Email Tracking

Summer is heating up here at our Indianapolis headquarters, and our May product release delivered a few new features with plenty of sizzle over the weekend. Whether aimed to save you time, optimize your marketing efforts, or just make our interface easier to navigate, we think you’ll really like these new enhancements.

And don’t forget—we have free training on product release features via 3sixty. It’s interactive, and takes less than 30 minutes.

1. It’s Here! Send to Multiple Data Extensions
This long-requested new feature gives you the ability to save time by sending to a large data set in one...

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...

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...

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 ...

As a kid my favorite question was "Why?" I'd ask my mother and father a hundred times a day, "Why this", and "Why that"?

They were good parents and would indulge my mindless questions. I never stopped asking questions, and as a marketer you should never stop asking that most important question: "Why?"

Marketing automation is a recent phenomenon and has made huge waves. Clicz.com reported 76% of the worlds largest SaaS companies are using marketing automation, and among these are some of the biggest brands in the world. The question you should ask yourself, is "Why?" Why are so many comapnies...

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...

There’s a big difference between a first-class flight and a pedi-cab ride. Similarly, there are many differences between an ROI-optimized digital marketing strategy and a half-baked, unprofitable one. As a travel and hospitality brand, you’re tasked with creating a seamless booking process for your customers—or else you might miss that narrow window of time when they’re most likely to convert.

Our own Jeff Rohrs recently shared some tips for reaching the digital traveler in a blog post for Ataway Exchange, where he’ll be speaking next month. Here are five of the top tips from Jeff’s post and...

Over the past few years, I've come to realize that my time here at Pardot has been nothing short of amazing. I love to watch our engineers take customer feedback and use it to develop new features. Just the other day, we rolled out a brand new feature that opens up a lot of doors for marketing and sales--an integration with UserVoice that will allow marketing and sales to identify both happy and unhappy consumers instantly, and apply business rules to these situations.

UserVoice is an application used by over 16,000 companies to help track suggestions and feedback from their users. At Pardot,...

I was doing some consulting recently for a company and they asked a great question, so I wanted to share it (and the solution, of course).

We were discussing sales enablement drip programs, and how to help sales keep up with more prospects over a long sales cycle. We discussed putting in place some very specific drip programs which would come from the sales reps. They loved the concept, but wondered what would happen if a prospect got an automated email and a "real" email from the sales rep in the same day?

This is a great question, and one that not enough marketers ask themselves. If you don't...

Each Thursday at 11am EST, marketers from around the world join the ExactTarget user community on Twitter for a conversation about trends and campaign ideas across the interactive marketing industry. We call this virtual coffee chat the ExactTarget Café.

During a recent #ETCafe chat, we discussed how user research can help ensure customer engagement. Led by our featured guest, Lisa Dragin, the Research and Customer Experience Director at Precision Dialogue (@pd_engage), the #ETCafe community discussed different forms of email research. Precision Dialogue was able to share some great techniques...

Cross-channel marketing. We're all trying to do it, but how many of us are doing it well? When it comes down to it, how do you put together a really successful cross-channel campaign?

Our advice? Build one campaign across email, mobile, and social media!

In this series of blog posts, I'm sharing three easy steps you can follow to accomplish this:

1. Create a Sweepstakes
2. Get a Committment and Follow Through
3. Measure, Refine, and Repeat!

Today, we'll explore the third and final step.

Step 3: Measure, Refine, and Repeat

In order to truly understand the impact of your campaign--and learn from the results--,...

The ExactTarget team invites you to participate in this week's #ETCafe Twitter chat, where some of the world's best marketers come together to discuss emerging topics and trends from across the interactive marketing world. This virtual coffee chat takes place directly on Twitter every Thursday from 11am-12pm ET, hosted by @ExactTarget.

This week we're excited to have Lisa Dragin, the Research and Customer Experience Director at Precision Dialogue (@pd_engage) join us to talk about how user research can help to ensure customer engagement. Here's a sneak peak of questions we'll be covering...

As a part of our Voice of Customer program, we're always innovating with new ways to delight clients and gather their feedback so we can continue to improve the ExactTarget experience. That's why we recently organized the first-ever company-wide Client Thank-a-Thon! 

The Thank-a-Thon worked just like it sounds: a drive to call clients and thank them for their partnership. Additionally, we targeted contacts who had not yet taken the Client Success Survey we had recently sent and asked for their time to complete it.

Over 30 non-client facing ExactTarget employees from teams across the company (HR,...

I recently read an article on TFB (The Future Buzz) which argued against the principle of using simple communications to reach out to the mass of your customers. I must admit, I wholly agree with assuming that you have a smart base of customers! It is definitely apparent that "dumbing down" messages does not guarantee that they will be engaged with by everyone, especially in today's digital age of smart and service-focused consumers.

The same blog post argues that using generic and simple messaging can portray your brand as "cheap" and "untrustworthy." I am not a businessman, but I am sure...

Jen Timmerman of Precision Dialogue (a partner of ours) recently posted about ExactTarget’s MobileConnect product: MobileConnect: Past, Present and Future. Jen is an eMarketing consultant, a seasoned email marketer with expertise in implementation. I’m thrilled to read her report on our mobile product and hear that she is “ready to shout about [her] love for MobileConnect from the rooftops”—and she’s even more enthusiastic about our 2013 product roadmap!

She starts out with a quick look back at MobileConnect when it launched last year, giving marketers a big opportunity to plan, automate, and...

About 18 months ago, I blogged about some impending changes to cookie laws in the EU, and potential ramifications for marketers. As it turns out, those laws didn't cause the world to end, some Governmental sites weren't even compliant, and to this date I do not believe the legislation has been truly enforced on any individual or organisation.

That being said, the latest proposed updates to the EU Data Protection Regulations have potentially much more widespread impact for all marketing, and indeed any company which handles or processes customer data.

If the legislation were to be passed in its...

Joanna Roberts of Return Path explains that Gmail "does not have a traditional feedback loop available to senders." Unlike Yahoo, Hotmail, and various other ISPs, Gmail has not implemented that automated mechanism that allows us to help you track and unsubscribe people who tell their ISP that your mail should be considered spam.

That's is indeed a bummer, but don't despair. Joanna goes on to explain that as long as you're authenticating your mail with SPF or DKIM, have a good sending reputation, and have implemented the list-unsubscribe email header functionality, Gmail will display an...

As mentioned elsewhere, US-based internet service provider Earthlink is now allowing email services providers back into their email feedback loop (FBL), something that hasn't been available to ESPs or their clients for many years now. We've now submitted all of our ranges and Earthlink has confirmed their addition to their feedback loop.

For ExactTarget clients, this means that now when an Earthlink user reports your mail as spam, that report will be sent back to us, allowing us to log it for compliance and tracking purposes, and ensure that the recipient will be unsubscribed.

As a follow-up to the article I wrote for ClickZ the other day, I wanted to talk a bit more about the use of technology and the adoption of best practices in large B2B organizations.

My research for the ClickZ article looked at B2B companies on the Fortune 500* and their adoption of modern marketing tools. But when you look at the raw data, it becomes clear that there are three easy lessons for any B2B marketer.

Lesson 1: Technology is only the beginning

When adopting radical new technologies, the technology itself is often only part of the story. The other part is a shift in thinking or action....