Day One Of MarketingSherpa’s Email Marketing Summit: What Has Changed?


Marketingsherpa-email-marketing-summit-2011 As usual the first day of MarketingSherpa’s Email Marketing Summit (as you know this time in Vegas) yesterday began with an overall view of the next challenges email marketers will be facing for 2011.
This is the top 5: Relevancy, List growth, RIO monitoring, Deliverability and Social media integration.

Funny isn’t it? Isn’t his more or less the same as last year? What have we been doing all that time? Indeed, often just growing our lists and trying to survive on running campaigns without any extra efforts?

Just as Flint indicated “Sometimes a complete re-design is necessary” and that doesn’t mean that we will have to re-think our “images”. As clearly stated in yesterday’s sessions, we should only use images if they bring any relevant meaning to the text or if they lead our eye to the right content. Speaking of it, one of the take-aways: “You control the eye-path by 5 factors: Size, Color, Shape, Motion and Position”. 

What’s the real value of an email? It’s content and a good value proposition: “Why should I, as an ideal customer, buy from you instead of your competitors!” A real value proposition should therefore always embrace these 3 elements: Appeal, Exclusivity and Credibility. Think about it. This is “Relevancy”.

To end with I was very delighted that Dr. Flint McGlaughlin used the same example about marketing as I always used to. Marketing is like dating. You know what the end-goal is, but start slowly.

The summary of the first day: yet another clean view on all the best practices in email marketing, although there is still a lot to work to do. Did you know that research indicates that 25% of all email marketers still think email marketing is “for free”!

Kenny Van Beeck

Kenny Van Beeck Kenny Van Beeck has over 10 years hands-on experience as an email marketing and e-direct marketing consultant. He was business unit manager and business development manager of Belgian email marketing service provider, EmailGarage. In his career he learned that the market has still a lot to discover about the true power of email marketing and decided to found his consultancy eTale. You can follow Kenny on Twitter or connect with him via LinkedIn.