Follow Us On...

Authors

Email Marketing Message

Email System Process Term of the Day: Asynchronous, Scheduled, and Real-Time

Tuesday, October 27, 2009 by Amanda Cross
Your email marketing messages don't have to be processed right away. Different timing is appropriate for different tasks, and in some cases the ExactTarget application gives you the control to choose how--and when--your system does its work.

Asynchronous
An asynchronous process is a process that runs “behind the scenes” while you continue to use the interface to perform other tasks. You receive an email or other alert that the process is complete so that you can view the results.

For example, if you start an asynchronous report, the report runs while you continue working. When the report is done, you receive an email that contains the report results.

Scheduled
A scheduled process is a process that runs automatically at the time you designate. You receive an email or other alert that the process is complete so that you can view the results.

For example, if you schedule an email send to begin at 11p.m., the system begins the send at 11p.m. and can send you an email when the process completes to give details on the success of the send.

Real-Time
A real‐time process is a process that runs in the foreground of your application. You cannot
perform other tasks while the real‐time process is running. When the process is complete, the application presents the results on your screen.
Comments (0)

Design Tip of the Week: Email Rendering in Outlook 2007

Thursday, October 22, 2009 by Andrea Smith
written by David Hoang

With the move from Outlook 2003 to 2007, Microsoft made a lot of security improvements. Along with that, however, were a number of design changes. Outlook changed its engine for rendering HTML content from Internet Explorer to Microsoft Word. Before, it essentially meant that if your code looked good in Internet Explorer, it looked good in Outlook.

However, that is not the case anymore.

This is a huge impact in the way we design emails; because of the high volume of Outlook users, particularly in the Business-to-Business realm.

Here are a few key elements to consider while designing email messages in Outlook 2007 to ensure it looks sharp.

Keep your styles in-line
Though Outlook 2007 does support embedded CSS, there are certain properties that present challenges, such as margin, line-height and float/clear. Keep your styles in-line while you are designing. In addition to being an email design best practice, using style attributes in-line will help ensure that your message renders properly.

No Animated .gif files
Animated .gif files will not function in Outlook 2007. However, there is a solution for using .gif files with Outlook 2007. Since the file will not animate, you only need to make sure the first frame makes sense; as that is what will appear in Outlook 2007.

Contain Yourself, No Floating!
Outlook 2007 does not support floating or CSS positioning in any capacity. Use standard HTML tables to contain and control the layout. This will ensure that your design elements won’t go flying all over the place!

Specify Accurate Table Widths
When using HTML tables it is important to specify accurate table widths to ensure proper display in Outlook 2007. This is especially important in table structures that contain multiple columns. For example, when you have a table cell that spans two columns, the width for that cell should equal the sum of the widths of the other two cells.

Continue Using Alt Tags
As it was in Outlook 2003, it is in 2007; images will automatically be blocked. While you’re designing your email message, keep in mind of what it will look like with images disabled. Remember that Outlook will display alt tags, but they will only appear after a default security message. For a list of acceptable tags in Outlook 2007, check out this guide on Microsoft’s website.

No Forms
Outlook 2007 disables embedded forms. If you design an email with a survey or form in the content, include a direct link (hosted from a website) to the survey for your Outlook users. Indicate clearly in your design that the form is not broken, so subscribers don’t get frustrated by trying to fill out the form.

With 2010 quickly approaching, you may be wonder if there will be any major CSS/HTML changes in Outlook 2010. Right now, don’t expect major changes.

To conclude, sticking to standard HTML table design for emails should help you effectively render emails in Outlook 2007. Be sure to read our design tips in the coming weeks for rendering tips in other email clients, including our past issue: Email Rendering in Hotmail by Anna Meier. Portions of this blog, Design Tip of the Week: Email Rendering in Outlook 2007 and more information on email rendering can be found in our white paper “Email Marketing Design: The New Essentials.”

For additional information about rendering in Outlook 2007, check out our white paper, Seven Email Marketing Design Tips for Outlook 2007.
Comments (0)

Real vs. Perceived Threats to Email: Part 1 - Addressing Misperceptions

Wednesday, October 21, 2009 by Morgan Stewart
The now infamous Wall Street Journal article announcing the death of email sparked a fire in the bellies of email marketers and social media gurus alike. The overwhelming response is that social media is not posing a significant threat to email. To date, all the signs seem to indicate that these two channels will continue to evolve together.

True, there are dissenting voices. However, I have found none that are backed by credible statistical data. Since there is no statistical validity in personal anecdotes, I don’t care (except for the value they provide in forming hypotheses to be tested in future research).  I care about what well-founded research tells us about the world at large.

