The
ExactTarget Nexus team invites you to participate in our #NexusCafe
Twitter chat this Thursday and every Thursday from 11 a.m. -
12 p.m. 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 @ETNexus.
Follow the #NexusCafe hashtag
and be sure and add the hashtag to your tweet to participate. The
person with the best tweets wins a Starbucks gift card!
With Facebooks recent purchase of Instagram we're excited to
discuss the hot topic of mobile images and social sharing. Join the
Nexus team...
Read More »
What is the difference between a Tab
and a Fan Page? How
is the Social Graph different from Open Graph? Marketers ask us these questions all the time and with
help from folks at Facebook, we put together a Glossary to help you
master the newest Facebook marketing concepts. We hope you find it
useful!
Glossary
Actions and Action Response “AR”
There are a variety of actions within Facebook Ads or Pages
including when a user clicks “Like”, “RSVP” or selects a custom
action. Another way to think of actions is to think of the
traditional “Call-to-Action” like click, call or download. AR
stands for...
Read More »
I had the pleasure of watching, tracking, and reading about the
first ever Facebook Marketing Conference held on Wednesday the
29th.
Facebook focused the announcements on three core changes:
- Timeline for Brand Pages
- Revamped Advertising Structure
- Direct Messaging and Upgraded Admin Capabilities
At ExactTarget, we understand that the changes in the
ever-evolving world of social media can be a little overwhelming.
To relieve the pressure, we have put together some crash course
blog posts (including this one) on the upcoming changes to the
platform.
Let’s get to the changes in the ad platform. Read ‘em...
Read More »
Recent
legislation passed in
Brazil could result in employers being required
to pay overtime to employees checking email or taking phone calls
after work hours. This law seems to follow some global employers'
efforts to limit the time spent on email while not at work--going
to such extremes as shutting off email servers during non-work
hours. You can read more of the original Mobiledia article that
reported this data
here.
Since much of the non-work email checking takes place on
smartphones, this news feels like a potentail speedbump in the
global acceleration path of mobile email--with many...
Read More »
If you spend much time in our 3sixty community, you will see that a
common suggestion is to offer better ways of searching for
information within our products: Emails, Templates, Subscribers,
Users, etc. One way we have addressed this is with our new search
feature in the Interactive Marketing Hub Calendar. The Calendar
search feature, released along with the launch of the IMH in
October of last year, lets you search for past and future email
sends by taking your search word (or words) and returning any
calendar entries that contain it in its name or description
The IMH Calendar is a...
Read More »
In
her recent DM News article titled, "
Restaurants
Drive Consumers to Dine Out with Calculated Email Coupons,"
Diana Dilworth reports restaurant chains are having huge success
using email to attract new and repeat customers. What’s noteworthy,
I think, is that restaurant chains like
Pei Wei Asian Diner and
Taco John’s International have
learned that the key to successful email marketing is using other
channels like social media, in-store signage and mobile to invite
consumers to become email subscribers.
To introduce its new Caramel Chicken entrée, Pei Wei used a
cross-channel marketing...
Read More »
Each
Thursday at 11am EDT, marketers from around the world join the
ExactTarget Nexus
partner ecosystem on Twitter for a conversation about trends and
campaign ideas across the interactive marketing industry. We
call the virtual coffee chat the
Nexus Café.
During our recent chat,
DJ
Waldow, founder and CEO of
Waldow Social, joined us for a
discussion on Email and Social Cross-Promotions. Having worked in
the interactive marketing industry for many years, DJ recently
started his own company to develop email and social media marketing
programs which help build leads, sales, and online...
Read More »
Facebook,
Twitter, Email and mobile continue to change the face of online
marketing.
eMarketer Chief Executive Officer and
Co-founder Geoff Ramsey fueled the conversation to more than 3,000
global marketers during his recent Connections ’11 keynote
presentation.
The author of
Digital
Impact: The Two Secrets to Online Marketing Success,Ramsey
outlined the unique challenges online marketers face in connecting
with customers in today’s digital world, explaining how driving
online marketing success requires two essential ingredients:
Measurement and “Magnetic Content.”
The first ingredient...
Read More »
Mobile
advertising is increasingly important, as cell phone adoption
rates, especially smartphone adoption rates, soar. With a range of
mobile advertising options, including SMS, WAP, mobile app display
ads, search ads, rich media, video and push notifications, it is
essential that advertisers keep up-to-date on their options in the
mobile space.
Below are some important mobile marketing trends to
watch.-
Continued importance of SMS:Text messaging
reigns as the most popular mobile activity. Available on almost
every mobile phone, from the low-end feature phone to the priciest
smart phone, it is...
