Many years ago (and I mean MANY), when I started my career in email, I had a mentor whom I still respect very much. One of the most important lessons I learned from her was the 40/40/20 Rule of Email Marketing. I would walk into just about any meeting with her, and she would tell clients that 40% of their program's success was driven by delivering someone the right message; 40% was driven by getting the message to them at the right time; and 20% was determined by the creative. She would say that you could write your offer on …

Anyone who has ever heard me speak knows that I'm a huge fan of focusing on the objective, whether it's focusing on an email programme, a newsletter or an individual email. That's what will set you on the path to conversion. I'm going to take this one step further now and propose that for every email programme we set up, we focus on the objective of this programme and name it accordingly.

I had the pleasure of moderating the first panel at the fantastic three-day Email Insider's Summit in Portugal, joined by an expert team of email marketers as panelists. Panos Melissaropoulos of Moosend, Sana Dubarry of Epsilon and Kay Kerman, an email marketing consultant, all shared their insights on the best ways to optimise for conversions with your email marketing programmes.