Email Marketing Message

What's the biggest challenge facing your email marketing?

If it's the quality of your email database, you're not alone. According to a new study by Econsultancy, 50% of surveyed marketers cited database quality as the biggest troublemaker in their email marketing strategies. Even more compelling, database quality has held that position three years running. So why is database quality such a big problem? 

Much like gourmet chefs working with spoiled ingredients, marketers working with outdated or unqualified databases have their chances at success handicapped from the start. If your database...

My colleages and I have dispensed a lot of deliverability tips on this blog throughout the years. But wouldn't it be nice to have the most useful nuggets of delivery-related wisdom compiled for easy reference? Well, your wish is our command.

Over the next few posts, we will, ahem, "deliver" the top ten tips to get your email campaigns to subscribers' inboxes in today's email ecosystem Let's start it off with the first two tips ...

Tip #1 - Subscriber Engagement Is Critical to Email Success
In years past, permission was seen as the key to having mail accepted. But we know things are changing. As...

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...

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...

Whether you're just getting started with mobile optimization or you're a pro and need some tips to share with your colleagues, here are our top mobile design resources for email.

Report: Designing for the Mobile Inbox
Get strategic and practical advice to help you deliver content that’s easy to consume on any device in this new report on mobile optimization.

Case Study: CareerBuilder's Responsive Email Design Results
Learn how CareerBuilder optimized their email design and saw increases of more than 20% in click-through and more than 15% in open rates.

Quick Guide: Design Tips: Mobile + Email
This...

Are you a digital marketer? Do you work for a travel brand? If you answered yes, then this blog post is for you!

ExactTarget recently released Reaching Today’s Digital Traveler, a compilation of tips and tactics that are critical for digital marketers in the travel and hospitality industry. Here’s the list of tactics, plus the questions you should ask yourself to keep your digital communication strategy on track.

1. Grow Your Subscriber list

To determine why your brand might be missing out on conversations with interested and ready-to-purchase travelers, ask yourself these questions:

• Do you...

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...

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...

What does it take to build targeted emails that move from capturing customer attention to ensuring lifetime retention? Chances are, you already know a thing or two about lifecycle marketing. But let’s do a quick recap:

Marketers understand the challenges of limited time and resources that often compete with increased expectations. That's why we created this free lifecycle marketing how-to poster—considering all the lifecycle programs you could execute and providing you with strategic recommendations that will immediately impact your business, one step at a time.

Here's a sneak peek of the...

If you’ve mastered marketing automation 101, and even tackled our 9 steps to go beyond the marketing automation basics, then you’re ready for a few of our expert tips. At this point, you should be delivering highly relevant and dynamic email content, sending out drip emails to nurture prospects over time, and managing your social profiles using real-time and scheduled posts.

Sound about right? If so, then read on to find out how you can continue to improve your marketing automation efforts with these 8 steps, inspired by the Mastering the Art of Marketing Automation eBook:

1. Don’t get lazy. At...

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...

Many companies have experienced the power and benefits of sending personalized email messages to customers and prospects. One organization in particular, Thomas Cook Group, has seen a tremendous increase in their email open rates, which in turn dramatically increased their sales.

So, who is Thomas Cook Group?
Thomas Cook Group is a global online and offline travel company with various retail brands, including Sears Travel and Thomas Cook retail stores. 

How did Thomas Cook use ExactTarget email?
The Thomas Cook retail stores used ExactTarget’s platform to allow their travel agents at each retail...

Marketing automation is the intersection of many useful features and functions. It's a proven fact that marketing automation software gives marketers full visibility into aspects of the sales cycle that were previously a mystery. But the sheer number of buttons and tools can seem daunting if they're not old-hat to you just yet.

As you begin to build an effective marketing automation program, you can begin to gain a holistic view of your marketing activities. From there, you can streamline traditionally manual processes (like customer segmentation, email marketing, and campaign management).

Start ...

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...

It’s amazing to think that just a little over two decades ago, consumers had only two options to communicate across long distances: telephone and mail. In today’s mobile, post-PC world, consumers have countless ways to communicate with each other.

They have similar options when it comes to communicating with brands. The question is, how do consumers determine the proper channel for their communication needs? The decision appears to boil down to six factors:

CONTENT: Is this a marketing message?
As we document throughout the Channel Preference Survey, consumers are much more selective about the...

Chances are you don’t wear the same kinds of clothing today as you did when you were a teenager. And much like wardrobes, the channel preferences of consumers evolve and mature with age. Without major life responsibilities (e.g,. a job, a spouse, a mortgage), teens have lots of time on their hands to communicate (and dress) as they please.

Teens are more likely than any other age group to use text messaging, Facebook, and Twitter. They are also more likely to communicate through a greater number of channels on a daily basis, picking the right channel based on speed, convenience, and privacy.

When...

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...