We sent emfluence CEO & President (and lucky dog) Dave Cacioppo down to Captiva Island for Media Post's Spring Email Insider Summit 2010. Here are 5 bits of information that will give you an idea of the value of the content and the experience:
- Retention Direct Marketing spend is moving to email and email is expected to grow by about 9% to $1.4 billion in 2010 according to Bruce Biegel of the Winterberry Group. Evidence that email marketing is healthy and effective for marketers.
- Universal Music Group discussed the challenges of marketing their talent. It was a great example of how social and email are channels and not strategies. You’ve got to understand where the audience is so you can reach them and then use the channels for their strengths. Universal highlighted some numbers from Lady Gaga to emphasize the point: 5.3 million Facebook fans, 2.8 Million MySpace friends, 1.7 Million Twitter followers and 200,000 email subscribers. For another artist, the audience breakdown can be very different. Is it a surprise that of the channels, email performed the best as a revenue generator?
- Cart abandonment emails still walk the line between creepy and convenient. Lean toward convenient by positioning cart abandonment emails as a customer service moment. “It looks like you may have had a problem with our online shopping cart. If there is anything we can do to help…”
- Want some up to date numbers on Spam? According to Carlo Catajan, Product Manager at Yahoo!, Yahoo! rejects about 60 billion spam messages a month. Dan Lewis, Product Manager for Microsoft Windows Live Hotmail says they block about 5.5 billion Spam messages a day. How great would it be if we could eliminate spammers? Anyone know where they live? Would they respond well to a couple of taps with a stun gun?
- Sprint looks at email marketing from a customer life-cycle perspective and gave a great example of how a sophisticated marketer truly understands their customer. First they focus on welcome, education and accessory upsells, then plan acceleration and referrals, followed by anniversary messaging, and finally, contract renewals, product upgrades, services and news.
Thanks to Media Post for a great conference. Wanna know what they've got up next? Visit www.mediapost.com/events.
