I came to this event with great plans of contributing numerous live blog entries but found that I was too busy to meet my own expectations. This is a good thing. We had a constant flow of great booth traffic, and this conflicted with my desire to see a lot of the presentations, and make a lot of entries.
Typically a glass half full type of person, I changed up my strategy… ask people about the sessions, the exposition, and what they found as the big take-aways. Here’s a short list of the most memorable:
• The event was very focused. As opposed to broad online marketing shows, this one had a clearly defined focus… doing better at email marketing.
• Attendees were very interested in hearing about things that are new, either a new way to view things or new tools to help them. Illustrative of this point is the interest generated by the Dell SMB testing session. Immediately following this presentation, maybe a half dozen marketers came by our booth and asked about our approach and what we had to offer in this area.
• Beyond the typical subject line, day of week, and other content concerns, marketers were asking us about targeting and dynamic content capabilities, and email to webpage integration.
Most presentations were hands on, take notes, and start implementing new ideas on Monday morning. The upside is that the time spent is based around trying to increase performance. The downside is that some of the audience may not know how to discern between options within these ideas, or know that there are options.
Would love to hear your comments!
Mark
Visitor Centric Marketing 