Takeaways from ExactTarget Connections 2009

ExactTarget Connections 2009 ended today after three great days of content and fun. Here are just a few of the great insights and learnings from the event:

Triggered Emails:
>>Helzberg Diamonds recouped their investment in triggered birthday/anniversary emails in just 2 months and see 6x conversions vs. their promotional emails.
>>Best Buy’s post-purchase triggered email strategy entails sending emails: (1) at the time of purchase focused on education and help—“Congratulations on your purchase of…”; (2) 7-14 days following the purchase focused on accessories; and (3) 21-18 days after the purchase focused on getting the buyer to review the product.

Deliverability:
>>“ISPs will tell you they block millions and millions of CAN-SPAM-compliant emails every day,” said Al Iverson of ExactTarget. “CAN-SPAM compliance is not enough.”
>>ISPs adding engagement metrics to their filtering and blocking algorithms “is one of the biggest changes in our industry,” said Michelle Eichner of Pivotal Veracity. “Customer preferences and actions supersede ISP-level spam filtering results except outright ‘port 25’ blocks.”
>>Looking across ExactTarget’s client base over the past 6 months, 40% of subscribers are unengaged (no opens or clicks), 44% have low engagement, 9% have medium engagement and 7% have high engagement with the emails being sent to them, according to Iverson.
>>To boost your engagement metrics, you may consider asking subscribers to reply to an email or promote a loss-leader that you wouldn’t have considered before, said Eichner. You may also develop a program dedicated completely to getting subscribers to add your address to their address book.
>>“Attention is rapidly becoming the new currency of marketing,” said Tom Lacki of Peppers & Rogers.
>>Over the past 12 months we haven’t seen any email appends done well, said Jamie Tomasello of Cloudmark.
>>91% of the Internet Retail 100 have authenticated their email—far more than the average and banks, which are the #1 target of phishing.

Social Media & SWYN:
>>Hotels.com implemented SWYN in May. Around 200-300 subscribers share an email each week on Facebook. Since the average Facebook user has 125 friends, they estimate that they’re getting an additional 25,000 email impressions every week by using SWYN. Hotels.com says that the more specific the item is that you’re asking subscribers to share, the more likely they are to share it.

Multichannel:
>>Only 37% of marketers know which channel their customers prefer, according to Forrester Research.
>>The customer journey [to conversion] is non-linear, multichannel and usually digital first, according to Kelly Mooney, CEO of Resource Interactive and author of The Open Brand.

Loyalty & Lifetime Value:
>>“Products can be copied…prices can be matched…but relationships are hard to beat,” said Lacki.
>>Customers create value in two ways: (1) they buy things today and (2) they change the likelihood that they will buy something tomorrow, said Lacki, who added that many marketers are reducing customer equity with overly aggressive and irrelevant messaging.

Misc.:
>>“Some brands are still spending more time editing legal copy than marketing copy,” said Mooney.
>>“The pizza industry is like the porn industry—they will do anything to get you to their website,” said Bill McCloskey of Email Data Source, when asked to comment on emails from three pizza delivery brands.

For more insights, impressions and happenings from the conference, check out my Twitter stream or see what all Twitterers at the conference were saying.
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