 | By Sandeep Vadgama, Founder, Fourth Source |
Last Thursday I attended the annual eCircle connect conference. Now in its second year it is the event where “innovation meets inspiration”, a one day event where a host of speakers aim to inspire digital marketers throughout the day.
Key Highlights
Advanced Email Marketing with The Cloud
Simon Bowker, Managing Director of eCircle
2012 is expected to be one of the most challenging years for email marketers and for most professions in digital marketing. The spend in email marketing continues to increase, a recent report by Forrester suggests it will reach $2.5bn by 2016. The tech space continues to grow, trends for 2012 will be; data, data security, multi-channel and multi-devices.
Data is King – Being able to send highly targeted and personalised emails requires data, making it king.
Data Security – Whilst data is king, it is important that data is kept secure and with all current issues surrounding privacy, it is important to remain transparent about how you will be using your customers data.
Multichannel – There are many channels available to reach your customers, the challenge remains how to maximise revenue across all of them.
Multi-devices – In addition to multichannels, we have an increase in the use of smartphones and tablets, it will be important for businesses to optimise for these devices.
Simon introduced to us to a clever campaign by Tesco in Korea, they wanted to break into the South Korean market and this campaign shows us how they made use of technology, it was worth sharing so I have embedded it below.
Data and the cloud
Building the best campaigns requires data and content, the problem with many businesses is that their data is fragmented across many systems within the organisation. The key is to bring all this data into one centralised area – the cloud. By having all your data in one area, it gives you the opportunity to then query and manipulate that data as you need allowing you to send highly sophisticated targeted email campaigns.
Innocent smoothies and social media
Richard Reed, Co-founder, Innocent
Richard Reed is one of the co-founders of Innocent, who are best known for their fruit smoothies (left), they have also ventured into food products including vegetable filled pots.
Twitter and Facebook should be an extension of your brand. Innocent have over 250,000 likes on Facebook, Richard said it is important to stress, it is not about the number of ‘likes’ but the number of active engagements that count on social media networks. Having a content calendar for your social media activities can help keep organised. Innocent also use social media for product development, it allows them to get real time feedback from their customers.
One Of Richard’s key piece of business advice was:
“If you’re 70% sure about an idea then just go for it, because if you wait till you’re 100% confident in business… you’ll never make a decision, you’ll never get anywhere.”
How Do You Make a Good Campaign (email marketing) Great?
Ol Janus, EHS 4D Discovery
You can make a good email marketing campaign great through three key areas:
- Clever HTML
Use your space effectively, remember the top-left part of the screen is where your readers eye balls will go to most of the time. Carefully place your email content and test your emails on multiple browsers, devices and email services. - Optimum send time
Send time can impact your open rates and click-through rates, continuously test what the best times are for your business, it is different for every business. - Personalisation
Use data to improve your emails, make them more relevant to your audience.
Have a test and learn strategy and continuously repeat.
Are you ready for the new Cookie law?
Conrad Bennett, Webtrends
You now have just 68 days before the new ePrivacy law comes into force.
In simple terms, it just means you have to tell people on your website exactly what you will do with the cookies and get their permission to do so. The legislation will apply to any organisation trading in the EU, even if they are based outside of it. If your thinking you will get away with not making your website compliant with the new regulations, think again, it is the law. As the site owner you are liable, so make sure your IT or marketing department get it done, or do it yourself.
What should you do?
- Check what types of cookies you are using on your website
- Assess how intrusive your cookies are
- Decide what solution you are going to use to obtain consent
- Implement!
Sir Ranulph Fiennes – OBE
Sir Ranulph Fiennes
Sir Ranulph Fiennes is the worlds greatest explorer, and is the only man alive ever to have travelled around the Earth’s circumpolar surface. He talked of his life adventure, and boy was it an adventure and truly inspiring, if your ever sensing a lack of motivation, I would urge you to go and hear him speak. I cannot begin to summarise his presentation, instead I will leave you with some of the reactions from his talk.
Completely and utterly blown away by Sir Ranulph Fiennes – a truly inspirational man, so honoured to have met a living legend #eceuro12
— Carolina Martin (@CarolinaMMartin) March 15, 2012
Just watched Sir Ranulph Fiennes key note speech at #eceuro12 what an amazing human being
— Lisa Pierce (@lisapierce0384) March 15, 2012
Full house for Sir Ranulph at @eCircleUK‘s #eceuro12. You can hear a pin drop, everyone is utterly gripped!
— eCircleUK (@eCircleUK) March 15, 2012
You can find out more about Sir Ranulph Fiennes here.
More Event Photos
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