Wednesday, October 7, 2009
Categorized | E-mail Best Practices, Panel of Peers, Service In Action
How to learn more about email marketing?
Posted by Sundeep Kapur | Wednesday, October 07, 2009
When email marketing was still in its infancy a few of us were looking for the best way to learn more about the industry and understand how to apply these best practices to our own marketing campaigns. We looked up a few major email marketing & direct marketing events and decided to interview the people who were going to be conducting these workshops.
What we learned was that the ‘teachers’ were really still ‘learning’ and that these best practices that were going to be shared were a combination of what we were already doing or what we wanted to do ourselves. So rather than subject ourselves through the travel, the exorbitant fees, and the ‘pitch’ we decided to meet and discuss best practices in a round table discussion.
In 1997, 22 companies across different industries and parts of the world decided to meet in a rather large living room and we brainstormed for two and half days. We shared our vision, our challenges, our opportunities, and tried to put together use cases to help us achieve our end state. We decided to share these ideas with each other and even though some of us competed, we decided that we would collude on our learning. The learning was absolutely electric and this is how the Panel of Peers community (http://www.panelofpeers.com/) was formed.
We liked this format so much that we decided to meet by phone every month, one hour every month to share in our learning and focus on a topic that we had picked. The calls usually ran over and it gave these marketers a great way to communicate with each other. Anne Holland from then President of Marketing Sherpa actually interviewed us about these calls – we called them Service in Action (http://www.serviceinaction.com/) – event based marketing at its best. Our goal here was simple, keep tabs of what is current in the industry and connect to discuss how we can do it better.
Both the Panel of Peers & Service in Action have evolved into large groups but the vision is still the same – learn about email, learn about consumers, and always anticipate what is next. We still meet annually, plus through regional workshops, the calls are on each month, & yes there is the blog that supports this learning network.
Come tap into this network, there are no sales pitches, just natural conversations on best practices amongst peers. Tomorrow, we will share the agenda from the first panel of peers – you will be surprised what was hot in 1997.
What we learned was that the ‘teachers’ were really still ‘learning’ and that these best practices that were going to be shared were a combination of what we were already doing or what we wanted to do ourselves. So rather than subject ourselves through the travel, the exorbitant fees, and the ‘pitch’ we decided to meet and discuss best practices in a round table discussion.
In 1997, 22 companies across different industries and parts of the world decided to meet in a rather large living room and we brainstormed for two and half days. We shared our vision, our challenges, our opportunities, and tried to put together use cases to help us achieve our end state. We decided to share these ideas with each other and even though some of us competed, we decided that we would collude on our learning. The learning was absolutely electric and this is how the Panel of Peers community (http://www.panelofpeers.com/) was formed.
We liked this format so much that we decided to meet by phone every month, one hour every month to share in our learning and focus on a topic that we had picked. The calls usually ran over and it gave these marketers a great way to communicate with each other. Anne Holland from then President of Marketing Sherpa actually interviewed us about these calls – we called them Service in Action (http://www.serviceinaction.com/) – event based marketing at its best. Our goal here was simple, keep tabs of what is current in the industry and connect to discuss how we can do it better.
Both the Panel of Peers & Service in Action have evolved into large groups but the vision is still the same – learn about email, learn about consumers, and always anticipate what is next. We still meet annually, plus through regional workshops, the calls are on each month, & yes there is the blog that supports this learning network.
Come tap into this network, there are no sales pitches, just natural conversations on best practices amongst peers. Tomorrow, we will share the agenda from the first panel of peers – you will be surprised what was hot in 1997.
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