Last Month's DMA Email Marketing Conference

In November 2007, the DMA hosted their annual Email Marketing Conference.

We have summarised this year's key messages below.

Relevancy and segmentation

Once again, the speakers encouraged marketers to consider the importance of relevancy and segmentation. They strongly emphasised the importance of sending appropriate content to a targeted list at the optimum time of day. The speakers did however concede that this is often too difficult and time consuming for many people to do.

John Nugent, Chairman of the event, stated that "64% of Marketeers said budget and resource were the biggest road-block to more email personalisation"

Those who have not already considered using segmentation were encouraged to begin by keeping it simple and experimenting with variables. For instance, it may be beneficial to divide a database by gender and target male and female audiences separately, with different offers or messages.

Experiment

The biggest lesson of the day emphasised the importance of testing and experimenting with email marketing campaigns. Marketers were encouraged to not be afraid of getting it wrong. Indeed, by changing the subject line and content of emails, significantly better results could be achieved. But you won't know until you try!

Friendly 'from' name

The importance of a friendly email 'from' name was also emphasised. Indeed, as we read from left to right, the from name is likely to be the first thing that we see in an email.

For B2C communications, a brand name is considered to be the most appropriate for the 'from' name. However, speakers claim that B2B communications should come from an individual at the company. Obviously, this should be someone who is recognisable to the recipient.

Subject line

The email subject line is also known to be a major contributor to the success of email campaigns, directly influencing the open rates. The first 60 characters should be carefully chosen and tested to include the killer words, as some email clients do not display any more than that.