Here is a list of the data sources I have located that reveal the truth about the current state of email use and email marketing:

Pew Internet & American Life: Online Activities Trends
  • 79% of Americans use the Internet 
  • 90% of online Americans use email, making it the most popular online activity
  • 57% of Americans check email daily

MarketingSherpa
  • 78% of users email friends a link to information they wish to share with friends over the internet.
  • 22% share through social media
  • MarketingSherpa’s research directly contradicts research released earlier this year from AddToAny, which suggested people share information twice as often through Facebook as they do through email. However, there were serious issues with the AddToAny research. 



USC Annenberg Digital Future Report
  • How Many Americans Are Using E-mail? -- Almost everyone who goes online uses e-mail (97 percent of all Internet users).
  • Regular Contact by E-mail -- E-mail users maintain weekly personal e-mail contact with an average of seven people in the current study, down from the peak of nine in 2006. Forty-nine percent of e-mail users said they maintain personal contact by e-mail on a weekly basis with five or more people.

Participatory Marketing Network
  • Email (26 percent) and text messaging (26 percent) are the activities least likely to be "given up for a week," followed by TV (15 percent), talking on phone (11 percent), visiting social networks (nine percent), reading magazines (seven percent) and visiting non social network sites (six percent).



Pontifelx / Harris Interactive Survey
  • 96% of online adults who have actually taken the step of providing brands personal information have shared their email addresses with marketers
  • 12% of online adults have been willing to share information like their Facebook user name or their Twitter handle with a brand in exchange for information or promotional offers

SmartBreif on Social Media

While not nationally representative, this poll is interesting in that is suggests even social media professionals are not significantly curtailing their use of email.
  • 59% of SmartBreif on Social Media readers (likely to have a heavy disposition toward social media use) report their use of email has stayed about the same despite the growth of social networks.
  • 28% are using slightly less often
  • 11% are using more often
  • 2% of these readers rarely use email



ExactTarget – Is Email Marketing Endangered?

We asked a question similar to the SmartBreif poll, however, the question excludes marketers—so it is a better representation of the population at large.
  • Net 25% of online consumers report using social networks more often over the past 6 months (42% using more often, 17% using less often)
  • Net 23% of online consumers report using email more often over the past 6 months (29% using more often, 6% using less often)
  • Net 21% of online consumers report using text messaging more often over the past 6 months (38% using more often, 17% using less often)
  • 71% of smartphone owners report sending more PERSONAL email on their smartphones than BUSINESS related email—it’s not all business.



ExactTarget – 2009 Channel Preferences Study
  • 57% of online consumers use email most often to send written messages to their friends, over text messaging (24%) and social networks (10%)
  • 75% of online consumers prefer to receive permission-based promotional messages through email—up 3.6% from 2008—followed by 17% who prefer direct mail promotions and 4% who prefer text promotions.
  • More than half of online consumers have made a purchase as the direct result of and email message they received, more than any other online communication channel.



Forrester Consulting – Customer Knowledge is Marketer Power
  • 34% of marketers believe email will become more effective over the next two years, 19% believe it will be less effective
  • Asked why marketers believe email will be more effective:
    • 74% believe their email communications are getting more relevant
    • 58% see email as an integral part of their multichannel activities
    • 44% believe customers prefer email as a marketing channel

That is not to say there are not threats to the future success of email. Stay tuned for part two where I share insights from a panel I moderated at Connections last week where Julie Katz from Forrester, Rebecca Lieb from eConsultancy, and Stefan Tornquist from MarketingSherpa were asked to share their takes on the real versus perceived threats to email marketing.
Comments (2)

Live Blog: Financial Services Solution Showcase

Wednesday, October 14, 2009 by Amanda Cross
We've got quite a change of pace in the ol' developer track conference room. Chris Murray of ExactTarget is the emcee for the Financial Services Solution Showcase.

He starts by introducing the first segment:

Beyond Deliverability: Consumer Choice & Control
Authentication, Privacy, and Policy
by Craig Spiezle
https://otalliance.org

The Online Trust Alliance is concerned with security in online activity, especially financial services. Spoofed email, phishing, and online exploits are a major challenge for financial organizations that operate online.

Craig said that government regulations are likely to come about in the next few weeks as a result of the identity theft incidents that we've heard of recently. Craig said that the United States is actually behind other parts of the world in consumer production.

Craig discussed extended validation certificates. In order to get one of these certificates, the business must prove that it's registered with a local tax authority. While this can't verify that the business has good business practices, but it does require that the business be a real business. When a business has this certificate, it turns the address bar in your browser green when you visit their site. If the address bar isn't green, you know that it's a spoofed site.

He continued to talk about the business value of authentication. Not only does this help protect your business from being spoofed, but also improves your deliverability.

