Email Evolution Conference takeaways

Just as with the MarketingSherpa Email Summit, I’ve put together a post with some of the (imho) best takeaways of the Email Evolution Conference held in Miami the past days. There will of course be some overlap in the takeaways, but then again: if something is good it’s worth being repeated, right?
This time the takeaways are again categorized for easier reading/viewing. Source was the Twitterverse, specifically the #EEC11 hashtag.
Campaigns & triggers
Stefan Eyram: Orbitz’s triggered programs account for 3-4% of volume, but it drives 40% of their profits.
Dwight Sholes: Travelocity gets 30-40% open rates and 40-50% clickthroughs on triggered messaging.
Kristin Hersant: Travelocity’s Low Fare Alert = dual triggered alert to promote low prices on specific city pairs. Converts active shoppers to buyers.
Stephen Epple: Let the data drive your email triggers, not your personal opinions or those of upper mngt.
Clients vs companies
SyncMarketing: New Marketing mindset: brands should strive for partnership with and service to vs manipulation and power over customers.
Loren McDonald: are email and social functions in the wrong departments.
Liz Lynch: People buy from companies they trust. So true
Kristin Hersant: For B2B (b/c the sales cycles are so long) you can go back as far as 2 years.
Liz Lynch: Provide options at opt out and save unsubs. Citizens saves 8K per month this way.
Chuck Pen: Create a lifetime value of an email address to convince sr mngt to make changes in your company.
Deliverability
Kristin Hersant: Hotmail defines unengagement as someone who hasn’t opened or clicked on an email in 6 months.
Design
Stefan Eyram: Keep your emails to 640px wide. Will still render properly on mobile devices at 320px wide.
Email marketing in general
Alessandra Souers: We’re email marketers. There’s no such thing as a ‘moral dilemma’ for us.
Dela Quist: The difference between us and spammers….we respect unsubscribe.
Kristin Hersant: Best practices be damned. Always test unique and creative ideas to determine what’s best for your business.
Luke Glasner: Challenge to marketers, stop looking at it as fragmentation, rather see a chance for real/deeper integrated mktg.
Shannon Holato: Top 3 reasons for getting email: 1) Transactional 2) Cust Serv 3) Offers.
Engagement/Segmenting
David Favero: Question: how do you define “engaged” with email? Answers range from 6mos to 2years! ISPs will soon start to make decision for you.
Kristin Hersant: Set up a standard segment in your email tool that separates engaged and unengaged. Engaged = opened an email in last 6 months.
Ryan Phelan: Rest before you reactivate — stop sending and then send win-back campaign to boost response.
Trendline Interactive: Email offers where all links direct to the same page have a 48% higher conversion rate.
Ryan Phelan: Implementing persona groups means highly dynamic emails based on motivation and preference.
Mobile
Shannon Holato: go on a word diet when planning for mobile emails
Matty Caldwell: iPhone preference center is your perfect guide to create scalable email designs http://twitpic.com/3vtqjw
Luke Glasner: Most smartphones use webkit to display emails including iPhone, Android, Blackberries & more so fairly standard rendering
Janet Roberts: What percentage of your list opens on mobile? Analyze ‘user agent string’ to find out!
Social media
Chuck Pen: Email messages that mention Facebook in the subject line have a 32% higher open rate than those that don’t.
Ryan Phelan: Social media is not about power over your customers, it’s about partnership.
Chuck Pen: Matt Caldwell used the phrase “the fertilizer of newsletters” referring to including social snippets. Love that.
Luke Glasner: Create social dispatches: snippets of content from social w/ graphical cues (social icons, avatars, talk bulbs/quote sign, etc).
Varsha Chawla: Good rule of thumb for social sharing in email: “If it takes more than 2 clicks, it’s not sharing.
Testing
Kristin Hersant: Try sending a “blind email”… One that doesn’t show any product. You’ll be surprised at how well it performs.
Luke Glasner: Once you have your win-back program setup, continue to test to optimize THEN automate it.
Jill Butler: SAJ conducted a 50/50 split test to determine optimal length of win-back contact stream. 1 segment got 2 emails, 1 got 3 emails.
Liz Lynch: Hold back a control group to see the true LTV of email.
Antony WS: Test with a logical customer experience. Don’t skip the proof of concept phase. From multi-channel blueprint.
So there you have it: some cool and useful nuggets from the Email Evolution Conference 2011 in Miami 🙂