Let's kick off the fun early! Get to know the attendees and mingle with other speakers and sponsors in the exhibit hall.  

Email is an amazing channel for marketers and can have an enormous impact on brand awareness and revenue, if done correctly! To say that inboxes are overcrowded is an understatement. Do your emails stand out in today's crowded inboxes? Are you getting the most out of every email campaign? There are many factors that can affect the performance of an email campaign from inbox placement to design. In this session we'll take a deep dive into key areas that will certainly increase your email marketing effectiveness.

- Tips on how to avoid Spam filters

- Effectively use the Subject line and Preheader text to encourage a subscriber to open your email

- Understand why considering accessibility within your email design is critical to the success of your campaigns

- Quick and easy email code changes that will allow you to communicate, captivate and connect with your subscribers

- How Accessibility technologies are going to change the way we interact with email

Of all the types of interactive email, forms in email provide the most value for your business and your subscribers -- but they also prove to be some of the most difficult to implement correctly. We all want to try something new and innovative in our email campaigns, but what good is innovation if the user experience is awful? WeddingWire has already navigated these waters and wants to give you tips on how to build a good email in the first place, integrate HTML forms in your email campaigns, and account for client support so that you're sending emails that are helpful and functional for all your users.

In the age of constant disruption, every organization is faced with the daunting task of getting more return on less investment. This increased pressure to not only adapt, but to thrive, is causing massive friction at all levels of the org chart.  

As email marketers, this hyper focus on ROI and profitability is already part of our culture.  We are quantified, we are responsive, we are personalized, we are automated, we are scalable, and we are integrated.  But we can DO more.  We can BE more. 

Let's explore some ways we can keep shaking up the email marketing industry while cranking up the collective ROI.  

Possible learnings from this session:

• Email ROI Beyond Revenue
• Orchestrating Better Email Experiences 
• The Impact of the Worker Experience
• How to Apply Actionable Strategy From Any Role
• Awesome Catch Phrases and Clichés 
• How to Win at Monopoly & The Theory of Relativity

In this session, learn how to conduct your own Marketing Automation tune-up. You will walk away with an understanding of how to determine when it is time to change your martech stack versus maximizing what you currently have in a Marketing Automation platform. Learn strategies and tactics to evaluate what your marketing automation needs are and how to constantly optimize your business goals against your current platform’s functionality and features.  Learn how to hire the right team to complement your current Marketing Automation platform.

As an agency working with large consumer-facing brands like Taco Bell and Aramark, eROI is often pushing the creative envelope in our email campaigns. To support creative innovation in the inbox we rely on data to make smart choices that help us reach our clients goals to deliver an engaging and hyper personalized message that speaks to all our subscribers. In this session Senior Digital Strategist Cher Fuller and Senior Developer Heidi Olsen will discuss what constitutes innovation and why your clients and internal team should care.

Everyone talks about personalizing emails, but where does a savvy email marketer start?  In this session, Genevieve Longtin, Director of Email and Engagement, helps start you on that path, showing how you can start with a single attribute.  Using real-life examples of how the Sharecare personalization program began with one attribute, Genevieve will illustrate how she used basic user data and test methodologies to build up to a fully dynamic email, one attribute at a time, one test at a time.

Are you still coding all your emails one by one while inlining every single CSS style? Ever wonder how you can leverage web technologies to help you output your emails more effectively? What about supporting the growing number of countries your business is targeting? Oh, and what about using resources like an API to tap into your ESP? Enter Gulp, a javascript based task runner. Get a unique perspective on how we at Nest have been able to streamline our email development workflow. Obtain some insight on how its helped us support a growing business as it expands into new international markets. We'll highlight high-level points on how this task runner has increased our velocity, brought clarity to our code structure, improved our QA workflow, inspired innovation, and made for some happy stakeholders all while eliminating repetitive code. In addition, get exposure to an example of how you might tap into your ESP’s API and bring your development workflow full circle.

**This talk delves into some low level to medium level technical specs on getting Gulp started. Code snippets and samples are shared.

So you've built a solid email program. Your engagement numbers are strong; you're driving consistent traffic and you're pumping out engaging content your subscribers seem to love. Everything is great, right? Well... What if you could do better? A LOT better?
 
Over the past year, Banfield Pet Hospital® developed a comprehensive email optimization program designed to maximize each individual touchpoint’s impact and worked to link results directly to key business metrics. The new program helped Banfield increase engagement by an average of 50% per email, with some emails seeing click rates more than double year-over-year.
 
