Mobile Marketing Platform

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...

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....

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...

The Gmail Team announced impending changes to their user interface today that will have an effect on users of their desktop and mobile platforms. The changes deal with how mail in the inbox is sorted for review by the recipient. These changes will be rolling out over the next several weeks for everyone, or you can opt-in to test things out now by selecting "Configure Inbox" after clicking on the gear icon.

Currently, default users of Gmail see mail which is sorted into "Important and unread" and "Everything else." In the future, though, the desktop will look like this (taken from the...

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...

As the sun rises across each time zone, where do consumers start their online day? Your customers' activities first thing in the morning can reveal their priorities and motivations (whether those are business-, social-, or news-oriented), and also provide an indication of how and when to engage with them.

In our 2013 Global Executive Summary, we compare and contrast the findings of our award-winning SUBSCRIBERS, FANS, & FOLLOWERS research series to bring you insight into what consumers worldwide are doing in the morning, as well as how they spend their time on multiple digital marketing...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

I'll start with a few simple words to remember: responsive web design is kind of a big deal. Even back in 2012, Mashable declared that 2013 would be the year of responsive web design, and it couldn't be more true.

I was able to attend a great webinar this week given by Josh Miles of Miles Design called the Responsive Design Revolution. He focused on why responsive design is becoming critical for websites, so I'll take a quick break from talking about email design and share his thoughts on web. For those that focus on email, remember that your message is only as good as the site that you're...

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...

I’m not a big fan of country music.

I don’t mean to alienate anyone due to personal preferences, and I’m sure we can find common interests even if country is the only genre on your iPod, but country tunes are just not my favorite tunes to hear.

That being said, one of my closest friends loves country music. We were recently at a restaurant that was playing a country song called “Where I Come From.” I was poking fun at the whole situation because I’d recently heard a completely different country song also called “Where I Come From.”

Lo and behold, there are two country songs with the exact...

3sixty Live April meetings are coming to a city near you! 

• Connect professionally with the most innovative marketers in your area who also use the ExactTarget software
• Provide a place for sharing both strategies for marketing and ways of technically implementing them on the platform
• Connect directly with ExactTarget resources and people who can help you do your job better
• Innovate with...

Once upon a time, in an age not so long ago, marketers were schooled to create a mobile-optimized version of their website. While this approach still offers advantages over most single sites, updating content on two separate sites is inefficient—and gets old quickly.

Smartphone penetration in the U.S. has reached 55%, and tablet usage climbs daily. Does that mean you now must have a tablet-optimized site, as well?

Not if you want to keep your sanity. Enter: responsive design.

Responsive designs adapt automatically to the size of the device, meaning the same site is navigable, legible,...

In my last post, "Do You have an Abandoned Cart Strategy?," I demonstrated how retailers could be leaving money on the table by not having a reengagement strategy to help shoppers return to their site and complete their purchase. In this post, we’ll be asking retailers if they are narrowing their shopping experience to a single channel and how this might impact their opportunity to capture revenue across channels.

#2 Way Retail Marketers are Leaving Money On the Table: Narrowing your shopping experience to a single channel

It’s no surprise that customers today interact through a variety of...

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...