Random thoughts on the MarketingSherpa Email SummitI. General feeling that this was going to be a good year for email marketers. Based on a survey of marketers email marketing and social networks were the only two marketing programs that are expected to see a net increase this year.
II. MarketingSherpa stressed:
- Take an analytic approach
- Tie in email marketing with optimized landing pages. Big push on optimizing landing pages that included full day of training prior to the start of the show.
- Tie in email marketing with social networks.
III. Social Media:
A. A lot of talk and survey results show big plans from companies on spending more here but the results on this were mixed. One case study of (anonymous company) showed a 62% increase in reach of the email. However, the case study where an emailer (Miles Media) showed results portrayed the reach as being minimal.
- 100K emails sent
- 47 posts
- Ave of 8.4 opens and clicks (she didn’t show these on her slides so I just scribbled down the numbers from her talk but I think I got them right)
B. The big winners from the two case studies for most popular social media sites were:
- Anonymous company in descending order of posts: Twitter, LinkedIn (sign a B2B emailer???), MySpace and Facebook (a distant forth)
- Non-anonymous (Miles Media) in descending order: Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and Digg (distant forth)
IV. The email marketing awards were a joke. only big name companies won. (Big names = Fortune 200 and Global 1000. )
You may be asking yourself right now – why, did their vast array of resources yield superior results? Well, no. Except for a couple of winners from Capital One and a catchy email postcard from Dell, the winners…how should I put this…stunk. They were just a mass of very tiny and often unformatted text. One exec I spoke with said they looked like the type of emails he gets all the time and automatically deletes. Another exec described them as “text dumps.”
Thank you for these notes from the summit, Craig. The anonymous and the non-anonymous company seem to have very different results? The take-away I get from this is at least twitter was in the top half of both studies and that social platforms is not an option anymore for email campaigns, but a requirement.
Too bad about the awards going to names instead of results. That seems to be a common problem in all industry type award ceremonies.