Phew! What a month.
London in the springtime is not all rain and warm beer you know, it’s also the online industry’s busiest show time. We’re finally catching our breath after two great shows - Internet World and salesforce.com’s inaugural Dreamforce Europe. If anybody needs a clear illustration of the strength and growth of the email marketing industry in Europe, you need look no further than these two events. Representatives from virtually every EU country were present, making these a homogonous bringing-together of some of Europe’s brightest marketing minds.
And what a pleasing contrast to the conversations of only a few years ago. Back then visitors would come on to our stand and ask – “how many emails can you send out in one hour?”, “can you view who opened an email?”, “do you have a built-in email editor?”, etc. All perfectly valid questions, but things have changed in a very short period. We are now engaged in more considered conversations right from the outset. Very common discussions now start with “how can we undertake better email marketing?”, “which products should we consider integrating with to give us a 360 view and maximise control over of our marketing efforts?”, “how can we test ideas and strategies and easily implement against results?”, etc. We love it!
Don’t get me wrong; product functionality is the foundation stone of the conversation, as without it you don’t have much! But being able to undertake triggered messages responding to an action in your CRM solution, then pulling content immediately from your CMS, taking into account behavioural information you have gathered in your Web Analytics is a very (very!) clever operation, but that’s all it is…an operation. The intelligent part is working out how you want this to work from a marketing point of view.
It is such a great position to be in, when asked these kind of questions, to be able to have ExactTarget’s bag of tools at our disposal. We can rest assured that whatever the challenge, we have a product solution to suit, leaving us to concentrate on the questions more interesting to the Marketer…about Marketing!
And after all the excitement of the two UK shows, it was a very relaxing contrast to invite customers, prospects, partners and colleagues to a special wine tasting evening at London’s exclusive Groucho Club to say a big “thank you”. Both winners of a competition run on our stands and friends from salesforce.com and Omniture attended the event run by “The Wine Adventure”. A mix of blind wine tasting, aroma scent tests and expert guidance from our energetic host meant all went away with a much better understanding of wine…and a little merrier! Plus the winning team each went away with a bottle of fine Champagne for their endeavours.
The evening was a great success by all accounts and it’s easy to draw a comparison between all those people who attended (representing clients, solutions partners and ExactTarget) and the industry in which we all work. If we all integrate as well as we did that balmy evening in London, then the online world will be a better place!
ExactTarget’s “Wine Adventure”, The Groucho Club, London. May 2008
David Godden
General Manager
Keymail Marketing Limited, Authorised EU Reseller of ExactTarget
