Recommended Reading - Audiences & Deliverability

Our recommendations this week:

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BLOG.RETURNPATH.COM -- How A Different From Name Can Hurt Your Engagement

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BLOG.AWEBER.COM -- The Top 7 Questions Everyone Has About Email List Segmentation

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SENDINBLUE.COM -- 6 Reasons Your Visitors Aren't Converting On Mobile (And How to Fix It)

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INVISIONAPP.COM -- Unsubscribe Me: A Ux Review

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LITMUS.COM -- Is Your Inbox Asking You to Unsubscribe? Don't Panic.

Recommended Reading - Good Examples

Our recommendations this week:

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CAMPAIGNMONITOR.COM -- 8 Brands Using Email Personalization Like Pros

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BLOG.HUBSPOT.COM -- 10 Examples of Effective Re-Engagement Emails

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BLOG.MAILCHIMP.COM -- 8 Ways to Create Thumb-Stopping Social Media Content

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BLOG.BENCHMARKEMAIL.COM -- How to Make Millennials Fall in Love with Your Emails

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LEARN.INFUSIONSOFT.COM -- Email Marketing: Why You Should Take the Inbound Route

Recommended Reading - Beyond Email

Let's go beyond email to some great thought leadership that will benefit you in any industry.

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SETHGODIN.TYPEPAD.COM -- Are You Trying to Sell Me Something?

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BLOG.LISTRAK.COM -- 7 Ways to Use Transactional Sms Messaging

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SHERPABLOG.MARKETINGSHERPA.COM -- Marketing 101: What Is the Happy Path?

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BLOG.AWEBER.COM -- The Beginner's Guide to Making Money with Email Marketing

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SHERPABLOG.MARKETINGSHERPA.COM -- The Difference Between Marketing and Advertising (And Why It Matters)

Recommended Reading - More

It's a bit of a mix this week, some thought to design and some thoughts to planning.

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PUBLICATE.IT -- 12 Email GIF Examples to Boost Your Click Through Rates

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BLOG.MAILCHIMP.COM -- Does the Perfect Email Template Exist? We Used Data to Find Out

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SENDGRID.COM -- Having Trouble Getting Your Company to Invest in Email? Read This

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HOLISTICEMAILMARKETING.COM -- 12 Email Experts Reveal Their Top Tips for Increasing Conversions Throughout the Customer Journey

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TRENDLINEINTERACTIVE.COM -- Back to the Basics: Email Infrequency

ExactTarget Interview Questions

Last year I had a phone screening with a consulting firm that specialized in supporting clients using the ExactTarget platform.  Since I'd been using the platform for many years in a number of capacities (direct contributor, manager over a team of developers, selected it in two RFPs at two companies, participated in several consulting sessions with not-yet-released functionality -- some of which I had recommended -- and even worked for a time at ExactTarget Professional Services), I was pretty embarrassed when I bombed their interview questions. 

It did go to show how complex ExactTarget was, but I felt like all of their questions were about legacy pieces of ET that people should be doing everything they can to no longer use.  I felt if I had had a chance to talk more about some of the complex solutions I had built -- some of which ET themselves said was impossible until I proved them wrong -- that it would have been a completely different outcome.

In the end, I finally had to write my own questions just to get that feeling of failure out of my head.  I shared them with the consulting firm (not sure what they thought) and then had a chance a few months later to use them myself in phone screenings, including for my replacement.

The point of these questions isn't to provide an exhaustive list of everything you can do in ET. In fact, these were biased towards how we used the tool, and if you've used the tool, you know there's lots of ways to perform tasks (perhaps too many) and that every place uses it a little differently.  But the point of the questions was to assess a candidate's experience with the parts of the tool we used and to see their thought process.  I told candidates that I wasn't looking for 100% right answers, but I wanted them to speak freeform as they thought about their answers and to use personal experience from their own past projects wherever possible.  I didn't ask all the questions, but as the conversation progressed, they helped me to aim at certain areas.  I found it was helpful in getting nervous people to open up as well.

So, here are my questions.  If I were looking to hire ExactTarget practitioners today, these are still the questions I'd start with.  -- James

• Explain the difference between Automation Studio and Journey Builder.
  
• Name three ways to get data into SFMC.
  
• What are some caveats to sending from Data Extensions?
  
• What is the difference between update, add and overwrite on import activities?
  
• What are the four ways Automations are started?
  
• What are some of the built-in Data Extensions/Views in every SFMC account?
  
• What does the Sendlog do?
  
• Without looking at SFMC, explain as many parts of User-Initiated Sends as you can.
  
• Within Automations, you can put multiple actions within a single step. Under what circumstances should you put multiple actions within a step? Under what circumstances should you separate actions into their own steps? Under what circumstances will SFMC not allow you to put actions in the same step?
  
• What happens/can happen when there's an error in an Automation?
  
• What are some limitations to working with images in SFMC? For the image size limitation, what are some ways you can mitigate? Name something else you need to consider when working with the new Content Studio, with regards to images.
  
• What are the limitations for browser-based uploads and downloads? What is the solution to overcome that limitation?
  
• Name three ways to invoke/initiate journeys in Journey Builder.
  
• What are some of the things present in SFMC contracts? (Now that they're charging per contact, important for people doing solutiongineering to be aware of how their decisions will financially impact their customers ongoing.) 
  
• What does Validation do in Automations?  

Recommended Reading - Behavioral Marketing

Your customers are telling you what they are interested in. Exploring the data will help you deliver what your customer is looking for when they're looking for it with well done Behavioral Marketing.

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CAMPAIGNMONITOR.COM -- Behavioral Marketing 101

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BLOGS.ORACLE.COM -- How Behavioral Triggers Are the Low Hanging Fruit of Marketing Automation

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CONTENTMARKETINGINSTITUTE.COM -- Why Marketers Need to Think Like Data Scientists (And How to Do It)

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LITMUS.COM -- 5 Ways You Can Use Email Analytics Data to Power Segmentation

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DELIVRA.COM -- The Psychology Behind the Perfect Thank You Email