The DMA are running a series of events around the email customer lifecycle. The latest on ‘conversion’ was so popular that even after finding a bigger venue the next one’s over half booked after just a week! If email marketing is your thing and you want to attend the next one then I’d get in there sooner rather than later.

In the meantime I thought it would be good for those of you who couldn’t attend the last seminar on Conversion to get a summary view, so here it is:

Richard Lees ‘Initial steps: create conversions’
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Richard Lees of the Database Group led off with a comprehensive strategic view, it’s absolutely fascinating the levels of planning these guys are able to support. This level of planning needs to be a part of any marketing plan, but can be intimidating for those without tonnes of resource.

If you simplify the messages, Richard was talking about these three key points:

1. Know what you are trying to achieve and make it the focus of everything you do.

2. Look at the customer lifecycle, all too often marketing works independently of sales (or ecommerce). Marketing can augment every stage of the buying cycle but often the input stops when the initial lead is generated.

3. What does a conversion mean to you? All too often “making a sale” is the default response, but are you considering converting existing customers to buy more or how about getting brand ambassadors on our side?

If you can clearly establish these before you start the process of trying to improve your conversions, your chances of success are greatly improved. My favourite stat from Richard? – each page you need someone to go through to covert you will get an 8% drop off – wow cut those pages down!

I was up next, but we’ll leave talking about me for a bit.
Margaret Farmakis ‘Testing 1-2-3: Get true email ROI’

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Margaret Farmakis from Return Path gave us some great insights into the effect further down the line of having poor deliverability, talking through what was to be the theme of the morning – testing.
A couple of interesting stats:

“84% of consumers report clicking through to a relevant email offer”

= So give recipients relevant content and you are very likely to get a click through.

“73% of email users report making an online purchase as the result of a relevant email offer.”

= They’ll end up buying as well!

My favourite speaker was up next, Jean-Michel Boujon.

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One of the head honchos over at Theladders.co.uk, he provided a client side view into how he goes about improving the conversion rate of his email campaigns.

• First off – understand which emails are most important in your email campaigns – his password reminders actually generated the highest conversions. Apparently this indicates that the prospect is ready to re-engage with the site and therefore is likely to convert.

• Once you’ve picked the ones you want to improve, test, test then test again! Jean suggested using agency resource to facilitate the extra HTML you’ll need, after all you are working on improving conversions – getting a design budget for that shouldn’t be too tough.

Another interesting insight was that when emails are sent from a female name they got a 10% bump in opens, due to the fact that most of their subscribers are males – how can you apply this thinking to your list?

His slides around landing pages and email content were really interesting, I suggest you download them along with all the presentations from the day *here*. (http://www.pure360.com/email-marketing-resources-insights/conversion)

To finish, some guy from Pure360 (me) did a presentation.

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I have 4 key “takeaways” when looking at conversions, follow these and I’ll bet you an overpriced coffee you’ll get higher conversions:

• Get conversion metrics into your email service provider, or wherever you make decisions on email marketing – don’t refine based on email metrics – do so based on conversions!

• Make the call to actions clear as day

• Invest in retargeting your subscribers based on what they have done – Jean-Micheal was a keen advocate of the cart abandon campaigns.

• Make sure your email creative matches your landing pages, you can see a good example from Citrix, poor matching of email and landing pages style, copy and creative will lead to a massive drop off.

You can still (for now) sign up for the final parts three and four of the email customer lifecycle series:

Part three: Engagement and Retention (June)
Part Four: Winback (September)

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