Email Integration | MarketingSherpa Blog

The 4 Pillars of Email Marketing

July 23rd, 2013 Daniel Burstein

In today’s MarketingSherpa Chart of the Week, we looked at the long list of organizational email marketing goals marketers told us they are focusing on for the next 12 months, and I implore marketers to narrow their focus to just the three or four goals that will really move the needle in their email marketing program this year.

This is not an exercise I’m unfamiliar with. As we launched the Call for Speakers for MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2014 at the Aria in Las Vegas, we also had to decide the email marketing pillars to focus on – and in the spirit of simplifying, this year you can enter MarketingSherpa Email Awards 2014 and submit a speaker proposal using the same form.

At Email Summit 2013, we built the agenda around five email marketing goals and two elements. Frankly, it was just too much. If you focus on everything, you focus on nothing.

So this year, we’ve narrowed down the Email Summit Call for Speakers and Email Awards Call for Entries to four topics. These topics are below, along with links to MarketingSherpa reporting to help you improve your email marketing, and perhaps get your juices flowing for your own proposal/entry.

Build and Cleanse: Efforts to build up email lists, or strengthen the program overall through cleansing make up this pillar. List data and management, database hygiene, list testing and optimization are examples of the types of campaigns to fall within it.

List Growth: 11% increase from sweepstakes for Waterford Crystal

Email Marketing: CNET win-back campaign sees 8% subscriber re-engagement

Create and Design: This pillar will recognize message testing and optimization, as well as delving into marketing efforts involving design creative, copywriting, messaging.

Email Marketing: User-generated content helps drive 16% clickthrough rate

Email Marketing Optimization: How you can create a testing environment to improve your email results

Deliver and Automate: This pillar will focus on marketers’ efforts with marketing automation and deliverability. The function and theories behind testing and optimization will also be discussed within this pillar.

Marketing Automation: 416% higher customer lifetime value from auto-email strategy

Personal vs. Robotic: How to turn automated email into personal experiences that drive new and repeat sales

Email Deliverability: How a marketing vendor with 99 percent delivery rates treats single opt-in lists vs. double opt-in lists

Connect and Integrate: The optimization of email integration tactics with social media, websites, mobile, offline and testing will make up this pillar.

Social Email Integration: Sony Electronics nets 3,000 clickthroughs from email to “pin” on Pinterest

Email Summit: Integrating mobile, social and email marketing channels

But, enough from us. We want to see what you’ve been working on, and more importantly, how your marketing peers can learn from your work. If you have any questions, we’re here to help. You can check out the FAQ … or just ask us.

Also, we put together a quick video to show you what it’s like to be an Email Summit speaker…

Mining Gold through Email Integration: 3 lessons from MarketingSherpa Email Awards 2013 winners

February 19th, 2013 Brad Bortone

On the first day of MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2013 in Las Vegas, I’ll be interviewing the Best-in-Show winner of MarketingSherpa’s Email Marketing Awards 2013, sponsored by Responsys. In this session, our winner, The National Football League, will discuss its fantastic NFL.com newsletter campaign.

However, there were several outstanding, winning campaigns from this year’s awards deserving of recognition as well.

Note: If you want to see the entire collection of winning entries, download the free Email Awards 2013 Special Report. There’s no squeeze page – just download, learn and share.

As the lead editor on this year’s Email Awards, I found it interesting that, of the myriad submissions we received, email integration played a part in many, if not all, of our winning campaigns.

In fact, as we’ll likely learn from our upcoming Summit sessions, one of the reasons email has been such a venerable channel throughout the years is because of the creative, strategic ways marketers have evolved the tactic to include elements of social media, PPC and website integration.

So, before we head west to the glitter of Las Vegas, let’s pull a few nuggets from these campaigns, seeing what you can learn from other Email Awards 2013 winners’ use of effective integration to find pure gold.

Lesson #1: Facebook contests don’t all have to look alike

Ritos GmbH, a consumer electronics company, submitted the OSRAM Innovation Store “Light ‘n’ Style” contest for Email Awards 2013. It was the one entrant in its category that bridged the gap between creativity and results, as it successfully tied together three key factors of an efficient, integrated email campaign:

Personalized emails as a support to the contest
A fan-gating tab on Facebook
A unique contest mechanism that created a viral response

The fan-gating tab on Facebook ensured only persons who were already fans of the OSRAM Innovation Store on Facebook could enter the contest. Contact with all participants was maintained throughout the contest through highly personalized emails.

The emails were personalized through use of the recipient’s name, an image of their favorite lighting product and the product’s current place in the real-time voting. The unusual contest mechanism also made the campaign go viral.

In the end, this creativity paid off handsomely, with the campaign achieving high rates of customer interaction, significantly increased social sharing and a tremendous boost (39%) in newsletter opt-ins – a “side effect” that wasn’t even a focus of the initial campaign.

1,583 people participated in the contest, more than 10% of the existing newsletter mailing list.
1,761,614 people were reached through Facebook ads and made aware of the new products – 119 times more than the size of the newsletter mailing list.
Facebook page increased its fan base by 18%.

Additionally, 582% more people posted on the Facebook page during the campaign run, while email open rates about the contest were between 55% and 70%.