The Email Insider Summit was held in Park City, Utah, this Monday through Wednesday. Here are just a few of the great insights and learnings from that event:
State Regulations>>Brian Ellefritz of Cisco said, We don’t always know where our subscribers are and we worry about a diversity of regulations from states. Kevin Olsen, director of consumer protection for the State of Utah, responded by saying that you’re always going to have to contend with regulations from individual states. He added, “We’d feel like you’d need to know where [your subscribers] are.” Dave Hendricks of Datran Media then asked, How do you determine where you have jurisdiction? He added, What if someone signs up for email in Utah and then moves to Idaho? What if the email goes through a relay in Provo? What if they’re in the airport on Wi-Fi during a layover and check their email? “Don’t you think it’s stupid? It really sounds stupid to me,” said Hendricks to applause from the audience. Olsen responded, “I know this is challenging, but it’s nothing new.”
>>Another audience member asked about Utah’s child protection do-not-email list that’s designed to protect children from harmful emails about alcohol, tobacco and pornography. Unspam maintains the list and when companies submit their email lists to Unspam it scrubs the email addresses of minors from the companies lists. The person said if someone sends a list to Unspam and gets a scrubbed list back, doesn’t that allow them to compare the lists and create a very clean list of minors’ email addresses? Olsen replied, “I don’t have an answer to that.”
The Proposed Do-Not-Track List>>This was one of the more vigorously debated topics during the conference. Brian Ellefritz, email program manager of Cisco Systems, said that anything that allows consumers to manage their online experience is good. However, David Daniels, VP at JupiterResearch, said, “It’s doomed to failure.” He said that implementing it would be near impossible because of computer sharing and other complications, and added that people that are concerned about tracking already have many options, such as using anti-spyware and deleting and blocking cookies. Jack Hogan, COO of LifeScript, concurred: “I think it would be a terrible thing.” Daniels added, “It would create a recessionary environment online. Think of Amazon.” Hal Brierley, founder and CEO of e-Miles, said, “I think you’re overstating this a little. I think we can all live without knowing every little thing,” giving an example of direct marketers who don’t know if their letters and catalogs are opened or just thrown away. “Letting people who are obsessed with privacy have their privacy” is fine. At this point, Bob Frady of LiveNation called Daniel out for using “inflammatory rhetoric” and saying that do-not-track wouldn’t affect advertisers that much. Daniels explained that, yes, marketers would continue to find ways to reach consumers but that there’s a $1 billion market for web analytics and the like that would be affected. He also said that this debate highlights disagreements within the federal government over tracking-based relevancy.
>>Alan Chapell, president of Chapell Associates, later said, “I know a lot of the people that were involved with the legislation and I don’t know what the heck they were thinking.” He added that he trusts Google with his information much more than the government.
Facebook and Email>>Facebook allows you to reach consumers that you can’t necessarily reach via email currently, said Josh Baer, CTO of Datran Media, who recommended the
AllFacebook blog as a good source for keeping up with development on the social network.
>>Consumers will demand more email functionality from the social networks, said Baer, who pointed out that the social networks are not interoperable just like the early email networks weren’t.
>>Diane Walter, senior marketing manager at American Eagle Outfitters, explained that the apparel retailer has a 3 million strong email list, gains 60,000 new subscribers a week and emails about once a week. She asked for advice in reaching young consumers through Facebook. Baer and audience members had these suggestions:
- Add a Facebook group sign-up during your email sign-up process.
- Have Facebook-only deals to create exclusiveness.
- When one of your Facebook members buys a product sent that person’s friends a 10%-off coupon.
- Set up a photo booth in your stores and allow customers to take a picture of themselves in an outfit and post it to their Facebook page to solicit opinions about the clothes from friends. Baer compared this to a “Am I Hot or Not” app.
- Notify a person’s friends when a purchase is made so they can see what he or she is buying.
- And here’s a bonus idea from me: Set up event pages for your big sponsored events. That will allow attendees to see who else is going and when they sign up their friends will be notified that they’re going to the event, creating buzz.
Deliverability>>While sender reputation was, of course, much talked about, the newer angle was the effect of content links on deliverability. For instance, Craig Spiezle, director of online trust at Microsoft, said if you create a link to an IP address, [the email] is going to be blocked because that’s a known spammer tactic. “Just like you don’t want to look like a spammer, you don’t want your links to look like a phisher,” he said.
>>Dennis Dayman, director of deliverability, privacy and standards at StrongMail, told the story of a teen furniture and accessories retailer that was getting blocked by MSN/Hotmail because they used “teen” throughout their emails along with other key words that led Microsoft’s systems to suspect that their emails were pedophilia-related. He said it took six to eight weeks before the realized the issue and were able to get it resolved.
Refer-a-Friend>>Quiznos held an Adventure Sweepstakes, partnering with New Line Cinema’s Lord of the Rings and Frontier Airlines. They had a refer-a-friend component to the sweeps where you’d get an additional entry for each friend that you successfully referred into Quiznos’ email program. Correy Honza, Quiznos’ director of internet marketing, said they got 29,000 new subscribers at a cost of only $1,500 for a CPC of 5 cents.
Incentives>>E-Miles is an advertising network where people fill out a 300-question survey, are presented with advertising offers based on their answers and are rewarded with airline miles when they read those offers or click-through. The combination of incentives and targeted offers seems to generate far above average results. For instance, 20,000 fashion-oriented women were presented with an sweepstakes offer from Neiman Marcus where in exchange for their email address they were entered to win a $25,000 shopping spree. The offer generated a click-through rate of approximately 39%, according to Brierley.
>>E-Miles’ program is double opt-in and that opt-in confirmation email contains an incentive to boost opt-ins and improve deliverability.
Mobile>>8% of email users triage their email with handhelds, deleting spam and unimportant emails so when they get to a computer only the relevant emails remain, according to Daniels.
>>“Within the next two years, people will need to have that mobile component” like WAP or .mobi landing pages, said Daniels.
>>Rendering on mobile devices will catch up with PCs, said Daniels. “Apple’s device already has.”
IciclesIn Park City, icicles can grow to be huge—and fall on your head.
Labels: American Eagle Outfitters, Deliverability, Mobile Devices, Neiman Marcus, Refer a Friend, Regulations, Social Networks, Subscribe, Takeaways
and Walter Mosley’s 
. Who isn’t interested in controversy?
I love Smith-Harmon's enthusiasm. It's so great to have a connection with people who really "get" and get excited by email marketing. (Truly, there are not that many of us out there!) I count myself very lucky to have found such accomplished enthusiasts to collaborate with on the REI program. They are helping to bring amazing opportunities to fruition with panache.
