MarketingSherpa Blog

This week we’re looking back on MarketingSherpa’s fifth annual Email Marketing Summit and what we learned from the over 600 marketers who came to Miami.

Take a look at our full wrap-up report with seven takeaways. It’s perfect for attendees who want to revisit key themes, and for those who couldn’t make it this year. We also published an article featuring Summit keynote speaker Joseph Jaffe, Chief Interrupter, Powered Inc. Jaffe launched his new book, “Flip the Funnel,” at the Summit.

Personally, I thought the Summit was a fantastic event loaded with cutting edge thought leadership and advice for running outstanding email marketing campaigns.

One interesting bit I noticed came from two back-to-back consumer marketing sessions where speakers mentioned the dreaded “list blasting” tactic. The broadcast tactic of sending a single email to an un-segmented list is thought to be an ineffective approach left behind years ago.

“Blast does horrible things to our industry in perception,” said Loren McDonald, VP, Industry Relations, Silverpop in a panel discussion. “But no matter how sophisticated you are, there is still some broadcasting.”

Although segmenting and sending targeted messages is a superior strategy, sending an occasional blast email to subscribers is acceptable — but it must be very occasional. The superiority of segmenting and targeting over broadcasting was emphasized by a session immediately following McDonald’s panel.

Joy Cropper, Director, Internet Strategy, Williams Randall Marketing described how her team transformed a blast-based email program for the Indiana Office of Tourism Development into a successful segmented program, dramatically improving results.

Cropper’s team surveyed their list with a $100 gas card contest as an incentive and used the responses to find segmentation opportunities. They then created three new newsletters and asked everyone on the list to re-opt-in.

They went from sending one email 10 times a year to three emails 12 times a year — increasing frequency. The result? The cut their list in half and increased their number of clickthroughs 10-fold.

About Adam T. Sutton

Adam T. Sutton, Senior Reporter, MarketingSherpa
Adam generates content for MarketingSherpa's Email and Inbound Marketing newsletters. His years of experience in interviewing marketers and conveying their insights has spanned topics such as search marketing, social media marketing, ecommerce, email and more. Adam previously powered the content behind MarketingSherpa's Search and Consumer-marketing newsletters and carries that experience into his new role. Today, in addition to writing articles, he contributes content to the MarketingExperiments and MarketingSherpa blogs, as well as MECLABS webinars, workshops and summits.

Prior to joining MarketingSherpa, Adam was the Managing Editor at the Mequoda group. There he created content and promotions for the company's daily email newsletter and managed its schedule.

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