The sun is shining here in Palm Desert, as marketers from around the wrold have gathered to talk about online retailing for eTail 2007. Today’s preview day events were split between search and e-mail, and just down the hall was day two of a nonrelated mobile marketing conference.
I sat in on the e-mail day and met marketers from L’Occitane, Saks, See’s Candies, LL Bean, Circuit City and Warner Home Video.
I met one man from Canada, another from France, and yet another from Brazil. eTail is not just for the big name American brands.
A big theme throughout the day was personalization and segmentation. Words I’ve heard a thousand times before, and so have most of the marketers in the room, but today was for those who are applying these best practices and trying to do it even better. Web 2.0 technologies like RSS and mobile marketing were discussed, which I heard a lot about in the mobile conference yesterday. Both mobile and RSS have to be highly segmented and it is good to see marketers recognizing the value of this kind of targeting in e-mail.
Today’s discussions were less theory driven, like “we should offer relevant content to consumers” and more about the actual application, such as “how do we make e-mail better for content on a mobile device.
I wonder if anyone from the e-mail marketing conference will run into anybody from the mobile conference at the pool. They’d certainly have something to talk about.
-Dianna Dilworth