Tyler Thompson, client communications program manager for Banfield, will share:
 

• The process Banfield uses to efficiently test into the best possible email
• Key learnings from more than a year of systematic testing
• Which email elements have the biggest impact on engagement
• Which elements don't seem to matter at all
• How to test multiple emails simultaneously with only a few hours of weekly work
• How to track & share results in a digestible format

Get to know the attendees and mingle with other speakers and sponsors in the exhibit hall.  

Savvy email marketers are increasingly automating multi-touch email campaigns intentionally sequenced to align with customer journeys and optimize conversion. While most realize an email series will outperform a single-message, figuring out how to map multi-message sequences and branching logic can be easier said than done. I'll present approaches for different types of email series (lead nurturing, event, re-marketing, abandonment recovery, reactivation) and hacks to optimize message flow, offer progression, content sequencing and more. If you've been struggling with how to conceptualize and implement more-than-basic multi-touch email campaigns, don't miss this session! Bring your questions and scenarios because we'll do some live coaching and Q&A too.

Email “newbie” Shannon Bagdigian talks about breaking into the email world and what she learned in her first years as an Email Marketing Strategist.

Being fairly new to the email marketing world (it'll be 3 years in 2018) I want to talk about some of the major things I learned in my first years as an email marketing strategist. My presentation will be geared toward those who are just entering the world of email marketing. Perhaps it's a career change, or maybe it's their first job, or perhaps they have just started their own business and are looking for some tips and tricks. One topic I really would like to focus on is CTR vs. CTOR. I feel for many just entering the email world, this can be very confusing. I know it was for me at first and to this day I still get asked by co-workers what the difference is. My plan is to outline a simple way to explain the difference and, with permission from my employer, show some actually examples of tests I conducted to help showcase the difference. I'd also like to discuss my personal approach to email to help highlight ways to "think like your customer" and hopefully give a new perspective on how one looks at their own email strategy.

Understand why the majority of email marketers are barely getting a passing grade and discover how you can become Best-In-Class. Expect to walk away from this session with a new perspective on how to start building the foundation for a successful email marketing plan.

Key takeaways:

·        Explore Best-In-Class vs Rest-In-Class

·        Understand the C-Suite Perspective

·        Identify your core capabilities to achieve desired ROI

·        Find how other email marketers rank

·        Discover what leaders are doing to maximize efficiencies

There are a number of elements that contribute to the success of your email program, but front and center is the quality of the subscribers you are engaging and the data you are collecting; not every email address is created equally. By focusing on quality and quantity, this session/panel will help marketers gain insights on:

-  Defining steps for analyzing your current subscriber base

-  Troubleshooting tactics for your current acquisition efforts

-  Brainstorming new acquisition tactics and best fit analysis

-  Collecting the right data at the right time

-  Applying strategies for post-signup analysis

Recent research by Oxford University and Deloitte reports that about 1/3 of marketing professionals risk losing their jobs to robots in the next 20 years and marketers have to accept that what they’re familiar with won’t be around forever. How bad could things get and how do marketers stay relevant in a world dominated by AI and Machine learning?

Dela’s presentation will help you understand where AI stands in marketing today by separating the hype from the reality. Discover how this translates into opportunities and threats – which roles and functions are most at risk and what skills are going to be in demand moving forward. Dela also shares his insights into a new breed of tools that will help savvy marketers to stay ahead and give them the edge over the competition.

We are living in an age where subscribers expect their inbox to be treated with respect, and AARP members are particularly sensitive to how their subscription is honored. It’s increasingly difficult to provide a positive customer experience without the use of technology.

Learn how AARP has leveraged email best practices along with innovative technology trends to grow their list while focusing on a customer-first experience to drive increased engagement and lifetime value.

This session will discuss how to test more complex technologies such as AI in order to get valid, quantifiable, actionable results.  It will also cover the value of continuous testing.  Our core philosophy is that Test and Learn needs to be ongoing, not one and done.  Testing Starts out Revolutionary then becomes Evolutionary.  

James Einspahr, Digital Director overseeing Furniture Row's email program, and Matthew Vernhout, Director, Privacy & Industry Relations at 250ok discuss the purpose, challenges, and rewards of deploying DMARC.  Expect to Learn:

- Why it's critical for your brand to deploy DMARC

- What to expect when moving from DMARC deployment to a reject policy (p=reject)

- How a deployed DMARC policy impacted Furniture Row's email program

During this conference, you have heard of great tools that people have used in their own marketing, and now you want to use them in your campaigns.  This can be overwhelming, and you need a plan. Learn how to decide which vendors will fit your needs the best, what factors you may not have considered yet, and how to prioritize implementations.