Email Marketing Summit Australia: 2020 Highlights

The Email Marketing Summit Australia wrapped up Friday, 6th November. This year we decided to host our first-ever virtual EMSA and boy did we get a turnout, with a whopping 1000+ registrants. The program featured six marketing legends across Australia.

For those of you who didn’t make it on the day, have no fear! Keep scrolling because we’re going to unpack each speaker session to uncover all their top tips and insights. Otherwise sign up to watch EMSA On Demand, where you can watch all the session recordings at your own leisure.

The Changing Face of Customer Experience: Creating a Conversational Strategy

Keynote speaker Kat Warboys from HubSpot, ANZ, kicked off the day by taking a deep dive into creating and implementing a conversational growth strategy. Kat revealed that since the pandemic, user-initiated on-site chat has almost doubled.

If 2020 has taught us anything, it’s that we’re an impatient bunch! In fact, 90% of consumers expect an immediate response when it comes to customer service. They want you always there, always knowing who they are and always ready to help. So how do we meet these ever-rising expectations at scale?

Kat shared three helpful strategies to creating personal, helpful and authentic conversations through live chat:

Attract by…

Engage by…

Delight by…

It’s important to stay ahead of the tech curve by building chat into your existing tech stack. There are many channels out there to consider, but here’s a couple to get started: 

• Facebook messenger 
• WhatsApp 
• Slack 
• Onsite chat and bots

KAT’S KEY TAKEAWAY: CRM + CHAT = PERSONALISED, HELPFUL, AUTHENTIC CONVERSATIONS AT SCALE

Earn My Attention: How to Create Content That Your Customers Want to See

Kurt Sanders, Director of Strategy at Content Division showed us what groundwork we need to do before we even touch a camera, a computer or the publish button on Tik Tok.

Your content needs to be part of a much wider strategy, something that has built equity. Most of us would probably have built-in tactics along the customer journey to nudge your leads down the sales funnel, but how do you know whether you’re focusing on the right thing? We can no longer rely on the old saying of “putting yourself in your customer’s shoes”. We are all too close to our brands to truly orient ourselves to the needs of the market. So how to get there?

Start with qualitative research every year

• One-on-ones with customers 
• Focus groups

And then you can dive into quantitative

• Surveys (segment and funnel questions)
• 1st party and secondary data (your data, your dashboards etc.)

Once you’ve got this bedrock of data, you can finally move on to the creative part which will give your campaign the oxygen to breathe. Creative execution is vital to your campaign and includes everything from brand architecture, brand language, image/video treatments, tone of voice, and a tilt on your content to make it unique to you.

Kurt’s Key Takeaway: If it doesn’t sell, it’s not creative

Unlock the Power of Personalisation: Expert Tips to Captivate Customers with Experimental Personalisation

The average adult has an attention span of just 8 seconds. Yep! Hours upon hours spent crafting an email for it to all fall down to 8 measly seconds. So how can you avoid the dreaded down arrow? You get personal, that’s how!

Personalisation is a criminally underused tactic by marketers. The reason for this being that many feel they don’t have the skills to manage the data or don’t have enough time to put these strategies into place. Personalisation goes way beyond just using your subscribers’ first name in the subject line and email copy. If you truly want to set your email marketing game on fire, try experimenting with some advanced personalisation techniques. So to prevent your head from spinning, we invited Alita Harvey-Rodriguez from MI Academy to help us navigate the crucial steps we need to take to create a more personalised journey for your customers.

• Identify and emphasise – Find an opportunity within your customer journey 
• Take stock – Understand what data you need but also what data you already have
• Strategy – What’s your goal? Use it to develop your MVP and testing 
• Implement – This is all about doing the do!
• Optimise – Did the campaign align with our goals? Time for a retro!

Here’s some examples you can put into practice:

Alita’s Key Takeaway: Your personalised automations shouldn’t be about ‘set and forget’, it should be ‘set and optimise’.

Lead Generation Campaigns that Convert

Our goal as marketers is to chase quality leads. But it can be challenging especially because we know inboxes are flooded, social media is overflowing with sponsored content and most viewers on Youtube are using some form of ad blockers. So we called in our lead generation expert and Vision6 CMO, Jessica Pantalleresco who delved into a more realistic approach to chasing the unicorn. Jess also shared some of the obstacles she faced and how she overcame them to achieve lead generation success. And it started with knowing who you’re talking to.

