Tomorrow is when the email marketing event fun starts: the Marketing Sherpa Email Summit 2013 will take place in Las Vegas. The venue is the Paris Las Vegas Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas. The agenda for the event can be found here.
Marketing Sherpa Email Summit keynote speakers include the following:
Jay Baer is President of Convince & Convert, and author of The Now Revolution: 7 Shifts to Make Your Business Faster, Smarter and More Social. Baer was named as one of America’s top three social media consultants by Fast Company, and has helped leading brands craft and implement winning social strategies.
Dr. Flint McGlaughlin is the managing director and CEO of MECLABS. His work has won multiple awards and he has been quoted in more than 13,000 online and offline sources. He frequently teaches on email testing, messaging and optimization. His organization has partnered with key market leaders includingThe New York Times, Microsoft Corporation and Reuters Group
Matt Bailey is the founder and president of SiteLogic Marketing. With more than 15 years in the Web marketing industry, Bailey excels in combining his marketing background with programming know-how to help companies create comprehensive strategies that improve Web presence and conversions.
Besides these keynotes, there are a lot more speakers: see the full of speakers at the sessions, workshops and roundtables overview page here.
The twitter hashtag for the event is #sherpaemail. Besides the many speaking sessions and roundtable discussions, there are networking events and other activities.
If you’re there, be sure to tweet using hashtag #sherpaemail to give those who are unable to attend a feeling of being there, and maybe share some knowledge from the conference floors.
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.
The MarketingSherpa Email Summit in Las Vegas held from 24th till 26th January is in its final day today: I thought it would be nice to gather all the tips, links and otherwise useful info posted on one single page. The tips are all sorted by topic for your convenience. The source for all these tips was the Twitter stream using hashtag #sherpaemail.
Email marketing in general
Kristin Hersant: Email Marketing Gem from Threadless: Be honest. Don’t try so hard… Keep it real.
Kristin Hersant: Non-relevant email is the #1 reason why subscribers unsubscribe.
Kristin Hersant: Internal relevance = Personal interests, demographics, etc. External events = Holidays, Seasons, Sales.
Kristin Hersant: Subject lines = Pick-up Lines. It’s their job to start a conversation.
Kristin Hersant: Creating a clearer, more valuable subject line can increase open rates by 25.3%
Kristin Hersant: Email subscribers are even more cautious and anxious than web browsers because of spam.
Ryan Phelan: when you have value, all you have to do is communicate clearly.
Engagement/Segmenting
Kristin Hersant: Treat the recipients who take time to share with their network as an influencer segment.
Kristin Hersant: Questions to answer: What should the recipient do and why should they care?
Martin Lieberman: Good calls to action include a value proposition/benefit. They don’t just tell people to do something.
Kristin Hersant: People don’t believe hype anymore. You’re going to get diminishing results if you keep using that tone.
Shannon Holato: Email is a conversation, not a magazine ad.
Martin Lieberman: Don’t ask for information from your customers unless you plan to use it
Testing
Kristin Hersant: Test a radical redesign to shake up your thinking.
Hubspot: Test with the most recent names on your email list because they will give you higher performance rate.
Chester Bullock: Optimization occurs in the mind. Goes along with “perception is reality.
Content
Kristin Hersant: Your content needs exclusivity and credibility. Learn to infuse that into your email value proposition.
Kristin Hersant: Key lesson: Content trumps creative. The offer is key.
Kristin Hersant: Key Principle #4: Two common elements that create friction are length and difficulty.
Design
Kenny van Beeck: Images are only useful if they add relevancy to the content of your email or draw your eyes to it.
Kenny van Beeck: You control the eye-path by 5 factors: Size, Color, Shape, Motion and Position.
Kenny van Beeck: The anatomy of a good email : Capture, Convince, Close or “Subject, Johnson box, body.
Ali Landow: Keeping the CTA above the fold in an email is a mistake – it jars the readers’ thought sequence.
Kristin Hersant: Do not give equally weighted calls to action to a recipient. You mitigate your conversion rate.
Kristin Hersant: Plain text outperforms busy emails time and time again.
Deliverability
Kristin Hersant: 20% of legitimate email goes undelivered. 4% is classified as junk. 16% goes missing.
Social media
Kristin Hersant: FreshPair’s Friends w/Benefits campaign drove 25% increase in Facebook fans by offering exclusive discount.
Kristin Hersant: 75% of Twitter users post less than 1 tweet a day. Most users are disengaged. But everyone checks their email… frequently.
Steve Wylie: Email & social media are like PB & chocolate. Good on their own but great together.
Martin from SalesLink: FreshPair’s addition of an “exclusive” tab in Facebook page after getting a “like” is pretty darn clever.
Martin Lieberman: Retail is one of the least-liked words on Facebook, says @hubspot.
Aweber: Clever: send email dedicated to a social network to ppl who click “share” links for that network in previous emails.
Martha Garcia: 96% of people polled were more willing to share their email address vs only 12% of people willing to share their social handle.
David Meerman Scott: Social media are tools. Real-Time is a mindset.
Clients vs companies
Emfluence: Customers don’t buy from companies, they buy from people. And they dislike companies for the same reasons they dislike people.
Martha Garcia: Tone impacts anxiety – A reader’s guard will go up when they think they’re about to be sold something.
Martha Garcia: Clarity trumps persuasion – lose the marketing speak. We are talking w/ people on the other side of our emails.
Karen Rubin: If you don’t get out of your head and into your customers, you will never be the marketer you could be.
Aweber: The goal of the email is to sell the click, not the product. Sell on the landing page, post-click.
Kristin Hersant: Nobody cares about your products except for you. People care about themselves and how you can solve their problems.
Mobile
Rory Carlyle: 29.7% U.S mobile email subscribers operate fully-loaded smartphones.
So there you have it: some nice takeaways from the MarketingSherpa Email Summit in Las Vegas. As added bonus I’ve collected some interviews and presentations and more resources below.
Tomorrow is when the email marketing event fun starts: the Marketing Sherpa Email Summit 2013 will take place in Las Vegas. The venue is the Paris Las Vegas Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas. The agenda for the event can be found here.
