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Email Marketing Response Rate

Getting Past Listening on Twitter

Friday, March 19, 2010 by Dawn DeVirgilio
If you have read anything about social media, the first thing you can do when starting out is to “Listen.”

But it’s really not enough just to listen anymore. 

Now don’t get me wrong, you definitely need to be listening.  Listening to what your customers are saying about you will help you formulate how you respond and find trends in what people are saying about your brand.

Just like with email marketing you have to be relevant and engaging or people will unsubcribe via unfollowing/unfriending you.  No one wants to talk to a brick wall and even worse no one wants to get a constant stream of interruptive marketing messages.  Twitter provides an instant communication tool that allows you to have conversations with your customers on a daily basis.  Why wouldn’t you use that to get feature requests, encourage customers to collaborate with each other and even get positive feedback!

Some of my most rewarding conversations have been helping our customers learn more about email marketing, learn more about our product, and help solve issues they may be having.

It is truly the year of the customer. It’s time to get past just listening and start engaging. 

You can follow us (and talk to me!) on Twitter @ExactTarget or by being our Fan on Facebook.

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Did You Know? Three Ways to get ExactTarget Customer Service

Wednesday, January 27, 2010 by Dawn DeVirgilio
In email marketing it's all about Channel Preferences! So did you know there are three different ways to get ExactTarget Customer Service from our Client Success Center: 

3Sixty Back Office
My favorite! If you are a member of 3sixty, you can click the Back Office Button and Sumbit a Case, Request an Update on a Case and also monitor case comments. 

Email to Case
Send an email to help@exacttarget.com and a case will be automatically created in our case management system.  You will get an email reply identifying your case number.

Good Old Fashioned Phone Call
  • US Customers can call 866-558-9823
  • UK Customers can call +44 (0) 808 101 7081
  • All other International Customers can call +44 (0) 207 291 8550

Lastly, I've found alot of the answers I need in 3sixty have already been asked (and answered!) but customers and ExactTarget employees. Make sure to check out 3sixty Community! 

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Haiti Relief Text Campaign from Red Cross Emphasizes Convenience and Immediacy of SMS

Friday, January 15, 2010 by Amanda Berkey
According to the Mashable blog, by 5:30pm EST Jan 14, only two days after the devastating earthquake in Haiti, the Red Cross has raised an impressive $5 million dollars from their Text campaign. If you were on Twitter, Facebook, or other social media sites this week, you may have seen the outcries to donate $10 by texting "Haiti" to the shortcode 90999. If you do the quick math, that's 500,000 mobile subscribers that have used text messaging to donate to the Haitian relief efforts led by the Red Cross. The blog post also shows an SMS message flow explaining how easy it is for a mobile subscriber to text in "Haiti" and then "Yes" to confirm their donation. In two short SMS messages, a single person is able to contribute to the larger cause from anywhere!

As the product marketing manager for the SMS portfolio at ExactTarget, I'm very impressed, but not surprised by the results of this SMS campaign. When I meet with customers who are strategizing about their 1 to 1 Marketing campaigns that include email, SMS, web, and social media, we discuss the reasons that SMS messaging to communicate with your subscribers are effective. 

We are in an era when people are more likely to have a mobile phone rather than a traditional land line. And mobile phones are something that people do not leave home without. Whether you have a smart phone or standard mobile phone, SMS text plans is now considered basic communication. How many times have you ditched leaving a person you were calling a voicemail to send them a simple text message? Many people outside of the business world forgo the expensive data plans to receive email and web from their phone, but gladly pay for their SMS messaging plans.

Including text messaging in your 1 to 1 marketing strategy is a powerful way to reach your audience can have huge rewards:
  • SMS messaging is immediate and direct: by nature of the US standard of 160 characters, text messages are short and concise. They reach the person that needs the quick information. And responding to or reading a text message takes only seconds and it doesn't require you to shift your focus too much. You can even do it in a meeting! *Wink*
  • Text messaging campaigns are always available when a person is interested: savvy marketers know that it takes massive effort to get a prospect engaged in their brand. Having a text campaign that a mobile subscriber can respond to a call-to-action at the emotional high of the interest, can be the difference if they ever participate or not. Let's face it, when they get back to their computer, even a geniunely interested person is likely to forget that they wanted to sign up for your program.
  • SMS can augment email marketing efforts: the best example of this approach is from our customer, Pier 1 Imports, who follows up with email drip marketing from new subscribers they captured from their text sweepstakes at college bookstores. Leveraging both email and text messaging for marketing campaigns can empower you to send relevant information using both messaging channels
The recent example of a non-profit organization raising donations and enabling the general public to act is proof that SMS messaging when combined with social media and email can have incredible impact and rewards. For more thoughts about getting started with Text Messaging check out our recent webinar.
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The BIG RED SHINY Button

