For me, something was missing from the InboxLove conference...But first, let me show some love for the event!
The InboxLove conference - not your father's email conference. No, nothing like many of the other email marketing events happening on a daily basis. This was a get-together of progressive thinkers around email who unanimously see a long life for email and want to make it work better. For that reason alone you could feel the love for 500startups and the other sponsors of this event before it even got started. There's a really great summary by Chris Nutall on the FTTechHub blog.
What I heard a lot of: Making it easier for us to manage our inbox overload and making the time we spend in our inbox more effective. Good! There's also a lot of effort by Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, and AOL going into making their various inbox applications harmonize with the rest of our online activities (possibly ridding us of the "ALT-tab" phenomenon that surfaced frequently).
What I didn't hear much of: How do we deal with the inneffective and time-sucking emails that are reaching our inbox in the first place? This is a tough problem to solve because it can't be solved by technology alone. It requires equal parts of innovation in technology and behavioral change on the part of all senders. For example, kudos to these folks:
- Rapleaf - for putting the information into email marketers fingertips to send more targeted and relevant email from day 1.
- Shortmail - for forcing the question.
- Ramit Sethi - for steering the conversation away from email marketing tactics/tools and toward behavioral change.
So let's talk about email marketing. There's so much left on the table for making email marketing more rewarding for recipients, and astronomical upside if you can get it right. Although you may not agree with Ramit's core value proposition, I think he was spot-on in saying:
- It's not about testing, it's about understanding behavioral psychology. Changing the behavior is the goal.
- Stop thinking like an expert. It's not about regurgitating information.
- Persuasion is written about and for people, not at people. The key is to get specific.
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The key question email recipients ask themselves: is it right for me? Show them people they can identify with who are receiving important benefits from your solution/service/product.
Here's a toast to this year's InboxLove! What seemed to be missing? Making the inbox more loveable. I hope that next year we're able to applaud a lot more compelling success stories involving technology and marketing practices coming together to reduce the stream of ineffective, irrelevant, and time-wasting emails reaching our inbox.
PS. My favorite quotes from the conference: Jeff Bonforte: "I want to huddle up by the fire with email. I want to make sweet love to email." Dan Martell: "Most people SUCK at email marketing." Ramit: "No one wants to receive a newsletter."
PPS. Interactive Email - our company's attempt to facilitate changing the behavior of email marketers through innovation in technology:
