<img height="1" width="1" style="display:none" src="https://www.facebook.com/tr?id=520757221678604&amp;ev=PageView&amp;noscript=1">
Suzanne Carawan

By: Suzanne Carawan on August 27th, 2015

Print/Save as PDF

#TBT & Present Day Love for Email

Email Marketing

mailto:demo@example.com?Subject=HighRoad Solutions - interesting article

Adam and I are at Litmus' Email Design Conference in Boston today and, as always, the conference always succeeds in delighting the audience. We just sat through a preso by RebelMail who did amazing things through embedding CSS in email that included complicated price calculations, 3-D image rotation and playing a slideshow (or at least giving you that experience). 

As in previous years, all I could think was "Why aren't associations doing ANY of this?" which is a fundamental question that I try to answer on a daily basis. I'm not like the Litmus peeps--I don't love email because email was always treated with this flippant attitude of "just send more" and "hurry up and send it" with the knowledge that no one really knew what they were doing making the entire effort a very scary crapshoot full of potential pitfalls for which I was ultimately responsible as the head of marketing.

The #tedc14 conference and now the #tedc15 conferences got me to love email (talk about event ROI!) and here's the top reasons why:

  1. Real email marketing is a total craft--it requires both creative and technical skills 

  2. Real email marketing understands there is a relationship of trust that needs to be honored throughout every step of email creation & distribution

  3. Real email marketing is designed around the user experience & what works for the recipient

  4. Real email marketing costs money and requires software+talented labor+messaging to do it right

From our 2015 State of Digital Marketing in Associations Report, we know that email marketing is still the #1 way that associations market & takes up the majority of the budget. However, we also know that associations aren't happy with their email programs and continuously report stagnating open rates & engagement. 

The conundrum I struggle with is why isn't anyone seeing what I'm seeing? It's your #1 way you market, but if we delve into your budget, we see that you reserved enough budget for software+messaging (and even that might be a stretch because a lot of associations are trying to do this on the cheap without tools like Dreamweaver or Photoshop), but you didn't account for the need for talented labor.

I wish that I could send every association executive, department chair and program head to #tedc15 to see for yourself what email should be and the way in which it should be viewed. #Tedc15 stops the notion that email is just a free medium for communication and puts it in the same vein as magazine production (which many associations absolutely invest in and yet don't have close to the ability to measure impact).

While I can't send everyone to the conference, I can take advantage of a throwback opportunity involving Litmus and provide a video as to why your association should love email and how your organization needs to think about email and the craftsmanship that is required to do it right. 

We have one more full day tomorrow, so consider following the convo at #tedc15 and watching Justine Jordan, head of marketing at Litmus, convince you about why you should heart email at our Innovation Day last November.

Justine Will Make You Love Email