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It’s that time of year again…where the greatest minds in email marketing come together for insightful sessions, adventurous networking activities, and some awesome after-hours themed parties. I’m talking about Media Post’s annual summer edition of their Email Insider Summit. Tropical Storm Colin tried to rain on our parade—but nothing can stop this crowd!

This was my first time at Email Insider Summit and it definitely lived up to the hype. I got a chance to step back into my email marketer shoes and interestingly, a lot of the challenges we were talking about a couple of years ago are still top-of-mind for folks today. That’s not to say no progress has been made, but it serves more as a reminder of the monumental challenge that all marketers are trying to tackle on a daily basis: connecting with customers in the right place and at the right time. Here are my four key takeaways from Media Post’s Email Insider Summit 2016: 

Welcome to our new Share a Coke series on the EDQ blog! We think hearing stories right from the people who make up our EDQ family gives us all a chance to recognize these individuals, their talents, and their stories. We wouldn’t be the company we are today without the people who make up our team, and they give a great view to what life at EDQ is like. 

Technology is making consumers’ lives easier, sure, but retailers have to continually play catch-up to match their own technology with consumer expectations. Some retailers are doing it well; others, not so much. Legacy systems have been in place for decades in some instances, and while they may have worked in the past, those systems can’t keep up with the demands for today.

As Dunkin Brand’s president of global marketing and innovation has quite bluntly stated, “If you’re doing business today like you did last week, the competition is gaining on you, and if you’re doing business like you did last year, you may soon be out of business.”

Ouch. But, it’s the truth. That’s why Melanie Clark, our Retail Partner Manager, and I have come together to discuss how today’s leading retailers are simplifying the purchase process, making mobile shopping frictionless, and why ‘showrooming’ and the ‘endless aisle’ should all become the new standards of retail.

If you’ve spent any time in the data management space, you know that the Chief Data Officer (CDO) is one of the hottest new roles in the industry. While the CDO position has been talked about a lot lately, most of the people who are actually in the role have never held this title before. This can be exciting and rewarding as you get to build your data program from the ground up, but also stressful since you don’t necessarily have a clear roadmap for success.

If you’re a Chief Data Officer (CDO), lingering bedtime thoughts about what may be lurking in your database could keep you up at night. And it’s easy to see why. Today’s financial services companies are so tightly regulated that any slip-up can be costly—and not just financially. Tales of noncompliance penalties levied against financial institutions spread like wildfire in the media, damaging your company’s reputation and spooking investors or potential customers.

Email marketing remains one of the most successful and cost-effective marketing channels. Some say it’s second only to search, and we agree. The cost of sending an email is measured in tiny fractions of a penny while the average return is between $0.06 and $0.07*. The common wisdom is that every $1 spent on email returns $40 in revenue. That’s a 4000% ROI!

Yet there’s a lot that can be done to improve results. Clearly open and click through rates depend a lot on subject lines and offers, but maximizing your return also means maximizing deliverability. Here are 10 tried-and-true steps for optimizing your retail email marketing efforts and achieving the greatest return.

In today’s increasingly digital marketplace, retailers find themselves at a crossroads. Their customers are seeking products and information online, and they’re entering retail stores more knowledgeable than ever before. In order to stay a step ahead of savvy customers, retailers are turning to high-tech marketing practices to give themselves an edge. A common way to do this is to use customer contact information to market products and increase customer engagement.

On Tuesday, May 10th several of our employees traveled to schools in the Boston area to participate in a day of volunteerism with JA in a Day New England! More than 50 Experian Data Quality (EDQ) employees volunteered at the St. Patrick’s Day School of Boston and Pope John Paul – Lower Mills. Students from the Boston Latin Academy were also invited into the EDQ office in the Financial District to learn more about our employees, products, and services and to see what a day in the life of an EDQ’er is like. 

I spent the past couple days in Washington, D.C., among hundreds of healthcare data experts. These are my main takeaways from this great event. Health agencies and organizations currently face many challenges as they move to modernize, become paper-free at the point of care, and use collected data to derive key information as decision-making drivers for industry innovation. In many ways, the healthcare industry has been left in the dark ages of technology, from an infrastructural standpoint, with barriers stagnating discovery of potential solutions to global health issues.

Welcome to our new Share a Coke series on the EDQ blog! We think hearing stories right from the people who make up our EDQ family gives us all a chance to recognize these individuals, their talents, and their stories. We wouldn’t be the company we are today without the people who make up our team, and they give a great view to what life at EDQ is like.  In order to make this happen, we are sitting down to Share a Coke with a featured member of the EDQ team, and sharing their story with all of you! So sit back, share a Coke with us, and let’s chat with today’s featured EDQ’er, Greg.