FutureVision – Taking Email to the Next Level

A couple weeks ago I had the opportunity to speak at Lyris FutureVision in Los Angeles. With it at the time being only 5 degrees in Vancouver, escaping to LA for a few days of 25-degree weather was a welcomed change, along with spending a day focused on learning the latest in online marketing.

FutureVision is a full day conference focused on the finer points of online marketing, including best practices, success tips, and real life industry case studies. This was designed to help marketers enhance their existing online programs and generate new ideas.

I was lucky enough to be asked to present my company’s online marketing strategy, and how we leverage extensive personalization to provide seamless interactions on behalf of my company’s 3,000 independent agents across email marketing and the web.

While I haven’t presented in front of a group as large as 150 people before, it was a great opportunity to brush up on my public speaking skills and share some insight.

The mix between industry experts and case study presentations was perfect, as it gave a broad overview of what we should be doing in terms of our online programs, along with actual testimonials from companies successfully leveraging the online environment to grow their business.

Even after 5 years of being focused on email and web marketing campaigns, I walked away with several pages of ideas and notes. A few off the most interesting ones I heard were…

• 20% of all email sent doesn’t reach its end user: While its no surprise that email marketing will never reach everyone, the fact that 1/5 emails stands almost no chance of surviving was quite revealing.
• A/B testing is not good enough: One of the case study presenters outlined the methodical process their company took when testing various email creative. They took it beyond just two different versions, and had upwards of 5-10 variations covering different positioning, imagery, copy, and call to actions.
• Welcome emails should go beyond a single email: An online supermarket demonstrated how they send out a series of triggered emails over the first 6 weeks to the subscriber, trying to encourage them to make their first purchase. If by week 6, they haven’t bought something, they send out a coupon code as an incentive – at this point, it usually does the converts the prospect into a customer.
• Trigger emails work: With email marketing, you can see how the user responds to the email, along with how they behave on the landing page itself, if set up correctly. Using this information, you can market to these users differently – if for example, the subscriber moves from your email to your website, and then looks at a specific category of merchandise, you can follow up with a second email offering them an incentive to buy that particular product, if they didn’t already. Leveraging this behavioral information, lets you better target your marketing based off their actual interests.

Those were just a few the things I walked away with from FutureVision… While it was a long day, the conference offered a tremendous amount of ideas on how to better align email and web marketing to generate sales.

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