The morning of the second conference day at MarketingSherpa’s Email Marketing Summit started with a presentation of Microsoft/Bing email marketing.
Yet another good example that highly personalized email marketing can be very effective.
All Bing emails are personalized on the fly adding a large variety of messages in the email based on previous implicit and explicit data, all that done in 20 milliseconds after receiving the email.
My only concern is that there are a lot of images in play. So I hope Microsoft managed to get a way to render them automatically.
Social media and email
The first session was followed by a panel discussion on how to use social media to engage your customers. We got it all: Facebook likes, Facebook fan pages, Twitter feeds, social media monitoring…
Some smart ideas like, why not post a Twitter post to promote the drop of the new newsletter and a very useful tool to connect your email database with the social activity of subscribers.
What was missing is that we spoke about how to use email to boost social, but what about using social to boost email subscription?
David Meerman Scott’s four guidelines to set-up effective real-time marketing
The first part of the day ended with a very impressive presentation of David Meerman Scott talking about real-time marketing. Today it’s all about brand journalism and this is not copywriting. It’s storytelling.
You’ve got to be aware that sometimes buyer personas are different than the people that actually buy the products. Benefit from the moment to launch your next smart storytelling idea.
One of the best examples was the Wynn hotel banning Hilton after getting arrested in Vegas and creating some buzz about it in the media.
David gave us some guidelines to set-up effective real-time marketing and PR:
- Appoint a real-time officer
- Develop some real-time guidelines
- Implement real-time (automated) systems
- And last but not least, develop a real-time mindset
Kenny Van Beeck
Kenny Van Beeck has over 10 years hands-on experience as an email marketing and e-direct marketing consultant. He was business unit manager and business development manager of Belgian email marketing service provider, EmailGarage. In his career he learned that the market has still a lot to discover about the true power of email marketing and decided to found his consultancy eTale. You can follow Kenny on Twitter or connect with him via LinkedIn.