After months of anticipation, the Return Path World Tour began on Tuesday 30 April at the prestigious home of BAFTA in Piccadilly. I had the pleasure of organizing this meeting of minds to discuss the changing email marketing landscape over the past year, with a focus on the profound effects of GDPR.
Kicking off this year’s proceedings was Return Path’s COO, Dave Wilby, who discussed his observations over the past year – including the return to prominence of email marketing, comparing the effectiveness of single and double opt-in subscriptions and the growing use of AI in email.
Guy Hanson, Return Path’s VP of Professional Services, followed with his keynote presentation on the conundrum of email customer lifetime value, discussing email marketing’s average return on investment, as well as stressing the importance of reducing list churn. Guy also looked to the future to discuss the introduction of new technology into email marketing and how the optimization of email for smartphones and other platforms, such as voice assistants and wearables technology, could be instrumental to email campaign success in the coming years.
After taking a short break to network, we got back to the action as McDonald’s Head of CRM, Andrew Ellis, explained the strategy behind the McDonald’s Monopoly campaign for 2018, which is the UK’s biggest annual sales promotion campaign. During the 2018 campaign, McDonald’s were also dealing with the introduction of GDPR, so it was extremely interesting to hear how this was turned to their advantage.
Next, we heard from West Wing’s Deliverability Manager, Magnus Eén, who explored the company’s techniques for driving higher engagement for its online-only homewares business. As a European business, it was interesting to hear their experiences dealing with various Mailbox Providers, the forecasted rise of the mid-sized MBPs and the conclusions that UK-centric businesses can glean from them. It was heartening to hear how Return Path Certification when using various IP addresses, some of which were certified and some were not, had cleared up their deliverability issues.
The event finished up with a drinks reception, where our attendees enjoyed a cocktail or two while networking with Return Path executives and other industry influencers.
Thank you to everyone who attended the first stop of the Return Path World Tour and, in particular, to our customers McDonald’s and West Wing for sharing their experiences with us. The next event in the series was Sydney on Wednesday 8 May to be followed by Paris on 22 May and São Paulo on 5 June.