Interactive marketing campaigns will influence at least 80 percent of consumers’ discretionary spending by 2015, according to a new Gartner study.

Featured in ExactTarget’s (NYSE:ET) “A Marketer’s Guide to Multichannel Campaign Management”, the research finds online continues to expand, providing interactive marketers new ways to engage customers.

“Marketers still need to shift their traditional campaign management strategy around executing campaigns to a customer and move toward a digital marketing, two-way engagement approach that acts more as a mutually beneficial decision journey involving customers’ wants and needs,” wrote Adam Sarner, author of “Digital Marketing: The Critical Trek for Multichannel Campaign Management”. “This evolving customer-focused strategy harnesses digital techniques and channels that will increase engagement, response and conversion rates. It helps marketers measure effectiveness and profoundly shifts traditional campaign management strategies and customer relationships.”

The guide identifies key recommendations marketers can implement to evolve their interactive marketing across social media, email, video, mobile and the Web.

Key recommendations include:

Enhance the consumer experience – Effective marketing requires brands to engage customers based on their preferences in order to deliver distinct and memorable messages.

Evolve with the customer – As consumers’ messaging habits evolve, so must marketers’ ability to connect across all interactive channels.

Partner campaign management with digital marketing – Consider campaign management as a way to coordinate online and offline interactions.

To download “Digital Marketing: The Critical Trek for Multichannel Campaign Management”, click here.

“Consumer’s interactions with brands across email, social, mobile and the Web continue to evolve,” said Tim Kopp, chief marketing officer at ExactTarget. “Interactive marketers must identifies how today’s hyper-connected consumers are engaging with brands in order to provide relevant, timely information across the channels they use the most.”

Over 95 percent of consumers use email at least weekly but consumer usage across mobile and social continues to grow according to ExactTarget’s 2012 Channel Preference Survey. Based on a survey of 1,500 U.S. online consumers, ExactTarget’s 2012 Channel Preference Survey asked how Americans communicate online with brands and with friends and found a growing divide between personal communications preferences and how consumers want to receive marketing messages.

About ExactTarget

ExactTarget is a leading global provider of email marketing and cross-channel interactive marketing software-as-a-service solutions that empower organizations of all sizes to communicate with their customers through email, mobile, social media and websites. ExactTarget’s powerful suite of integrated applications enable marketers to plan, automate, deliver and optimize data-driven interactive marketing and real-time communications to drive customer engagement, increase sales and improve return on marketing investment. Headquartered in Indianapolis, Indiana with offices across North America and in Europe, South America and Australia, ExactTarget trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol “ET.” For more information, visit www.ExactTarget.com.

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