Email Marketing Strategies

Repurposing content can be an enormous time and sanity-saver for marketers struggling to scale content production. It takes a lot of pressure off non-marketers within your organization who aren’t natural writers, and ensures content relevancy when previously successful content is repurposed.

There are, however, a few common pitfalls that can get you into trouble.  Follow these guidelines to save time and avoid headaches when repurposing content:

1. Am I really repurposing?
It’s important not to confuse repurposing with reusing or redistributing content. 

A common trap marketers fall into...

Using video is nothing new. YouTube reports that they have 72 hours of content uploaded every minute, demonstrating just how crowded and noisy the video content area is. 

When you start creating videos, you’ve got to understand that once your video is out there, you don’t have full control over it any more. Sometimes a spoof of a video can take off and can really positively aid brand awareness. Then there are the other occasions where it can do enormous damage – is all publicity really good publicity? (Let’s leave that for another day!)

If your content is good, then it’s more than likely someone...

A recent article by Allie Freeland, "Four Lessons Marketers Can Learn From Yoga," elegantly outlines how yoga concepts like simplicity, small gestures of kindness and a clean mental state apply to marketing. As a yoga enthusiast, I found the piece very insightful and thought of even more lessons we marketers can learn from the ancient art.

1. Find your center
A central tenet of yoga, "finding your center" typically means an awareness and acceptance of yourself - your mental state, your body, your being. In marketing, this translates to a sense of realism about the nature of your organization....

This week, ExactTarget launched the 21st research report in our SUBSCRIBERS, FANS, & FOLLOWERS series: The Digital North. This cross-channel report covers the online habits and preferences of online Canadian consumers, through detailed analyses of the channels they check daily and the communication methods they respond to best.

If Canadian consumers are part of the target audience for your digital marketing campaigns, you'll want to download this free report to power those campaigns with critical statistics and numbers. But even if Canadians aren't a primary audience for your brand, the...

There’s nothing quite like a classic combo. Dinner and a movie. Burgers and fries. Opt-ins and SMS? Yes, please.

Many consumers have long associated the act of opting-in as something to be done by email, for email. But today’s cross-channel world doesn’t just include email. Companies and organizations could find big success in acquiring new customers by adding a mobile component with SMS (short message service). There are two great approaches to this strategy:

1. Email opt-in via SMS
This one is a quick addition to reinforce the presence of your email campaigns, as well as how easy you’ve made it...

It’s a common misconception that SEO, social media, email, and other content distribution channels should reside in silos. There are numerous synergies to be had by launching campaigns that affect multiple channels of distribution. Strategic earned media is just one way to influence these channels simultaneously. When executed properly the social sphere lights up with buzz, landing page conversions increase and search engines take notice.

What a Strategic Earned Media Campaign Looks Like
Earning media has been a public relations (PR) goal for many decades – targeting newspapers, magazines and...

There’s no question about it: email is the foundation of successful B2B marketing strategies.

In 2012, BtoB Magazine reported that 59% of B2B marketers rank email as the #1 tactic for generating revenue and predicted that in 2013 spending on email by B2B marketers would increase 65%. A big reason more B2B marketing budget is flowing to permission-based email is that 57% of marketers say email newsletters are their most effective tool for lead nurturing. (Source: MarketingSherpa 2013 Email Marketing Benchmark Report)

B2B Email Marketing at its Best
One brand that, in my opinion, is a best-in-class...

Digital marketers know that it’s all about the numbers. Every quality social media tool will have a powerful analytics platform to show CMOs (and their teams) how effective their social media strategies are shaping up to be. Hopefully, most CMOs also know that social media is truly an area of marketing where the numbers can craft a narrative. Although numbers can’t capture all the nuances of a brand’s voice on social media, the numbers do help to show how well the brand’s messages are being received by customers, and that’s a direct reflection of the strategy and voice as a whole.

As a CMO,...

1. Smart Phone Penetration Hits over 50%. In 2012, eMarketer estimates, "six countries—South Korea, Norway, Sweden, Australia, the UK, and the US—saw smartphone user penetration rates among users rise above 50% for the first time. In regional terms, only North America will boast average smartphone penetration rates above 50% in 2013 among mobile users, as Canada crosses the 50% mark this year. Western Europe as a whole will cross that boundary in 2014."

2. mCommerce and the Mobile Transaction. For the B2C brands, mobile payments have already revolutionized the way consumers pay for products....

Our last post focused on managing customer conversations and preferences. Next up are #5 and #6 on our Deliverabilty Top 10 List:

Tip #5 - Offer Engaging Content, Not Just Marketing
Marketers who succedd are the ones who recognize that users remain in control when it comes to email. Mail streams that consist of nothing but marketing material are likely to fail, as they will experience high spam complaints and low user engagement. On the other hand, mail containing content that the recipient finds useful or desirable should do well as ISPs move to engagement models when making filtering...

Social media has been around for more than a decade, and most businesses have come to realize that social can (and should) be an important part of their marketing program. At the same time, marketers continue to struggle with with how to fully leverage—or even understand—the ever-changing world of social media marketing.

Finding and installing a social media management product isn't enough. You need a thorough understanding of how to launch, grow, and innovate your social media programs.

Look no further! ExactTarget Social Media Services can provide you with proactive support, a pragmatic...

With social media and mobile dominating the current digital marketing landscape, email marketing strategies can easily get left behind. Many marketers now consider email an outdated medium. Over.

But that’s simply not the case. While it’s important to continue (or begin!) your social media and mobile marketing efforts, these should work in conjunction with email marketing. The benefits are numerous – apart from significantly higher ROI than other marketing strategies like direct mail, email marketing provides an opportunity for you as a business to take your conversation with a consumer...

Like many social media marketers, you're probably focused on strengthening your content marketing strategy--which means you need a solid policy for outbound publishing and approval of social media messages. And you know that can get complex in a hurry!

Effective content marketing means not only defining who can publish what and where, but also managing the communication stream of creating, editing and approving final content. As your team starts to grow, this whole process can often become a massive tangle of roundabout email exchanges and lengthy Excel spreadsheets.

SocialEngage approvals...

The Gmail Team announced impending changes to their user interface today that will have an effect on users of their desktop and mobile platforms. The changes deal with how mail in the inbox is sorted for review by the recipient. These changes will be rolling out over the next several weeks for everyone, or you can opt-in to test things out now by selecting "Configure Inbox" after clicking on the gear icon.

Currently, default users of Gmail see mail which is sorted into "Important and unread" and "Everything else." In the future, though, the desktop will look like this (taken from the...

While the potential to generate high-quality leads through webinars has become more widely recognized over the past few years, the importance of pre- and post-webinar promotion is often underemphasized. Marketers can certainly accelerate their lead conversions using webinars, but without a promotional strategy in place, the webinars that they’ve worked so hard to create will just fall flat.

Here’s a quick rule of thumb when it comes to webinar promotions: to keep your hard work from going to waste, plan to start promoting four to six weeks before the actual date of the webinar. After the...

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...

The difference between doing email appends right and doing them wrong involves changing one significant step… the outbound message.  Instead of the outbound message containing a link to opt-out, the outbound email marketing message should have registration as the primary call to action. This approach to email appends is called "opt-in" email append.

ExactTarget was one of the early proponents of this approach and we have now real life experience with this approach under our belts.  Opt-in email appends have been very successful in delivering highly responsive subscribers without the headaches...