The MarketingSherpa 2012 Email Summit was held last week in Las Vegas and some familiar themes were heard by hundreds of leading email marketers at Cesar’s Palace in Las Vegas. From the presentations and our video interviews with the thought leaders attending, here are five takeaways from the summit for email marketers to consider.
Listen to your customers
Sounds simple enough, but are you actually listening to what they want? Are you asking them? Or are you assuming you know what they want and trying to convince them. Actually listening to your customers and then acting on what you hear means less convincing and more converting.
Good content comes from good questions
Generating content is an intimidating thing for most of us. However, if you quarry it from your customers, then you have a source of fantastic content! You customer facing employees know what questions your patrons are asking and mining those questions from your staff gives you a rich and deep source of great content.
It’s all about me
In fact, it’s always been about me (you). This isn’t exactly new, but before consumers had the power to speak out via social media channels such as email, marketers had the luxury of assuming they knew what it was about or worse, what you were about.
Test everything often
This comes up again and again because we still find that a minority of people actually do test their campaigns. If you are doing it, you should be testing it and you should be doing comparative testing between campaigns.
GetResponse has developed a smart and intuitive integrated analytics package which allows you to test, compare and optimize for better email marketing ROI.
Personalize
I’m avoiding the term “personalization” here because I’ve always thought that sounds a little industrial – like something which might roll off an assembly line (and isn’t that a contradiction?). I also think it sometimes gives the impression that all personalizing your email marketing means is using the name variable.
Collect the right data and then use it to enhance relevance and engagement. Improve your relationship with your subscribers by providing them with a positive personal experience. When deciding what data to collect, don’t focus on what information will sell people better, but focus on what will serve them better.
Good marketing is good relationship building. It’s a process and it requires you to be patient and not “pop the question” on the first date.
Heard these before?
Sure you have, but are you doing any of it? One reason we have these points coming up again and again is because as email marketers, we aren’t doing them as well as we should.
There’s a tremendous amount of online marketing insight to be gained from the video interviews we conducted at this year’s MarketingSherpa Email Summit in Vegas. Watch them and that light bulb above your head will burn out from flashing on an off so many times.
MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2012 Takeaways is a post from: Email Marketing Tips - Blog GetResponse
