The MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2012 edition was held last week in Las Vegas and boy, did they have a blast. I wasn’t there myself, but by keeping track of all the livetweets on Twitter with hashtags #sherpaemail and #emailsummit I’ve been able to create a new Email Summit takeaways post.
Just like the event takeaways post from last year I’ll be grouping the takeaways and sort them on topic alphabetically for your convenience.
Here they are:
Automation / Campaign management
Rachael Darmanin: Automated emails that are extremely personal is the ultimate combination.
Content
Jim Ducharme: “When done right, content is the greatest sales tool in the world.”
Greg Hyer: The rights of a content marketer are much greater than he who produces no content.
Ryan Amirault: Use your content and push them down the funnel.
Justine Jordan: Money talks. Developing content about costs (even in general terms) can drive a ton of traffic from keyword searches.
Three Deep Email: Content is the most important thing in marketing. It must be done right.
Daniel Burstein: “Use conversational tone and reference past actions taken”.
Martin Lieberman: The job of a headline is to get you to read the first paragraph. Not to close the sale.
Conversion
Martin Lieberman: “Conversion is a process, not an event, and it starts early on.”
Ashley Aboud: Find the correlation to who buys and who doesnt. Know your tipping point focus marketing on it.
Ashley Abboud: Spend marketing money on those that spend money on you.
Customers
Jessica Best: We’re all human offline. Why do we have to be told so often to be human online too?
Martin Lieberman: “Walk, talk, and think like our customers, and everything will change.”
Kelly Haggard: Consumption is nothing without application.
Ryan Phelan: Give customers the research they are looking for before they are looking for it or know they are.
Aweber: If your customers are thinking it, you should be writing about it. Including pricing, comparisons, problems.
Martin Lieberman: You don’t need to answer every customer question. You just have to address them.
Michelle Mogelson Levy: There is no B2B or B2C. Its all P2P.
Jim Ducharme: I would go further and say it’s people to people with business as the topic.
Daniel Burstein: Marketers should be teachers.
Martin Lieberman: We’re growing more impatient. Everyone expects a real-time experience to work out in their favor.
Katie Healy: People are people have a conversation with them!
Ryan Phelan: Let your guard down and dont play the “We’re corporate” line. Come on people! Reach out and embrace your customers.
Ryan Phelan: HOLY COW – #emailmarketing done RIGHT though listening to the customer and using the data AMEN! @realhearandplay
Ashley Abboud: Asking your customer #why they should get something for free is a great and creative way to engage your customer base
Deliverability / Email clients
Ryan Phelan: Errors in deliverability (sending to inactives, bad list hygene) can have your program in jail for 2 months
Ryan Phelan: It’s not just about getting to the inbox. Changing methods will alter what the inbox really is.
Design / Email clients
Emfluence: Don’t build out 15 versions of your email. Add code to your emails to determine the OS opening it and make your email scalable.
Martin Lieberman: The words in your call to action matter: No one wants to “Register.” They want to “Reserve Your Seat.”
Justine Jordan: If your email looks like a webpage, magazine, or the landing page coming after it, it’s time to reconsider what’s going on.
Engagement/Segmenting
Andrea Wood: Emails based on what the subscriber does, not what you thought they would do. Duh… But how many of us do it?
SEO Expert: segmented targeted emails have a 300% improvement in response rate. That’s huge!
Ryan Phelan: Want to start getting to “adult marketing”? start thinking about persona based segmentation and lead score based processes.
SEO Expert: you can segment emails by content or by persona or both.
Ryan Phelan: Batch and blast is lazy marketing. It takes work to be successful.
Ryan Phelan: Hearandplay started USING THE DATA! Marketers have to work hard for success and use the data and segment the data!
Forms
Kristi Bjornaas: When you use the long form prefill them with info you already have to make it less cumbersome
List Management / CRM / Database
Tammy Esser: Email Marketers need systems that ‘talk’ to each other in order to act on the packets of possibilities.
Martin Lieberman: Incentivize action: Make people want to join your list, and make employees want to help you build it too.
Mobile
Jessica Best: Love hearing #SherpaEmail’s mobile panel remind audience that 60% still don’t have smartphones. Use Text to Opt-In to grow email list!
Ryan Phelan: Large number of people at #sherpaemail aren’t optimizing for mobile. WHY?
Litmus: Email opens on mobile have increased more than 150% recently. See where subscribers are opening email.
Acxiom: Don’t overlook the importance of mobile emails. Your audience more likely to have mobile phone than toothbrush.
Social
Ryan Phelan: Twitter and facebook is not for everyone. AMEN!
Strategy
Ryan Phelan: HEY! Start with a strategy, design a pilot (test) analyze and deploy! Great steps for development
Savanah Stewart: “Adequacy is the enemy of excellence.” – Powerful words of Flint McGlaughhlin
Ryan Phelan: You know what is consistant with all the #sherpaemail winners? They thought strategically about their customers and products.
Rebecca Wilmoth: The job of marketing is to foster a conclusion, the job of sales is to convert.
Testing
Jim Ducharme: On a regular basis, role play as your customer and go through the experience – test the process all the way through.
Video
Justine Jordan: Video in Yahoo not open to all. Marketers must contact Yahoo to get whitelisted to include video in email.
Justine Jordan: Curious about the technology in Yahoo video email. HTML5? Historically, video in email has poor support across email clients.
So there you have it, this edition’s Email Summit takeaways sorted. Hope they’re helpful in your email marketing practices, either as a reminder or as new insights!
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