Big thanks to Steph for organizing Mailcamp. A really useful whistle-stop series of talks from various government and associated organisations on how they are using email for effective marketing.

In these days of shiny trendy social media, email has been tarnished with the dinosaur technology tag. However it’s longevity and ubiquity still makes it one of the most effective engagement tools in the digital marketing melange. These #mailcamp talks offered a useful reminder of the quantifiable benefits of email that we sometime forget in the hurley-burley of twitter gushing.

Takeaways

Ed Cox - ReasonDigital
Email should have actionable requests or ‘asks’. Asks should be small, easily achievable and time-bound.

Simon Burgess - Sift Media
Email shouldn’t just be a push of “news”,  subscribers engage more with opinion and analysis. Work harder to engage.

Paul Kent - Hillingdon Council
Provided real metrics, with the introduction of an email survey showing a 75% reduction in cost with twice the responses of a similar postal survey.

Andy Snow - MHRA
In sectors with very specific interests and regulatory incentive, email can have great engagement rates. MHRA have 78% engagement rate for their email campaigns!

Lloyd Davis
Reminder of usefulness of Posterous as an easy way to co-create websites using email.

Matt Howarth - ReasonDigital
Hilarious talk on what makes the perfect email. Lots of great advice but probably the main take-home for where I work is;  don’t waste time introducing the email that the user has just received. Get to the fucking point!

You can see a great round-up of the day on powered by Storify, and Matt Jukes does a much better effort than me of summarising the day.