Strasbourg celebrates the 10th anniversary of Email Marketing Day

On May 22 and 23, Email Marketing Day celebrated its 10th edition at IRCAD (Institute for Research Against Cancers of the Digestive System). AutomationDay, partner of the event, brings you its recap of the event!

EMDAY is the only event 100% dedicated to Email Marketing. 

Here is what caught our attention: 

Email marketing at the heart of crisis communication

The NGO Baroudeurs de l’espoir raised €122,000 in donations through an email communication campaign following the earthquake in Syria. A 60% click-through rate from a single donation appeal email.
Anne-Laure Adam and Sacha Souffran demonstrated the effectiveness of email campaigns for fundraising in support of humanitarian action in Aleppo. Active on social networks such as Linkedin, Whatsapp, Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, the NGO usually sends 1 newsletter per week. Communication is carried out over the long term with profiles of professional patrons and individuals over 50. The areas for improvement are more advanced segmentation and personalization through Marketing Automation. 

Becoming your own email router: ROI-driven or heroic?

Laurent Garnier from NP6 by ChapsVision and Yves-Marie LE PORS-CHAUVEL from Postmastery gave us a Norman answer: it depends. However, they laid out for us the pros and cons of the on-premise version and the SaaS model. If there is one idea everyone agrees on, it is that becoming your own router means combining many highly specialized roles: data analyst, developer, DBA, integrator, marketing and GDPR expert, and even mediator and lobbyist (with ISPs).

Email UX, 90% of the information reaching the brain comes from vision

Gabriel Gastaud proves to us with figures the enormous superiority of design in the effectiveness of email campaigns compared with storytelling. Or at least that without UX-first design, no message gets read. We spend an average of only 9 seconds on an email, and even just 8 seconds on mobile. He then gave us his 4 best marketing tips: 

1. Lighten your emails to under 500KB to speed up loading time (HTML under 102KB, and use Pingdom Website Speed Test to test it.
2. Visual scanning requires you to work on maximum readability depending on the target audience. For this, the flesch-reading-ease methodology gives you a score that should get as close as possible to your objective. 
3. Finally, never forget the call to action with well-coded, well-placed CTA buttons, while also remembering the value proposition inside. 
4. Fat-finger syndrome requires you to place an eye-catching visual first. 

Cookies & consent, 70% accept everything

You could not have missed the consent request made by Axeptio on websites, complete with humor and appetizing cookies. Its CEO Romain Bessuges-Meusy gave us an update on the use of cookies and tracking for implementing marketing automation strategies since the end of Privacy Shield, and before the expected arrival of the AI Act this year, and ePrivacy in 2024. “The future of websites and email marketing is being called into question by AI and other assistants, so we might as well prepare for it.” In the meantime, know that when you let internet users choose their level of acceptance of cookie tracking, 70% accept everything, 30% refuse everything, and … 0.05% configure. 

Email security, SPF, DKIM and DMARC: what are they? 

Lotfi Benyelles and Marc van der Wal from Afnic explained to us the difference between SPF, DKIM and DMARC, and above all why they need to be implemented. When we tell you EMDAY is serious stuff, this is where it gets hardcore. You should know that these 3 levels of Domain Name (DN) security are respectively used at rates of 57%, 23%, and … 7.8% (1.3% on .fr). It may not seem like much to the uninitiated, but the quality of a site’s address and its sub-sites can determine how easily they can be used for spam and phishing. To learn more, quickly consult your CTO. 

+27% by injecting AI into email campaigns

Through generative AI, Eric SABINE demonstrates how his solution Deebr enables Florian risi, marketing manager at Appart’City, to achieve +47% performance on the RPM of his email campaigns. Deebr uses ChatGPT, MidJourney and predictive marketing algorithms to segment and create engaging emails.

B2B salespeople, stop spamming us on LinkedIn!

Denis COHEN ?? from Dropcontact answered the questions of Bruno · Fridlansky on the concepts of cold email, data and GDPR. While in 2014 we had a 90% open rate, today cold email is becoming spam. And yet, thanks to the enrichment of CRM databases, old-school cold email prospecting is becoming effective and profitable again. Inbound marketing is no longer the ultimate holy grail. 

But only on condition of respecting 3 fundamental rules: 

1. a data audit to segment it and hyper-personalize it,
2. a legitimate interest in contacting the prospect,
3. requiring yourself to stop the campaign if there is no response, and even deleting the data after 3 years without interaction.

Stop buying prospect contact lists

Annalivia Ford and Carel Bitter gave us the 3 essential tips to avoid ending up blacklisted on the lists of Spamhaus Technology Ltd.. It is common sense and almost obvious, but it is always better said out loud: 

• Phishing happens mostly through ISP accounts (ESP in English, your internet service providers and email accounts). So regularly update your passwords and deploy two-factor authentication systems (2FA, identification on the web with a code on your mobile). 
• Far too many companies have poor contact list hygiene and no process for bounces (emails that do not reach their recipient, addresses that no longer exist). Create a “bounce unlist” and update it after each email marketing or marketing automation campaign. 
• Stop buying contact lists. You have no traceability of their origin or age, there are trackers inside, and finally and above all “consent is not transferable”. 

Convert 40% of your MQLs into customers with Marketing Automation 

Yours truly had the pleasure, on behalf of Webmecanik, of presenting marketing automation scenarios whether your company is just starting out or already expert: 

1. start by qualifying and segmenting existing databases,
2. then activate nurturing to double performance by feeding the top of the sales funnel with those looking for information, but also all those who could not make a decision because it was too early,
3. increase the overall value of your existing customers (LTV, or Lifetime Value) with scenarios for up-selling, cross-selling, and add-selling. The cherry on top: selling more value to your customers also keeps them longer.