Friday, December 11, 2009 by Karen Balle

Dearest mailer,

My fearless leader Phil Schott pointed me at this Ken Magill article today.  It's all about blame.  Who really is responsible when your email gets blocked?  We've been together for so long and there's so much that we could point to. 

I don't want to talk about blame.  I gave up blame for Lent one year and never picked it up again.  I replaced it with personal responsibility and owning my actions.  Since I can't own your actions, I can't own all the responsibility for your email getting blocked.  Blocking happens for a very select number of reasons.  I will own responsibility if your email getting blocked happens for one of the reasons that are in my control if you will own your part.

The things that I can do wrong that might lead to blocking include some technical things you shouldn't have to worry about like mail servers are otherwise behaving obnoxiously or outside of internet norms.

1. Too many concurrent (or simultaneous) connections.
2. Too many recipients sent per connection.
3. Too many connections per IP.
4. Too many connections timing out during the transaction.
5. Transactions are being retried too often.

This is the part that I, as your ESP, own.  I have control over this part.  I'm set up to act respectfully to the internet.  Otherwise, my business model wouldn't work.  I want things with us to work out.  If you have a problem with an individual domain, I can make changes for them, I promise!  I am set up to be as respectful of ISPs and the rest of the internet as I can possibly be.  I really want this email marketing thing between us to work!  This is a relationship, a true partnership and it takes both of us working at it to make it work right. 

I know it may sound like a lot, but the rest is up to you.  Your list quality, user engagement, not mailing to older segments, sending relevant content to the right segments, regular re-engagement campaigns, knowing when to let go of old addresses...  This is all up to you.  I’ll even talk to ISPs for you.  You just need to tell me honestly what you're doing and work with me as a team.  I rely on you, my dearest mailer, to also act respectfully or all the work done on my side will make no difference for when it comes to your deliverability.

I really am doing my best to do my part.  Some of these things change and there are so many moving parts to keep up with.  There are things like sender authentication, too, that I have to know.   Laws change all the time and I have to keep up with all of those to give good guidance.  Will you work on keeping your list segmented and fresh?  Will you make sure you have true permission to send to your recipients and that you’re sending relevant content?  Do you send out regular re-engagement campaigns to people who haven't responded to you in the last six months to a year?  Are you willing say goodbye when a recipient hasn’t opened or clicked in the last year to eighteen months?  That’s what we both need to make this work between us and with the ISPs.

                                                           Yours always,
                                                           ExactTarget Deliverability

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4 Ways to Use Analytics to Improve Your Email Campaigns

Wednesday, December 9, 2009 by Kevin Nuest
This post was guest written by Lary Stucker of FreshClicks.net, a blog about Marketing and Analytics Strategies.

If you're anything like me, one of the big draws of online marketing is the ability to use analytics to track, report, and improve your marketing campaigns. Not only can you use this data to demonstrate the value of your marketing efforts, you can also gain greater customer insight by studying how they respond. So lets look at 4 practical ways you can improve your email campaigns by using your basic reporting tools.


1. Improving Delivery Rates:

Improve Delivery Rates

Low delivery rates make ISPs nervous. When ISPs get nervous about your emails they label you as SPAM first and ask questions later. Your email campaigns' delivery rates should be in the high 90%. If they are not it means that you need to:

• Filter out those bad and old email address: When you send email to bad addresses, ISPs take notice. Often ISPs will flag a known bad address and if you are sending email to that address they are going to think you are sending spam.

• Improve your collection methods: Make sure potential subscribers clearly understand what they are signing up for, and use a double opt-in method. You can even write the confirmation email so that it reminds them why they signed up for your list in the first place.


