Yesterday I attended an email marketing event organized by the UK DMA’s Email Marketing Council. Here are some of the learnings I took away:

• Quote of the day: "Making simple things complicated is easy.  Making complicated things simple is hard."
• Jeanniey Mullen said the 3 most important things that drive return are delivery, welcome messaging and the message (creative)
• average # of spam messages received by web users each day: 70
• focus on the basic things for the best results. Great creative is no good if it doesn’t get delivered to the inbox
• mix your campaigns up with valuable content so that it’s not just offers.
• subject line, brand and prior value are the 3 things which subscribers value your email on before opening it
• 20% of legitimate mail which subscribers want will not be delivered to the inbox
• 1 complaint in 1000 will get you blocked
• YOU control your sender
  reputation- complaints, list quality, spam traps, sending
  infrastructure and permanenc are all your problem.
• the only way to get rid of spam traps is to re-optin everyone
• higher frequency makes your list churn faster – forever
• sending a series of emails work,  as an precursor for signing up to a newsletter when they are still making decision
• make sure replyto addresses are attended to. If you’re building a relationship with them, they may reply
• sign up to returnpath.net/rules and receive a 4 email series
• test subject lines for yourself. And don’t be afraid to test long subject lines
• subject lines act as
  relevance filter. Too ambigous could mean that the wrong people open
  the email. SL needs to represent the offer
• don’t ask how can I be relevant ask how can I add value?
• top 3 factors in determining whether to open is know and trust sender, subject line and previously opened and thought valuable
• testing subject lines B2B
  sales cycle is longer so need to give at least 48hrs for SL tests to
  come in before deciding on the best SL
• ‘the mom test’-get your mum to tests and see if she finds all the relevant links and hotspots in your creative.
• the most relevant authenticaton for B2B is senderid-it doesn’t hurt having the others though!
• James Bunting believes 90% success
  of campaign is due to data and the information collected. Doesn’t
  believe this will change on the future

You can find more bits and pieces from the conference here. Thanks for all the tweets Kath!!