Of the top 100 financial institutions in North America, only 43% have protections in place for consumers.

Craig talked about the problem with unsubscribe: an unsubscribe link in the footer of the email is required by CAN-SPAM, but consumers are warned not to click links in emails they don't want for fear that they'll alert spammers that they're a real person. An unsubscribe header allow ISPs to render an unsubscribe link in their client so that people can unsubscribe without clicking the "report as spam" link and degrading your reputation. About this time, someone from ExactTarget piped up to mention that ExactTarget email already does this automatically.

Addressing Email Security Concerns
Matt Burton - GMAC/Ally Bank

Matt talked about Ally bank and the fact that its customers were receiving more spoof emails that were pretending to be from Ally as they were receiving from the real bank.

Ally Bank, like many places, would love for there to be a "silver bullet" that would solve the problem, but in fact the best way to protect consumers is with a combination of proactive monitoring, excellent deliverability of your legit content, and customer education.

Governance, while unpopular, is critical. If your company has multiple business units, ALL of them have to have successful security.

Some financial institutions do not include links in their emails, instead telling consumers to go to the website. This is problematic because it requires more copy and results in fewer site hits. Also, this doesn't prevent phishing emails from including links in their emails.

Security tools, such as ISP Phish Blocking and Certified Mail, are available to help prevent risk and increase confidence in your message respectively.

Education of consumers can be tricky. Sending emails that tells customers how to tell whether your email is real might make it look like you're a spoofer trying to set them up to trust fraudulent email in the future. Better to just remain consistent in your sending so that consumers become accustomed to your style and learn to identify spoofs on their own.

To wrap up, Matt recommended proactive risk diminuation rather than waiting for a problem happens and only responding then.

Technology Solution
e-statements at Nationwide
Brian Jaffe - Nationwide Insurance

Nationwide was facing a "statement challenge"--sending statements to customers on email. The address this issue, they created an elegant solution.
  • Governance - As part of this process, they codified their program for sending emails.
  • Preference management - allow customers to specify their preferences. Brian recommends double opt in.
  • Billing format - recreate view of paper statement
  • Send mode - bulk or single send. You probably batch up your bills, but some might do individual sends.
  • Data preparation - attributes or data extensions? what is the unique subscriber key? You need to understand your extremes (what happens if you have an extremely large amount of data?) and your data-display issues.
  • Deliverability - decisions about IP and Domain. Learn from your deliverability team!
  • Feedback - decisions about bounce management, reply management. If people unsubscribe and then try to sign up, you could have technical problems sending emails. Make sure you understand how your unsubscribes are managed. And be ready to monitor replies, even if you tell people not to reply to a message.
  • Inserting marketing messages into transactional emails - CAN-SPAM does allow you include marketing messages into your transactional emails under certain circumstances.
Paperless statements can create issues. For example, what if customers call in saying that they never received their statement. Customer service needs to be able to access tracking to see whether the subscriber ever opened the email and have other strategies to deal with these complaints. Customer service needs to be able to resend statements.

Nationwide includes quite a bit of personal information in their emails so that subscribers know that the email must be legit, since a phishing scam wouldn't have access to so much personal information. Watch out for links to log-in pages, since phishing emails like to send very similar emails that direct to their own "login page."

Having a protocol to deal with bounces is wise. In their case, if a subscriber soft-bounces, they put the subscriber back into the paper stream for one cycle and try paperless again for the next cycle. If they run into a hard-bounce, they put the subscriber back into the paper stream indefinitely until the subscriber re-enrolls themselves in the paperless process.

Nationwide's solution is based on the ExactTarget SOAP API. Their OMS (outbound messaging service) is a middleware layer of abstraction that actually sits behind their firewall. Between the OMS and ExactTarget much communication occurs to get the statements out to subscribers.

The content of the eStatement itself uses AMPscript to build the bill by parsing concatenated attributes and dynamically displaying content in appropriate data tables.

Michael Murdza (ExactTarget) took us through the technical aspect of the eStatement data flow. A sophisticated decision tree weave through the Nationwide database and ExactTarget application, using XML, AMPscript, and API calls.

And then the presentation wrapped up, and everyone started getting ready for the evening entertainment. I've really enjoyed live blogging the technology track for everyone today, and I hope you've enjoyed reading as much as I've enjoyed writing it. See you between the lines :)
Comments (0)

Live Blog: Automation Event Triggered Sends Using SOAP API

Wednesday, October 14, 2009 by Amanda Cross
The developer track continues with Automation Event Triggered Sends Using SOAP API. Between sessions, the intrepid staff of the Westin brought in several more chairs, effectively ensuring that no one will be sitting on the floor this time. There wouldn't be room, even if they wanted to.

