• by Dianna Dilworth , May 4, 2013

In the final panel at the Email Insider Summit, email marketing executives shared some of the key insights that they learned at the conference.

Ron Blum, director of member marketing at Care.com, was pleased to hear so much talk of data at the conference. Blum, who has a background in both database management and email marketing said, “It is good to hear what an important role email marketers play in the data world.”

Christopher Kopenec, manager of marketing at Brinker International, which owns Chili’s said that while his restaurant chain does very well with its email as compared to other restaurants, he was struck by how much room for growth there is for their email program after learning about what other marketers are up to at the conference.

The issue of email imagery and creative came up during various panels at the conference. Some marketers said that sometimes one image works better than another, yet for others images didn't matter. Regardless, creative can have an impact on the success rate of emails. On the takeaway panel, Kara Trivunovic, VP of marketing services at StrongMail, said that one of the challenges with creative isthat email marketers move really quickly and don't always slow down to really think about the images. "Sometimes we move too quickly to really take advantage of the creative," she said.

An executive from ExactTarget who was in the audience during the final panel of the show remarked that his key takeaway from the conference is that the big thing that everyone is struggling with is how to create personalized email experiences at scale. “It is easy to think about how you want to treat every individual consumer but the difficult thing is to think about doing that at scale,” he said.