The Hidden Talents of Email — WistiaFest 2015

In addition to being an email critic, cat lover, and explain-a-holic, Justine is also marketing director at Litmus. You can find her organizing the world’s only conference for people who make email, editing Litmus' latest blog post, or speaking at industry events. She’s strangely passionate about email, hates being called a spammer, and isn’t scared to belch on camera.

In her talk, Justine explains how to leverage email to deliver video in personal, 1–1, and contextually relevant ways. She also demonstrates a number of mistakes that marketers routinely make as they get started with email.

She starts by digging into how email is not dead, contrary to popular belief. It’s a direct, qualitative, and real-time medium. When you send an email — out comes the data. You can see this on social media, with clicks, or even views on a video you linked to.

However, emails are a unique beast, and need to be treated as such. They are not landing pages — emails are the invitation to the webpage. Email is a pesonal medium. We carry it around in our back pockets. We use email to send 1–1 messages. Even when you send an email out to thousands of people, it’s still one person on the other end of the line reading the email.

“Emails are not landing pages — emails are the invitation to the webpage.”

Justine brings up how emails are like credits and debits for your brand. Every time you send something helpful and educational to your audience, you’re building up credits. And every time you send something that’s simply all about buying your product, you are creating debits for your brand.

Email is super useful — it’s responsive. Never use no-reply as the “from” field in the emails you send. You want the user at the other end of the line to feel like the lines of communication are open, not closed.

Finally, Justine discusses how important it is to inject some personality into your emails. If you’re using video, include a fun thumbnail in your email to stir up engagement. The bottom line? Email is an opportunity — take advantage of it.