Ana Ng plays over the PA system while we wait for the session to start, and with a minute to go it switches to Particle Man as the room fills up. You can tell that we're gearing up for the They Might be Giants concert tonight, after the Second City performance. Indeed, I'm already wearing my wristband :)

Automation Event Triggered Sends Using SOAP API
ExactTarget Product Specialist Manager and general super brain, Dale McCrory beings the presentation by asking how many people in the crowd have used triggered sends before. This feature is one of the most powerfully compelling and commonly implemented functionalities available in the SOAP API. Triggered emails are perfect for things like password reminders, order confirmations, and welcome emails. You can also use them together with Web Collect forms, Reply Mail Management, and other parts of the ExactTarget system that automatically send response emails to subscribers.

He continues by talking about send classifications: marketing and transactional, and the differences between then. Basically, marketing messages are subject to CAN-SPAM regulation, while transactional messages are not, since they're might actually be required to be sent to subscribers, such as receipts.

Dale puts some code up on the screen to show the anatomy of a triggered send call. He talks about how the template, content, and all the look-and-feel stuff about the email are created within the application and are controllable by marketers. The API then references the triggered send definition using the external key and doesn't have to bother with actually creating the content  of the email using the API.

Next, Dale moved in to the difference between synchronous and asynchronous API. A synchronous API call goes to the server, which responds. If the server is unavailable, there's no response, and it's on the ExactTarget customer's shoulders to retry. Asynchronous calls, on the other hand, are queued up, so even if they can't be processed right away, they will get processed when the server is available. He recommends that people starting new triggered send initiatives use asynchronous API, unless development is so constrained that synchronous is all there's time for.

High priority API calls can be processed immediately, even if one of the servers is unavailable, by using our multiple data centers. There are limitations on emails that can be sent this way (they can't contain info from data extensions...stuff like that) and it incurs an additional cost per send.

Dale ran a little short of time, but he'll be presenting again later in the day.

Intuit's Notifications Service Engine: A practical approach to facilitating customer notifications
Next Intuit's Gary Rittinger directed everyone to http://connect.intuit.com to check out the implementation that he'll be talking about.



His purpose is to provide Intuit's infrastructure and offerings the ability to send, monitor, and manage the notifications they send to customers in a consistent and reliable way.  To do this, Gary uses triggered sends to send welcome emails, order confirmation, shipping conversation, and other transactional messages.

Intuit finds that it's difficult to get consistent programming from across its organization, so it uses "application adapters" to normalize the input. They're using ExactTarget accounts to let each product manager get in and see the status of email sends.

As a result of implementing ExactTarget, Intuit enjoys:
  • Better transparency into notifications deliverability.
  • Reduced cost and increased efficiency of customer notifications.
  • Improved enterprise SOA adoption through standard web service technologies.
  • Fewer of redundant apps that served the same purpose.
  • Improve governance and compliance.
Gary recounted the ease and smoothness of putting this process in place. He commented that they've recently been moved from the Indy data center to the Las Vegas data center--one of the first customer to be live sending out of that data center--and the move took only 90 seconds. He also said that rolling out the process took only a couple weeks.

During the Q&A, Bryan Wade (the emcee) is talking up the documentation wiki and the API content that's available on it. This is a topic near and dear to my heart <3

Comments (0)

1-to-1 Marketing and Beyond: Success Stories

Wednesday, October 14, 2009 by Amanda Cross
When you hear The World Society for the Protection of Animals you probably don't think of a standard B2C with a targeted marketing message. Even so, this group has achieved a 50% increase in online donations with the power of 1-to-1 marketing tools, specifically dynamic content through ExactTarget.

Meanwhile, Motorcycle Superstore realized double-digit increases in open rates as a result of integrating online browsing and purchase data into their email marketing decisions. In this case, the ExactTarget tool driving the relevant message to the customer was the integration with Webtrends.

In another case, the online photo book publisher, Inkubook, announces that email marketing through ExactTarget drove more than 60% of its first year revenue. While PetPlace.com went from zero to $1 million in online sales in less than 12 months with the help of ExactTarget email campaigns.

It doesn't matter whether you're selling sidecars or gathering signatures on a petition, people are more likely to hear your message when you're saying something that's important to them. Using the tools that help you send a more customized messages not only create more fertile ground for conversions, but also create more fertile ground for building a lasting relationship.
Comments (0)

Get Personal: One-to-One Marketing with Personalized Product Recommendations

Friday, October 2, 2009 by Joel Book
An article in the October issue of Internet Retailer, observes that “although the Internet makes it possible to personalize offers to shoppers, most e-retailers and other online businesses are failing to optimize web site content to improve the chances that shoppers will become buyers.”

