Email Newsletter Software

This week, a handful of clients reached out to me and other members of the ExactTarget deliverability team, asking for our "official guidance" on Gmail's "new inbox." Truth is, I don't know that we can't provide anything official as of yet, as we're still digesting this change ourselves. I'm certain you'll hear more from us on this topic in the coming weeks and months.

In the meantime, here's what we can tell you.

Gmail doesn't seem to be enabling the new inbox by default. You have to click on the gear icon, and click "configure inbox" to enable this new functionality.

Mickey Chandler points out...

Earlier this week, salesforce.com Chairman and CEO Marc Benioff and I announced that we have entered into a definitive agreement under which salesforce.com will acquire ExactTarget. The response to the announcement has been tremendous, and it’s been great seeing so many share our excitement for how ExactTarget and salesforce.com will increase the value proposition for customers of both companies and deliver the marketing platform of choice for CMOs.

Since the announcement, I have received a tremendous amount of positive feedback from our clients and partners, and I wanted to follow up 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...

In recent years, the explosion of social media has left savvy Internet-goers with choices far beyond Facebook. If you're just about tweeted out, one strong option to consider for promoting your small business is Instagram. With roughly 100 million users, it's a viable method for getting the word out about your organization. Unlike other social media giants, Instagram doesn't focus on a full website; it's mainly available via smartphone app - and if your target audience is smartphone savvy, then you should be too. Follow these tips to help get your Instagramming efforts kickstarted today:

1....

First off, I forgot to renew my Call Recorder software and didn't realize it until after the video was recorded. My apologies to all. 

June 5 marked the 32nd anniversary of AIDS being discovered, and Project (RED) / Mashable decided to mark it with a campaign centered around breaking the WORLD RECORD for Most Vine videos created in a day. 

From the Project Red website: 

We’ll even be featuring some of our favorite Vine videos on the NASDAQ marquee screen and tower in Times Square and on Mashable’s homepage. How do you join us in setting the#REDWorldRecord? It’s easy – shoot your 6-second Vine...

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...

Success in most digital marketing channels can be proven by the numbers. As much as some marketers and communicators don't like to spend their time drowning in math, any truly successful social media program will have the numbers to prove it.

In his new whitepaper The Mathematics of Social Marketing, Jason Falls says that many companies have turned social media marketing into a thriving source of web traffic and revenue, while others still don't fully understand how to leverage the world of social media and business.

According to the report, 45% of small business CEOs do not consider social...

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

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

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

Josh Miles is principal and founder of Miles Design, a branding firm specializing in branding and website design for professional services and software firms. Josh is the author of the new Content Marketing Institute book Bold Brand: The New Rules for Differentiating, Branding, and Marketing Your Professional Services Firm.

“It will look like you guys are on everywhere, even if you’re not.”

Our media buyer always had a way of helping our clients make the...

Is your brand on every social media platform under the sun yet mastering engagement in none?

The virtues of having a social media presence are blindingly obvious. After all, what brand wouldn’t want to connect with their customers, build brand reputation and ultimately increase sales? But all too often this desire to engage online gets side-tracked and you find yourself staring down the barrel of multiple social media profiles with no notifications. So how can you optimise your efforts on social media and increase engagement with fans and followers?

Let’s take a look at some best practice...

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 ...

Content marketing, likely because of the term, is often viewed as a function of the marketing department. However, some of the best content marketing is produced by the president or CEO of a business.

The president of a company understands the business and product fully and has the end in mind in all activities. The end is serving customers. For those of you scared of the word “sales,” you actually have to make one to have a customer.

This doesn’t mean that content marketing is reserved for the president or CEO. What this means is that content marketers, their prospective customers, and their...

I had the pleasure of interviewing DJ Waldow, CEO of Waldow Social, a couple of weeks ago about email, social, and everything digital marketing. He is a friend and author of The Rebel's Guide to Email Marketing. Needless to say, he is knowledgeable. Period.

Today's inspired video is about auto-responders and email marketing messages. DJ recently went to Cabo (jealous) and set his out-of-office email to reply on behalf of his inbox. We all do this. We go on vacation and set our out-of-office reply to let everyone in the world know we are out of touch. However, DJ noticed a funny thing when...

We’re excited to announce the launch of ExactTarget’s new partner program, the ExactTarget Orange Partner Network, at Connections 2012!

The ExactTarget Orange Partner Network draws on ExactTarget’s entrepreneurial spirit, innovative technology, and commitment to client success—helping extend our Orange culture beyond the walls of our offices. The goal of the Orange Partner Network is to build and promote a world-class ecosystem of partners who deliver global expertise, comprehensive services and innovative technology to help ExactTarget's clients design, manage and deliver highly targeted...

I’m excited to share the news that CoTweet has formed a partnership with Dachis Group to deliver social business solutions to enterprises.

Dachis Group is a new type of technology solutions firm. It was created in 2008 by Jeffrey Dachis to help large corporate enterprises unlock the value of social technologies to do business better. The firm takes a holistic approach to its client engagements, combining advisory services along with technology implementation across three practice areas: customer participation, workforce collaboration and business partner optimization. Today, Dachis Group...

ExactTarget provides our customers the ability to market through email, mobile, social, and sites—but why is that combination so powerful? The answer is the data and connectivity—which provides marketers the ability to communicate in a consistent, targeted, and branded manner across channels, while honoring consumer preferences.

There are many companies out there who specialize in Landing Page marketing—but ExactTarget Landing Pages are different because they are integrated with the same data and technology customers use to power the rest of the interactive marketing campaigns.

Consider taking...

A couple weeks ago I dug deeper into a survey we conducted last year on the use of mobile email for a presentation at the Email Insiders Conference. In the course of that evaluation I came across an interesting trend that has not entered into discussions about mobile email--that there is a significant segment of users who maintain "mobile only" email addresses.

Most of the discussion on mobile email has focused on people who access the same email from their mobile device that they access from their primary email account. In that scenario, the mobile inbox simply becomes a different access point...