SMS API

As we head into the busy summer travel season, travel brands will be looking for ways to connect with consumers. Of course, brands are constantly chided to avoid over-communicating with their opted-in subscribers. Even after consumers have subscribed to your brand's email or chosen to "like' you on Facebook, your brand's connection with them remains tenuous, because they can break off the relationship at any time.

A major temptation for some brands is to over-communicate with customers, inundating them with offers, deals, product news, and just about anything else that marketers believe could...

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.

This week's chat is focused on data management. Interactive marketers are obsessed with data for good reason! Driving personalization, segmentation, and relevant campaigns are all backed by data. We're going to dive into the data that drives cross-channel campaigns. We look forward to your insights and questions!

Here's...

Retailers spend most of their budget and energy on the in-store experience. It only makes sense: upwards of 95% of revenue is generated inside the bricks and mortar. However, retailers should also consider the following:

The path to purchase often begins online. 73%-83% of US consumers research online before buying in-store, per a Pricewaterhouse Coopers survey.  

Shoppers leave stores to buy online.  Per a Harris Interactive Poll, 43% of adults report that they’ve visited a brick and mortar store to examine a product before purchasing it elsewhere.

Customer expectations of online/in-store...

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...

It’s amazing to think that just a little over two decades ago, consumers had only two options to communicate across long distances: telephone and mail. In today’s mobile, post-PC world, consumers have countless ways to communicate with each other.

They have similar options when it comes to communicating with brands. The question is, how do consumers determine the proper channel for their communication needs? The decision appears to boil down to six factors:

CONTENT: Is this a marketing message?
As we document throughout the Channel Preference Survey, consumers are much more selective about the...

When Seth Godin introduced the concept of permission marketing in 1999, it was a big idea: ask customers to accept marketing messages from you. Looking at the best uses of mobile, I believe we are at a new crossroads; one where customers request marketing messages.

Never forget that digital messages rendered on mobile devices are personal and intrusive. On the Advertising Aggravation Continuum (shown below), they are most comparable to telemarketing. We all know what happened to that traditional marketing channel and the impact on brands that abused it.

In the middle of the continuum, people...

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...

(Warning: Sarcasm ahead)

Sometimes it’s just too easy. The power to communicate through email, mobile and social is all right there waiting for someone to start flooding the world with information. So you strike out into the world with your content and expect great results.

Using email for monthly news, SMS for quick bites of information and social media for event announcements might seem like a good idea, but you can easily end up with a bunch of disconnected content aimed at way too many targets. At this point, you're just sitting and back hoping for results without a specific goal in mind.

Misu...

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...

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 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.

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...

This month, Facebook announced that it would prioritize comments based on their quality and relevancy. This means that the most active and popular comments will appear at the top of all posts, allowing marketers and community managers to respond to the most engaged users.

As a Facebook Preferred Marketing Developer (PMD), we will have access to the API so that we can support this new feature in SocialEngage. The product team is thinking through user experience scenarios to ensure you have the best experience when the API is finally released.

The algorithm seems really interesting. Essentially,...

There were so many inspiring sessions at SXSW this year that it’s hard to narrow it down to a couple highlights. Since it was impossible to attend every session, I bounced the “favorites” question off my two colleagues, David Galante and Doug Wilson, who divided and conquered the Austin conference with me. Here’s our highlight reel from SXSW 2013:

1. Identity in 30 Years: Sam Lessin, founder and CEO of Drop.io and current Director of Identity Products at Facebook, gave a very interesting talk on the evolution of identity management. He made some bold statements about how, in the future, your...

Jen Timmerman of Precision Dialogue (a partner of ours) recently posted about ExactTarget’s MobileConnect product: MobileConnect: Past, Present and Future. Jen is an eMarketing consultant, a seasoned email marketer with expertise in implementation. I’m thrilled to read her report on our mobile product and hear that she is “ready to shout about [her] love for MobileConnect from the rooftops”—and she’s even more enthusiastic about our 2013 product roadmap!

She starts out with a quick look back at MobileConnect when it launched last year, giving marketers a big opportunity to plan, automate, and...

Permission-based email has become the foundation of successful one-to-one marketing, and a company's database of email subscribers is one of its most valuable assets.

And with good reason! As our 2012 Channel Preference Survey revealed, 66% of US online consumers report making at least one purchase that was triggered by an offer received via email. And for BtoB marketing, nothing tops email for aiding the customer’s buying decision. In a 2012 article, BtoB Magazine reported that 59% of BtoB marketers say email is their most effective channel for generating revenue.

At the recent 2013 MarketingShe...

As a member of ExactTarget's Global Support leadership team, I see a lot of examples of how not to do things. Most of the time, my team can help you reverse-engineer the issue and align your work to industry and ExactTarget best practices. There are some mistakes, though, that even we can't help you come back from--and that can be disastrous to your marketing program.

Here are the top five that I've seen from my time at the support desk, and how you can avoid being a victim:

1. Location location location: Know your source of truth for subscriber information. Is it your internal CRM database? Is...

Mobile World Congress in Barcelona kicked off in full force on Sunday. In addition to presenting at Pepcom, the ExactTarget Mobile team had the chance to talk to hundreds of press and analysts about our expanded mobile platform—all while eating wonderful Spanish food and enjoying some Catalan music!

We also attended the MWC Show, with its eight different exhibit halls. One of the highlights of the show was the Connected City, which included examples of all the ways our lives are—and will be—impacted by mobile across home, health, work, entertainment, and more. The high point for me was the...

When you’re just starting to put your mobile strategy into action, email is probably your bread and butter for reaching customers. At this stage, using mobile to beef up your email list is a good first step—but there’s plenty more you can do to get your mobile program off the ground!

Here are some ideas to help jump-start your mobile efforts during the first few months.

Grow your email opt-in list via mobile. If gaining email opt-ins is your goal, then create plenty of opt-in opportunities via text message—like, “Text JOIN and youremail@address.com to 12345 to subscribe to our program”—or add an...