Past attendee: “I have to let you know how interesting and useful I found the morning, my marketing manager was very impressed with all the tips for our newsletters I brought back from it!”

This will be my third presentation of  the half day email newsletter workshop for the Marketing Institute. The first two have been big successes – and we’ve gotten great feedback from attendees. During the morning, I take you through creating,  sending and tracking email newsletters that provide excellent ROI for your business.  Along with examples and talking points, you’ll participate in interactive exercises and case studies – and get all your questions answered …

Whether you are beginning the process of publishing email newsletters, or want to improve on what you are doing – I know you’ll get plenty of takeaways.

EVENT:  The Marketing Institute of Ireland  half day workshop:
“Email Newsletters: Best Practice for Best Results”

Where: Dublin, at the Marketing Institute, Leopardstown
When: Wednesday 10 February, 9.30 – 1pm
About: Conducted by denise cox, it is aimed at marketers interested in gaining clear insight and easy takeaways to use with their own email newsletters.

(More information & registration)

I am at the MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2010 here in Miami  soaking up the sun doing two of my favourite things – talking about and hearing about all things email.

I’ll be sharing some key takeaways with you soon. (Including research from Bob Johnson of IDG showing the difference between what content marketers think B2B buyers want – and what the buyers really want.)

For now, I will repeat keynote speaker Dr. Flint McGlaughlin’s mantra – Clarity trumps persuasion.

What does he mean by this?  Declutter your message. Remove unnecessary layers of noise that you think are persuading the reader, but are just confusing them. (And confusion usually results in NO action taken.) Offer clear intent.

Simple really.  But as with many things that are simple, it often requires a lot of thinking or re-thinking to ensure that you’ve reached that goal.

Here’s how he laid out the process to reach clarity:

External Clarity – These questions are to be answered by the marketer before crafting the email content and call to action.

1. What am I asking you to do?

2. Why should you do it?

Internal Clarity – This is the email message. These questions should be easily answered by the recipient of the message.

1. What is my objective? (What exactly is being offered – and am I interested?)

2. What is the best way to achieve it? (If I am interested – can I easily take action?)

Setting goals and reviewing Calls to Action are topics I speak and write about frequently – they are absolutely essential to a marketer’s success.

I cover these areas – along with other elements in successful email marketing campaigns – in the current Business of Email newsletter:  Recharge Your Marketing for 2010.

EVENT: “Email marketing excellence – practical strategies to maximise effectiveness and ROI”

I’ll be speaking at this half-day  B2B marketing magazine event coming up Wednesday the 27th of January – 1:30pm to 5:15pm.

I’ll be covering creative & content for email marketing in B2B. I plan to take attendees through a step-by-step process that can them achieve effective email communications with customers and prospects. I’ll provide simple, clear insight into creative and content that works for B2B, and ideas and takeaways that can be applied immediately to your own email marketing.

More about the event

Hope to see you there!

The DMA UK Email Marketing Council recently published the results of their 2009 DMA Email Client Report.

It’s all fascinating reading; but here are just two of the many findings that immediately jumped out at me:

• 80% of marketers see email as “very important” or “important strategically” – and they plan to spend more on email marketing in the coming year.
• The most popular email tactic is the regular email newsletter (78%); and there is an encouraging growth of the use of other types of email as a ‘complimentary’ part of that regular communication by newsletters.

Mark Brownlow provides the overview in this report – and there’s great insight to be found in the area of frequency and segmentation, list hygiene, metrics, integration and list building tactics.

If you want learn how other marketers (both B2B & B2C) are using email – and their results – download the entire DMA Email Client Report 2009 (pdf)

People don’t limit themselves to reading emails online. Many of us choose to print out email newsletters.

Emails are often printed out as part of the online research collateral brought into meetings, for reading in transit – or are brought into a shop to show sales staff.

Printed emails play direct and indirect roles in a sales process, so you should optimise your email newsletters for print to take full advantage of having them viewed on and off line. A few tips for designing:

• Have the template designed no wider than 647 pixels. Do a test print to make sure it works.
• Make all the elements of a page are meaningful when read offline. Instead of using “email us” as the link cover – which won’t mean anything on a printed copy – use the real address as both the link and the cover.
• Have the complete URL to your website is listed somewhere on the page.
• Don’t confine responses to email. Have other contact points such as a phone number.
• Create measurable ‘print this’ links. The technology is available to offer links to printer friendly versions of an article that will register as a click metric. Even taking in to consideration this figure will only represent a portion of “print” actions (many will use their browser) this is still an interesting metric to measure.

• Jan 29 : 10 Feb Event: Half-day Email Newsletter Workshop
• Jan 22 : Clarity trumps persuasion
• Jan 13 : 27th January: London, email marketing event (B2B Marketing magazine)
• Dec 21 : DMA UK Email Client Report 2009
• Nov 18 : Optimise email newsletters for print