MarketingSherpa Blog

I’ve interviewed around 500 marketers since I started as a reporter at MarketingSherpa. Looking back, most of those conversations are inevitably a bit of a blur, but it’s marketers like Mary Abrahamson, Email Marketing Specialist, Ferguson Enterprises, that truly stand out.

Mary was a first-time attendee at MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2014, and took back what she learned to her office and implemented a transformative, customer-centric campaign that led to her winning Best in Show at Email Summit 2015.

“I learned a lot at Email Summit last year, and coming back [to the office], I felt like we were in an okay place, but we had a lot of room to grow,” she said, explaining that the team began taking steps to refuel their database.

When the team began making changes to view the email program as a whole enterprise, they took what Mary referred to as the “crawl, walk, run approach,” which is where they started off small and went back to optimize later.

The first thing to know when it comes to email relevancy is: there is no email that fits your entire list.

Marketers get requests all the time from different teams and interests to send out an email, and it’s up to the email marketing team to be the stopgap for what goes out to customers.

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At MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2015, Mary Abrahamson, Email Marketing Specialist, Ferguson Enterprises, not only spoke onstage in front of 1,000 of her peers but she was also awarded the Best B2B Campaign.

The video below was recorded at Email Summit, and I recently had the privilege of talking to Mary about how speaking has impacted her career and what other marketers can do to find success through public speaking.

“When I was doing the [interview at Email Summit], that’s exactly how I feel, still exactly how I feel [about speaking at events],” said Mary, describing the importance of public speaking events.

With the Call for Speakers for MarketingSherpa Summit 2016 ending Monday, June 15, I asked Mary what advice she had for marketers selected to speak at industry events.

“You will get out of the experience what you put into it. It will bring you tremendous growth both personally and professionally — don’t take a moment of the experience for granted. Also, just like you do in your daily job, think about your ‘customer’ — the attendee — first. What do they want to hear about?  That is the key,” she said.

Since MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2015, Mary has had two other speaking opportunities and continues to find ways to improve the quality of her email program.

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