MarketingSherpa Email Summit takeaways

The MarketingSherpa Email Summit in Las Vegas held from 24th till 26th January is in its final day today: I thought it would be nice to gather all the tips, links and otherwise useful info posted on one single page. The tips are all sorted by topic for your convenience. The source for all these tips was the Twitter stream using hashtag #sherpaemail.
Email marketing in general
Kristin Hersant: Email Marketing Gem from Threadless: Be honest. Don’t try so hard… Keep it real.
Kristin Hersant: Non-relevant email is the #1 reason why subscribers unsubscribe.
Kristin Hersant: Internal relevance = Personal interests, demographics, etc. External events = Holidays, Seasons, Sales.
Kristin Hersant: Subject lines = Pick-up Lines. It’s their job to start a conversation.
Kristin Hersant: Creating a clearer, more valuable subject line can increase open rates by 25.3%
Kristin Hersant: Email subscribers are even more cautious and anxious than web browsers because of spam.
Ryan Phelan: when you have value, all you have to do is communicate clearly.
Engagement/Segmenting
Kristin Hersant: Treat the recipients who take time to share with their network as an influencer segment.
Kristin Hersant: Questions to answer: What should the recipient do and why should they care?
Martin Lieberman: Good calls to action include a value proposition/benefit. They don’t just tell people to do something.
Kristin Hersant: People don’t believe hype anymore. You’re going to get diminishing results if you keep using that tone.
Shannon Holato: Email is a conversation, not a magazine ad.
Martin Lieberman: Don’t ask for information from your customers unless you plan to use it
Testing
Kristin Hersant: Test a radical redesign to shake up your thinking.
Hubspot: Test with the most recent names on your email list because they will give you higher performance rate.
Chester Bullock: Optimization occurs in the mind. Goes along with “perception is reality.
Content
Kristin Hersant: Your content needs exclusivity and credibility. Learn to infuse that into your email value proposition.
Kristin Hersant: Key lesson: Content trumps creative. The offer is key.
Kristin Hersant: Key Principle #4: Two common elements that create friction are length and difficulty.
Design
Kenny van Beeck: Images are only useful if they add relevancy to the content of your email or draw your eyes to it.
Kenny van Beeck: You control the eye-path by 5 factors: Size, Color, Shape, Motion and Position.
Kenny van Beeck: The anatomy of a good email : Capture, Convince, Close or “Subject, Johnson box, body.
Ali Landow: Keeping the CTA above the fold in an email is a mistake – it jars the readers’ thought sequence.
Kristin Hersant: Do not give equally weighted calls to action to a recipient. You mitigate your conversion rate.
Kristin Hersant: Plain text outperforms busy emails time and time again.
Deliverability
Kristin Hersant: 20% of legitimate email goes undelivered. 4% is classified as junk. 16% goes missing.
Social media
Kristin Hersant: FreshPair’s Friends w/Benefits campaign drove 25% increase in Facebook fans by offering exclusive discount.
Kristin Hersant: 75% of Twitter users post less than 1 tweet a day. Most users are disengaged. But everyone checks their email… frequently.
Steve Wylie: Email & social media are like PB & chocolate. Good on their own but great together.
Martin from SalesLink: FreshPair’s addition of an “exclusive” tab in Facebook page after getting a “like” is pretty darn clever.
Martin Lieberman: Retail is one of the least-liked words on Facebook, says @hubspot.
Aweber: Clever: send email dedicated to a social network to ppl who click “share” links for that network in previous emails.
Martha Garcia: 96% of people polled were more willing to share their email address vs only 12% of people willing to share their social handle.
David Meerman Scott: Social media are tools. Real-Time is a mindset.
Clients vs companies
Emfluence: Customers don’t buy from companies, they buy from people. And they dislike companies for the same reasons they dislike people.
Martha Garcia: Tone impacts anxiety – A reader’s guard will go up when they think they’re about to be sold something.
Martha Garcia: Clarity trumps persuasion – lose the marketing speak. We are talking w/ people on the other side of our emails.
Karen Rubin: If you don’t get out of your head and into your customers, you will never be the marketer you could be.
Aweber: The goal of the email is to sell the click, not the product. Sell on the landing page, post-click.
Kristin Hersant: Nobody cares about your products except for you. People care about themselves and how you can solve their problems.
Mobile
Rory Carlyle: 29.7% U.S mobile email subscribers operate fully-loaded smartphones.