Last week saw the SmartFocus team attend the Marketing Week Live tradeshow at Olympia in London. This show has grown over the last few years, previously being the standalone ‘Online Marketing Show’, to now being part of a quadruple show affair!
We had a very busy two days at the show, speaking with many ecommerce, publishing and travel organisations. Our recently published ‘Dummies Guide to Retention Email Marketing’ attracted many visitors to our stand to talk through their email marketing programmes, whether beginners or veterans.
As we’ve seen in a lot of the tradeshows we’ve exhibited at this year, the standard of visitors is becoming increasingly more savvy about digital marketing. They use these tradeshows to not only see new suppliers and new emerging technologies, but to educate themselves on industry trends, best practice and leveraging digital technologies to their advantage.
The seminar programmes at digital exhibitions give exhibitors like ourselves the opportunity to pass on our industry expertise and help educate this generation of online marketers. This time round we enlisted the help of John Sadowsky, marketing guru to talk with our CEO and Founder Nick Heys, on the subject of Storytelling.
Having last year published a book on the ‘Seven Rules of Storytelling’, John gave his thoughts about how Storytelling can be a crucial part in the success of email marketing. By applying these rules to email marketing and social marketing, Storytelling can enable email marketers to use their tools and technologies more effectively – utilising the traditional method of storytelling.
A great example of how this is working in reality is our client Filofax. Jess Stephens, Group eMarketing Manager at Filofax spoke with John and Nick at the show last week. Filofax have built a passionate online community, stemming from their email and website activity. Filofax have utilised their social media channels and online following to create more than just a personal organiser – it’s developed into people’s stories, their dreams and how it makes them feel. One such blog creation ‘philofaxy’ concentrates on the love people have for their Filofax. Engaging with their social audience has allowed Filofax to employ their user-generated content within emails and their website content, to tell the Filofax story with more than just the product.
Working with John, we are aiming to help our clients use storytelling to make their email programmes more engaging, interesting and ultimately become the best email marketers they can.