Mike Chertudi, vice president of demand and online marketing for Omniture notes, “The majority of businesses aren’t optimizing their on-site conversion,” Omniture has teamed with Marketing Experiments to conduct the 2009 Online Conversion Benchmark Survey. The purpose of the survey, which began in June, is to help online marketers better understand best practices in onsite conversion, and know how they compare to their peers. Data is being compiled from more than 1,000 companies, of which more than half are retailers. Among the findings as of late August: About 80% of retailers don’t present personalized content based on shoppers’ interests suggested by analytics and clickstream data.

One-to-One Merchandising Works for Motorcycle Superstore

Webtrends analytics integration with ExactTargetProving that personalized product recommendations work, Motorcycle Superstore saw a 21.7% revenue increase in the first week after launching an email campaign on September 21st that incorporated personalized product recommendations.

Motorcycle Superstore uses behavioral data -- gathered with WebTrends technology combined with its e-mail marketing application from ExactTarget -- to send email messages with personalized product recommendations. These items appear as “Your Picks” in the lower part of the email and are based on the customer’s website visiting habits over the previous two weeks.

Commenting on the power of data-driven offer personalization, Erick Barney, vice president of marketing at Motorcycle Superstore, says “I believe this feature is so effective because rather than guessing at a handful of products to appeal to our entire customer base, we can merchandise products directly related to each customer’s historical interaction with our store.” Motorcycle Superstore is No. 223 in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide.

Learn more about combining precision one-to-one communications and comprehensive web analytics by integrating ExactTarget and Webtrends.
Comments (0)

Huge Opportunity for Travel Industry to Leverage Social Media

Monday, September 28, 2009 by Blaine Cooper-Surma

With the third quarter coming to a close, and the holiday season approaching, it's about that time to begin making holiday vacation arrangements.  Personally, every year I travel to Florida to spend the holidays with my family.  So how am I getting down to the beautiful, sunny weather this year?  When it comes to planning my trips, I always purchase my flights online - quickly and painlessly.

There certainly is a buzz right now around social media in the marketing world.  eMarketer.com recently published the results of one of their surveys that analyzed the percentage of internet users that have been influenced by social media in making their travel/vacation decisions.  eMarketer found that 23 percent of respondents, who happen to be U.S. internet users, have been somewhat or significantly influenced by social media when it comes to making travel/vacation decisions.
 

US Internet Users Who Say Their Travel/Vacation Decisions Are Influenced by Social Media*, 2009 (% of respondents)


Although just less than a quarter of these people noted the effectiveness of social media in influencing their decisions, this still is an enormous audience that travel companies are reaching.  As I've already pointed out, I fall into the 23 percent of people that have made or changed travel plans due to some sort of social media.  A month or so ago I noticed an ad on Twitter that boasted cheap flights to Orlando, and within minutes had scheduled a trip across the country.  I see this as a huge opportunity for the travel industry to offer travel deals that are specific to Facebook and Twitter, as both of these social networking platforms have such an enormous user base.

Large social media platforms also have the ability to use 1 to 1 marketing techniques by pulling travel locations from user info in order to provide users with more relevant content - for example, if I lived in Anchorage, Alaska, it is likely that I would be interested in going on vacation somewhere a little bit more like Key West.  Once the user has purchased the trip, travel sites like Expedia.com send a confirmation email that contains the travel itinerary and purchase information.  In addition, travel companies have the ability to take this one step further by instituting an SMS campaign that sends customers an SMS message letting them know if their flight is on time - I know this is something that many frequent travelers appreciate and certainly take advantage of.

As soon as you've identified your 23 percent and have built your subscriber list, you are now able to send automated email messages that every-so-often offer your subscribers different travel deals and opportunities.  As I pointed out in my last post, email marketing is still the best internet marketing channel and is sure to be around for a good while longer. 

To see another example of how social media has benefitted personal travel arrangements, check out Liz's post.

Comments (0)

Marketers Moving More Budget to Email Marketing

Friday, September 25, 2009 by Joel Book
Two recent studies provide compelling evidence that marketers are turning to digital marketing – and specifically email marketing – to improve marketing effectiveness.

According to the “2009 ANA/MMA Marketing Accountability Survey” from the Association of National Advertisers and Marketing Management Analytics, “The No. 1 strategy for marketers who wanted to improve effectiveness without spending more, according to the June 2009 poll, was shifting from traditional to digital media. More than one-half of respondents also reported shifting spending away from brand-building initiatives, and 38% were putting more spending into lower-cost media.”

Tactics Used by US Marketers to Improve Marketing Effectiveness

Change in Marketing Spending for Select Media in 2009

And as more marketers shift to digital media, the tactic that is seeing the largest increase in spending is email.

