The Whitelist » email summit

Em@il Summit 2009: Hanging-out With A Rock Star

ClickMail Marketing — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 00:09:30 +0000

I had the chance today to exchange pleasantries and more with a true legend, Arthur Hughes. If there’s a human alive that has done more in the field of database marketing than he, I haven’t met him.

Arthur has a new book out, ’Successful E-mail Marketing Strategies: From Hunting to Farming’. I’ve picked-up a copy, and recommend you do the same.

Thank you, Arthur, for all you’ve done for the eMarketing profession.

Em@il Summit Day II: Emerging Themes

ClickMail Marketing — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 23:19:53 +0000

My brain has defrosted just enough to impart the following observations:

An recurring theme here in Miami is how to best reduce the anxiety and friction caused by asking people for information. Ask a web visitor for their email address or other details and they get their back up. So the zillion yen question is, how to build the ideal email and landing page?

An email or landing page that reduces the (often reasonable) concerns that people have when they give out information over the internet is what is needed. While there is no magic bullet to solve this problem, there are many things one can do.

As an example, if your landing page says ‘I won’t sell or share your information’ right next to the area where you’re asking for information, a whopping 66% of your visitors will be more likely to share their contact details.

Em@il Summit Day II: My Brain Hurts

ClickMail Marketing — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 22:52:08 +0000

Team ClickMail attended a number of today’s MarketingSherpa’s Em@il Summit sessions, but please don’t ask me which ones they were: brain burn has set in. All I know is that we’re absorbing a ton of information and have learned a lot. We look forward to sharing our insights over this medium over time.

Miami Em@il Summit: Last Night’s Party With The Cool Lyris Kids

ClickMail Marketing — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 21:18:07 +0000

Today’s been so crazy busy I neglected to mention last night’s Lyris party. Erick Mott is a rock star as well as Lyris’ communications guru; and was kind enough to invite Team ClickMail to participate. It was a classy, well put-together event made even better by the partygoers heading off en mass to dinner.

Make this Reason #512 why we at ClickMail are proud to be a purveyor of Lyris’ quality ESP services.

Miami, Day Two: Getting Certified By Dr. Flint

ClickMail Marketing — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 08:16:44 +0000

Another day at the Email Summit and another great certification course led by the dynamic Dr. Flint McGlaughlin. Today was the Email Messaging Optimization Professional Certification and as if I didn’t have enough to do as a result of what we covered in yesterday’s course, I now have more insight into how to optimize the ‘email capture to landing page conversion’ process. The idea of looking at email marketing as a science is not new but having someone like Dr McGlaughlin and the rest of the MarketingExperiments group provide these types of programs can really open even the most seasoned veteran’s eyes. Throughout the day there were many little tidbits of information, any of which alone could make a big difference in your email marketing ROI.

Today’s course was broken into three areas:

1) Optimizing Email Capture

2) Optimizing Open Rate and Clickthrough

3) Optimizing Landing Pages

And although they are each extremely important (the chain is as strong as the weakest link), the formula presented today states:

Email capture < Open Rate < Click Through < Landing Page

Again, this is skimming the surface and, like yesterday, I strongly urge anyone involved in email marketing to take this course as well: you won’t regret it.