One of my favorite speakers at the recent Silverpop customer conference in London was Michael Nutley, editor-in-chief of New Media Age, the U.K. weekly news magazine. Ignoring the standard PowerPoint and visual aids, Michael got up and did something unusual--he just spoke.

He gave a terrific presentation, and I filled pages with notes on his provocative ideas. I won't take you through them all, but here are a few things he said that really stood out for me:

• PVRs (personal video recorders like TiVo) are the rejection of interruption advertising.
• The hegemony of TV and TV advertising is breaking down because people no longer live scheduled lives.
• Communities are no longer limited by geography--they can now be based on shared interests regardless of where members live.
• All roads lead to interactivity--all media is moving toward a dialogue.
• Quoting G. M. O'Connell, founder of Modem Media, on the overuse of interruption-based advertising, Michael said, "You can't annoy people into liking you." This is a sobering point for marketers of otherwise well-respected brands when they ask, "How often can I send to my email list?"
• In the social media space, you don't buy media--you earn it. This is one of my favorites.
• Brands are no longer what we as marketers tell people they are--brands are what people's friends tell them they are.
• Marketers should aspire to the condition of service. In other words, view your marketing as a service to your customers.
• Each new medium spawns a brand new form of advertising. For the Web, it was search. The question is, what will the ideal advertising form be for mobile? It's definitely not search, Michael said. My own thought is that it's not likely to be any form of interruptive marketing because mobile devices are simply too personal and too awkward to manage a stream of incoming messages.

Michael, thanks for coming out and doing such a great job.

Posted by Bill Nussey at 10:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm on the tail end of a great trip to our London office to speak at our annual customer conference in Europe.

The event was held at the Churchill Museum and Cabinet War Rooms, the very same place that Winston Churchill ran Britain during World War II. For those of you who have read my book, you know that I'm a huge fan of Churchill. It was a powerful experience to visit the place where he lived and worked and to see so many reflections of his words and actions. Most of the 120 people at the event had not been to the museum, and they all agreed it was an amazing venue for a business conference.

The conference, which we called Advanced Email Strategies, was a great snapshot of the U.K. and broader European email marketplace. Our managing director, Mike Weston, did a great job of lining up speakers and delivering high impact content. We took the opportunity to introduce our U.K. retail email marketing study, which highlights trends in email marketing here in the United Kingdom and contrasts them with what we're seeing in the United States. (You can read the Silverpop press release, which contains a link to get a free copy of the study, here.)

Keep an eye out for my follow-on posting as I get a chance to transcribe my notes on the many things I learned during this knowledge-filled day.

Posted by Bill Nussey at 10:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

If you are not familiar with the Email Insider Summit, it's pretty much as its name describes. A group of 100 or so of the top email folks in the country get together to share ideas, network and have some fun. Attendees include marketers from big companies, executives from vendors and the occasional media person. This is the second Email Insider Summit, and the folks at MediaPost are already planning another two for 2007.

I will be posting several entries over the next several days from the notes I took, but let me start by telling you about the number 49.

A recent study by ReturnPath presented by Stephanie Miller, vice president of strategic services, found that the maximum number of characters in a subject field should be 49. She said that lines consisting of 49 characters (presumably give or take a few) performed 75-percent better than longer subject lines and much shorter subject lines. Stephanie, who also organized the summit, pointed out that your actual numbers may vary a lot, and that testing is always called for when determining what works best for each marketer.

Posted by Bill Nussey at 02:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

If you measure the momentum of an industry by how many people you have to squeeze by on a tradeshow floor, then interactive marketing as evidenced by ad:tech, is on fire. The conference in New York this week had as much buzz as anything I've seen since 1999. The sessions focused on the typical themes of past ad:techs (affiliate networks, search, email, etc.), but the rooms were all packed. The tradeshow area is what really blew me away, though. A few years ago, it was one section on the second floor of the Hilton. This year, it went on... and on... and on... for several floors, and into the hallways. Wow. Tons of new companies were there, as well as a bunch of familiar names.

