Helzberg Diamonds online marketing manager Lisa Dick said too much testing on email content effectiveness can wear out proud designers. She said you can suck the soul out of them, "so you really need to be mindful and respectful" that you're trying to do your job and they're trying to do theirs. "They will quit if you suck out their soul and tell them too many times, this isn't art," she said. But Brian Brown of ideapark said there are business goals and "branding guidelines within an established set of what we can do," so there are …

Email content designers need to be mindful of the difference between art and commerce. So, ideapark's Brian Brown said designers need some emotional detachment from their work. Even a beauty may not show statistical effectiveness. Brown said one email redesign had him so proud he "personally wanted to marry" it. Then, it was sent out and results were negative. "Got its but handed to it" versus the incumbent design, Brown said. "You need to go with the winner and sort of move on and not get attached to these things," Brown said. Said Litmus marketing director …

Helzberg Diamonds online marketing manager Lisa Dick said nothing can be something when testing an email content's effectiveness. If one design doesn't show statistically significant metrics ... well, that's good to know. "Even no result is a result," she said. In the diamond business, a learning could be to go with a prettier design the next time. Creatives do have sparkling assets to tap, after all. Brian Brown, director of modern marketing at ideapark, said half the tests his company does bring statistically insignificant results in moving the needle. But "that just helps you in the future" …

Lisa Dick, online marketing manager, at Helzberg Diamonds said that often email content takes its cue from the company's catalog, but it can't just be shifted over or re-purposed. For example, print creative can be "so pretty and romanticized," but email has to strike a balance between beauty and functionality. Email has to make it easier to drive engagement and click-throughs. Dick said email has an advantage in over print in testing effectiveness since it costs much less.

WhatCounts President Allen Nance said email marketers need to read the Online Trust Alliance's "Security By Design" recommended security guidelines. He recently saw an RFP that included questions lifted from it verbatim. The RFP asked for a dedicated instance of a database, not a different partition on the same server. It was the first time he saw that in an RFP. Nance added: "We're going to see a much greater emphasis on dedicated databases."

Eloqua Chief Privacy Officer Dennis Dayman said there is considerable activity in governments as far as regulating privacy, but not around security and protecting customer data. Dayman said he thinks self-regulation can work, but there's still a need for legislation on security. There is nothing overarching around marketing data, he said.

One suggestion for increasing security around email addresses is whether a person should be prompted to change a password more frequently in order to log-in. Yet, a show of hands vote in the room conducted by Turner Broadcasting's David Bronson indicated that the business is doing a good job there. Eloqua's Dennis Dayman said 8 characters and punctuation should be used as a minimum for a password, but he is not an advocate of "single sign-on."

Eloqua Chief Privacy Officer Dennis Dayman said that marketers trying to prevent hacking into a system with email addresses may need to ramp up a focus on security. "We as marketers don't put the right protections on things like email addresses," he said. Social security numbers are protected heavily, but less so email addresses.

Content Marketing Institute's Joe Pulizzi said email marketers need to focus more on content quality, partly by designating a "Chief Content Officer," or de facto editor-in-chief, internally. The title doesn't have to be known exactly as a "Chief Content Officer," but the role is crucial. Here are some titles in other companies: Cisco – Content Evangelist Incept – Content Engineer Quality Logo Products – Content Marketing Manager Radian6 – Content Community Manager Johns Hopkins – Web Content Coordinator National Instruments – Content Manager Who is best to fill the role? Pulizzi …

Content Marketing Institute's Joe Pulizzi, the keynote speaker Wednesday, said he'll ask a marketer to lay out all its collateral on a table -- brochures, magazines, email newsletters -- and they can't believe the tone. They find: "It's always about us, how can they stand us? How can they want to do business with us, we're sending them all this crap." Make it more about the consumer. Use a pull, not push publishing tactic. A Custom Content Council survey shows 73% of consumers would prefer to get information from a company "in the form of a collection …