According to the “2009 Media Survey Results & Analysis” study conducted by Round2, “40% of US Marketers reported that they had increased spending on email marketing in 2009.

What This Means for Marketers

Increased dependency on email marketing means three things:

1. Email is no longer optional. It has firmly established itself as the #1 tactic for 1to1 marketing. And email has become the “go to” tactic for word-of-mouth marketing as brands empower email subscribers to “share” email messages and offers with their friends on Facebook, their followers on Twitter, and their connections on LinkedIn.

2. Email marketing will become more sophisticated as marketers move aggressively to integrate email with other tactics and technologies – like CRM, SMS, POS, Websites, and Social Networks -- that are used to keep customers connected to the brand. The cornerstones of effective email marketing will be Integration, Automation and Optimization.

3. ESP (Email Service Provider) selection will become a more strategic decision. Marketers must evaluate and select an ESP by their ability to provide “industrial strength” application functionality plus consulting services including 1to1 marketing strategy, email and landing page design, email deliverability, and application integration.
Comments (0)

Marketing within Social Networks

Thursday, September 3, 2009 by Lisa White
With the number of people using social networks increasing, the opportunity to spread information using these networks is becoming more exciting. According to the article "What Women Want from Social Sites," women are interested in using social sites for finding out about products, services and discounts.  Not surprisingly, the survey found that the top reasons women use social sites are staying up to date with friends and professional networking, however, an astounding 79% of survey participants considered researching products and services important and 64% considered finding deals and discounts important.  This means that a great deal of women that use social networks would respond to marketing on social networks that is relevant to them.

Integrating social media marketing with an email marketing strategy is a great way to spread the word about products, services, deals and discounts.  If I get an email with information about a sale going on at my favorite store, then sharing the media to facebook or twitter would allow my friends to also be aware of the great deals.  Thus, the power of social networks allows marketers to easily spread email messages while still adhering to the principles of permission based email marketing.

To learn more about integrating your email strategy with your social network strategy, check out the whitepaper "Expanding the Reach of Email through Social Networks."
Comments (0)

Be Relevant with your Social Media Marketing Message

Friday, August 28, 2009 by Scott Roth
Be Relevant with your Social Media Marketing MessageToday there was a great article in Clickz by Bryan Eisenberg called Social Media is not the Message that I couldn't agree with more. Bryan doesn't bash the importance of Social Media, rather he embraces it and says that it shouldn't take our focus away from making our overall communications better. Here's my favorite quote:

"Every status update, tweet, and inbox message is nothing more than a communication between a sender and a reader. What you say and how you say it matters. Be relevant."

Leveraging Social Media as a part of your overall marketing communications strategy shouldn't come as a replacement to what you're doing through existing proven channels such as email - but more as a compliment. Here's a link to a presentation that I did at the Online Marketing Summit earlier this year in which we walked through several examples of how ExactTarget clients are embracing Social Media as a part of their overall one-to-one and email marketing strategy - not simply replacing what they are doing.

Relevance drives engagement, and engagement drives business...

To learn more about leveraging Social Media check out:
Webinar - Social Forward: Email Meets Social Networking
Whitepaper - Expanding the Reach of Email Through Social Networks
Comments (0)

Summer Reflections from an Intern at an Email Marketing Company

Thursday, August 27, 2009 by Kyle Schroeder

So, I thought I knew about email before this summer.

I had signed up for newsletters and fan clubs. I got the coupons from online retails and bookstores. I even thought that I sent a decent amount of email in a given day. But, I had a lot to learn.

I remember the day that I had first heard about ExactTarget at a career fair. I talked with the employees at the booth for ten minutes or so and thought it was a really interesting company. I went home and began sharing with my friends about this “email company” ExactTarget:

Friends: “So what do they do?”
Me: “They send email.”
Friends: “Spam?”
Me: “No, I don’t think so. Its email you sign up for.”
Friends: “Oh, spam.”

After spending 14 weeks working for ExactTarget, I know and can explain why we actually are driven by the opposite of spam—and fight hard against companies that want to send spam.

ExactTarget is actually focused on sending relevant, permission-based email messages to consumers in a one to one marketing model that reaches specific customers that have chosen to opt-in to the particular email message.

There are two types of email messages sent out: transactional and triggered. There is also a CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 that has set out to regulate what email needs to look like.

I now realize what a powerful email marketing software platform ExactTarget is and how it can truly help raise the ROI for a company’s marketing dollar.

Kyle Schroeder
Slingshot Summer Intern

Comments (0)

SMS Mobile Marketing Ideas

Friday, August 7, 2009 by Megan Sabine
SMS Mobile MarketingSMS Mobile Marketing. It’s all a buzz in the market right now, but are you having trouble thinking of ways it can help your business? Well hopefully the ideas listed below will help get the wheels turning on how your organization can benefit from SMS mobile marketing.

