• by David Goetzl  @dgoetzl, December 11, 2008

A discussion on the final day of MediaPost's Email Insider Summit found email marketers emphasizing the importance of employing a bottom-up and not top-down strategy. In other words: Avoid the easy trap of forgetting consumer preferences and habits.

Stephanie Miller, vice president of strategic services at Return Path, who moderated the panel "A Call to Arms: How You Can Truly Move the Needle on Email," suggested that marketers often deliver messages they want to convey, rather than what a consumer is seeking.

"We're giving them broccoli when what they really want is pizza," she said. Much of email marketing is still not relevant to--and not targeted at--consumers, she added.

Brad Bacon, director of distribution at The Weather Channel Interactive, said it's easy to focus on evaluating data and "sort of forget about the face of the consumer ... and focusing solely on them." One issue to consider is how to avoid tipping the scale in favor of advertiser preferences, he said.

"We've made the mistake before," he said. "Several years back, we kind of took an advertiser-focused approach to building out an email program that we could monetize."

But that mistake has him more cautious about focusing "efforts solely on the advertiser because you're really not going to make your consumers happy that way."

Return Path's Miller responded that if consumers are happy, advertisers will be, too.

During the panel, Miller asked those in attendance to make a series of commitments. Among the seven pledges was: "I will ensure that subscribers who opt out of my email messages will not receive another email they don't want. Period."

And the last one? "I will never place a hyphen in the word 'email.'"

"It's an internal debate with the editor in chief and myself," said Jack Hogan, COO of LifeScript. "It is in the dictionary without the hyphen, so we as an industry should make sure that's cemented."

Bacon followed tongue-in-cheek: "Think of the time each one of you in this room could save not typing the hyphen."