Social Marketing Effectiveness

If you’ve recently implemented a marketing automation system, or are thinking about doing so in the near future, then you’re probably ready to start dazzling your email recipients with highly targeted email communications, measuring and reporting on marketing campaign effectiveness, and automating tedious manual tasks like lead assignment. But first, let’s go through a few marketing automation dos and don’t — you don’t want to risk jumping in too quickly now, do you?

Before we get to all the great things you can and should be doing with your marketing automation system, let’s get a few of...

My colleages and I have dispensed a lot of deliverability tips on this blog throughout the years. But wouldn't it be nice to have the most useful nuggets of delivery-related wisdom compiled for easy reference? Well, your wish is our command.

Over the next few posts, we will, ahem, "deliver" the top ten tips to get your email campaigns to subscribers' inboxes in today's email ecosystem Let's start it off with the first two tips ...

Tip #1 - Subscriber Engagement Is Critical to Email Success
In years past, permission was seen as the key to having mail accepted. But we know things are changing. As...

Consumers who mention your brand on Twitter expect a quick response, especially if they have a complaint or question. A recent study by Socialbakers suggests brands are improving, although many industries have work to do in becoming more responsive. 

As we know at ExactTarget, the airline industry stands out for succeeding in intense customer response on Twitter: the real-time nature of flight cancellations and other problems airlines face in helping travelers means that airlines must respond quickly to consumers to be relevant. We were pleased to see ExactTarget clients WestJet and JetBlue call...

Social media has impacted everything from daily friendships to business practices. But one of the most dynamic effects of social media is how it has blurred the lines between customer service and marketing.

As a CMO, you know that your brand needs to go beyond listening and start doing. When it comes to social media, a further examination between customer experience and marketing has led us to three essential truths that CMOs should know about the social space. (Read the full list of truths and background information in our free-to-download whitepaper.)

The first truth for CMOs to grasp is that r...

When people talk about the basic elements of a successful email marketing campaign, there are a lot of facets to consider—responsive design, relevant messaging, personalization, pertinent send time, and beyond. But one facet of a successful email campaign that many marketers regrettably overlook is deliverability. After all, no matter how great the email, if it doesn’t reach the inbox, it can’t be effective.

Which brings us to Sky Angel.

Sky Angel came to ExactTarget in 2007 after experiencing deliverability issues sending emails from their internal servers. As a faith and family television...

Are you a digital marketer? Do you work for a travel brand? If you answered yes, then this blog post is for you!

ExactTarget recently released Reaching Today’s Digital Traveler, a compilation of tips and tactics that are critical for digital marketers in the travel and hospitality industry. Here’s the list of tactics, plus the questions you should ask yourself to keep your digital communication strategy on track.

1. Grow Your Subscriber list

To determine why your brand might be missing out on conversations with interested and ready-to-purchase travelers, ask yourself these questions:

• Do you...

Over the next several weeks, we will be sharing guest articles from experts in the realm of content marketing. This week, Josh Miles writes.

Josh Miles is principal and founder of Miles Design, a branding firm specializing in branding and website design for professional services and software firms. Josh is the author of the new Content Marketing Institute book Bold Brand: The New Rules for Differentiating, Branding, and Marketing Your Professional Services Firm.

“It will look like you guys are on everywhere, even if you’re not.”

Our media buyer always had a way of helping our clients make the...

Over the next several weeks, we will be sharing guest articles from experts in the realm of content marketing. This week, Steven Shattuck writes.

Steven is VP of Marketing at Bloomerang. He is a featured contributor to Social Media Today, and has been published in Search Engine Journal, Business2Community and the Content Marketing Institute. Steven has spoken at national and local conferences, and is frequently interviewed by traditional media outlets in Indianapolis for his expertise in social media marketing.

There's no shortage of content marketing advice out there. Now that most marketers...

Marketing automation is the intersection of many useful features and functions. It's a proven fact that marketing automation software gives marketers full visibility into aspects of the sales cycle that were previously a mystery. But the sheer number of buttons and tools can seem daunting if they're not old-hat to you just yet.

