• by David Goetzl  @dgoetzl, April 27, 2012

Speaking at the MediaPost Email Insider Summit, the engaging Erik Teng, marketing manager in email at WebMD, said there continues to be a sort of beauty vs. the beast debate in email marketing.

A creative team may design appealing messages, but they lack praticality in areas such as how they appear on mobile platforms. There needs to be more coordination between designers and email marketers, he suggested.

"They can design the most beautiful email, but it may not work at the end of the day,” he said.

Separately, Teng said WebMD has been very successful with testing in the list segmentation arena.

Michael Hotz, a senior director at Responsys, said that testing email strategy often lacks planning. It needs to be planned far in advance. Perhaps, look at how much email is planned to be sent out in a particular quarter, and then make a test plan based on that and avoid hastily conceived efforts.