Email Marketing Company

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...

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...

Facebook poses unique opportunities—and challenges—for marketers. It’s an inherently social channel where consumers are open to interacting with brands. But because consumers typically think of Facebook as their “personal” space, marketers have to tread lightly with hard-sell messages.

To complicate this balancing act further, consumers have a variety of reasons for “liking” a brand. Overall, however, consumers’ top reasons for becoming Facebook fans are similar to their reasons for subscribing to email. These statistics from ExactTarget's 2013 Global Executive Summary tell the story:

• For...

Marketers have some pretty bad habits.

From sending the occasional unqualified lead to sales to not segmenting email lists properly, there are little things we do everyday that we know we could be doing better. 

However, like the millions that make and break New Year's resolutions each year, we find ways to convince ourselves that these little slips are OK, that no real harm can come of them, or that nobody will notice. Unfortunately for the imperfect marketer, these excuses provide less protection for us every year.

We are operating in an age of marketing where more is expected of us than ever...

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

Jeb is CEO of SmallBox, an Indianapolis web design and marketing company. He is also a co-founder of the Speak Easy, a local co-working space. He is happily married to his wife, Jenny, and they have three amazing daughters.

I attended a local tech panel recently and was starting to space out when ExactTarget's CMO Tim Kopp said something that caught my attention: "Serving is the new selling." It reminded me of something my buddy Kevin Bailey from Slingshot...

Andrea Vahl (@AndreaVahl) wrote a great blog post about How Your Business Can Use the New Facebook Cover Photos. While she goes into much more depth, the two primary items to keep in mind are 1) cover photos may not include more than 20% text, and 2) cover photos are no longer disallowed to incorporate calls to action, websites, or address information.

Marketers should definitely keep #1 in mind to ensure they don’t go through official Facebook reviews like I mentioned in my last blog post. Meanwhile, #2 provides some great new opportunities in taking advantage of your Facebook presence.  Even...

Wireframing is one of those mysterious steps of a web or email design project that can be tempting to skip. After all, once the site map and general architecture is established, everyone is eager to see those first beautiful mockups of the homepage complete with amazing photography, perfectly kerned typography and glossy buttons. 

However, taking the time to wireframe before jumping headfirst into Photoshop and mockups can spare everyone headaches down the road. Hereare a few reasons why:

Wireframing serves as a communication tool early in the design process
Developing a full mockup of an entire...

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...

The Harvard Business Review recently posted an article called "Act Like a Leader Before You Are One." It was perfect timing for ExactTarget and the theme of Connections 2013, "Lead from Within." The article gives great advice about showing leadership before reaching that level, and here are even more tips!

1. Set long-term plans: You probably write a to-do list for each day and week, but what about for this year? The next? Think about what you want to accomplish on individual, team, and company levels. Then break down the steps necessary to get there so you can make consistent progress towards...

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...

“Leadership is no longer about your position. It’s now more about your passion for excellence and making a difference. You can lead without a title.”

–Robin Sharma, Author, Lawyer, and Leadership Expert

The theme for ExactTarget’s Connections 2013 conference is "Lead From Within." This theme speaks to the belief that all people, regardless of role or title, can be leaders. That’s because leadership works through influence, not through making decisions for other people.

I, for one, can relate to this theme. A year ago this past weekend, I graduated from college. A month later, I started my first...

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...

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...

With the last name Best, I feel I may be somewhat of an expert when it comes to this particular superlative.

When I started with ExactTarget back in March of 2010, I joined my husband Nick who been with ET since July of 2009. 

Still in the “honeymoon phase,” we were settling in as a family--we both had great jobs, we were getting ready to purchase our first house, and we were even thinking of buying a dog. We were living the dream!

On March 20, 2010, Nick’s mom passed away from a long battle of ovarian cancer. Once our co-workers were made aware of the news, we were showered with thoughts,...

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...

Last week I spent some time in Michigan where we teamed up with Adobe and Demandbase to explore lifecycle marketing from a B2B lens. Marketing Profs recently published an article on some of the issues B2B marketers face on a consistent basis, and our seminars really aimed to tackle two of these glaring issues:

• One major obstacle to measurement is poor data infrastructure. 34% say they do not have the right tools to collect and analyze marketing program data.
• Another challenge is a lack of understanding of the metrics needed at each stage of the buying decision. 22% cite this as a top obstacle to...

• 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...