As you begin to build an effective marketing automation program, you can begin to gain a holistic view of your marketing activities. From there, you can streamline traditionally manual processes (like customer segmentation, email marketing, and campaign management).

Start ...

Join us in San Francisco on May 9^th and Seattle on May 10^th for the launch of the Digital Mornings Breakfast Seminar Series. In this monthly six-part series we’ll gather together to discuss some of the latest research, updates and trends in cross-channel marketing over coffee and breakfast.

In the first session we’ll dig into an overview of the Cross-Channel Marketing Challenge, taking a look at how effective cross-channel campaigns can support the customer lifecycle: acquire, on-board, engage and retain. We will share best practices and case studies on cross-channel programs that incorporate...

Email list growth is a concern for many organizations--so you're definitely not alone if it's one of your concerns! In order to succeed in your email marketing efforts, you want your subscriber base to grow, not stay static. Fortunately there are numerous ways to build your email list.   

Depending on your industry, a web form may be the most effective way to capture more subscribers. Other options include social media tactics, mobile strategies, or even an offline approach. The possibilities are limitless.

Since this is such a popular topic and concern for marketers, there is plenty of informati...

(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...

As I write this, 93% of UK online consumers are email subscribers and 40% of these subscribers are opening, reading and responding to email on their mobile phones or tablets. If you think these statistics suggest UK consumers prefer email above all channels for receiving offers and information from brands, you are absolutely correct!

A new report from eMarketer confirms why more marketing budget is flowing to permission-based email and why email has become “The Linchpin” of integrated digital marketing strategies.

Among the key findings in the report are these:

• Econsultancy and Adestra’s Email...

What are you doing with your Facebook presence right now? While many companies are spending big dollars and lots of time on results-driven social media marketing, many others are doing nothing.

Fortunately, there are strategies you can employ to drive results regardless of the time and resources you have on hand. 

1. Good
   Passive List Growth: Create a new Facebook Tab where Facebook users can sign up to receive your email campaigns. You won’t see a hockey-stick growth curve on Day 1, but this is a super easy, cost-effective way to increase email subscriptions and improve results in the email...

As brands become more social and customers become the social mouthpiece of brands, the intersection of advertising and word-of-mouth recommendations is now online. Traditional advertising methods fade into the background as customers are more wary of brand promises and, instead, turn to their friends and family when making a purchase.

Like any marketer curious about the numbers that back up such claims, I was interested to hear Jay Baer (of Convince and Convert) and Greg Shove (of SocialChorus) discuss the stats in their webinar The Influence Triangle: How to Leverage 3 Types of Brand Fans to...

You can have a massive subscriber list and a powerful subject line ready to impress, but without the right email designer, your subscribers will be deleting your email long before they notice the CTA.

A highly skilled email designer is a crucial member of your email marketing team, as ExactTarget Regional Manager, Services (Central Region) Chris Studabaker points out. In a recent column for MarketingLand, Chris argues for six required skills that marketers should consider when hiring a designer for an email marketing campaign.

Be sure your next email designer is the best you’ve ever hired...

Digital channels have revolutionized the way we communicate with our customers. We’re all in hot pursuit of new and innovative ways to effectively deliver the right messages, through the right channels, at the right time.

At ExactTarget, we recognize that creating and maintaining relationships with consumers requires more than clever writing and glossy marketing materials. To truly connect with customers, marketers need to understand both consumer behaviors and motivations. That’s why we went straight to the source and asked consumers how they view and use each unique communication medium.

Five...

Here in Indiana, we love our basketball. Given the amount of blog posts we have dedicated to #MarchMadness, you probably already knew that. Well, the end is near. The field has been narrowed to the Final Four. Before the teams clash in Atlanta next weekend, we thought it would be appropriate to take one final (maybe) look at the field and see exactly how and where their social media marketing strategies rank.

Last week we provided our readers with official handles and hashtags for each team. We then provided the bracket filled out based on each team’s Klout score. If you had followed our Klout...

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...