What are readers favorite conferences and events around email and marketing? I’m starting to plan out my schedule for this year. I did a lot of talks at familiar places last year, and I’m looking to find some new places.
Tell me your favorite conferences in the comments.
I’ve been accepted as a speaker for the Email Innovations Summit in Las Vegas in May. This is a conference hosted by the folks behind the Only Influencers group and should be a great way to meet some of the leading minds in email marketing.
I’ll be speaking on some of the things I see changing in the email space and how that will affect email marketing as a whole. I think it will be great fun and look forward to meeting many of my OI colleagues.
Deliverability is a challenge, I think everyone who has ever tried to send bulk mail will acknowledge that. There are a lot of reasons for this. One of the big reasons is that there are bad players who spend a lot of time trying to get around filters. And a lot of these people are sending very bad mail. Phishing. Spear Phishing. Viruses. Malware.
Email is a prime vector for a lot of criminals.
A lot of deliverability discussions really gloss over the dangers, though. We don’t often think about it, because we’re not sending bad mail. But we still have to go through the same filters that ask: Is this message safe?
Security was a big deal at the recent Sparkpost / MessageSystems conference.
The Email Innovations Summit in London was a good conference. Much smaller than Vegas, but with a number of very interesting talks. I got to meet a number of folks I’ve only known online and we had some interesting conversations at the conference and at the pub-track in the evenings.
I had so many grand plans for doing some work while in London. So many plans. And then I actually mostly disconnected and ignored anything I “should” be doing. Instead, Steve and I did some touristing, some relaxing, some family time and some connecting with his college friends. We also (over)heard a lot of conversations about the US Election. One night at dinner every table around us was talking about our candidates and what they thought of them. It’s always interesting to hear what non-Americans think about our country.
In addition to missing two debates, it seems we missed some online news, too. I think the biggest thing was another large DDoS attack against that took out many major websites. I’m starting to see some comments that spam levels were down during the attack, too, but haven’t dug into that yet.
I did have an article published in the Only Influencers newsletter last week: Marketers Can’t Learn from Spam. All too often marketers think spammers are better at unboxing because they see spam in their inbox. But spammers are just more criminal and spend a lot of effort trying to bypass filters. These aren’t lessons marketers can learn from.
Unfortunately, due to our London trip, we are going to miss M3AAWG in Paris, which starts today. Two weeks between conferences was exactly the wrong time for going to both. Never fear, many folks will be tweeting what they can using #m3aawg38.
We’re both slowly getting back into the swing (and timezone!) of back to work. Blogging will pick up over the next few days. And I have new castle pictures to share.