2. Improving Open Rates:

Improve Open Rates

You got the email in their inbox, but now what? When someone receives an email they usually open it in the first 24-48 hours. After that, it has been pushed so far down by new emails and other priorities that it will most likely get deleted. So every minute that goes by decreases the possibility that they are actually going to open your email. There are two things that you can measure and test to improve your open rates:

• Time of Day/ Week: Your subscribers are busy people, and depending on the type of campaigns you are running they might not want to read your newsletter or "special offer" first thing Monday morning. I use our existing web analytics to see which days are the most busy on our website. Then I'll look at which hours are the busiest on those days. Once I have that data I'll create random samples from my subscriber list and send on those busy days/hours and see which ones have the best open rates.

• Subject lines: make sure that your subject lines are interesting, enticing, and actually re-enforce the body of the email. The great thing is you can test subject lines and see what kinds of messages entice your subscribers to open. You'd be surprised how the smallest changes can make a big difference. We had a campaign with a decent open rate, (16.8%) after adding the word "Tips" to the subject line our open rate jumped to 25.4%! Suddenly the email went from looking like a marketing piece, to a useful resource our subscribers could actually use. By the way, the body of the email didn't change, but the subject line changed the expectation of the subscriber.


3. Improving Conversion/ Click-Through Rates:

One of the best things to improve conversion and click-through rates is to make it clear what the subscriber is going to find when they click on any link. We recently ran an "upgrade" campaign and decide to run A/B testing on a random portion of our list. The email to group A contained a link with a "Upgrade Now" button, while group B received an email message with a "buy now" button. What we found out was that group A expected the link to give them information about obtaining a free upgrade while group B clearly understood that the "buy now" link would take them to our store to purchase the upgrade. The results, 9.2% conversion rate on the "Upgrade Now" group and a 19.4% conversion rate on the "buy now" group. A difference of 210%!


4. Decreasing Unsubscribes

Lets be totally honest for a second. There are two reasons your company is putting resources into email campaigns. The reason you state on your signup form, to inform, educate or entertain your subscribers, and the reasons you discuss back at the office. Whether it’s to drive direct sales, nurture leads or increase brand awareness, email marketing is a valuable tool for your company. You know it and guess what, your subscribers know it too, and their okay with it. What they want is to not feel like you are trying to trick them into anything. Make sure that your email campaigns add value, have a consistent send schedule, and don't surprise them. After sending a campaign I always check our unsubscribe rates. Our average unsubscribe rate is 0.01%-0.02%. Anytime I see it above those rates I know something went wrong. Usually it has to do with the perceived value of the message or the time between campaigns. When you have analytical evidence like an increase in unsubscribe rates it is a lot easier to convince your copywriter and others in the company of needed changes.

What do you think?

By studying the analytical of your email campaigns you can greatly improve the effectiveness of your campaigns and gain greater insight into your customers. What kinds of insights have you been able to gain from your analytics? How were you able to use that to improve your email campaigns and marketing to your customers? I'd love to hear from you on twitter @LaryStucker or on my blog, www.FreshClicks.net!

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Personalizing Email for Sales Agents Boosts Response

Tuesday, December 8, 2009 by Joel Book
Personalizing Email for Sales Agents Boosts ResponseI’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. If you sell through sales agents or dealers, one of the smartest things you can do to boost email response is to personalize the email by sending it “on behalf” of the customer’s sales rep or account manager.

Putting the agent’s picture and contact information on the email will boost response rates by a factor of 15-20%. The reason? No matter how advanced and how sophisticated we get at using technology to improve sales and marketing, one fact remains constant: People by from People.

And you can automate the entire process using “dynamic content” technology to personalize the content of every email you send based on what is relevant to each customer.

Personalized Email Works for GLS Companies
Personalizing Email for Sales Agents Boosts ResponseGLS Companies sends personalized email on behalf of each sales agent to people they meet at trade shows. The Integrated Communication Solutions (SM) company also uses personalized email to nurture leads.

Jim Benedict, Marketing Director for GLS, reports that this tactic is being used effectively to shorten the sales cycle.

