This third and final day started with a very enthusiastic presentation on the role of email marketing in inbound by Karen Ruben of HubSpot. She made it very clear that email marketing in an inbound approach is all about content. So you have to work on your mobile rendering and social authority. Certainly now that Inbox priority by Gmail and the Social mailbox by Facebook are looking more and more to human interaction to filter out our email marketing messages. Add Comment Yesterday’s summit afternoon consisted of dual track, divided in B2B and B2C tracks. I choose to go for the B2C tracks. These are my findings. The Air Canada Case: I specially chose this case because I was pretty impressed by this company when they showed their email marketing approach at MarketingSherpa summit back in 2008. It seems that Air Canada is still on the same wave launching their WebSaver program. The initial strategy of dynamically segmented content depending on people’s preferences is still there, but they enhanced it with some new approaches. Social, mobile and fare alerts are some of them, but I was pleasantly surprised by the use of geo targeted banner communication in their overall strategy. Keep up the good work guys! The morning of this second conference day started with a presentation of Microsoft/Bing email marketing. Yet another good example that highly personalized email marketing can be very effective. All Bing emails are personalized on the fly adding a large variety of messages in the email based on previous implicit and explicit data, all that done in 20 milli seconds after receiving the email. My only concern is that there are a lot of images in play. So I hope Microsoft managed to get a way to render them automatically. As usual the summit begins with an overall view of the next challenges email marketers will be facing for 2011. Guess what, this is the top 5: Relevancy, List growth, RIO monitoring, Deliverability, Social media integration. Funny isn’t it? Is did not more or less the same as last year? What have we been doing all that time? Indeed, growing our list and trying to survive on running campaign without any extra efforts. 2010 was another exciting email marketing year. Google released its "priority mailbox", Facebook announced the arrival of Facebook mail and like and share buttons appeared in email messages, but what will 2011 bring us? Think about this: 1. Email marketing is not a channel, but a strategy. Social, email, mobile, barcodes are all compliant. Use it that way. 2. Consider a re-design of your emails. Mobile, tablets, video? (Facebook mail), Javascripts (Hotmail Active Views)… are you ready for it? 3. Content segmentation is a "do or die" Carpet bombing is over, learn to live with it! The user decides what, where and when he wants his content. Act upon it. 4. Integrate, automate and monitor. Welcome messages and basket-recovery are mostly neglected. Do something about it. 5. Build a cross-channel dialogue. Use explicit and implicit user data to refine your strategy. Now let’s start building on a new fantastic email marketing year!! Best wishes, Kenny | ArchivesJanuary 2012 CategoriesAll   |
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