Email is the glue holding together all other communication mediums, experts agree at MediaPost's Email Insider Summit on Friday. That's because "it's a proactive media, and we have the ability to make things stick," said Ryan Phelan, VP of Digital Impact and Strategic Services, at Acxiom. Yet, according to Phelan, the industry is doing a "horrible job" at connecting consumers' communication threads. Why? For one, the message is "mostly about a discount." It's important to really think about what said glue is for, according to Rob Brosnan, SVP Strategy at StrongView. Ideally, it should be about "moving the message forward." …

As CMO of DonorsChoose.org, Katie Bisbee knows something about standing out from the crowd. The nonprofit, which encourages people to fund classroom projects across the country, has recently received a ton of good press, including the cover of Fast Company's recent "Most Innovative Companies" issue. This second, Bisbee is sharing her stand-out secrets with attendees of MediaPost's Email Insider Summit in Key Largo. Keep customers in the loop; don't overwhelm them; make recommendations based on the data you can gather; etc. Oh, and "Mind your manners," Bisbee stressed. More than just a marketing strategy, "It's how we operate as an …

In the keynote at Email Insider Summit this morning, Katie Bisbee, CMO of DonorsChoose.org discussed how her nonprofit is using email to help crowd fund for underserved public schools across the U.S. Teachers can go onto the site to create a desired project for their classroom, be it buying dictionaries for all of the kids, buying science kits or going on field trips.

It isn't just one email “journey” but several different types of interactions for customers with one company's email marketing.   Speaking at the MediaPost's Email Insider Summit, Joel Book, principal of marketing insights of ExactTarget, says one-to-one marketing campaigns are more complicated these days when …

Regis, the largest hair salon chain in the world, has found that the biggest challenge with email acquisition has been to train hairstylists to collect email addresses. The company has found that educating stylists is the way to get around this issue, said Brad McDonald, VP, Loyalty at Regis, said in a panel at the Email Insider Summit today. Rather than just offering incentives (which can result in bad email addresses), McDonald said that his company has focused on educating stylists on how growing an email list can help their personal business has been effective.

Jennifer Statham, Executive Director of Global Marketing Technology & Agency Management, at Dell spoke about the importance of innovation and customer-centitcity to help address the challenge of building business growth and revenue. While she admits that customer-centricy is a basic idea, she said that it is still worth reminding teams about the importance of being customer-centric in order to identify how the company is building pipelines to achieve this goal. The customer is core, after all. "Everybody let's go solve long division together so that we can get the customer what they need across the equation," she said. To help …

Given growing media distractions, what gets TV-video consumers' initial attention for a piece of marketing content? TV has its audio prompts; internet platforms needs video cues. Typically, TV viewers get an audio cue — from TV marketers or other content providers -- to get viewers to focus on their primary screens, and perhaps away from their second screens. But this isn’t as true of an commercial on YouTube, Facebook or on other digital platforms.  "You have to make ads more visually engaging,” says Joseph Tam, senior partner/ senior digital director of MEC, in speaking at MediaPost’s …