Interactive Marketing Blog

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...

If you’ve mastered marketing automation 101, and even tackled our 9 steps to go beyond the marketing automation basics, then you’re ready for a few of our expert tips. At this point, you should be delivering highly relevant and dynamic email content, sending out drip emails to nurture prospects over time, and managing your social profiles using real-time and scheduled posts.

Sound about right? If so, then read on to find out how you can continue to improve your marketing automation efforts with these 8 steps, inspired by the Mastering the Art of Marketing Automation eBook:

1. Don’t get lazy. At...

The first thing most aspiring marketers learn is the importance of identifying and subsequently engaging those beautiful people called “the audience” no matter where they live online. This lesson gains wholehearted acceptance from everyone in the marketing world. However, the execution becomes complicated, and soon we all learn that feeding something like a blog everyday just simply isn’t enough.

We must put ourselves on the customer's online path.

Think goals first, campaigns second and tactics third.

What’s the goal? Always start there. That’s what the university lecturer taught you a long time...

ExactTarget has a passion for bringing marketers and consumers closer. And we’ve gathered the industry’s top thought leaders and interactive gurus for the second annual ExactTarget CONNECT Global Tour.

Marketers from across Canada will have the opportunity to meet, inspire, educate, and empower the future generation of digital marketing on June 12, 2013, at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre. This full-day gathering will include break-out sessions complete with leading-edge research, networking opportunities, and advice for guiding engaged digital marketing campaigns.

Leading the keynote...

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...

“Email is dead – Sign up for our email to hear more…”

Google the phrase "email is dead" and you’ll find countless news articles, blogs and opinion pieces claiming the death of our beloved email is nigh--and that by 2018, email's trendier younger cousin social media will ensure that email becomes as popular a communication device as the carrier pigeon.

ExactTarget caught up with Dominic Edmunds--founder and president of SaleCycle, the basket abandonment email specialists--to get his thoughts on the death of email.

ExactTarget: So, Dominic, let’s get straight to the point. When will you be closing...

There have been dunks, upsets, blowouts, inspiring story lines and a whole lot of basketball in the past few weeks. Sports and Twitter are a match made in heaven…or maybe March. With real-time commentary and an expansive tournament to determine the national champion, Twitter activity has been more plentiful than Florida Gulf Coast dunks were in the first three rounds.

Now, though, the field has been narrowed to the #Final4. The basketball will be good, and the potential on Twitter may be even greater. With two perennial powers, an up-and-comer, and heavy underdog, there will be plenty of...

If you had eight hours a day to work on your brand’s social media, what could you accomplish?

… Are you done daydreaming?

The reality is, a marketer’s day is filled to the brim with responsibilities and projects that take a lot of time. One minute, you’re brainstorming strategy for a cross-channel marketing campaign, and the next, you’re reviewing the latest marketplace data on subscriber acquisition and list growth. What’s a time-savvy marketer to do?

This infographic by Pardot (an ExactTarget company) breaks down your daily social media must-dos into an actionable 30-minute plan. A winning...

Want some advice on how to deal with those complainers on Facebook and Twitter? I recently wrote an article for Marketing Profs on this very topic!

For every complaint expressed, studies indicate that more than 25 go unregistered. Rather than complain, the vast majority of those dissatisfied customers simply take their business elsewhere. And the millions (or billions) of lost revenue are rarely recovered. But for those who do complain, there is no one right way to respond because every situation is unique. Instead, it's important to look at different complainer personas and react accordingly.

So...

The Sweet 16 is where Cinderellas start to dance. The first round is fun but in the round of 32, games and teams are taken more seriously. The Sweet 16 can legitimize a season for underdogs. But losing before the Sweet 16 can be classified as failure for the favorites. Contenders and pretenders are sorted and, thanks to Twitter, the fans get to come along for the ride.

The #Sweet16 tips off tonight but before it takes over the hardwood, the national spotlight and the Twitter universe, we thought it would be appropriate to see how the Social 32 stacked up in the most recent round.

