40 Things I Learned at the Marketing Sherpa Email Summit

Me and Big Jason Henderson

In January I was lucky enough to attend the Marketing Sherpa Email Summit in Miami for absolutely nothing. Quite literally, all I paid for was gas for the drive down, parking, and my hotel room. I was the lucky winner of a free ticket to the summit itself, the pre-workshop the day before, a VIP party, dinner in South Beach, the Gala dinner and party poolside...pretty much everything the event had to offer. And for this wonderful package I have to offer a belated but truly heartfelt thank you to Jason Henderson of Big Marketing, Erick Mott and the team at Lyris, and Todd Lebo and everyone else from Marketing Sherpa. All were tons of fun to hang out with and I learned a lot at the conference that I was able to bring back and put into action. So I wanted to share the top forty takeaways from my two-and-a-half-day jaunt down I-95 to Miami.

Me and the Lyris Team

1. "Adequecy is the enemy of excellence." Dr. Flint McGlaughlin of Marketing Experiments
2. On email signup forms, consider the offer - are you just offering the newsletter? Gee. Wow. What's the incentive in signing up for a newsletter? Instead, offer something useful.
3. Use specific statements of quantity, not vague statements of quality.
4. Your copy should focus on what the customer gets from your company, not what your company gets from the customer.
5. Your call-to-action should communicate value.
6. Don't offer a conclusion about your company. Offer hard facts that lead the reader to an inevitable conclusion.
7. Use images to create value. If the hero shot or smiley-faced girl doesn't communicate anything of value, replace it with something that does - and use it to guide the customer's eyes.
8. Every button should make a promise, should tell you what you're going to get.
9. "Free" is good. "Completely free" is better. "Fully-functioning, completely free" is even better.
10. Link to your privacy policy on your signup form. (It can open in a popup window.)
11. There is no one optimal sending frequency - it differs for everyone. TEST.
12. Address the consumer's needs and how you can fix those needs.
13. The only goal of your email is a click from the recipient, not a sale. The landing page leads to the sale.
14. It's important to know how few of your repeat customers are responsible for what percentage of your sales. For example, 12% of Coke customers are responsible for 80% of its sales.
15. Customer retention is both relegated to the back office, and in and of itself fragmented/diluted. Joseph Jaffe, Author of Flip the Funnel
16. When it comes to social media, people don't want to talk to shoes, but shoes keep trying to talk to people!
17. Lead nurturing is a relevant and consistent dialog with viable potential customers regardless of their timing to buy.
18. In B2B it's important to focus on lead nurturing - 80% of marketing leads wind up lost, ignored, or discarded.
19. Existing site traffic is full of potential subscribers, so optimize your best entry paths (look at your analytics) and lead them to your subscription forms.
20. Segment your lists for more effective email marketing - "batch and blast" is the past.
21. In B2B marketing, the name of the sender affects open rates twice as much as the subject of the email.
22. In social media, your audience is made up of three groups - silent majority, vocal minority, social authority. The latter has the highest ability to spread your word.
23. Connect with subscribers wherever they are - this is the intersection of social and email.
24. Enable campaigns with social sharing buttons - 89% who use it say it effectively extends their reach to new markets. Sergio Balegno of Marketing Sherpa
25. Turn your fans into an outside sales force.
26. Before you send out your newsletter, send out tweet asking people to subscribe.
27. Track who is sharing to segment the vocal minority or social authority from the silent majority.
28. Email is about sending your site to people. Dela Quist of Alchemy Worx.
29. Traffic is expensive - eyeballs cost money.
30. Consider affiliates, co-brand deals, licensing, natural search, paid search, tv press, sponsorships, list rental, and opt in email...of these, opt-in email is by far the cheapest.
31. Strike up a co-registration deal with someone in a similar but not competing market. The best co-reg deals are barter/trade and don't cost you (or the other company) anything.
32. For many companies, double opt-in subscriptions are really overkill...how hard is it, really, to just unsubscribe? (Don't take this as advice from me, it's a paraphrased quote!) However, double-optin is preferred for co-reg, sweeps, and 3rd-party leads.
33. Make sure your email has value, not just relevance.
34. Sources of opt-in names can be newsletter offers, customer service call-ins, trade events, tele-prospecting.
35. Make emails easy to forward to a friend. Then ask your subscribers to do so!
36. Best placement for email signup forms is top left or right, "above the fold", and on every page of your site.
37. Use benefit-oriented language in your signup form.
38. Make sure there's at least one form field and not just a button, because people are used to seeing form fields and that field is the widget that their eyes are used to associating with signing up for something.
39. Tell people how often the emails will come when they sign up.
40. 

    Cricket Lollipop

    And finally, even kids don't want to eat lollipops with dead crickets in them, even if they are a novel idea. Thanks anyway, Bamboo Cricket, at least I can guarantee I won't forget your name!

Note: Cricket lollipop photo courtesy of Offbeat Treats.

Top 10 Email Marketing Mistakes

Most online businesses set up email lists of some sort, then proceed to just send out emails. This document will show you, from the perspective of the person RECEIVING the emails, what mistakes many people make. Avoid these mistakes to ramp up your email list to profitability.