By Tink Taylor

Not even a trespasser on the train tracks could stop dotMailer’s Inside Knowledge seminar at the IAB last Friday – an event which saw over 60 email marketeers join myself, Simon Bird, Skip Fidura and Anita White for an afternoon of email and digital thought leadership.

Mainly concentrating on email, attendees went on a whirlwind afternoon through the dotMailer platform, real life examples from retailers studied within our Hitting the Mark email benchmarking report, onto optimising your website and ending with a thought provoking half hour from our newest Strategy Director Skip Fidura on Email in a Web 2.0 World.

Throughout his presentation, Skip hammered home the fact that email is the gateway to customer’s digital lives. Consumers want to be listened to and offered flexibility and choice in the way they receive communications. This means as marketer’s we need to work smarter to ensure we meet their new and changing needs.

Is Email dead in a Web 2.0 world? A resounding no was answered, it just needs some careful thought and an integrated strategy.

by Tink Taylor

The ‘Ready Steady Email’ team followed up on the success of the inaugural London event, with an equally popular workshop in Bristol this month. The format of the Ready, Steady… workshops has proved really popular and effective, so rolling the workshops out to the Regions is an exciting opportunity for all involved.

For the Bristol event we set out to improve on the winning formula with a new, Key Learnings presentation at the end of the afternoon, providing even more practical advice for participants.

Six industry experts, (including your truly) served as facilitators and the competitive element of the workshop helped to keep the day buzzing with energy and ideas.

The RSE workshops are held jointly by the DMA and the IAB, and supported by sponsors dotMailer and Adestra. Part organised by myself and Stephan Elliot and a host of others (to whom a big, special thank you goes) the RSE is set to bring its unique approach to email marketing education even further afield as we plan the 2009 schedule, including Manchester, Scotland and a return to Bristol.

The next Ready Steady Email workshop will be held in London on December 4th 2008. There’s more information at http://www.dma.org.uk By the way – we’re building a dedicated RSE website, so keep an eye out in this blog for more details on that.