Strategy

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...

I had the pleasure of listening to Rachel Botsman, author of What's Mine Is Yours? The Rise of Collaborative Consumption at our ExactTarget Connect Conference in Sydney, Australia. Her presentation was absolutely brilliant and full of ideas about using technology to "empower people to make meaningful connections. Connections that are enabling use to rediscover a humanness that we lost somewhere along the way." 

During her presentation she made a comment that hit pretty hard. 

(I'm paraphrasing here...) We should have never called it social media. It has always been social design. Social design...

Every industry is unique, with its own challenges and opportunities. But for marketers in the travel and hospitality industry, the pressure of delivering the right message, at the right time, via the right channel is truly next level.

To succeed in this heavily-saturated market, travel brands must create a seamless information-gathering and booking experience for their customers. If they don’t, they risk missing that very narrow window of time when travelers are ready to make their tentative travel plans become a reality (i.e., book the trip!).

In short, missing that elusive window of...

Is your brand on every social media platform under the sun yet mastering engagement in none?

The virtues of having a social media presence are blindingly obvious. After all, what brand wouldn’t want to connect with their customers, build brand reputation and ultimately increase sales? But all too often this desire to engage online gets side-tracked and you find yourself staring down the barrel of multiple social media profiles with no notifications. So how can you optimise your efforts on social media and increase engagement with fans and followers?

Let’s take a look at some best practice...

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Currently, a stunning 43% of all email opens occur on mobile devices, quickly overshadowing desktop opens (32%) and webmail opens (25%). Data from Litmus shows us that this percentage is up 38% in the last year alone. Basically, subscribers continue to use viewing environments that include many screen sizes:

• iPhone, Android, and tablets (mobile devices)
• Installed email programs like Outlook and Apple Mail (desktop)
• Email accessed through a web browser like Gmail and Yahoo! Mail (webmail)

This means that by a growing majority, subscribers are tapping and swiping instead...

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...

You’ve all read the stats and seen the infographics: consumers are awash with technology, and mobility is leading the charge. Many marketers already have mobile marketing strategies in place--but for those who don’t, now is the time to prioritise. It’s no longer a matter of just being mobile-friendly. You have to think mobile first.

Remember, you’re up close and personal

Consider how you use your phone. You keep it in a special case, use it to take and store personal photos and communicate with loved ones. You work with it. You play with it. Heck, most of us even sleep with it! The smartphone...

One of the great things about working on the web is that the work is never done. Even after a website or landing page is launched, there is always opportunity for improvement. Additional pages will be added. Some will be revamped. New microsites and landing pages will spawn at a moment's notice.

With all this movement and additional work, it is possible that the original designer or team that worked on the initial launch won't be as heavily involved in these new projects. But how does one maintain consistency and brand integrity with projects being passed through so many hands?

Unless you spend...

Welcome to another edition of the Baer Facts! First off, we need to apologize for the lack of Baer Facts knowledge over the past couple of weeks. Jay and I have been traveling constantly over the past month and have had little time to chat via the Skype. 

We finally found some time to chat and I didn't publish it until the weekend. 

Anyway... please accept my sincere apology... and moving on. 

Today on the Baer Facts Jay and I discuss the productivity and marketing strategy that consists of 90% focus on engagement and 10% focus on content. I happened across this idea over the "interwebs" last...

Designing for the mobile inbox takes time not just from a design perspective, but involves other important parts of the campaign process—strategy and content changes, production and QA time, and the general investment needed from a cost and resources perspective to update or redesign your current campaigns.

To help your decision, check out a short guide that outlines:

• Tips on designing for small screens and touch interfaces
• A quick comparison of mobile-aware and responsive email design

Explore your options in to order to choose which mobile optimization approach is right for your brand.

I'm so glad that Uberflip just posted this infographic on the current state of content. I just got done speaking on a panel yesterday, and content was the buzzword for the day.

As marketing changes and consumers are more empowered by the internet, marketers have to learn a new game: content creation. Content is something we all consume--and in large amounts! We are more connected than ever before, and consuming content the entire time. In fact, a study in the UK reveals that we are in front of a screen for 12 hours a day! 

With a captive audience, instant publishing platforms (blogs, Twitter,...

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...

David Cowling from Socialmedianews.com.au has released his Social media Statistics Report recently and the numbers are interesting.

The ten most popular networks in Australia are as follows:

Google+ was in 11^th position, with approximately 340 000 users.

The key take away from these...

Advertising Age magazine recently announced the opening for their annual cover competition. Creatives under the age of 30 from all over the world are invited to to design an original cover for the June 10th issue of Ad Age, the prize being a trip to the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. The brief for this contest is to present what encapsulates the meaning of creativity in the year 2013, which opens the door to use one's imagination to highlight individual thoughts and beliefs.

Several points can be made about what Ad Age's contest says about the importance of content...

Picasso is credited with saying, “Good artists copy. Great artists steal.” To the best of my knowledge, he wasn’t a kleptomaniac—instead, he knew that artists need outside sources of inspiration. Whether they draw that inspiration from Mother Nature, Michelangelo, or Apple, great artists study the masters and use that success to create their own new and original ideas.

When you’re tackling a new digital marketing program—a website, a landing page, an email, a Facebook page, an app—take off your marketing hat and just wear your consumer hat for a while. Think about the sites and digital...

In my last post, "Are you Leaving Money on the Table by Sending Non-Targeted or Blast Emails?", I explained that sending the same offer to your entire database could actually be hurting your sales efforts and causing you to leave money on the table.

In this post, we will shift gears to focus on your merchandising strategy. By utilizing a "crawl, walk, run" strategy that leverages automation, you can actually increase AOV, boost your conversion rate, and provide your shoppers with an overall better shopping experience.

#4 Way Retail Marketers are Leaving Money On the Table: Manually Merchandising...

When your birthday rolls around, you may get as many well wishes from companies as from friends and family these days! Birthday emails can drive great results, but since more and more organizations send these automated emails, it's becoming more difficult to cut through the clutter. Here are some ways to stand out:

1. Let Your Brand Shine. Birthday emails are a perfect opportunity to build loyalty. Create an attractive, engaging, personalized email that matches your brand's look and personality. You can learn how to improve your email design here. And don't forget to optimize for mobile!

2. Offer...

In my last post, "Are You Narrowing Your Shopping Experience to a Single Channel?", I explained how interacting with shoppers in the same way regardless of channel could produce a bad user experience, and that retailer may be missing out on an opportunity to personalize the user experience for the “next best offer” for a particular channel.

In this post, we'll look at how non-targeted or blast emails could be causing increased opt-outs, more un-engaged subscribers, and a poor user experience.

#3 Way Retail Marketers are Leaving Money On the Table: Sending Non-Targeted or Blast Emails

Sending the...

March 13, 2013, was a historic day for Kickstarter, the website dedicated to social funding for anything from software development to stage shows and everything inbetween. Ex-hit television series "Veronica Mars" launched a campaign to raise $2 million in financing to produce a motion picture of the cult favorite, hitting its goal in under 10 hours and setting a record for the quickest $1 million to be raised in the site's history.

Fans rejoice at the impending return of their favorite moonlighting private eye, but what does this mean for the film industry? And what does this say about...