Expedia Leverages Personalization
As reported in the December 2nd issue of MarketingSherpa, Expedia CruiseShipCenters, a brick-and-click cruise agency has more than 2,500 cruise consultants who operate independently or from franchised locations across North America.  The cruise agency uses an automated, centralized email and website system that creates personalized communications for its 2,500 sales agents. Putting an agent’s face and name on correspondence has lifted clickthroughs 23%. You can read the entire article online at no charge until December 12th.

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Coupons Boost Email Response Rates

Thursday, November 19, 2009 by Joel Book
Retailers and consumer packaged goods marketers that include coupons in consumer email communications are experiencing higher open and click-through rates.

As reported in the November 19th eMarketer Daily Newsletter, “There is a pronounced difference between open rates for e-mails that include a coupon offer and those that do not. Open rates of around 24% to 25% for coupon e-mails dropped to just 16% to 18% for non-coupon campaigns.”

Open Rates for Coupon Offers vs. Other Mailings

The eMarketer article also confirms that “Higher open rates for coupon offers translated into higher click rates as well, though the difference was much smaller. emails with coupons that could be used online were most likely to be clicked, at 4%.”

Click Rates for Coupon Offers vs. Other Mailings in the US

As coupon use expands, I believe those brands that are able to personalize offers to the product needs and purchase behavior of individual consumers will have a distinct advantage over those brands that practice a “one-size-fits-all” coupon strategy. To learn more about technology that enables marketers to deliver relevant and timely offers – including coupons -- based on email subscriber data and behavior, check out ExactTarget Live Offers at ExactTarget.com

What About Mobile Coupons?

Are mobile coupons ready for prime time? Not quite, but we’re getting there fast – really fast. According to a recent Mobile Marketing Survey of 511 consumers by HipCricket, 83% of US consumers say their favorite brand has yet to market to them via their mobile phone, even though 37% say they would be interested in participating in a mobile customer loyalty program from a brand they trust.

This indicates growing consumer interest in mobile marketing and represents a significant -- but largely untapped -- opportunity for brands to connect with customers on mobile devices.  “With consumer interest in mobile marketing continuing to steadily increase, it’s clear that now is the time for brands to launch and execute their mobile strategy and programs,” said Scott Debson, HipCricket’s VP of brand solutions.

It seems that brands are starting to listen. Ten million digital coupons were redeemed in the first six months of 2009, up 25% from a year ago, according to Inmar, a coupon-processing company. But they still account for less than half a percent of all coupons distributed.

Top Tips for Using Mobile Coupons

If you’re looking for practical insight on how to use mobile coupons effectively, check back here to see my next post, “Five tips for using Mobile Coupons to Drive in-store Traffic.”

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Inadvertent blocking at Cox this morning.

Thursday, October 29, 2009 by Karen Balle

Cox made some changes to their mail servers this morning, leading to some accidental blocks this morning that we understand were not actually listed on the dnsbl referenced.  Other sources have confirmed that these blocks were wide-spread and accidental. 

Cox seems to have this resolved now and our tests show that previously blocked emails are now being delivered.   They responded to earlier cases and asked that customers who had email blocked this morning to try resending their blocked messages.

We received the following official statement from Invalument:

 

On Thursday, October 29th, Cox Communications make a number of changes and improvements to their spam filters. They added a special Postmaster
page:

http://postmaster.cox.net

And they added the invaluement.com DNSBLs to the blacklists they use to eliminate spam.

Unfortunately, during the early morning hours after this was implemented, there was a glitch in their system which caused some legitimate e-mail sent to cox.net addresses to mistakenly get blocked, and this was mistakenly attributed to the invaluement lists. (The invaluement.com lists did NOT have those legitimate sending IP addresses
blacklisted.) This glitch occurred between 4 a.m. and 8 a.m. EST on 10/29/2009. The damage was greatly minimized by the off-hours timing of the incident and greatly minimized by Cox's internal whitelist.
The glitch is now completely fixed.
 