SMS Mobile Marketing to Grow Email Marketing Lists
Here at ExactTarget, we call this Text Capture. It allows a subscriber to opt in to your email communications via SMS. If you are a brick & mortar shop looking for a way to grow your email marketing list, why not place a promotion at your register prompting your most engaged segment – your customers – to opt-in to your email marketing programs. And once they have, reward them with a coupon on their phone that they can use on that purchase or a later one.

SMS Mobile Marketing to Reward Loyal Customers
Allow your customers to opt-in to receive outbound SMS mobile marketing messages from you. Use those messages to entice your customers to engage with products at your store or website to redeem a SMS subscriber-only coupon. Your SMS savvy customers will enjoy this new way of receiving coupons or deals.

SMS Mobile Marketing to Deliver Timely Messages
Perhaps the most recognizable SMS mobile marketing use case is to deliver alerts.  It’s unrealistic to think that your customers are always in a place where they can access their email when they need to read an alert from your company. On the other hand, it’s more realistic that they will have access to their cell phones during that time.

SMS Mobile Marketing to Deliver Presentation Materials
This is one that ExactTarget has experienced success with. Historically, audience members had to wait a day or two to receive presentation materials – and possibly getting caught back up in the day-to-day grind. By allowing audience members to text in to receive the presentation materials via email while they are still watching the presentation (and the most engaged with the topic) you are continuing the engagement before it has had time to die down.

Hopefully the list above helps you get the wheels turning for how your organization can benefit from the power of SMS mobile marketing! For more ideas, be sure to check out ExactTarget's Field Guide to SMS - "Text is Next: Marketing with SMS."

Comments (0)

Now That’s Smart! Volvo Construction Equipment Uses Email Marketing to Help Dealers Sell Refurbished Equipment

Monday, August 3, 2009 by Joel Book

Volvo Construction Equipment N.A. Inc. sells a wide array of new and used construction machinery through its network of 70 North American dealers. These dealers sell everything from Skid Steer Loaders, to Pipelayers, to Highway Pavers. And these machines are used in a variety of industries including construction, forestry and waste management. The dealers also take trade-in equipment that is refurbished and re-marketed to other customers.

 

Like other construction equipment companies, Volvo started to see sales slowing over the past year due to the recession. That’s when John Johnston, Manager of eBusiness Marketing, decided to take a look at how the company could begin using email marketing to help its dealers move used equipment off their lots. Selling used machines not only improves dealer cash flow, it also provides an opportunity to attract new customers to the dealership.

 

Using focus groups and surveys, Johnston got input from Volvo dealers and customers. He also studied the latest research on email marketing best practices for the construction equipment industry. Then, Johnston worked with ExactTarget’s Design Services team to redesign the company’s B-to-B e-newsletter for dealers to make it more engaging and improve response.

 

In addition, Johnston began using ExactTarget's content syndication feature to automate production of Volvo’s email program for used equipment remarketing. Using ExactTarget’s content syndication, Johnston captures the HTML from its online inventory Website and automatically populates its email marketing messages without having to manually enter inventory data or other information.

 

The results?

  • Volvo’s redesigned email newsletter for dealers generated 15% more click-throughs on articles.
  • Using ExactTarget’s Content Syndication feature, Johnston reduced overall build time of Volvo’s remarketing emails for end-users by more than 50 percent.

Karen Bannan of BtoB Magazine recently interviewed John Johnston about Volvo Construction Equipment’s email marketing strategy. You can read her article at BtoB Online.

Comments (0)

Dynamic Content for Dummies (I mean everyone)

Monday, July 27, 2009 by Shelly Griffin
Do you think that dynamic content for email marketing is only for companies with piles of data on their subscribers?  Dynamic Content is for any company with any amount of data - and I mean any.  If you have name, email address and state or gender- you can leverage dynamic content for your email marketing messages.  In fact, having content dynamically change within an email is so easy that we have created a "10-Minute Takeways" video.  Take 10 minutes to watch it now and learn how you can create personal emails that drive relevancy and ROI.
Comments (0)

SMS Marketing Term of the Day: Aggregator

Tuesday, June 30, 2009 by Amanda Cross
ISPs may apply all sorts of sometimes-cryptic spam criteria to your email messages and refuse to deliver them. In the SMS world, SMSCs (short message service centers) are the approximate equivalent to the ISPs, holding on to your SMS messages and deciding when and whether to deliver them.

To send SMS messages, you have be concerned with each different SMSC in order to ensure that your SMS messages are delivered to all customer. If you were working directly with the SMSCs, you would need to negotiate a contract with each on individually, which is why early SMS marketing campaigns were sometimes only available to people with a certain carriers.

