Email marketing and Optimization Best Practices

Delfina Balestra (CEO & Founder, ClickExperts)
The number one concern today in this arena is the fact that email interaction rates are slowly going down. Many say that an issue influencing this situation is the uncertainty about images being displayed or not on email messages and if this is bringing down open rates.

Still, email ranks high with marketers. The key driver behind this is that their ROI (57.25%) is still very high compared to other channels.

David Baker (VP of Email Solutions, Avenue A │Razorfish)
Email is not going away - it is ubiquitous it is pervasive. It is a syndication tool.
You wouldn’t have the joke pool you have today without emails!

Everyone uses email - personal and work related… during work days and vacations… People use it all the time every day, during children’s events, in the restroom, at church, they send emails to their spouse from the other room, they have fights via email, and they even email neighbors instead of walking over to talk to them. For kids email is just second nature.

Consumers will consume email. It is the number one activity, period.

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CNN’s Alberto Padilla Prods Shawn Gold of MySpace

CNN’s Alberto Padilla interviews Shawn Gold of MySpace! I braced myself for the inevitable ripped-off feeling as, having started 15 minutes late, they wasted another 15 minutes playing getting-to-know-you on session time. What a jam-packed half-hour it was that awaited me.

(If you’re wondering what the image is at left, it’s Gold’s current MySpace profile picture.)

Digital Publishing: It’s a Feast, If You’ll Scavenge

Somebody tell me why everyone in here has a Blackberry, and nobody is capable of turning off their festive little ringtones.

While the speakers for Publishing in the Digital Age: Feast or Famine? make product pitches in polite succession (how different from the debate and discourse at previous ad:techs!), I finally locate the take-away: Internet publishers are sitting amidst a feast.

(Note pirate - get it? Like online piracy? - feasting at left.)

Hispanic Creative Greats Highlight Great Hispanic Creative

There’s not much to say about an ad:tech session that focuses on creative since its so subjective. However, during the Creative Showcase: The Best of Latin America moderated by AHAA Immediate Past Chairman and Parliamentarian Carl Kravetz, Media 8 Digital Marketing Executive Creative Director Gustavo Garcia presented work his agency did which maximized the notion Hispanic women love to talk about beauty and all the product that go along with beautifying oneself.

Viral and Word of Mouth Marketing

While the panel (Brad Pick/Edelman, Luis Cabrera/The Bravo Group, Gene Derose/HouseParty.com) was very knowledgeable, gave enjoyable presentations, and offered great examples of big business ventures in this area of marketing, they offered nothing for the little guy.  In the online world viral and WOM ventures have grown and developed from the actions of marketers operating on a fraction of the budgets necessary for most of what was displayed in this session. Except for, oddly enough, the panel’s own selections of their favorite viral campaigns.

Blogs, Podcasts, and Vidcasts

This was an excellent session for anyone thinking about or planning to develop these mediums for their business, clients, or as a personal vehicle.  The panelists (Diego Naranjo/MiamiAdGuy.com, Jesus Hoyos/crmenlatinamerica.com, Blogs, Julio Vaca/EveryZing.com) and moderator (Jay Berkowitz, Ten Golden Rules) actually covered all of those users and found a way to avoid repeating the words of the panelists before them.

Latin American and Hispanic Markets Adjust to Consumer Control

For Wednesday’s Keynote Roundtable, held the second day of ad:tech Miami, Advertising Age’s Laurel Wentz gathered together a collection of the finest minds in the Hispanic and Latin American market places to discuss the changing relationship between consumers, content and control. On the panel were MTV Networks VP of Digital Media Luis Goicouria, VOY Group Chairman and CEO Fernando Espuelas, Batanga Chairman and CEO Rafael Urbina-Quintero and NBC Universal, Telemundo Network Group Senior VP Digital Media Peter Blacker.

Among all members of the panels, the overriding acknowledgment that consumers have the keys to content kingdom was agreed to though not to the exclusion of well-produced content. Content is still king as has been said. It’s simply being created and consumed very differently than it was just three or five years ago. The panelists agreed the explosion of consumer generated media has forever changed the media landscape and will continue to do so in ways even the best minds can’t yet imagine.

Brazil: ‘Hey, We’re Latino Too. Have Some Numbers.’

When I read that a session called Brazil:State of the Industry was going to be on “ad:tech Miami” I got very excited. I said to myself, this will be a great and rare opportunity to learn something new from our “Portuguese speaking brothers”. You know, you usually don’t hear much about how Brasil targets its market, and I was right even Mauricio Palermo from IAB Brazil started the session saying, “Brazil does not participate much in conventions...”

The Multi-Platform World Simplifies Consumption, Not Our Jobs

It’s my opinion that multi-platform marketing, despite its maddening number of nuances, has made a lot of advertisers lazy. Consider how many brands settled for a CGM contest during the last Super Bowl instead of sitting down to think of something genuinely unique and thrilling.

But lest we tread too far down the path of least resistance, it merits noting that while a two-way discourse between ourselves and The Consumer is nice, it’s hardly made our job easier. And it isn’t supposed to.

Multi-platform marketing suggests a much broader responsibility than just throwing your brand onto every medium you can imagine. You’re not engaging in viral marketing, for example, if all you’re doing is loading your :30 spots onto YouTube.

Do you really think The Consumer is that stupid?

Consumer Habits and Online Behavior - Latin America

Companies usually look into US Hispanics only as a big potential demographic for selling their goods, but out here in Latin America there are also plenty of brand-loyal online buyers, often overlooked.

Comments from the Social Media Panel

Four panelists gave some specific advice and particular examples for winning the engagement of people through social media, keeping it, measuring it and messaging with it…

In Argentina, Cell Phones Trump Credit Cards

With 380 million mobile user in Latin America and just 3 major carriers, monopoly-related problems are the norm to say the least. During the ad:tech panel Mobile Advertising in Latin America: When Will it Be a Reality, the lack of a common platform, as is the case in other markets, is always a hurdle that must be jumped during mobile campaign creation.

On the panel were Moderator, Fernando Pafumi, director of business development for Pyramid Research, Victor Kong, VP of Strategy and New Media for MTVNetworks Latin America, Jorge Oartides, CEO of LatCel and Juan Saldivar.

Measurements and Metrics Measures Up

This was a fantastic panel. Finally, data guys (and gal) who understand advertising and the many different things metrics can point to. Moderator Jack Flanagan of comScore, and panelists Esco Strong/Atlas, Natasha Funk/Terra Networks, and Martino Bagini/RealMedia Brazil all brought a wealth of knowledge on the current landscape of analytics, and wonderful insight into the future potential of online marketing.

The Basics of SEO/SEM

The speakers were great, but “the basics” is right. This was very basic and unfortunately not in-depth enough to really teach much. It was simply a rehash of what most marketers should certainly know, and yet only enough to generate more questions for a true novice.

Social Networking Perfect For Close Hispanic Family Ties

The gist of the Hispanic: The State of the Industry panel (led by ADN Communications CEO Jose Lopez-Varela with Publicitas VP of Digital Media Paul Meyer, mun2 Director of Digital Media Jose Nestor Marquez and Machado, Garcia, Serra Associate Media Director Stephen Paez) was that the Hispanic market is both very much the same and very much different than the general market.

With many families splitting - some members coming to American and others staying in their home country - the strong family bonds built from that separation make social networking a big growth area. Facebook recent opening of its API to developers could be a boon to Hispanic-specific social network development. Also, services such as Ning, which provide drag and drop social network creation, serves perfectly for topic specific networks.