Read More »
Over the past few years, as cell phones have gained more and more
popularity, we've started to see "no cell phones beyond this point"
signs outside libraries and hear "please silence your cell phones"
announcements in movie theaters, classrooms, and even church
services--but never will you hear this announcement made at
Connections.
Yesterday, in the "CMO Roundtable: Fuel for Thought" general
session, ExactTarget CMO Tim Kopp made an interesting observation:
in the past, speakers and presenters used to get offended by the
use of cell phones during their speeches--but not anymore.
Today, seeing...
Read More »
There
only can be one number one. The best. Número uno. That is the newly
stated goal of Indianapolis based email service provider,
ExactTarget - to be #1. CEO, Scott Dorsey, stated that
ExactTarget's goal for 2011 is to be best in breed for email,
social, SMS and mobile services. This news sent the a conference
room of over 2,000 ExactTarget user attendees buzzing with Twitter
tweets, text messages, Facebook fan posts and, of course,
old-school email messages.
A demo of ExactTarget's new Interactive Marketing Hub followed with
new software tools and toys that will be released in beta...
Read More »
The big news in the past week has been
Facebook’s announcement of “Places” which allows users
to add their location to status updates/activity. This is something
that’s been playing on my mind recently as I’ve also been putting
geo-location service/game “Foursquare” through it’s
motions. So here's my take on the situation...
The lay of the land
For those of you not familiar, Foursquare is
essentially a service/app/game you can use to
“check-in” to locations – most commonly via an app on your
smartphone. If you check-in to places regularly, you become “Mayor”
of that location, you earn badges...
Read More »
“Hi,
insert your company’s name here; My name is
Caitlin and I’m an ‘Inner Circle Consumer’. An efficient and
productive sales and marketing strategy for me would highlight the
positive effects which
your business will have on
my personal and professional
relationships. I check my email and Facebook accounts daily
in order to stay organized professionally and connected
socially.”
Wait a minute! This can’t be real. Consumers
don’t openly express their preferred interactive online marketing
practices to the companies they are interested in…although it would
be nice if they did. The truth...
Read More »
The art of conversation meets the science of
conversion.
Today, just fourteen months after we demo'd CoTweet publicly for
the first time, I'm thrilled to announce that CoTweet has signed a
definitive agreement to be acquired by ExactTarget, the leading
provider of on-demand email and one-to-one marketing solutions. The
combined companies will offer the first complete solution for
businesses to manage all aspects of their online communication with
customers and prospects, including email, mobile, and social
media.
CoTweet will continue to operate in San Francisco and establish
a new Social Media...
Read More »
The
benefits of continued testing should never be forgotten. While
testing a number of email campaigns in Gmail we discovered that
support has been recently added for the CSS background-repeat
property and the HTML cellpadding and cellspacing attributes. While
this doesn’t amount to a fundamental shift in standards support, it
is still a step in the right direction. Sadly, it’s not all
sunshine and rainbows since Gmail appears to be suffering from the
same lack of support for paragraph tags that affects Yahoo
Mail.
Let’s begin with the good news.
Support for the CSS background-repeat...
Read More »
In a ClickZ article this week tiled,
Bye-Bye
Email?, Jeanniey Mullen of Zinio, touches on the reality
that email is far from dead since it is connected to all of us, and
continues to connect us via social media. So when social media
seems to be dominating the airways these days, email marketers
should take heart knowing that email is still the connective
tissue.
Jeanniey points out: “Just because lots of people tweet, update
statuses, and write on walls, doesn't mean they won't use e-mail
anymore. When Post-it notes came out, people didn't stop writing
letters.” So true.
Twitter is immediate,...
Read More »
More news that impacts how we think about mobile email, sms
marketing, and coupons...
AA Launches Mobile Boarding Passes. American is now the fifth
airline to test mobile boarding passes in the US (Continental was
first, followed by Northwest, Delta, and Alaska). While still not
available at the majority of airports, the technology is
interesting in that it relies on the distribution of a link through
email and presentation of a 2-D barcode on a landing page. If you
were at our annual user conference, Connections 08, this concept
may sound familiar--it is right in line with our new
LiveOffers ...
Read More »
I have been a bit quiet recently--especially on the mobile email
front. Two bits of news came out this week that I believe are
interesting developments that impact how we think about mobile
email, sms marketing, and coupons--three things that I watch a
lot.
The first big one: the
iPhone is the top selling mobile phone in Q3 2008. Well we know
it was selling fast and was a clear favorite in the smartphone
category, but that sales of iPhone surpassed sales of Motorola RAZR
(which is available for half the price) is significant because of
the iPhone's full support of HTML email. Thus, most new...
Read More »
Do you think that email is a thing of the past? If so,
according to the new 
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