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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 :)
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Mobile Developers Solution Showcase

Wednesday, October 14, 2009 by Amanda Cross
Ratul Shah is the presenter for the first part of the solution showcase. Unlike every other presenter that's talked in this room so far today, Ratul is maneuvering through the crowd with the hand-held mic. What a showman. :)

Industry Standard Terms
  • SMS = short message service, aka text messaging. It has a 160 character limit.
  • MO = mobile originated = a message sent FROM a phone
  • MT = mobile terminated = a message sent TO a phone
  • short code = a 5- or 6-digit number that you buy from a carrier to send messages to your customers. http://www.usshortcodes.com
  • vanity short code = a short code that spells something out, such as our, ETSMS
  • random short code = a short code that doesn't intentionally spell anything. These cost slightly less.
  • private short code = only your traffic goes through this code
  • shared short code = a code that you share with other SMS users. Keywords differentiate your traffic from the traffic of other people on the shared short codes.
  • MMA = Mobile Marketing Association http://mmaglobal.com/policies. A group that creates guidelines for United States mobile marketing.
  • Aggregator = a third party company that maintains connections between the carriers and the content providers. When we provisioning a short code for you, we work with an aggregator to get you approved for all carriers.
ExactTarget SMS Architecture
You create JOIN, VOTE, HELP, UNSUBSCRIBE and other kinds of actions that subscribers use to send you MO messages to get in on your mobile messages.

Unfortunately, you can't create keywords or actions in the API at this point. You can initiate SMS sends through the API, however.

System Terms
  • Subscriber key = unique identifier for subscribers. Allows you to identify subscribers by phone number instead of email address.
  • Publication list = contains subscribers who opt-in using their mobile device
  • Data extension = contains subscribers whom you import through the GUI or the API  
Implementing Text
  • Keyword response - text in and receive a response
  • Mobile capture - captures email address for list growth
  • Vote and check vote count - submit your vote. poll the response
  • Outbound (with opt-in) - a message from ExactTarget to the mobile device
  • Custom campaigns
Wow, Ratul goes through a lot of content fast, and a lot of these slides are very graphics heavy and difficult to translate to blog. Thankfully, everyone at the conference is supposed to be able to get the slides.

FanMail Solution

Dave DeVore - CEO FanMail marketing
Josiah Kaiser - Senior Operations and Solutions Consultant
Tim Kauble - ExactTarget product specialist and world-class AMPscript guru

FanMail Marketing is using SMS to capture email addresses. Initially they were asking subscriber to text their email addresses in this format:

krohn email@example.com to 88769

but they found that customers found this confusing and made errors that prevented the system from capturing their information. So for the next phase, they made it into a 2-stage process to make it more like a conversation. In the new setup, subscribers text in in this format:

stubbs to 88769

then the system sends back an text saying something to the effect of, "Thanks for your interest. Reply to this message with your email address to join our mailing list." When the subscriber responds with the email address, it is added to the email list. The customer gets an email immediately welcoming them to the list, and then any future mailings to that list.

The SMS message that was sent back after the first message included AMPscript to trigger the welcome email.

The first use case resulted in more errors than the second, and people weren't willing to try to sign up more than once. A limitation of both use cases is that it only captures people's email addresses, omitting other important subscriber information that would be useful for relevant messaging .

In the third phase of FanMail's SMS evolution, they integrated their SMS with landing pages to allow the capture of more subscriber information. People text in:

butter to 88769

The system responds with a message saying to respond with an email address. When the subscriber replies with the email address, the system sends them an email with a link to a landing page built with the Smart Capture feature.  People complete the Smart Capture form and now the system has information to send really personalized information. For example, this band (Hot Buttered Rum) uses the subscriber's ZIP code to let the subscriber know about upcoming concerts in their area.

What FanMail discovered was that going through this process aggregated higher quality subscribers who were more likely to be engaged with the marketing campaigns and therefore higher ROI on their marketing efforts.

The future phases of this SMS evolution may allow subscriber to provide attribute information via SMS, such as ZIP code to empower the functionality above.

Another thing that FanMail has discovered is that subscribers are willing to send you SMS messages if they're interested in what you have to offer, but they don't like for you to begin the SMS conversation.

Custom Use Case
Tim Kauble took the stage for the final portion of this presentation. Poor Tim--his phone junked out on him this morning and his data connection didn't work, so we're seeing a modified version of his presentation. Typical of technology!

