• by Staff Writers , June 19, 2019

Let's start with failures. During the first panel discussion Monday at the Email insider Summit in Pinehurst, N.C., moderator Marisa Pisani, Marketing Manager, Email & SMS, Sherwin Williams, left, asked panelists to talk about their epic email mistakes.

Renata Riechelmann, second from left, eCommerce Programs Manager, BISSELL Homecare, Inc., said the brand's tactics led the team to expect high engagement. "We were excited to launch" and then the KPIs came in at 2%. "We are constantly testing and learning," she said.

Brian Schmidt, second from right, Director of CRM & Retention, Fender Musical Instruments, said his team once sent 60,000 welcome emails to people already on board. "We have checks and balances in place now," he said. "Teams working in silos can impact your program."

Caroline Sheedy, right, Senior Manager, CRM, GasBuddy, said her team once send emails about how much car owners could save on gas to ... Tesla owners, "who don't need gas. We learned the hard way that we need to think of all the corner cases."

Where is my data? As Pisani said, "you have complete job security if you know what your data structure is." Sheedy said she feels lucky because the brand has a data scientist housed in one place. "The challenge is getting it into the Salesforce cloud."

Schmidt said Fender has brought on good data engineers in the last six months who know how to process the data it collects. "We're still cleaning up past stuff," he said. Product registration, he admitted, is a problem because people buy their guitars elsewhere or they are handed down. "We can help them learn to play."

Riechelmann said one thing BISSELL asks is whether customers are pet owners, which tells them a lot about the cleaning jobs needed in the home. "We're always thinking about where the data has to go," she said, admitting that "some work needs to be done."

Find the rest of this video here, and see the rest of our Email Insider Summit Agenda page.