David Kirkpatrick

Email Summit 2011: Your peers’ top takeaways about email content, enhancing deliverability and optimizing swag

January 28th, 2011

For everyone who made it out to the MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2011 this past week at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas, you know ;). And everyone who couldn’t attend this year, you missed some great sessions, case studies, speeches and interaction with around 750 of your peers.

What happens in Vegas …

MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2011

Unless some #SherpaEMAIL folks hit me up *cough @mgieva @martinlieberman cough* this is my evening in #SinCity - phintch

Everyone probably knows the second half of this advertising tagline (hint: what happens, stays), but that’s pretty hard to achieve with real-time blogging (I had posts up on Flint McGlaughlin and David Meerman Scott‘s talks with almost no lead time) from both Sherpa and attendees, crazy-active Twitter hashtag activity (#SherpaEmail) and entire rooms of marketers uploading pictures and video all day long.

We even brought along some of our optimization experts from MECLABS to do one-on-one live optimization of email, landing pages and more (see below) …

Crowdsourced takeaways

A great thing about a successful Email Summit filled with engaged attendees is that reactions to individual sessions and the entire event go online in real-time.

Here’s just a small sample from all the great material this Summit generated:

The #sherpaemail Daily

Email Summit notes shared by Alison Chandler, Marketing Manager American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Here’s some of the material Alison is sharing:

  • Exclusive content gives people a reason to fork over their email addresses. Make at least some of the content in your emails available ONLY to email subscribers (such as special discounts), or FIRST to email subscribers (such as the chance to buy tickets before the general population).

And be sure to check out Alison’s “random gems” at the link.

Key MarketingSherpa Email Summit takeaways from Emailblog.eu — this is a great collection of Twitter commentary

Live Blog: How Pandora Uses Email Marketing to Keep You Listening from EE Tech News

More from EE Tech News — Live Blog: Email Marketing Summit, Real-Time Marketing and PR & Inbound Marketing

Summit panelist, Ardath Albee — Make 3rd Party Content an Opportunity Not a Necessity

4 Email Marketing Challenges and How to Tackle Them from Magdalena Georgieva at HubSpot

And do hit the official MarketingSherpa Twitter account to find retweets of even more crowdsourced content and photos from the Summit.

#SherpaEmail

Of course a blog of crowdsourced material would not be complete without taking in all the activity at the Summit’s Twitter hashtag — #SherpaEmail. Some numbers for the seven-day period from 1/21 to 1/27:

  • 2,295 tweets
  • 389 contributors
  • 327.9 tweets per day

MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2011

Here’s a sample from the top ten tweeters (and yes, I somehow made it onto this list):

Optimizing swag

The “more” up there in the live optimation section leads to something probably near, and dear, to most conference and expo veterans’ hearts — swag. At lunch on Wednesday, me and my editor — and Director of Editorial Content MarketingSherpa — Daniel Burstein, sat with Karen Rubin and Magdalena Georgieva of HubSpot and Jessica Best of emfluence and did a little swag optimization.

Sure MECLABS Research Managers and the MarketingExperiments Quarterly Research Journal are the go-to people when you need a better-performing landing page, but who should you turn to in order to make cool swag even cooler? Marketing experts, that’s who.

I’m taking full credit for this one:

MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2011

Optimizing Swag Real Time (#osrt) at #SherpaEmail @davidkonline: Add a USB drive for an #emailgeek #swissarmyknife - bestofjess

How to optimize this swag from emfluence Interactive Marketing? Easy. Lose the letter opener and add a USB flash drive on the other side of the keyboard brush, and leave the screen cleaner strip alone. Done and done, and voila, you have a Geek Swiss Army Knife. Ah, swag optimization at its best.

These efforts led to this Twitter exchange:

So you can see we have something of a swag-optimizing super group. If you were at MarketingSherpa Email Summit and have your own swag optimization suggestions, feel free to tweet them using #optimizedswag.

And, who could leave out — or forget — the Slingshot SEO monkey:

MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2011

“I’m walking through the airport and every so often my suitcase screams like a monkey. #sherpaEmail” – @karenrubin

Related resources

Live optimization with Dr. Flint McGlaughlin at Email Summit 2011

Real-Time Marketing: David Meerman Scott at MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2011

MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2011 One-on-One Case Study

Email Summit Case Study: National Education Association’s Member Benefits Corporation

David Kirkpatrick

About David Kirkpatrick

David is a reporter for MarketingSherpa and has over twenty years of experience in business journalism, marketing and corporate communications. His published work includes newspaper, magazine and online journalism; website content; full-length ghosted nonfiction; marketing content; and short fiction. He served as producer for the business research horizontal at the original Office.com, regularly reporting on the world of marketing; covered a beat for D/FW TechBiz, a member of the American City Business Journals family; and he provided daily reporting for multiple LocalBusiness.com cities. David’s other media and corporate clients include: USA Today, Oxford Intelligence, GMAC, AOL, Business Development Outlook and C-Level Media, among many others.

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  1. David Kirkpatrick
    David Kirkpatrick
    January 28th, 2011 at 11:58 | #1

    Here’s more crowdsourced content from Email Summit 2011

    10 Takeaways from MarketingSherpa’s Email Summit 2011 – Martin Lieberman, ConstantContact
    http://blogs.constantcontact.com/commentary/10-takeaways-from-marketingsherpas-email-summit-2011/

    How to Continue the Conversation with Your Consumer – Sundeep Kapur, Email Yogi
    http://www.emailyogi.com/2011/01/how-to-continue-conversation-with-your.html

  2. David Kirkpatrick
    David Kirkpatrick
    January 28th, 2011 at 13:42 | #2

    Another blog post on the presentation on mobile marketing given by Neal Narayani, Director of Marketing Caesars Entertainment:

    Prepare for the Year of Mobile, This Time for Real — Maggie Georgieva, HubSpot

    http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/9062/Prepare-for-the-Year-of-Mobile-This-Time-for-Real.aspx#ixzz1CMBmC5ok

  3. David Kirkpatrick
    David Kirkpatrick
    January 28th, 2011 at 18:07 | #3

    Five Summit takeaways from GroupVine Blog:

    Your email can do better! 5 quick tips to put into practice right now

    http://blog.thegroupery.com/2011/01/your-email-can-do-better.html

  4. Andrew Burch
    February 22nd, 2011 at 01:11 | #4

    Thanks again for featuring my picture! That flush was the point my luck turned around 🙂 Awesome event Sherpa!

  5. David Kirkpatrick
    David Kirkpatrick
    February 23rd, 2011 at 18:03 | #5

    Andrew,

    Thanks for putting that photo up on the Twitter hashtag for me to find. Hope to see you at next year’s Summit. Glad you enjoyed the event. I know everyone here at MarketingSherpa did.

  6. George Adamidis
    August 8th, 2011 at 17:19 | #6

    I’m surprised a “top tweet” promotes “comprehensive email hygiene and correction” because being too vigorous can (and has) accidentally subscribe someone who has no idea who you are.

    I think it’s better to get the address right from the start – confirming the email address on sign-up.

    What does everyone else think?

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