You know the old saying…for every two steps forward, you take one step back. If you’re an email marketer, chances are this really hits home. Running an email program – and more specifically, a successful email program – is not always a smooth road.

Here on the ExactTarget marketing team, we experience the same everyday challenges that each and every one of our customers face. Sure, we have access to the industry-leading one-to-one marketing platform and a team of experts that backs it up. We know our application inside and out. But I’m certainly not an HTML expert (or a deliverability expert, or an integration expert, etc…) Sound familiar? At the end of the day, we’re marketers juggling lots of different responsibilities just like you. And we’re trying to make improvements to our email program one day and one step at a time.

Over the past few months, you might have noticed some major changes to ExactTarget’s own email marketing efforts. After an intensive audit and an in-depth Email Marketing eValuation with our Strategic Services and Account Management teams, we identified key areas of improvement and an action plan to implement them.

Three months into the efforts, it sometimes feels like we’re taking two steps forward and one step back. The progress has been amazing - our goals have been established, the new look has been received to rave reviews, list growth is picking up, and our metrics are on a slow but steady incline. Though each one of these items may be small, together they certainly add up to movement in the right direction.

But of course, there have been a few hurdles as well. Take the August issue of ExactTarget InSight. We sent two versions of each newsletter out – one version rendered flawlessly in all major ISPs. But the other version (on the same template, no less!) had rendering issues in Gmail. Frustrating? You bet. It’s easy to get caught up in what’s not working with your email program. But ultimately, it’s more important to stay focused on the end goal. A couple of setbacks every now and then can actually be healthy, especially when they force you to focus and improve on areas of your email program you’ve been taking for granted.

Working with our Design & Deployment team, the following month we were able to optimize the HTML in our newsletters for maximum rendering. We’ve also implemented Pivotal Veracity’s eDesign Optimizer to catch potential rendering issues before it’s too late. If you've had similar issue with rendering lately, we'd love to hear about them. And I'm excited to share more of the email marketing challenges (and solutions!) we encounter right here on this blog.

Cheers,
Ashley Sales
Manager, Marketing Communication