The latest thinking on email marketing from the Email marketing experts

Video insights from the MarketingSherpa Email Summit

Just a few weeks ago, I attended the MarketingSherpa Email Summit in Las Vegas. I brought along my trusty camera and interviewed most of the speakers and several attendees.  Needless to say, these interviews resulted in some great insight on a range of email marketing related topics.

GetResponse ran a contest encouraging our customers to arm me with questions to fire at the influencers at the event. Here I've selected four great (common) questions from average email marketers and four great answers from the videos. I've also created a transcript of the answers for you to scan.

You can view all of the videos here.

Does email still work?

John Caldwell of Red Pill Email answers the question: "Why lately are email marketing campaigns not working as well as they should?"

“It’s not about the sender it’s about the recipient. It doesn’t matter what you want to send them, it matters what they want to read. If you make your messages relevant, give them some value, something that they look forward to receiving, they’ll read the messages. When it works for the subscriber, it will work for you.”

Getting more subscribers

Pamela Markey of MecLabs answers: "How do I get people to sign up for my email list?"

“Value; there’s a perceived cost to every action and a perceived value as well, so you need to be sure you’re providing as much value or more value than what people believe to be the cost.

So, if I’m going to give up my email address , which for a lot of people is a big deal, don’t send me stuff I don’t want. You need to match that (value) with something they want -- something of value to them. Not just white papers, but something of real interest to them, real research, real data.”

Email frequency

Brian Clarke of Copyblogger answers the question: "Should you be frequent or periodic with your mailings?"

“You should be periodic and regular. You don’t want to overload and bombard people with more messages than they are willing to take because you’ll get the immediate unsubscribe.

At the same time, you don’t want to just show up when you have something to sell or promote. What you want to do is hit them with periodic “cookie content” – stuff they look forward to and they are rewarded for opening (with) good solid content.  Then when you do have something to promote, they will be responsive because you’ve earned the right to sell them."

Integrating social and email

Sundeep Kapur of Email Yogi answers this question: "What is the optimal way to integrate and connect the activity of your social and email marketing efforts?"

“There are three very simple ways to use social. I use social to grow. I use social to improve the effectiveness of my emails. And essentially, I’m using social to cut costs.  

If I have social content, essentially what I’m doing is putting social content in my emails. Basically what this does is it drives up my open rates.  Now I’m putting something out which is no longer just promotional, it’s inspirational and my open rates can go as high as 65% to 75%.  Essentially you’re showing content is king and user generated content indeed rules".

For more insight from the MarketingSherpa Email Summit, visit GetResponse TV.