Week of September 20, 2012:

We’re coming to you live from the largest conference any of the WhatCounts team has ever seen in our professional careers, Dreamforce 2012, the annual Salesforce conference. There are close to 100,000 people at this event, and its scale is breathtaking. You’ll get a sneak preview of what we’re seeing and what it means for you as an email marketing professional in this week’s issue.

Christopher S. Penn, Director of Inbound Marketing, WhatCounts

Your carefully crafted subject line is pointless…

Your expensive designer-made responsive template means nothing…

Your clever and informative content fails to move sales forward…

… if your message isn’t delivered in the first place.

In this new white paper from WhatCounts, learn the best practices, tips, tricks, and hints for getting your emails delivered. From major ISPs like Gmail and Hotmail to tricky corporate email systems, this paper will guide you through what you need to know to make it past spam filters and firewalls and into subscriber inboxes.

Download your copy now!

Want to get even more insight and access to great discussions about email marketing? Join our LinkedIn group, Enterprise Email Marketers, and catch discussions, polls, and debates about what’s happening in email marketing now.

Want to meet members of the WhatCounts team and share your experiences finding and growing your email marketing ROI? Here’s a list of upcoming events where you can interact with the WhatCounts team.

September 18-21: Dreamforce, San Francisco, CA

WhatCounts Director of Inbound Marketing Christopher Penn will be speaking on digital marketing ROI along with several members of our team.

October 3-5: MarketingProfs B2B Forum, Boston, MA

WhatCounts Director of Inbound Marketing Christopher Penn will be speaking on marketing ROI, as well as hosting a breakfast table on email marketing.

WhatCounts is hiring EVEN MORE PEOPLE!

We’ve got a whole careers page full of opportunities for you to showcase how well you know email marketing, and more positions being posted every day. If you know email marketing, come work for WhatCounts!

Marketing Education

In this week’s newsletter, we’re coming to you live from Dreamforce 2012. Far beyond just a gathering of Salesforce users, we’ve gotten a chance to see how effective use of Software as a Service (SaaS) applications, including WhatCounts, can help pave the way towards increased growth, profitability, efficiency, and happiness.

The common message among all of the more than 800+ presentations and speakers is this: the future is knowing the customer at levels of detail previously unheard of, then providing service to that customer in unprecedented ways. For example, WhatCounts client Virgin America was showcased in its use of customer data to assist travelers. When a plane appears significantly delayed, Virgin’s customer service teams proactively look at the flight, isolate the customers who would be affected by the delay, rebook them so that they make the appropriate connections, and then automatically transmit updates, maps, and messages to the customers at their seats while in flight. Instead of being stressed and unhappy, they arrive satisfied and ready with a plan that helps them get where they need to go.

As email marketers, we need to be providing as much data and insight to our overall marketing efforts as possible. To lay the foundation for this, there are some simple steps you can take today. First and foremost, turn on Google Analytics tracking in every campaign that you send out. Many of the top sales and marketing applications like Salesforce.com rely on or leverage Google Analytics data, and just turning this feature on (supported in all WhatCounts platforms) will give you terrific insight about how your email is being shared and read.

Adopt a data-driven mindset. Test everything and anything that you send, constantly, so that you’re always improving your email marketing program. WhatCounts provides you with an incredible amount of data and insight about your customers – who’s engaged, who’s not, what’s popular, what’s invisible – and adding those insights to any data analysis effort is as easy as a simple export from any of our platforms.

Finally, look to integrate your email marketing with other marketing systems. WhatCounts provides robust application programming interfaces (APIs) for its Publicaster and Professional Edition platforms, and we’re happy to help you learn more about how to use these features to tie into hundreds of different other services that use these same inudstry-standard APIs. Talk to your account manager if you’re interested in learning more.

Dreamforce 2012 has been an amazing experience for us as we work to grow our knowledge of what’s changing in the marketing and sales software industry. We’ll have more insights from the show next week on our blog and in this newsletter.