Random thoughts on the MarketingSherpa Email Summit

I. 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.”