I spoke on a panel about the integration of Web analytics and email. We had a great audience, and the questions kept coming until we were kicked out of the room. A few of the take-aways from our panel:

• David Baker, the moderator from Avenue A / Razorfish did a great job of pulling this together. He talked a lot about dashboards, and how to create a single view on your marketing data.
• Margie Chiu, also from Avenue A, shared some great real-world experience on these integrations. One of my favorite points from Margie is the idea that the single, simple, ultimate measurement to use for online campaigns is revenue per campaign. Then, starting with such a high-level view, you can look at why revenue has changed from previous campaigns. I liked this a lot because it gets right to the heart of things and only highlights the drill-down metrics that are affecting the changes (e.g., larger list, reduced opens, etc.).
• Jay Kulkarni from Theorem talked about many of the specific technical challenges in moving email data into analytics systems.
• I talked about how integration between email and Web analytics can occur at several levels: link data (so the analytics tool knows which campaigns to assign clicks to), triggered communications (like shopping cart abandonment) and bi-directional reporting (looking at the data in a single view). And since Silverpop has done integration work with all the major analytics players, I provided a quick overview of our experience with the vendors as well as their relative strengths.

Posted by Bill Nussey at 10:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

One of my absolute favorite things to do is to spend a day with a bunch of email fanatics. I'm pleased to report that the U.K. has more than its fair share of email fanatics (and visionaries). We put together a great agenda, and the audience seemed to be engaged throughout the day. We had some great speakers -- too many to mention them all. But I thought I'd highlight a few who stood out in my notes.

Analyst Nate Elliott of JupiterResearch kicked off the day with some great research and observations on the E.U. and U.K. email marketing landscape.

One of my favorite Brits, Dela Quist of Alchemy Worx, did his usual smashing job talking about email analytics and best practices (he's also spoken at our U.S. customer conference). A few of his more notable ideas:

• Measuring "clicks per clicker" (total clicks / unique clicks) will tell you how relevant your content really is. If you're getting fewer than 1.5, Dela says you need to do some work.
• If you are struggling to come up with creative newsletter content, consider lists. Dela says recipients love "The Top 5" type lists.
• His research shows that the more you can stuff into an email subject line, the better your results will be -- even if some email programs cut part of it off.

P.S. I also had the privilege of previewing the results from our recently completed study on email creative. I believe this is the first study of its kind to use such a rigorous analytic method. Keep alert for a formal announcement coming soon.

Posted by Bill Nussey at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I've been on a whirlwind travel tour these last few weeks: The DMA's B to B conference, MarketingSherpa's Email Conference, ad:tech in San Francisco, and the eMarketing Association conference also in San Francisco.

The first conference I attended, MarketingSherpa's conference, was the first of it's kind - a dedicated email marketing-only conference focused primarily on companies who use email for relationship marketing (e.g. permission and anticipation). Bottom line, the conference was great. While there were some first-time conference logistics hiccups, the content, the attendees and, most importantly, the discussions outside the meetings were all top notch. The conference covered the usual hot topics from deliverability to design/layout to list building. But given it's exclusive focus on email, the depth and breadth of those topics reached a new level. I was also pleased to see that the conference was not a "vendor fest". There seemed to be many more practitioners than there were vendors. Like Shop.org, this keeps the dialog far more interesting and everyone walks away learning a great deal more (and spends less time selling).

I had the privilege of hosting a panel with IBM, Vail Resorts and Air2Web were we discussed next generation communications technologies (RSS, desktop apps and mobile, respectively). A lot of these topics were new to the audience and I thought some of the follow up questions were great.

For a more in depth review, I recommend reading the wrap up from Anne Holland, the Publisher of MarketingSherpa: http://www.marketingsherpa.com/sample.cfm?contentID=3238

Posted by Bill Nussey at 02:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)