Agenda

Read rates appear to be declining. Machine learning seems to be driving more of your drops into spam folders. Email clients are giving users easier ways to unsubscribe, Keeping customers engaged has never been harder and more critical. Marketers who have fought back the disengagement challenge share how they are analyzing reader behaviors and crafting engagement strategies for maintaining the base.

In-housing is the big trend among marketers who strive to retain control of their customers and data and to become more spry in their creative and integrated work. But should that trend include email. We hear from two marketers taking different approaches: one that saved money and gained efficiency by bringing email in house and the other who extended their staff and capabilities with the right agency.

An EIS tradition - the baring of the souls. Several of our messaging gurus share their most embarrassing but valuable mishaps. We explore not only where and how good intentions went wrong, but what marketers learned from them. What weakness did this faux pas reveal. And most importantly, what did they do to ensure it wouldn’t happen again?

Deep personalization reaches far beyond the custom subject line and "Dear XXXX." A new generation of direct-to-consumer (D2C) brands are showing how true one-to-one leverages data and messaging seamlessly across touchpoint to understand a customer's personal shopping journey, relationship to the brand, and future needs. We ask some of the most innovative emerging brands to share how they are using messaging to drive performance and build brand all at once.

The pain of integrating a new ESP is legendary. The best start, however, is a solid RFP that clarifies for brand and vendor the needs and goals of the project. Marketers who have successfully navigated this experience recently share their lessons learned, their checklists, their regrets. How did they poll and reconcile internal stakeholders? Understand their database need? Work with IT, product development and engineering? Define goals and feature sets?

As most email marketers continue to move away from batch and blast and towards target and trigger, waves of new data layers and automation tech pile in. The promise of higher tech always has been better performance, but it also claims to free teams up from mundane tasks to focus on higher level strategy. Is it so? We ask several brands to reflect on how they are managing (or being managed by) automation. Has it just added a new task set? Did the new tech come as advertised or get used in unanticipated ways? Is it helping them achieve higher level marketing goals? And what have we learned about making automation work for rather than us work for it?

Our in-boxes are talking, moving, animating and interacting. But are these new capabilities just flailing for attention or really improving customer experiences and marketer engagement. When does (and doesn't) bringing the multimedia experience into the in-box work?