Spring 2017 Email Insider Summit opening remarks by Steve Smith

1. What Are Your Chief Frustrations?
Organization
• Organizational push-back on moving from batch and blast to
customer-first email
• Data disbelievers. There are still marketers who view credible
data as #fakenews?
• Teaching the traditional marketers that email and the digital
space, in general, are completely different than traditional
print.
• Overcomplicating automation with too many requirements
rather than keeping it small and simple at first.
• Laziness: The ‘ol “It’s working fine so we don’t need
improvements.”
• Getting our service team that support our email program to
be nimble and strategic in designing/supporting our initiatives

2. What Are Your Chief Frustrations?
Organization
• The business relying solely on email as a means of reaching out
customers
• Too many cooks in the kitchen. Just because you receive and send
personal email doesn’t make you an expert!
• The balance between brand direction and channel strategy. Brands
can often turn to email to try solve everything, and it can hurt the
narrative that the channel experts are trying to build.

3. What Are Your Chief Frustrations?
Creative
• Scaling creative/messaging internal processes and incorporating
personalization/real time customer information. Incorporating dynamic
content and imagery
• Creating data-driven, lifecycle emails at scale that deploy via our ESP in an
automated fashion
• Finding new types of content that will generate engagement
• Consistently and quickly performing QA on heavily personalized content.
• Changing the way we develop creative to support personalization efforts
• Easier A/B Testing

4. What Are Your Chief Frustrations?
Vendors/Platforms
• Weak service from our full-serve ESP has undermined our confidence
that they’re a partner that can execute complex and evolutionary
email technologies
• Clear documentation of the logic behind complex (and ever-evolving)
campaigns, so all stakeholders are informed and don’t weigh the
program down with questions.
• HOTMAIL. Always Hotmail

5. What Are Your Chief Frustrations?
Data and Metrics
• Generating insights about how customer segments perform in our email
campaigns, unless we send a version of each campaign to each segment
that we want to report on
• Internal technologies and processes making data and content availability
scarce or cumbersome to get in an efficient manner
• Data — getting the data I need, validating that it's always correct, making
sure everything syncs properly.
• Fully quantifying impact — our product isn't something that you're
necessarily going to click through and buy from an email.
• Our data is a hot mess

6. What Approach/Tactic Has Seen The Most Progress/Success
• Personalized recommendation emails based on the user’s website search
• Personalization has allowed for more frequent mailing without “burning” the list.
• Leveraging customer data to power contextually relevant content in real time
• Long-tail reengagement. We see folks go dormant for up to 6 months, and then
come back with a vengeance.
• Automated browse-abandoned email campaigns triggered off of customer web
behavior
• Email containing dynamic content and/or user-generated content have been our
most successful
• Implementing a test and learn strategy at a company that never thought to do it
• Dynamic lifecycle campaigns that are triggered by customer events or
transactions create operational efficiencies and drive customer engagement (but
are difficult to scale and properly manage)

7. What Approach/Tactic Has Seen The Most Progress/Success
• Modularization of our email technologies – visualizing the makeup of an email creative as
blocks/widgets that are agnostic of sources (crafted creative, product reccommendations, loyalty
data, etc.) powering each.
• Send time optimization has helped increase our open rate by sending the right email at the right
time.
• Deliverability
• Smarter audience targeting.
• Developing templates for email creative versus creating standalone HTMLs every time
• A/B testing promotions and creative concepts
• Soliciting subscriber feedback.

8. Most Overhyped Topic/Tactic/Tech in Email
• Inbox placement solutions. Just send people content they want to
receive.
• The increase in emphasis on testing messaging in emails.
• AI…AI…AI
• Subject lines - Way too many companies analyzing and trumpeting
their importance.
• Full automation/journey building of the marketing channel. Retailers
need to react extremely quickly. Full automation of customer
journeys sounds great during a sales pitch, but comes at the cost of
flexibility and agility.

9. Most Overhyped Topic/Tactic/Tech in Email
Dynamic Goofiness
• Goofy dynamic content: weather, countdown clocks, animations)
• Interactive/kinetic email. By a long shot.
• Social feeds in email. Sure, I get the value of adding UGC content, but
nobody is returning to an email to check a social feed

10. Most Overhyped Topic/Tactic/Tech in Email
• Send Time Optimization
• “Engagement” is a word that has turned dirty. Opens are
engagement, but they are virtually meaningless. Clicks aren’t much
better. Engagement is a distraction from CONVERSION.
• Over/Hyper-Personalization

11. Game Changers We May Be Overlooking…Or Need
• Interactive emails, dynamic email content
• Games/Forms in Email: “the first step in changing a consumer’s perspective
on engaging with email”
• HTML5 and embedded video In Email. “it’s great for increasing engagement
and brand affinity.”
• ESPs should add more functionality like Bluecore to enable the creation
and deployment of data-driven / triggered emails with ease
• Machine learning/AI to learn user wants and behaviors
• Highly skilled service teams providing “white-glove” service of email
programs
• Internet of Things. Adding a device or partnering with a device is a terrific
way to get personal with your consumers. Just think of what Amazon can
do with their alexa and echo devices.

12. Game Changers We May Be Overlooking
• Behavioral triggers. Seems obvious, but still an undervalued basic
tenet of email marketing.
• Simplification
• Sending Less Email