The Future of Email Marketing: A Wake-Up Call from the Stage at FWD: London

Last week I had the incredible honor of speaking at Intuit Mailchimp 's event, FWD: London. 

From the moment you walked in, the energy was electric. The production level was so high-level, that even if you hadn't made it to any of the talks, you'd still walk away with SO much inspiration and ideas.

The venue itself was covered in beautiful flowers and it felt like they had every single angle covered, starting with their beautifully curated book shop, featuring some of the best marketing reads out there (including yours truly!!!) to a scent bar where you could create your own custom perfume. 🤯

But of course, the content is what made it so memorable and inspirational. 

So here are the top email marketing lessons from FWD: London that everyone needs to know and embrace:

#1 "Email is the highest revenue driver for most businesses but that's not the only way to leverage it"

Starting out with Dela Quist 's talk about the biggest mistake marketers make with email marketing which is... Treating it as a conversion channel only. 😲 I was actually kind of blown away by how simple and obvious this point was and yet, somehow we're all ignoring it. His point was simple; Email is a great top of funnel channel for building your brand, creating a relationship and making sure you're top of mind when people ARE ready to buy. Even if they ignore your emails and do not open them, they're still seeing you show up in their inbox and you're getting those impressions.

Why is this so good? Because the cost per impression for email is the lowest of ALL others channels (£0.6 vs. £2.10 display for example), yet we don't even blink at spending 10X as much on PPC or any other paid channel. Marketers simply ignore their "unengaged" audiences and refuse to send them emails, but they are willing to invest in a billboard they have no way of measuring, a Facebook ad that won't convert or a radio ads.

Bottom line: Send more emails to reach larger crowds and keep the relationship going, even if they're not as engaged as you hope. Every time you send an email you’re building your brand, one impression at a time.

#2 "Do not become dumb with AI"

Next was an inspiring panel with Andi Jarvis , Nishma Patel Robb 🪩⚡️ , Dave Birss and Joe Wicks . The panel discussed how to stay authentic with the rise of AI, where to find inspiration and how to avoid the trap of blandness. One of the biggest take aways was regarding the two most common ways people are using AI right now:

1. People using AI to do all of their thinking for them,
2. People using the minds, knowledge and experience to create, tweak, optimize and build things with AI.

One of these ways will slow down humanity and create dumb humans... and it's not the second one.

“The people who use AI the best way are those who use AI to amplify their skills and then use their brain for judgement, persuasion, communication, and all the important stuff. AI can’t help with those things. You as the human are the jockey on top of the horse – you have to steer the horse in the right direction." Dave Birss

#3 "Your content won't come from watching your feed"

Creating content that stands out is hard (especially when AI makes it SO easy to create mountains of content that has no value). As Nishma put it: "Our biggest challenge right now is: how do you stand out when there’s more content than ever before?" If you want to create content that stands out and motivates people into action, you need to create value and be authentic.

Bottom line: You're unlikely to find inspiration scrolling on your phone, so get outside and explore the world. Don't try and be anyone other than yourself, stop obsessing about what your product does and focus on what problem it solves.

#4 "Use email marketing for more than just sending emails"

During my talk I spoke about the power of Emotional Targeting in connecting with your audience and increasing conversions. Reminding the audience that every decision their customers make, has an emotional reason behind it - and it's up to them to figure it out what those emotions are.

There's a HUGE difference between Data and Insights. Data tells you where to problem is (e.g a product or a landing page), insights tell you why the problem is happening and HOW to fix it.

To collect these kind of insights you need to turn to meaningful research - surveys, interviews, review mining and social listening. Leverage your emails to reach out to people, ask them questions and connect.

In addition I showed examples of leveraging email marketing as your A/B testing power house. It can be hard sometimes to run A/B tests on your site, or get buy-in for your ideas, so you should leverage email to test out strategies and hypotheses, record your results and THEN translate them to your website.

It can be hard to choose whether to step out of our day to day and go to a conference or not. Above all, FWD: London left me buzzing with ideas, inspiration and new connections, which in my books is far more important than any tactic you could read about in your Linkedin feed. Now more than ever, I definitely recommend finding the time to attend in-person events.