For email marketers, Think Summit is a one-of-a-kind event. It brings together thought leaders, innovative brands, and plenty of forward-thinking #EmailGeeks. Attendees get in-depth training on the Movable Ink Platform during the pre-conference day, and loads of actionable insight on the day of the conference.
Think Summit is all about creating genuinely inspiring experiences, and every aspect of the event – from the speaker’s topics right down to the choose-your-own adventure style experiential gift bags – is carefully curated to ensure that every attendee not only has a great experience, but learns something too.
Here are some of the top takeaways from Think Summit 2017.
Content is the future of email
Movable Ink CEO Vivek Sharma’s talk, “The Marketer’s Almanac 2017: Harvesting Email’s Potential,” focused on the future of email and its many opportunities. One of the biggest opportunities? Content.
Be human. Be helpful. Be handy.
Shar VanBoskirk, Principal Analyst Serving CMO Professionals at Forrester underlined the importance of customer-centric email content and Forrester’s Customer Obsession: “Make your customer the center of your total operating model. And, lucky for us, she said that there has never been a better time to be an email marketer.
Personalization is one of the best ways to reach your customers
Leslie Jurgens from Walgreens showed us several ways the brand is using intelligent content to better reach their customers, including location personalization, device personalization, geo-targeting, create optimization and more. She also revealed that Walgreens will be completely transforming the way they market to customers with personalized product recommendations.
Speak to one person, not one million people
David Korins, founder of David Korins Design, creates iconic theatrical environments, and is responsible for creating the sets for Hamilton, Bandstand, and has worked with artists like Lady Gaga and Kanye West. In his fireside chat, David stressed the importance of using email to create a personal experience. To do that, he suggests creating content that is aimed at the individual, as opposed to one-size-fits-all content aimed at a massive email list.
Add surprise and delight to your emails
Tania Luna from LifeLabs Learning led an interactive session that changed the way many attendees viewed thought about creating experiences with email. Here’s her 5-point checklist for creating memorable and surprising experiences:
We’re investing big time in our platform
CEO Vivek Sharma took the stage to announce that Movable Ink would be investing $25 million up to the end of next year on new product efforts, and that we’d be tripling our product team. Read more about those updates here.
Movable Ink case studies
We had an incredible roster of clients presenting case studies about how they’ve used the Movable Ink Platform.
Travelocity: Activate your data, see real results
Jim Carlson from Travelocity shared how Movable Ink helped the brand put their wealth of data to work in their emails. By integrating data like pricing, hotel, and location information, along with an optimized email layout, Travelocity saw huge results: just one of their modules saw a 21% lift in revenue and a 106% lift in contribution.
HSN: Behavioral marketing + email = $$$
HSN saw incredible results using Movable Ink’s web-cropping, so they decided to add behavioral marketing into the mix. Using Stories, the Movable Ink behavioral targeting expansion, they ran a test where they added their customer’s abandoned cart items, recently browsed items, and top items to their test group. As a result, HSN saw lifts in net revenue from 11-24% and lifts in engagement from 14-28%.
HotelTonight: Live pricing lifts conversions
Katie White from HotelTonight revealed that their welcome series emails with live pricing and inventory lifted conversions by a whopping 100% over static content. They also boosted their average cart size by $10. When HotelTonight used this tactic in their abandoned cart emails, they boosted conversions by 30%.
Lenovo: More amazing results with behavioral marketing
Kevin Walker from Lenovo discussed how the brand has been a big champion of Movable Ink for a while, and now they’re seeing big results with Stories. Not only have they seen 40% email build time reduction, behavioral marketing has granted them a 17x increase in CTR.
New York Times: Blend personalization + API integrations for top-notch content experiences
Talis Lin from the New York Times explained that the organization created massive amounts of content – about 7,000 pieces per month, to be exact. They needed a way to decrease development time, increase personalization and reduce churn. Movable Ink helped them implement personalization and an API integration that resulted in a 23% lift in CTR.
There were a few surprises during Think Summit, too
The Cafe Wha? house band entertained us (and woke us up)…
We played Email Marketing Family Feud…
There were cookie dough shots during our break…
We hosted a kick-off party on a boat at The Frying Pan…
… and an after-party on a roof at the PHD at Dream Downtown.
Oh, and let’s not forget our VR experience provided by The Glimpse Group.
A huge thanks to everyone who came out and made this our biggest and best Think Summit yet! Have photos and memories to share? Be sure to tag them on social media using #ThinkSummit17.
See you next year 🙂