared some tips for reaching the digital traveler in a blog post for Ataway Exchange, where he’ll be speaking next month. Here are five of the top tips from Jeff’s post and...

3sixty Live April meetings are coming to a city near you! 

• Connect professionally with the most innovative marketers in your area who also use the ExactTarget software
• Provide a place for sharing both strategies for marketing and ways of technically implementing them on the platform
• Connect directly with ExactTarget resources and people who can help you do your job better
• Innovate with...

The mobile inbox is a powerful tool if used the right way. We know that smart phone penetration in the US has reached 55% and mobile email open rates are over 40%. Almost half of your database is opening email via their mobile phone. Are you designing your emails to display correctly?

You could be leaving money on the table by not designing effective mobile email. Actually, you ARE leaving money on the table. Here are four design tips to help you design for the mobile inbox. Need more tips? Check out our Designing for the Mobile Inbox white paper.

1. Design for Your Audience

Know your...

ExactTarget is excited to announce the launch of a new website across seven regions and a fresh brand experience. The vibrant new look, elegant navigation, and richer user experience reflect the evolution of our company’s growth over the past 12 years. A lot has happened since then and we’re excited to share new services, innovations, and partnerships that help marketers around the world connect with their customers across the spectrum of digital channels.

What’s New:

• 7 new sites spanning ExactTarget’s global presence in the US, Australia, Brazil, Germany, France, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.
• W...

Multiple touch points and disparate systems can often prove challenging for organisations trying to make sense of their data, leaving them with no way to leverage the information they have to gain insight into their customers.

At TFM&A (Technology for Marketing & Advertising) in London recently, I was struck by the number of similar conversations I had with various marketers. Consistently, they expressed frustrations around having to depend heavily on IT to obtain data in order to send out customer communications and how this generally leads to delays and unnecessary additional costs.

Whenever a...

Jen Timmerman of Precision Dialogue (a partner of ours) recently posted about ExactTarget’s MobileConnect product: MobileConnect: Past, Present and Future. Jen is an eMarketing consultant, a seasoned email marketer with expertise in implementation. I’m thrilled to read her report on our mobile product and hear that she is “ready to shout about [her] love for MobileConnect from the rooftops”—and she’s even more enthusiastic about our 2013 product roadmap!

She starts out with a quick look back at MobileConnect when it launched last year, giving marketers a big opportunity to plan, automate, and...

When you log into the Interactive Marketing Hub, you will now find a "Playbooks" button at the top of the screen. Wondering what "Playbooks" are all about? Click that button to check it out!

We recently rolled out the Welcome Series Playbook to all of our customers. The Welcome Series is the first in our catalog of Email Playbooks with more to follow. Navigating the customer lifecycle can take a lot of time and attention, and we want to make it as simple as possible for you.

A Welcome Series is an essential part of your marketing efforts. Regardless of your industry or the variety of your email...

ExactTarget’s February 2013 release went live over the weekend, and several exciting enhancements and additions joined the cast.

The Welcome Series Playbook is now available via the Interactive Marketing Hub

Welcome series campaigns are critical players in the interactive marketing industry. They greet customers, and are often the first impression for a company’s email marketing. Subscribers tend to be most engaged at the point of opt-in, and the recently released Welcome Series Playbook makes it easy for marketers to act on this in a few simple steps. Take a few minutes and read about the Welcom...

Kyle Lacy recently posted a compilation of 140 Mobile Marketing Tips collected from marketing professionals via email, LinkedIn, Twitter, and other social media outlets. These are great 140-characters-or-less nuggets of knowledge you can apply to your mobile strategy. I’ll dissect a few favorites here:

#6 – Always include a call to action in push or SMS
It’s mind-blowing how brands invest so much in advertising yet leave out a simple call to action. As an example, only two Super Bowl ads included a mobile CTA! In an analysis on these pricey misses, Jeff Rohrs discusses how “branding only” ads...

ExactTarget’s first release of 2013 is now live! We’re constantly hard at work behind the scenes to deliver new features, improvements, and enhancements across all product lines. Here are three things that went live with this release that you could benefit from (or might just find interesting):

1. Distributed Sending = Empowerment

ExactTarget Distributed Sending is an easy-to-use application accessed via the Interactive Marketing Hub. It delivers an email marketing solution where corporate can provide email templates, images/logos, subscriber lists, and more for local marketers to use.

End users...

In case you hadn’t heard, ExactTarget launched the Orange Partner Network to our partners at Connections 2012. The Orange Partner Network includes three partner programs with which companies can participate – the HubExchange Partner Program, the Channel Partner Program (which includes our referral network), and the Services Partner Program. 

Connections 2012 is here! The entire ExactTarget staff has put every ounce of energy imaginable into making this not only the BEST Connections ever, but the best event ever! I wanted to quickly explain the four awesome contests that 3sixty will be running during Connections. If you have any questions about any of them, do not hesitate to tweet @ryanleecox, and he’ll be more than happy to explain something to you and/or help you out!

Suggestion Box Contest

At the 3sixty Live Hub Crawl event on Tuesday night you have a chance to win one of four $25 Amazon gift cards!  3sixty wants to know how to...

So what's all the hype with mobile email lately? First, let's start fresh in our approach. Try not to refer to any email message as "mobile" - your audience will likely view a message on desktops, tablets and mobile devices. Unless there is a specific use case for a mobile-only email, it's best to approach optimization considerations that focus on overall experience, respecting all environments.



*These statistics represent industry averages, and results for individual audiences may have more or less for any particular email client. iPhone can commonly range up to 30-40%, Android is often in the...

We are all really busy, so its important to leverage skills, content and data to be more efficient and productive. SocialPages was built from the ground up to integrate with ExactTarget Email, so you can leverage logos, images, videos and other content to build a brand presence on Facebook:

1. If you can build an email, you can build a Facebook Tab: SocialPages provides intuitive tools to create, design and publish. You’ll never have to worry about the Facebook UI changing, how to ensure your iFrame loads and renders properly, or any of those tricky aspects of navigating the developer site....

"Is the time I am putting into Facebook marketing really working?"

"How can I justify the campaigns we are running?"

Here are 3 tips and techniques you can use to start measuring and reporting on the impact of your Facebook marketing today:

1. Engagement. Engagement reporting is available in SocialEngage and provides managers with insight into how your brand is engaging on a full-scale or individual level with customers on Facebook pages. Engagement metrics are a great way to test content and messaging with your customers in real-time, build relationships and measure loyalty.

2. Reach and...