Tim talked about designing a system to allow him to manage his own tasks using text messages. He wanted to accomplish the following:
  • Accept tasks
  • Assign those tasks
  • Assign priority, including deadlines
  • Expose the tasks to landing pages so that he could see them all
  • Support multiple methods of input, such a forwarding emails to an endpoint that generates a task with the content of the email.
Tim demonstrated texting in to the system to find out how many tasks he had. He had 30, by the way, plus the system also sent him a message to stop messing around with text messages and get back to work. :)

Tim also brought up the landing page where we could see his lengthy task list--such is the life of the ExactTarget employee!
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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

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Email + Surveys

Wednesday, October 7, 2009 by Scott Roth
At ExactTarget, we often talk about honoring subscriber preferences in regards to permission, frequency, content and channel. In my last post on Email + Web Analytics I wrote about the value that web analytics brings to the table by allowing you to sense behavior and then respond with appropriate offers.

Here's my buzz-word free advice for today. Instead of just observing behavior and reacting, why not also ask your subscribers what they are looking for? It may seem like a no-brainer, but not that many people do it, or do it well. This is where preference centers, lead capture forms, and surveys come into play. By leveraging surveys both on your website and within emails, you can gradually accumulate more and more information about your subscribers that will help you target them with more timely and relevant one-to-one communications.

One of our certified ExactTarget Extensions Network survey partners is SurveyGizmo. SurveyGizmo provides a seamless integration to include intelligent surveys in your emails, leverage existing subscriber data in surveys, and automatically update ExactTarget subscriber records with survey responses.

You can learn more about SurveyGizmo by visiting their listing on the ExactTarget Extensions Network.

Or, if you are going to be in Indianapolis for Connections on Tuesday, October 13th you can stop by their user meet-up happy hour from 5:00-7:00. Click here for more information.
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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.

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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.
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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."
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Email is Still Communication King, but Social Media is No Jester

Thursday, September 3, 2009 by Blaine Cooper-Surma

 

In 2003, with the introduction of MySpace, the way we communicate with one another drastically changed. 

 

Last year, MarketingSherpa ran a survey to help it better understand society’s perception of social media regarding its role in marketing communications. What did these marketing experts discover, you ask?  They found that 97 percent of respondents use social media platforms, like MySpace, Linkedin, Twitter, and Facebook as complimentary marketing mediums to the current communication king – email. 
 


 

So why are email service providers like ExactTarget not threatened with the rise in social media usage?  The answer is simple.  Email, as a means of communication, allows social networking sites to send relevant information to its users.  Social media enterprises have realized the convenience and effectiveness of email – hence the reason you receive an automated email when someone posts on you Facebook wall or sends you a Linkedin connection request.  Essentially, your personal email account funnels all activity that occurs throughout your numerous social media accounts into one location.  For this reason, email isn't going anywhere – at least anytime soon.

So where does ExactTarget fit in this picture?  We fully understand the importance of social media and its ability to expand the reach of your email marketing campaign.  For example, another resource that should be added to your marketing arsenal, as a means of facilitating subscriber list growth, is the social forward feature. 

In the past few years social media has emerged as an effective tool in the marketing world, however, we agree with the 97 percent that still find email is the primary means of marketing communication.

Just because everything is different doesn't mean anything has changed.  – Irene Peter
 


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2009 Marketer's Dilemma: Doing More with Less...Again

Thursday, August 20, 2009 by Amanda Berkey
39% of Marketers think their budget will be cut in 2009As a marketer, I've always focused on balancing driving the most results from a limited budget. Then the global recession took effect last year and to remain competitive, companies began their prudent cost-cutting measures across all areas of the business. All marketers know that their budgets are some of the first to be reduced during trying economic times. This challenge helps us flex our virtual marketing muscles to affect our target audience with strategic marketing campaigns, with less budget than before.

The good news is that you're not alone! MediaPost shared results from the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) recent survey of marketers, concluding that while marketing spend is slightly increasing in some companies, the amount of new projects is surging. What a balancing act!

MediaPost's Jack Loechner writes, "today, 87% of the respondents indicate they are identifying cost savings and reductions, the same as one year ago, and only slightly improved from 93% six months ago." The survey shows that marketing spending is still tight often leading to sending fewer people on the road, reducing the media advertising, and lowering overall production costs.

This recent survey validates that the pressure is on to continue to improve marketing strategies that drive business results, all while spending less budget. At ExactTarget we know more than ever that our customers come to us for One to One Marketing and Email Marketing Strategies that help set them apart from their competitors.

