DMA Conference Feb 08 Takeaways

Earlier this year in February, the DMA Email Marketing Council held "Effective Email Marketing" conferences in Bristol and Edinburgh. The events were very well attended and feedback was extremely good. As chair of them both I had the pleasure of attending both conferences and here are some of my 'takeaways'.

Phil Singh, emailvision gave some great pointers on building your list, database management and segmentation.

• In answer to a JupiterResearch quesion: "how do you acquire email addresses for your email marketing efforts", 83% of respondants selected 'web site registration'.
• Make it quick and easy to subscribe
• Give newsletter examples when subscribing
• Always obtain permission with affirmative consent (i.e don't use negative tick boxes "If you don't want to recieve emails, tick here")
• Let them know the 'From address' so they can add it to their address book
• Only 32% of forms had privacy policy highlighted (JupiterResearch executive survey 2006)
• Remove spam flag addresses: go through your database and remove all addresses which contain abuse@, postmaste@ or nospam@.

Tink Taylor, Dotmailer and Nick Cole, Blonde shared how to create effective emails:

• Rendering: 19% of recipients  assume  an email is spam if it fails to render properly and 19% of recipients delete mails entirely constructed from images assuming it is blank
• Friendly 'From' address: For B2B, a known contact may work best. For B2C, company branding is extremely important.
• Subject line: 35% of email users open messages because of what is contained in the subject line (JupiterResearch) and consider the length & key message
• Consumers deal with more than 250 emails per week (Forrester 2007)
• 32% of consumers thin that email is a great way to find out about products or promotions (Forrester 2007)
• Email delivers the most value when they offer a timely, coherent message in a tone the  reader can relate to.
• There should be a clear call to action above the fold, (i.e within the preview pane) with other paths elsewhere in the email to entice the user to take action.
• Image Blocking: The message should be able to be read without graphic aids.
• 83.2% of marketers listed email as #1 advertising tactic (Datran Media 2007)

Kath Pay, Managing Director, Ezemail