The MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2012 edition was held last week in Las Vegas and boy, did they have a blast. I wasn’t there myself, but by keeping track of all the livetweets on Twitter with hashtags #sherpaemail and #emailsummit I’ve been able to create a new Email Summit takeaways post.

Just like the event takeaways post from last year I’ll be grouping the takeaways and sort them on topic alphabetically for your convenience.

Here they are:

Automation / Campaign management

Rachael Darmanin: Automated emails that are extremely personal is the ultimate combination.

Content

Jim Ducharme: ”When done right, content is the greatest sales tool in the world.”

Greg Hyer: The rights of a content marketer are much greater than he who produces no content.

Ryan Amirault: Use your content and push them down the funnel.

Justine Jordan: Money talks. Developing content about costs (even in general terms) can drive a ton of traffic from keyword searches.

Three Deep Email: Content is the most important thing in marketing. It must be done right.

Daniel Burstein: ”Use conversational tone and reference past actions taken”.

Martin Lieberman: The job of a headline is to get you to read the first paragraph. Not to close the sale.

Conversion

Martin Lieberman: ”Conversion is a process, not an event, and it starts early on.”

Ashley Aboud: Find the correlation to who buys and who doesnt. Know your tipping point focus marketing on it.

Ashley Abboud: Spend marketing money on those that spend money on you.

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If your email marketing results are still lagging after you’ve put in quite some effort, you might want to take a look at personas. For those who are not familiar with personas: they represent different user types based on psychological data. Lets take these four types of personas (the part in parentheses shows the way they behave).

The four personas

- Competitive (logical and fast)
- Spontaneous (emotional and fast)
- Humanistic (emotional and slow)
- Methodical (logical and slow)

By the way, these four types are not just limited to marketing. They are just anywhere and everywhere. Remember the Sex and the city series? All four main characters were based on one of the four types:

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The email insight title about this article is about knowledge of all the bigger and smaller principles and factors involved in email marketing. It is said to be one of the best performing online marketing channels out there, but that doesn’t mean it’s simple. The vast amount of work to be done even before you can send out something simple as an email newsletter can be daunting at first. Email marketing vendors and service providers can help, but specific knowledge about your email marketing practices and goals should be in-house.

Imagine having the marketing department solely running the email marketing tasks. In most companies, the marketing department isn’t that big, so email marketing will be a task of one single person, sometimes assisted by another. In other cases it is divided depending on types of communications. However, the knowledge and experience while executing email campaigns is built over time. You cannot go from zero to top speed in a short amount of time like a supercar. Besides, the ride in a supercar most of the time doesn’t take long: either it’s a gas guzzler, the ride isn’t comfortable or you can’t hear yourself think.

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Roxy is a retail brand specifically for women who are into surfing and skiing. Their email campaign designs are often well crafted, and the email below is a good example:

The bright pictures and overall clean layout help in this email to get attention and have potential buyers shop directly.

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Recently Google’s CEO Larry Page shared some milestones during the company’s 2011 earnings conference call. One of the most interesting numbers shared was that the Gmail webservice now has 350 million users. This is a big jump from the 260 million people that were using Gmail back in October 2011, just 3 months ago.

The most recent number of Hotmail users is from March 2010 which sits at 369 million users, expectations are that that number has grown since then, but not by much.

A quote from Larry Page during the earnings call:

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I saw this on the news yesterday and thought it deserved an article here. The company called Telegram.nl started out in the nineties, taking over the telegram business of KPN (big Dutch telco) in 2001 and here’s the news they have acquired a Swiss telex company. The company is called SwissTelex, and with the acquisition Telegram.nl now holds one third of the international telex market. I didn’t even know there was still a telex market! Let alone one could make money with it.

Apparently, there are quite some businesses that depend heavily on telexes, or even require them to operate in a normal fashion. Read More

In the closing of 2011, the New York Times did a bit of an email marketing oopsie: a total of 8 million people were emailed instead of 300.

According to an article at The Next Web, an offer about subscription continuation was supposed to be sent to 300 people. Instead, the target group was a little bit bigger: 8 million.

At first the official Twitter account tweeted that it wasn’t from them:

If you received an email today about canceling your NYT subscription, ignore it. It’s not from us.

— The New York Times (@nytimes) December 28, 2011

Afterwards a reporter noted that it was from NYT and something went quite wrong:

UPDATE on NYT email: “The email was sent by the NYT,” a spokeswoman said. Should’ve gone to appx 300 people & went to over 8 mil. Story TK

— Amy Chozick (@amychozick) December 28, 2011

In the end, to clear things up, New York Times sent out an apology mail stating the error and apologizing.

This just goes to show that absolute care and checks should be in place when putting together target groups for email campaigns.

Also, this might affect their inbox placement as quite some people will have marked that first erronous message as spam, meaning that the apology email arriving later was put in the spam folder as well.

Related Posts:

• DMARC launched: standardizes email authentication
• Email spam volume drops to historically low levels
• Don’t hit the spam button when you actually just want to unsubscribe
• Email insight: how to lose your spam tag
• Email insight: crowded inboxes of the future

Finishing up the last days of 2011, we have an infographic about the usage of email (finishing with the just words ‘ email is here to stay’ ) compared to Facebook and Twitter.

The infographic is courtesy of visiblegains.com, and gives some insight into the main numbers. Some of those numbers: while Facebook has 750 Million accounts (now about 800 Million), the number of email accounts is 2.9 Billion. That’s nearly one in every two persons worldwide who has an email account! Expectations are that by 2o14 some 3.8 Billion people will have an email account.

Furthermore, a staggering 107 Trillion emails were sent in 2010 – up 19% from 2009. Here’s the infographic – click for the large version:

Related Posts:

• Return Path report: email usage stats on desktop, mobile and webmail

The email spam volume worldwide has dropped to the lowest in the past three years, according to the Symantec November Intelligence Report:

Biggest sources for spam worldwide is still the USA with 28%, while india is at 9% and Russia at 5.7%. Overall spam has dropped to 70.5% of total email volume, down 3.7% from last October.

Some very effective ways of bringing spammers and complete networks sending spam (called botnets) down have been to make sure computer systems are better protected or cut off from internet until they are, and getting credit card companies and banks to stop do business with spammers.

The trouble with spammers however is that they will always find other or new ways to reach an audience that will participate in their schemes. Both comment spam and especially spam on social media networks has been getting bigger in recent years: for instance Twitter is plagued on a daily basis with spam accounts doing useless mentions with links on the platform.

Related Posts:

• Pingdom posts email spam stats insight
• Spam volume declined in last quarter of 2010
• DMARC launched: standardizes email authentication
• New York Times email marketing oopsie, 8 million people emailed
• Don’t hit the spam button when you actually just want to unsubscribe

Hotmail has re-introduced an old feature: flags to keep messages on top (click for larger):

The content of the email from the Hotmail Team reads:

As the Hotmail flags email notes, you can choose to show other actions in the Options page. The flags feature can help in managing inboxes with high daily or weekly volume to keep the messages that deserve more attention on top of your inbox. This new/old feature seems a lot like Gmail’s Priority Inbox, launched in August last year.

Related Posts:

• All your inboxes are belong to…you!
• Gmail now at 350 Million users, set to beat Hotmail as no.1 used webmail service
• The webmail war is on, it seems
• Email insight: Engagement vs deliverability, how does one affect the other?
• Losing a bet, no HTML5 email in webmail clients