Those who’ve known me for some time know that I kind of have a love/hate relationship with MarketingSherpa and the information they provide. At times they provide great support and numbers from the industry to use when crafting your own campaigns. At other times, they frustrate me no end when I find that I disagree with their conclusions…

All that being said, they recently released a short summary on the Email Marketing Summit 2008. Below are some of the top dozen takeaways:

1. Don’t get caught up in only being a marketer – Put on the hats of those in your organization that you are trying to co-opt to your way of thinking. How can what YOU do assist those above and beside you in the organization.
2. Landing pages are becoming de riguer – Most marketers wouldn’t think these days about testing a marketing campaign without having strong landing pages associated with them. Suggestions include building the landing page as soon as the offer and message are defined to ensure that the work gets done before the emails go out.
3. It is message, stupid – stick to your message at every step of the campaign. This includes the subject line, the text and images of the message and the landing page itself. Tips: Landing pages shouldn’t carry all the site navigation elements to prevent distracting from the message in the offer.
4. Don’t waste too much energy worrying about deliverability – while important, this is becoming less and less of a concern as opposed to ensuring that your message comes across to those who do get it.
5. Segment your audience – One size doesn’t fit all and you’ll find that many small, targettable lists will out perform a massive but unspecific list any day.
6. The rumor of the death of email is just that, a rumor – don’t give in to talk that email marketing is dead as email loses it’s day in – day out value to Internet customers and users. A resurgence of email availability is seen with the large swings of consumer to connected devices like Blackberries, iPhones and Windows Mobile devices.
7. Be Interesting – Give your targets a reason to open your emails. You can do this by trying different subject lines across your segmented list (you are segmenting your list, aren’t you? If not, see #5 above). Be irreverent, be obtuse, just please be something other than predictable or boring.
8. Close the door on Open Rates – While there is some value to open rates, this is being too short-sighted. You need to keep your aim a little higher. You should be concerned more with conversion rates or click-through rates; depending upon your goals.
9. B2B, or not 2B – The answer to this question is that B-to-B email marketing is on the upswing but keep it targeted, interesting and directly personalized to get recipients engaged in the message of the campaign.
10. Ask and ye shall receive – Use the communication opportunity to your customers to ask questions about anything you can think of. These provided great opportunities to learn more about your customers and targets alike.
11. Get Mobile – Reaching out to mobile users with your message will become a key target in the coming years as the penetration of email capable devices continues to grow over the next few years.
12. And lastly… TEST, TEST, TEST

Interested in how EMM can help with these? Here’s the high points:

• Need to segment lists? Use Custom Queries to create repeatable groups of campaign recipients. You can slice and dice your users by network, by zip codes or just about any data point available in ASPDNSF customer records. With some SQL creativity, you could even target your lists at customers who haven’t bought recently (or ever) or even ones who bought a specific product.
• Accountability? Track not only opens, but more importantly, use the click tracking to monitor the success of actually driving your customers to your landing pages, site or other location
• Mobile ready? Taking full advantage of multi-part messaging available in EMM to reach mobile devices of varying email capabilities by letting the device sort out which of version of your campaign to display.

If you have any thoughts on this, or any topic, please DO use the comments feature below start a dialog with MJG or any other readers of this blog!