Highlights: No...

March Madness is only getting madder. The proliferation of social media is driving teams, schools, media, fans, and even mascots to the internet to interact with their fellow basketball loyalists. For those loyalists, the first two days of the NCAA tournament are like a 48-hour Christmas morning. 64 teams, 32 games, upsets, and emerging storylines make this round incredibly exciting on the hardwood and on Twitter.

ExactTarget is headquartered in the Hoosier heartland, so you know we love our basketball. Last week we helped you prepare for the tournament with hashtags, handles and Klout. Now,...

Although much of the interactive world was focused on SXSW in Austin this week—and then New York for the Galaxy S 4 launch—the news did not slow down for a moment. Luckily, the Content Marketing team at ExactTarget is here to help you stay on top of what’s important!

We’re always on the lookout for fresh, interesting content, to help you stay up-to-date with the latest news and trends.

Here are a few of the top stories that caught our eye this week:

Facebook Working on Incorporating the Hashtag (Wall Street Journal)

Samsung Galaxy S 4 Compared (Mashable)

Facebook Unveils Revamped Timeline (MediaPost)

Wh...

Everything was going fine. You had set up your email marketing campaigns properly, all of your subscribers were double opt-in, you were sending emails on the right frequency, and your content was exactly what you had promised.

As far as you knew, people loved this stuff.....

But then, out of the blue, Gmail and the other ISPs started blocking your emails! But why? Why? Because those subscribers aren't interacting with your email anymore. They've become disinterested. They've become what are now known as 'the un-engaged.'

Just sending email to your subscribers isn't good enough

Just sending email...

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...

If there was ever a buzzword in business that defined an era it would have to be “Big Data.” Everywhere you look there’s another article about merging data sets to make more relevant business decisions. To kick off blogging in 2013 I plan to write a few posts about how ExactTarget’s platform helps organizations leverage other technology providers to make more sense of this term. But first, what is Big Data? IBM shares some pretty eye-opening statistics in defining this term:

Every day, we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data — so much that 90% of the data in the world today has been created in...

Mobile World Congress convenes just one week from today in Barcelona, Spain (February 25-28). We are excited to make the trip to the world’s premier mobile industry event and round out what seems like a mobile world tour, after already hitting CES, Mobile Insider Summit, and MMA this year.

The theme of Mobile World Congress 2013 is “Explore the New Mobile Horizon” and will center on trends like contactless payments, augmented reality, embedded devices, and connected cities. There will be over 1,500 product and technology exhibitors and an App Planet dedicated to the mobile app...

Sunday, February 10, was the biggest night of the year for the music industry, with the live broadcast of the Grammy Awards on CBS. Every year, millions of viewers huddle around their televisions to take in the many performances (and the few awards) that make up the 3.5 hour event. After host LL Cool J prompted viewers to engage with the show via Twitter hashtag #Grammys, it seemed like the awards show's social presence would be one of the evening's highlights.  

The big surprise for followers of television ratings came the next morning, when it was reported that AMC's cable program "The Walkin...

What image formats are most appropriate to use when I’m building an email? Let's explore the three common image file formats appropriate for email: JPGs, GIFs, and PNGs.

JPGs

The file name .jpg stands for Joint Photographic Experts Group. It’s one of the most common image formats, allowing for compression adjusting to benefit speedy load times for web display. The format utilizes compression that is best for image slices that include photography and images that need a higher amount of data to show detail. When you save the image for web use (often referred to as "save for web" in Photoshop),...

If a company is serious about video marketing, they might need the services of Wistia, a fast-growing online video hosting company.

Wistia hosts videos for companies so that prospects don't have to leave the site to view it or watch ads. By using Wistia, marketers get analytics on user behavior and interactivity with the video. If the video was a hit, and most people watched it straight through, perhaps the company will produce another one like it. If it wasn't successful, it's time to come up with a new concept.