It’s important to develop an ICP (Ideal Customer Persona) by looking at your customer database so you can identify your high-revenue customers, look at their traits and know what industry you’re looking at. Let your data tell you who your ICP is instead of attacking your strategy blindly by making assumptions about your audience.

Once you’ve identified what your quality leads look like you can now begin to map out your customer journey. Lead nurture campaigns are all about the ‘soft sells’. So you need to inject value-add content into your campaigns that solve your customer pain points. This will help transform your leads into loyal paying customers. Jess filled us in on some non-negotiables when it comes to creating your lead-nurtures :

Personalise

Add value according to customer pain points

Set up optimal lead nurture schedule

Segment your database

Re-engage with leads that fall off

Jess’ Key Takeaway: Products don’t match people, they match problems. 

Customer First Automation: The Path to Repurchase

Marketing automation is not a silver bullet. Brands should be taking full advantage of automation across multiple channels, and using it to communicate only relevant information, tailored to each and every customer. In the afternoon session, we invited Chief Strategist, Mark James from Customology to give us an idea of what strategies and thinking goes into activating the path to repurchase.

If you’re not coming across as genuine and authentic in your approach from the get-go then your customers will start to drop off one by one. It’s all about leveraging what Mark likes to call the ‘moneymoon’ phase. The ‘moneymoon’ phase begins when a customer makes their first purchase with you, providing us marketers with a 7-30 day window to make your customers feel important and valued. 

When people are designing a program to keep their customers there are two key building blocks:

• Continue the conversation –  more often than not brands aren’t talking to their customers they are talking at them. You need to make your customers feel like they are important, valued and they are someone you care about.
• You want to be in the position to influence behaviour – by educating them on another product or service offering you are beginning to set up the path to repurchase. 

What we may perceive as value is one one but what your customers think is a whole lot different. It’s not all about who can scream the loudest to get your customers attention. We need to stop thinking of sales like a transaction and start going human to human in approach.

Mark shared the new value equation:

mARK’S kEY tAKEAWAY: Stop thinking of it like a transaction. Brands need to talk to their customers, not at them.

Data Privacy Landscape 2020: What Marketers Need to Know to Stay Compliant

It’s been a time of exciting change in the data privacy landscape. 2020 has put an emphasis on all things digital. As businesses shift their marketing efforts to online, renewed attention has been drawn to questions around data privacy.In this session, we chatted with Technology, Media and Communications Lawyer Dan Pearce from Holding Redlich on key data privacy regulations, updates, trends, and future predictions.

To give everyone a quick refresher here are the key pieces of legislation that all marketers should be keeping an eye out for:

• SPAM Act and GDPR
• Australian Consumer Law 
• Australian Privacy Act
• Consumer Data Right (Treasury Laws Amendment Act 2019) for banking, energy and telecommunications sectors 
• Defamation Law
• Surveillance/Devices Legislation
• Health Records Legislation for businesses in the healthcare sector
• Commonwealth Privacy Act
• State and Territory Legislation requiring contact tracing records to be maintained

What to do

For email, common data breaches occur as a result of cyber crime, human error, and system faults. It is very easy to get lost in this great variety of legislation so it’s crucial you have a formal document in place to set protocols.

You need to know what regulations apply to your industry, identify what data needs protecting, and enforce policies to educate all employees. 

Dan recommends reading up on:

• Freedom of Information Act (FOI) Guidelines
• Australian Privacy Principles Guidelines
• Guides to help organisations and agencies comply with the Privacy Act

Email Design Awards

Are you ready to see the best of best in email marketing design? This year we hosted our first-ever Email Design Awards, crowning four winners across the four categories. Head on over to our Email Design Awards 2020 page where we are showcasing all of this year’s amazing entries. Get mad inspired for your next superstar email campaign!

Winner for Best Design goes to…Network 10

Winner for Best Content goes to…ghd hair

Winner for Best Results goes to…Sydney Metro

Winner for Best Overall goes to…QUT Science and Engineering Faculty

Stay tuned for The Vision6 Email Design Awards next year. It’s going to be an even bigger and better event!