DMA Email Council Meeting - 5th July 2018

Written by Lili Boev who sits on the DMA Email Council. Lili is the Director of Client Success at Vuture.

The monthly email council meeting at DMA House is my monthly opportunity to remove myself from the daily grind of my own inbox and look outwards to other people’s inboxes. In this blog post I’ll give you the happenings from this month’s meeting.

Industry Updates - interesting news, articles and a good old gossip

• Econsultancy’s email census was released. Among the many interesting titbits from the census, email marketing now forms 15% of overall marketing budgets.
• The Email Marketing Tracker has been out for some time. We discussed the costs for email marketing that aren’t considered in the budget which should be accounted for.
• The Wall Street Journal ran a story exploring the data privacy practices of Google and the third-party systems who use their G Suite ecosystem. Return Path were among the companies mentioned. Matt Blumberg wrote a very interesting response to the article on the Return Path here.
• The ICO has fined Yahoo £250k for their data breach in 2016 and BT for sending unsolicited emails in 2017.
• There has been a sharp rise in GDPR ‘complaints’ across Europe - the Guardian.
• One council member has noticed that some organisations have started sending excessive service messaging that could be considered borderline marketing. We discussed where that line is between service and marketing.
• The Legislative Taskforce of the DMA (formerly GDPR Taskforce) has a main agenda item of the new GDPR style law made in California and the upcoming ePrivacy legislation.
• Really Good Emails are educating the public about the diversity of people in email marketing.

What the council is working on

Outreach Hub: We are putting out more content on the inner workings of the email council, what we discuss in our meetings

Research Hub: The long awaited Email benchmarking report 2018 is now live.

The Legal Hub: will be working with the new Legislative Taskforce and will continue to publish the Q&A blogs on GDPR.

Best Practice Hub: working on creating infographics for each section of the Best Practice Guide to give bitesize summaries of the content. The first infographic is nearing completion already.

Guest Speaker, Adam Purslow from Individual Restaurants

Adam talked to us about their journey with email so far. They introduced a loyalty card to drive repeat visits and communicate more effectively with their guests. Through the loyalty card they built a database of contacts but then found they just weren’t getting through to their customer’s inboxes. They worked closely with Return Path to improve their deliverability rates. They are now tackling the challenge of bridging internal silos and making their email marketing more personalised. The council members suggested different ways they could approach these challenges whilst continuing to engage with their loyal customers.

To enquire about being a guest speaker please get in touch with me Lili Boev at: lili.boev@vutu.re

Next month we are taking a short hiatus as much of the council is away. Instead our focus will be on beating the other DMA councils in the inter-council softball tournament.