Vice President of Account Services Christine McQuilkin and Digital Marketing Account Manager Grace Clark attended the 2024 Guru Conference. Guru Conference is an annual free, virtual email marketing conference dedicated to providing attendees with the latest tools, strategies, and insights to help them improve email deliverability, engagement, and effectiveness. This two day event is organized by Guru Media Hub and hosted by Jay Schwedelson –also know as ‘the king of email’ – the Founder of SubjectLine.com and the host of the podcast “Do This, Not That!: For Marketers.”

Top Insights from Guru Conference

This year, the conference’s theme was “totally radical: a throwback to the 80s.” The event featured guest speaker Sarah Jessica Parker and even had a surprise drop-in from Goonies’ star Cory Feldman.

The conference featured a wide variety of email topics, including future-proofing email marketing, customer acquisition, and retention. Here are a few highlights:

Optimizing Deliverability and Engagement

• Email deliverability is going to continue to be challenging, so use strategies like:
  • Double opt-in. This is where after an email is provided, like through filling out a form on your website, send out an automatic email to ask them to confirm their subscription. You’re verifying that the subscriber is genuinely interested in your content.
  • Reputation checks. Tools like SenderScore.com help marketers evaluate and monitor your sender reputation. A good sender reputation gives you better chances of being delivered into an inbox rather than into the spam folder.
  • Random send times. Don’t send email on the hour! It makes your email look automated, like spam.
• Bounces rates are going to be impacted by Gmail aggressively deleting dormant accounts
• Email annotation and automatic deletion dates can streamline inbox management

Email Scoring and Reporting

Creating a scoring model to analyze the performance of your emails is an important aspect of email marketing. Here are some steps to creating an email scoring model:

• Choose key performance metrics – open rate, click-through rate, etc. – and assign each a percentage weighting. These weights will total 100%.
• Set benchmarks for what defines good, average, and poor performance using past data to guide scoring ranges
• Utilize Excel to automate scoring using an IF/THEN formula

An email scoring model will not be perfect the first iteration; be sure to test and tweak your model. A good model will plot as a normal bell-curve, with the average being at the top of the curve. Once you have this model, you can start experimenting with A/B testing to understand how you can apply the success of top-performing emails to future emails. 

Email Retention and Acquisition

• Avoid purchasing lists for your email
• Use relevant, targeted pop-ups on your website
• Engagement tactics:
  • Loyalty rewards. Celebrate anniversaries and birthdays. Give your audience early access to new products, or first access to content. Make them feel like a VIP.
  • Interactive content. Test out quizzes that provide personalized recommendations. Try dynamic content like a countdown to limited offers. Create a sense of urgency for your audience to act on.
  • Behavior triggers. Create automated responses to certain actions, like sending a re-engagement email if the customer hasn’t interacted within a set time, offer recommendations based on past sales, or send additional emails with relevant content based on downloads.

Practical Tips and Tactics

• Use live text (text embedded in the actual email, instead of an image of text) and alt-text for images to improve accessibility and engagement
• Pop-ups are an underutilized tool for your website
• Newsletter writing should prioritize customer’s values and authenticity; avoid clichés
• YouTube and LinkedIn are great channels to organically grow your email list
• Segment customers not only by demographics but by behavior: keep information in your CRM about what they actually bought from you and use that information to know what else you could offer them. Tailor their experience based on what brought them to you.

Guru Conference in Summation

While looking over her shoulder at her computer during the conference, Grace’s husband said “Man, marketers get way cooler conferences than engineers.” While we do enjoy an engineering conference, the vibrance and excitement at a marketing conference is hard to beat!

“Jay Schwedelson is one of my favorite marketing influencers,” said Christine McQuilkin.  “He contributes a lot of valuable information to the industry, from his subjectline.com evaluation website to his Worldata.com email sending dates calendar to his fantastic, high-energy Guru Conference.  Jay was even kind enough to join us on an episode of The Rivergate Marketing Podcast.”

Attending the Guru Conference gave our team valuable insights into the latest strategies and tools for email marketing. We’re excited to refine our campaigns, experiment with new ideas, and continue providing meaningful value for our clients.

If you have any questions about how to implement these strategies and tips at your company, feel free to reach out to our team.