This Tuesday, Myron Corporation, announced that they renewed their contract with ExactTarget because they were able to reduce their marketing costs while more than doubling their email-related sales using our on-demand marketing solutions. So what's "in" for 2009, you ask? Saving on costs, while driving business is always in style.
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ExactTarget 2009 SUBSCRIBERS RULE! Awards – Nominations Now Accepted!

Tuesday, August 4, 2009 by Chip House

Each year at the ExactTarget Connections conference we give out awards to our clients that have demonstrated some of the best programs, designs, list growth and results of the year. This year is no different…but there is a new twist. This year we’re launching the SUBSCRIBERS RULE! Awards.
SR Award
There are 5 key awards and 3 grand prizes that go to those programs that best honor the three main tenets of our SR! philosophy:

1. Serve the individual.
2. Honor their unique preferences for communication, content, frequency and channel.
3. Deliver them timely, relevant content that improves their lives
 

If you are an ExactTarget client or partner you can now nominate yourself, or another program online. Nominations are only open until Friday, September 4th so please start those wheels turning now.

Submit nominations here!
Award Categories are:

Communication & Content Relevance Award
Do you design your content around subscriber preferences? This award focuses on customers that have shown big improvements in subscriber relevancy by designing emails to match subscriber preferences. Of course design and metrics matter here!

Behavior & Data Relevance Award
This award is for marketers that have really done a great job integrating and leveraging data from multiple sources (CRM, analytics, POS) in a way that results in more individualized communications through ExactTarget.

Channel Preference Award
Honoring your subscribers’ channel preferences to receive email via email, SMS, voice or other channels? If so, this award is for you!  Nominees must have used at least two messaging channels and will be judged on demonstrated customer retention or lift in response.

Permission-based List Growth Award
The best marketing lists are grown subscriber by subscriber while honoring permission. If you are an ExactTarget customer using unique, permission-based list capture strategies that have shown big improvements in list growth or response rates then we want to hear from you!

Improving Lives Award
Who says email can’t change lives? Many of our customers in non-profit and profit sectors help others every day. This award is for a customer with the most inspirational story of how their one-to-one marketing efforts are improving the lives of their customers.

Grand Prizes:

Reseller Partner of the Year Award
From beginning to end this ExactTarget Reseller demonstrates excellence in email marketing strategy, design, integration, execution and client success all while honoring the tenets Subscribers Rule!

Embedded Partner of the Year
A number of companies have embedded ExactTarget into their software application. This award is for the best embedded solution that honors Subscribers Rule!

Email Program of the Year Award
This award will simply go to the best of the best. The grand prize winner of the SR! Awards 2009 will be the best overall email marketing program that honors the tenets of Subscribers Rule from start to finish. That includes solid strategy, data management, creative, use of dynamic content and targeting, integration, and results!

One thing is for sure…we’ll have a great time giving out the awards this year. ExactTarget customers never disappoint. There are always some amazing programs shown off at these awards and I’m sure this year will be no different!
 

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Reporter Butchers Social Media Usage Statistics

Monday, August 3, 2009 by Morgan Stewart
On Friday, the Houston Chronicle ran Companies in new age of networking. Jeff Rohrs sent me a link to the article asking me to do a little digging into the opening statement:

"As social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook assimilate into our lexicon as verbs, companies faced with reduced communication budgets are realizing the value of engaging their employees and customers through Web-based interactive media.

A June survey conducted by The Internal Association of Business Communicators (IABC) and Buck Consultants reported almost 80 percent of organizations frequently use social media, outranking even e-mail."

The rest of the article contains excerpts from an interview with Julie Freeman, president of the International Association of Business Communications (IABC) talking about how ans why companies should participate in social networking. Which of course begs the question, if 80% of companies are already using it, then why the need to talk about the basics of social media? Simple, because they don't!

So, where is the problem? Well, the original press release from the IABC, Two Out of Three Communication Professionals Don't Think Twitter's Popularity Will Last, makes a lot more sense. Furthermore, the full report, Employee Engagement Survey, provides some interesting information on the current and future plans of how companies plan to use social media tools in communicating with internal employees.

Unfortunately, the Houston Chronicle is the latest to get caught up in the feeding frenzy around social media and email bashing. In doing so, they failed to grasp the incredible significance of an asterisk.



