Interactive Mobile Marketing

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 this week's chat, we were happy to have to have Simms Jenkins (@SimmsJenkins) founder & CEO of BrightWave Marketing (@BrightWave) join us. Tied to the launch of his second book, The New Inbox, the focus of this week's chat was around the future of email, how to truly integrate social and mobile, and what trends and disruptions are...

The ExactTarget team invites you to participate in our #ETCafe Twitter chat this Thursday (and every Thursday) from 11am - 12pm ET, where we discuss emerging topics and trends from across the interactive marketing world. This virtual coffee chat is hosted directly on Twitter by @ExactTarget using the hashtag #ETCafe.

This week, we're excited to have Simms Jenkins (@SimmsJenkins) founder & CEO of BrightWave Marketing (@BrightWave). Tied to the launch of his second book, The New Inbox, this week's chat will discuss the future of email, how to truly integrate social and mobile, and what trends and...

Whether you're just getting started with mobile optimization or you're a pro and need some tips to share with your colleagues, here are our top mobile design resources for email.

Report: Designing for the Mobile Inbox
Get strategic and practical advice to help you deliver content that’s easy to consume on any device in this new report on mobile optimization.

Case Study: CareerBuilder's Responsive Email Design Results
Learn how CareerBuilder optimized their email design and saw increases of more than 20% in click-through and more than 15% in open rates.

Quick Guide: Design Tips: Mobile + Email
This...

When it comes to the marketing industry, it’s important to stay ahead of the curve. Not long ago, digital marketing was only a whisper within corporate marketing teams – now it’s here, it’s as competitive as ever and it’s completely changing the way we do business. Here are my predictions for what’s to come over the next year.

Smart, personalised content
It’s time to stop being oh-so-frightened of data capture and start taking advantage of the fact that personalised content makes browsing the web an absolute pleasure! Take Linkedin, for example – simply log in and you’re presented with the...

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...

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Currently, a stunning 43% of all email opens occur on mobile devices, quickly overshadowing desktop opens (32%) and webmail opens (25%). Data from Litmus shows us that this percentage is up 38% in the last year alone. Basically, subscribers continue to use viewing environments that include many screen sizes:

• iPhone, Android, and tablets (mobile devices)
• Installed email programs like Outlook and Apple Mail (desktop)
• Email accessed through a web browser like Gmail and Yahoo! Mail (webmail)

This means that by a growing majority, subscribers are tapping and swiping instead...

You’ve all read the stats and seen the infographics: consumers are awash with technology, and mobility is leading the charge. Many marketers already have mobile marketing strategies in place--but for those who don’t, now is the time to prioritise. It’s no longer a matter of just being mobile-friendly. You have to think mobile first.

Remember, you’re up close and personal

Consider how you use your phone. You keep it in a special case, use it to take and store personal photos and communicate with loved ones. You work with it. You play with it. Heck, most of us even sleep with it! The smartphone...

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...

There’s no doubt that today’s consumers are mobile. They’re constantly on-the-go, sending and receiving communications of all types, and they’ve come to expect that information be (literally) in-hand at all times. Consumers in the UK and around the globe are no longer sitting at their computers searching for information—instead, they expect information to be available all around them. At the same time, they expect that information to be relevant to their lives.

The hyper-connected consumer expects brands of all sizes and industries to start meeting them where they are. It also provides new...

Bonin Bough, VP of Global Media & Consumer Engagement at Mondelez Brands, presented a webinar with SocialChorus earlier this week. The focus of the presentation was how brands like Oreo and Wheat Thins have been generating consumer advocacy in a marketing world that now largely revolves around social channels and mobile devices.

Probably the most staggering fact shared was this statistic: 3% of brand fans create 75% of engagement. Furthermore, a customer typically has one interaction with a brand per year, while an advocate will have around 12 interactions per year. Clearly, the importance...

Join Kristina Huffman, Design Practice Lead, as she discusses and answers seven common questions about responsive email design:

What is responsive email?
Responsive design is a set of techniques in web design and development used to adapt a website to be readable on any screen and/or platform on which it's displayed. These techniques are being repurposed for emails. A responsive layout uses a piece of CSS3 code called a media query to detect the pixel size of the screen on which that email is opened. Based on the screen size detected, multiple stylesheets may be triggered to alter the layout and...

Mixed Martial Arts, or MMA, has had one of the fastest growing fan bases of any TV sports entertainment in the past decade. Boasting a huge audience--typically males in the teenage to 40s demographic--engagement has been key for retention as the sport has blossomed. As television broadcasts become less of a viewing experience and more of a conversation amongst individuals, Spike TV needed to discover a means of connecting MMA fans before, during, and after major events.

A little over a month ago, the Bellator app was born in the iTunes store. This mobile application for iPhone and iPad allows...

“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...

The ExactTarget team invites you to participate in our #ETCafe Twitter chat every Thursday from 11am-12pm ET, where we discuss emerging topics and trends from across the interactive marketing world. The virtual coffee chat is hosted directly on Twitter, hosted by @ExactTarget. 

It was no suprise to us that Australians are leading the world in their adoption of technology, and in partiular how they connect with brands on mobile devices. The unparalleled adoption of smartphones in Australia (49% of us own one!) means that today’s always-on, hyper-connected consumer is placing demands on marketers that can often seem bewildering. What was once seen as the "multi-channel opportunity" is now a "cross-channel imperative" as our audiences continue to adopt technology that opens up an increasing array of brand engagement mechanisms.

SMS is just another way to adapt to the...

October 2012 was an exciting time for ExactTarget’s partner ecosystem. Not only was the Orange Partner Network program launched at Connections, but also in front of the 4,000+ attendees, ExactTarget was excited to present the Power of ONE Reseller Partner of the Year award to our Platinum partner, C.TRAC.

C.TRAC has taken ExactTarget’s passion and unwavering commitment to client success and worked it into their own daily business practices by truly embodying ExactTarget's core values. Combined with their innovative strategy, design, integration, database management, reporting services, and...

As a marketer, it's your job to keep up with new technologies that can help drive your business forward. With social media, it can be a challenge to keep up with the changing landscape that includes Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Pinterest, Tumblr, Reddit, Flickr, and more every day!

And what's worse, most social media teams are still very small. Even some of the largest brands in the world have surprisingly small and very busy teams. From our experience, the most successful brands focus on one or two networks that best suit their audience. Let's look at the 2012 Edison Survey Data and summary...