Online shopping giant Beyond the Rack will unveil its new mobile app at South By Southwest in Austin Saturday, highlighting the power of real-time engagement through its integration with global cross-channel digital marketing provider ExactTarget.
Presented during the event’s inaugural Mobile Saturday hosted by Urban Airship, the retailer will showcase its new app on stage with ExactTarget’s Vice President of Mobile Products R.J. Talyor, as the two discuss the role of push messaging and email in driving app engagement during a 5 p.m. session entitled Seamless Customer Experiences.
“To create engaging experiences for hyper-connected consumers, brands must transform their digital marketing campaigns to deliver personalized, timely communications across the channels consumers use most,” said Kevin Murphy, Beyond the Rack’s senior director of business intelligence and CRM. “With ExactTarget, we anticipate increased engagement and ROI by seamlessly integrating experiences across email and push messaging.”
Beyond the Rack is among the first enterprises to add ExactTarget’s new MobilePush application to its existing ExactTarget-powered email and digital marketing efforts. Launched in January, ExactTarget’s MobilePush application enables marketers to power push notifications to tablets and smartphones through a standalone application or integrate the push messages with campaigns across email, social and the Web via ExactTarget’s cross-channel digital marketing solution, the Interactive Marketing Hub.
“The proliferation of smartphones and tablets is accelerating the need for brands to integrate mobile experiences into their broader digital marketing strategy,” said Talyor. “ExactTarget’s expanded suite of mobile applications empowers brands to unlock the power of data and the cloud to deliver relevant and engaging experiences across SMS, push, email and the Web.”
In addition to MobilePush, ExactTarget’s suite of cloud-based mobile applications also includes mobile optimized email and MobileConnect, an SMS messaging application that makes it easy for marketers to integrate mobile-originated or mobile-terminated messaging into the digital marketing mix. Like all of ExactTarget’s products, the company’s mobile applications are available as standalone applications or fully integrated with campaigns across email, social and the Web.
“Mobile's momentum continues to accelerate in 2013 — more than 1 million apps available, more than 150 million tablets sold, and more than 1 billion smartphones in consumers' pockets globally,” according to Forrester Research, Inc.’s February 2013 report entitled, 2013 Mobile Trends For Marketers: Multiyear Strategies And Larger Investments Define This Year. “We believe mobile will be more disruptive than the PC Web was a decade ago.”
The news of Beyond the Rack expanding its digital marketing with ExactTarget follows the release of a new commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of ExactTarget.
The October 2012 study, entitled “The Key to Successful Cross-Channel Marketing,” found 35 percent of marketers ranked managing marketing campaigns across multiple marketing point solutions as one of their greatest challenges - despite 78 percent who said they believe cross-channel marketing is important or very important to their business.
