This is one in a series of columns exploring the examples and trends highlighted in The Best of the Email Swipe File.

Foursquare

Type: Welcome Home triggered email
Send date: 3/2013
Subject line: Welcome back from your trip! How was it?

“Not only does this email use responsive design to target Foursquare’s highly mobile users, it is triggered by check-in patterns that involve airports and locations outside of my normal stomping grounds.”
—Kristina Huffman, Design Practice Lead

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Crutchfield email >>

Crate & Barrel email >>

This Foursquare email...

I recently returned from Phoenix, Ariz. where I attended my first Direct Selling Association’s (DSA) Annual Meeting. Over 1,000 people gathered for three days of 110 degree weather for keynotes, breakout sessions, and networking. 

The overall theme for this year’s meeting was celebrating the direct selling industry. Executives from all over the world gathered together to celebrate both the achievements and opportunities of the direct selling industry. And there was a lot to celebrate this year! US direct sales increased 5.9 percent in 2012 to $31.63 billion. In addition, the number of direct...

A recent article by Allie Freeland, "Four Lessons Marketers Can Learn From Yoga," elegantly outlines how yoga concepts like simplicity, small gestures of kindness and a clean mental state apply to marketing. As a yoga enthusiast, I found the piece very insightful and thought of even more lessons we marketers can learn from the ancient art.

1. Find your center
A central tenet of yoga, "finding your center" typically means an awareness and acceptance of yourself - your mental state, your body, your being. In marketing, this translates to a sense of realism about the nature of your organization....

This is one in a series of columns exploring the examples and trends highlighted in The Best of the Email Swipe File.

Moosejaw

Type: Promotional email
Send date: 1/7/2013
Subject line: It worked for Obama...

“A catchy, intriguing, topical subject line introduces a mobile-friendly, plain-text email that’s well-suited to convey the concise message. Both this email and the text-heavy emails of the campaign season are reminders that plain text can still be very effective, particularly in the age of mobile.”
—Laura Earley, Associate Designer

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Icelan...

1. Foursquare's Awesome Virtual Map / Time Machine 

Kind of creepy, just not really creepy.

The animation flies you around all those haunts you've visited in times past, served up in a lovely 3D effect that you can autoplay to your heart's content. You can zoom in or out of its map showing all the places you've been, checking out each of your check-ins. The interface helpfully provides places Foursquare has recommended for you as well. (via Mashable) 

2. Apple is Back, Jack

- WDDC (Apple's Wordwide Developers Conference) was this week and it looks like the technology power brand has some kick...

There’s nothing quite like a classic combo. Dinner and a movie. Burgers and fries. Opt-ins and SMS? Yes, please.

Many consumers have long associated the act of opting-in as something to be done by email, for email. But today’s cross-channel world doesn’t just include email. Companies and organizations could find big success in acquiring new customers by adding a mobile component with SMS (short message service). There are two great approaches to this strategy:

1. Email opt-in via SMS
This one is a quick addition to reinforce the presence of your email campaigns, as well as how easy you’ve made it...

The future of digital marketing is bright. The global retail brand's consumer has evolved with the advent of new technology and channels, and these channels demand a new type of marketer. With more marketing metrics and tactics than ever before, modern marketers must look at the current trends to prepare their strategies for the future. 

1. Purchase Journeys Evolution: In the future, the retail customer's purchase journey will likely put more stock in online reviews and social recommendations. Just take a look at the current state of a customer lifecycle to get an idea of how the purchase process...

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....

1. Smart Phone Penetration Hits over 50%. In 2012, eMarketer estimates, "six countries—South Korea, Norway, Sweden, Australia, the UK, and the US—saw smartphone user penetration rates among users rise above 50% for the first time. In regional terms, only North America will boast average smartphone penetration rates above 50% in 2013 among mobile users, as Canada crosses the 50% mark this year. Western Europe as a whole will cross that boundary in 2014."

2. mCommerce and the Mobile Transaction. For the B2C brands, mobile payments have already revolutionized the way consumers pay for products....

Spoiler alert: there's no silver bullet for subject lines.

Even email marketing experts like our friends at Litmus have openly admitted that there’s no secret to crafting subject lines that will guarantee you opens and clicks. (I know, I was disappointed too). In fact, they’ll be among the first to tell you that writing subject lines is hard.

The good news? There are a few tips and tricks that these experts have identified that will increase your open rates, and others that they suggest avoiding. Let’s go through a few of these dos and don’ts to get an idea of current email subject line best...

There is no doubt that the CMO and CIO roles will merge in the near future. Gartner predicts that the CMO will control the majority of the IT budget by 2017. This means that the Chief Digital Officer will play a large part in the future of any organization.

With that in mind, here are some thoughts about the future of the Chief Marketing Officer. 

1. Social media and the customer experience. As the lines between customer service and marketing blur, it’s becoming more important than ever to develop a social strategy that serves both of these critical business functions. Why is responsive customer...

I'm excited to start a new series on the ExactTarget blog centered around the hottest digital marketing stories and trends of the past week. We will publish a new list at the beginning of every week. Just to be clear, this is a blatant rip-off of the BBC series. 

1. The Power Behind Waze and Mapping: Waze was on the tip of many tongues last week with rumored bids from Apple and Google. Why is there so much buzz about Waze? The company, which initially launched in Israel, provides crowd-sourced information. Users can wave their hands over their mobile device while driving to vocally report...

This is one in a series of columns exploring the examples and trends highlighted in The Best of the Email Swipe File.

Zulily

Type: Welcome email series
Send date: Q1/2013
Subject lines:

1st welcome: Get shopping credit! Invite your pals to join zulily too
2nd welcome: Go ahead ... play favorites
3rd welcome: Anytime. Anywhere. Take zulily with you.
4th welcome: Calling all social butterflies
5th welcome: Smart shopping is your superpower

“With the vast majority of marketers still sending a single welcome email, Zulily is well ahead of the curve with this five-email welcome series that seeks a closer...

With social media and mobile dominating the current digital marketing landscape, email marketing strategies can easily get left behind. Many marketers now consider email an outdated medium. Over.

But that’s simply not the case. While it’s important to continue (or begin!) your social media and mobile marketing efforts, these should work in conjunction with email marketing. The benefits are numerous – apart from significantly higher ROI than other marketing strategies like direct mail, email marketing provides an opportunity for you as a business to take your conversation with a consumer...

I'm proud to announce the release of the newest predictions guide from Australia. The guide features predictions for emerging trends across email, mobile, social, cross-channel and marketing automation from industry leaders, including Jeff Bullas, Chris Baumann and Iggy Pintado as well as thought leaders from Adobe, Direct Marketing Association, ExactTarget and Microsoft.

“The new year provides new opportunities for marketers to create innovative, customer experiences that build loyalty and deliver business results across email, mobile, social media and the Web,” said Lee Hawksley,...

At ExactTarget, we pride ourselves on empowering our clients to connect with their customers to drive engagement that builds loyalty and brand advocates. One of the highlights of my day is getting to spend time talking with our great clients and diving into their innovative campaigns across email, mobile and social.

One of Celebrity Cruises’ recent campaigns focused on transforming on-hold bookings into reservations with an automated email campaign. The campaign saw a double digit percent boost by triggering custom emails to potential travelers featuring their preferred destinations, cruise...

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...