Reading this chart, you must take the little notation next to the channel that says (n=xx) into consideration. This tells you how many people answered the question and form the basis for the percentage in the chart. For social media, there is an additional asterisk saying that this was not listed as an option in the survey. However, 72 people wrote in social media as a way they used to communicate internally. Of the 72, 79% said they use this method frequently. So, about 57 of the 1,477 survey respondents frequently use social media for internal communication. This is about 4%.

Contrarily, 75% of 1,418 survey respondents said email is used frequently for internal communication. This is approximately 1,064 of the total respondents.

The survey provides absolutely zero basis for comparison between social media and email. Since email was an answer choice and social media was a write in answer, we can't compare them. The "outranking even email" comment is simply wrong.

Email is still the workhorse for internal employee communication. Blogs, discussion boards, internal social networks, and wikis are all being used more and provide very valuable tools. They haven't displaced email and they won't displace email for a long time. Beware statistics that support hype in spite of the facts (and common sense).

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Email Open and Click Benchmarks

Friday, July 31, 2009 by Morgan Stewart
This week eMarketer released their second report of the month on email marketing open and click-through rate benchmarks.

If you missed them, here are the two articles:

E-Mail Marketing and Click-Through Rates features benchmarks recently released from MailerMailer.

E-Mail Marketing and Click-Through Rates: Part II features benchmarks recently released from Epsilon.

Looking at the charts, it does not take much time to notice that the data is different. In many cases, it is VERY different. Consider:

Average Delivery Rates
  • MailerMailer says 99%
  • Epsilon says 94%

Average Open Rates
  • MailerMailer says 12.5%
  • Epsilon says 22.1%

Average Click-Through Rates
  • MailerMailer says 2.8%
  • Epsilon says 6.1%

To understand the differences, one must take into account their respective client bases. MailerMailer conducted their research based on 300 million emails sent from 3,000 clients over 6 months. Do the math and their average client is sending just under 17,000 emails per month.

Alternatively, Epsilon’s numbers are based on an analysis of 6 billion emails sent from 200 clients over 3 months. Their average client is sending approximately 10 million emails a month.

Epsilon clients send 600 times the number of emails MailerMailer clients send. No wonder they are different. Epsilon is focused on big senders. MailerMailer is focused on small senders.

So, what’s the benchmark?

Benchmarks in email marketing can be tricky. Considering the large and significant differences in the benchmarks published by MailerMailer and Epsilon, this should be crystal clear. Use these numbers as guidelines and nothing more!

I commend the authors of these studies, but all benchmarks I have ever seen (or published) are subject to scrutiny. Benchmarks such as these (generated from client data) are subject to the diversity of the client base. Benchmarks generated from surveys are subject to the reality that marketers (like all survey respondents) tend to report best-case scenarios.

Keep in mind than benchmarks represent the average. The university I attended is notorious for grading on a curve. So, if we performed average, you got a “C”--hardly worth writing home to mom and dad about. Shoot high by benchmarking yourself against the better averages.

With that in mind, here are some suggestions based on my experience of looking at benchmarks over time.

Delivery Rates

MailerMailer’s average delivery rate seems high to me… as an average. Epsilon’s 94% average seems low based on our data.

Companies getting A’s in deliverability are consistently at or above 99% deliverability.  Anything below 96% should be looked at with some scrutiny. Permission-based email marketers who send on a regular schedule do not tend to fall below the 96% threshold on a consistent basis.

Open and Click-Through Rates

MailerMailer’s averages are somewhat erratic, especially when looking at the benchmarks by industry. Looking at Banking and Finance open rate averages for example, one would not normally expect to see such wild swings between messages sent to a list of 500-999 compared to sends sent to 1,000 or more. This is likely due the their client base consisting of smaller senders. These swings are likely driven by individual senders who either consistently over or underperform instead of true variance by industry.





Epsilon’s numbers are more in line with what I typically see and would expect. They are also much more stable. Given a choice, benchmark your program against the Q1 2009 numbers presented in these charts.





If you are looking for ways to increase your click-through rate, sign-up for InSight and receive an email each month with the best tips and tricks to get the most out of your email marketing campaigns.

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