More than 800 marketers gathered last week in Miami for MarketingSherpa's 3rd annual Email Marketing Summit -- the world's largest gathering of its type.  The Summit was packed with relevant data and useful tips -- you can read the full summary here. Here are the top dozen takeaways:

  1. Become more than a marketer: The days of simply dedicating yourself to designing email or multichannel campaigns and then testing them are over. Marketers now have to learn how to think like their IT people, their financial officers, and their other top execs.
  2. Email marketers get religion on landing pages: It's official: Every marketer is now at least thinking about landing pages.
  3. It's all about the message: People are still coming to grips with how to keep a campaign on message. For instance, the copywriting base camp on Sunday -- where landing pages were critiqued -- showed that people are getting off message in the transfer from subject line to email body to landing page.
  4. Deliverability anxiety fades: At last year's Summit, attendees -- and people in the email community at that time -- were deeply worried about deliverability. This year, the number of one-on-one clinics for deliverability was noticeably lower.
  5. Segmentation grows on emailers: With marketers feeling better about getting their emails into in-boxes, it wasn't surprising to hear them talk more about the next steps of executing successful campaigns -- like subject lines, body copy and segmentation.
  6. Email is not dead: The death of email is premature. Some people think it is stagnating or withering rather than growing, but it seems exactly the opposite.
  7. Be interesting: Multiple presenters said that if you want to get your email opened and read, you need to quit "mailing it in." In short, you have to test the idea of taking chances with subject lines, overall messaging themes, body copy and images. A few great tips:

    o Write targeted emails to each segment.
    o Test headlines that test curiosity.
  8. Are we really "post-open"?: No, this is not a "subject lines are dead" takeaway. However, there were a number of presenters who said that while open rates are hugely important in the grand scheme of things, some marketers take their eyes off the prize(s) -- clickthroughs or sales, depending on their niches.
  9. B-to-B emailers are playing hard at catch-up: On the whole, B-to-C emailers are still ahead of their B-to-B counterparts. But the field is leveling. And it was clear at the Summit that B-to-B marketers are taking their email more serious than ever.
  10. Ask your customers questions: Sherpa's recommendation of using surveys to better target your audience was well-represented in the Case Studies. Some folks are emailing surveys, while others are including them at various points on their websites.
  11. Mobile is 'new deliverability': There was definitely more talk about mobile email this year. Until the US catches up with Asia and Europe on this front, however, marketers seem like they are still going to be only dipping their toes for a while.
  12. Test, test, test: Testing will always be a key to successful email and interactive marketing. The most important reason why: You will never truly understand what each segment of your audience is looking for until you crunch and analyze the numbers. Everything comes down to testing.

 

Read the full summary at MarketingSherpa.com:
http://www.marketingsherpa.com/article.html?id=30367