Enter the aggregator. The aggregator negotiates with each SMSC for you, giving you a single point of entry into the SMS delivery world.

You sign a contract with the aggregator and send your messages to it, and the aggregator then distributes the message to the appropriate SMSC for the subscriber to receive the message. Not only does working with an aggregator simplify the sending of your SMS marketing messages, but it also provide an avenue for technical support should you run into any problems.

The ExactTarget's SMS solution uses an aggregator to ensure the ability to deliver to subscribers, regardless of carrier. Read more about it on our SMS product page.
Comments (0)

SMS Marketing Term of the Day: MT and MO Messages

Tuesday, June 30, 2009 by Amanda Cross
When you talk about SMS marketing messages, you always talk about it in terms of the mobile device. 

The term MO message (mobile-originated message) is a message that a subscriber sent from a mobile device into the ExactTarget system. Setting up your system to respond to MO messages is similar to setting up a triggered email: you create content and the system sends it out automatically whenever anyone triggers the message. In the case of SMS, people trigger the message by sending you a keyword in a MO message.

The term MT message (mobile-terminated message) refers to a message that goes out from the ExactTarget system and is received by the subscriber's mobile device. Setting up an MT message is similar to setting up a user-initiated email: you choose the content and select the subscribers, and send the message at the time you choose.

Right now, ExactTarget users with a private short code can set up their system to respond to MO message as well as send MT messages. With the next release, shared short code users will be able to send MT messages as well. Check out the SMS page on our website.
Comments (0)

Spamblocked at Yahoo?

Wednesday, June 24, 2009 by Al Iverson
Once in a while, a client will run into an issue where a send has a high number of bounces at Yahoo. Investigation of the issue reveals that the bounces are due to spam complaints: "smtp;421 4.7.0 [TS01] Messages from 1.2.3.4 temporarily deferred due to user complaints - 4.16.55.1; see http://postmaster.yahoo.com/421-ts01.html"

"Help!" A client will ask. "Tell Yahoo I'm not a bad guy! Can you get them on the phone and explain to them that we're good guys?"

Sure, I can call them and tell them you're a good guy. They'll believe me, too. The people I talk to at Yahoo are always polite, affable and easy to deal with.

HOWEVER, THIS WON'T GET YOU UNBLOCKED.

Yahoo (like all the other big and smart ISPs) doesn't block your mail because you're a bad guy. They don't unblock your mail because you're a good guy.

They block your mail because it gets too many spam complaints.

The fix to get Yahoo to stop blocking your mail is to reduce your spam complaints.

Sure, getting you signed up for the Yahoo Feedback Loop will help. But it's not a 100% fix-it helps give you insight into who is complaining, but it alone doesn't stop people from complaining about your mail. What you really need to do is examine your opt-in practices. Fix issues with them that are resulting in people receiving unwanted and unexpected mail. Clean up your legacy lists by way of re-engagement. Dump people who aren't ever opening or clicking on any links in your email messages.

This is all necessary stuff to prevent Yahoo blocks (and resolve them when they pop-up). My relationship with various individuals at Yahoo really has nothing to do with it.

Comments (1)

Deliverability and Tiny URLs

Wednesday, June 24, 2009 by Amanda Cross
Many times, URLs are too long or contain too many non-word characters to be rememberable for regular human beings. Usually, this isn't such a big deal if the URL is hidden behind a text link, but if you are asking your readers to type in a URL, such as from a piece of print marketing, or if you are sharing URLs via Twitter, URL length can get to be a serious concern.

Several services, such as TinyURL.com, will give you a very short URL that they will redirect to your longer URL so that you can use the short version when you need it. MarketingSherpa recently ran a story on the impact that using these services can have on the deliverability of your email marketing messages.

Within the ExactTarget application, you can create short, meaningful URLs for your landing pages by using the personalized URL feature. When you create the landing page, you enter the "key" value that identifies the page. Then, to access that page, subscribers just type in your company domain followed by the key. For example, the URL for a page with a key of "community" would be something like:

http://example.com/community

Comments (0)

Metrics-Driven Video Email Marketing

Tuesday, June 23, 2009 by Amanda Cross
Just noticed this story on PR Newswire:

Flimp logoFlimp Media, a developer of online video marketing and viewer analytics solutions, announced today that it is partnering with on-demand email provider ExactTarget to offer email marketers a metrics-driven video email messaging solution.

Flimp is a solution that allows you to create, distribute, and track video content in your email and landing page marketing. They are working with ExactTarget through the Extensions Network, a program in which applications that integrate with the ExactTarget application are made available to users.

Read more about the solution on the ExactTarget Extensions Network website.

Comments (0)