Marketing Wisdom for 2008

In Their Own Words, MarketingSherpa Readers Cover Every Aspect Of Marketing

The sixth annual edition of our Wisdom report, features 101 stories and lessons learned from MarketingSherpa's readers, all in their own words. As in previous years, the Editorial team spent many hours poring over the hundreds of submissions, narrowing them down to the ones featured in this report. It wasn't an easy task because we could tell how much time and effort many marketers put into their quotes.

The topics covered in this year's Marketing Wisdom for 2008 touch every aspect in marketing - the old tactics (direct mail, advertising), the new ones (Web 2.0, mobile marketing) and everything in between (email, search, lead generation, customer service).

To serve as inspiration, this year's report features dozens of real-life test campaign lessons and tips. Not all of them are big-sky ideas. In fact, it's often the little ones that bring large payoffs.

Trends

As the Editorial team looked through the entries, similar themes kept reappearing. Here are three we noticed:

Trend #1. Email Don't stop changing Marketers continue to segment, customize, personalize, test, dabble with and tweak their emails. No one appears to be standing pat although keeping emails simple with shorter subject lines continues to be a best practice as marketers work to boost open, click-through and conversion rates. Among the areas being dabbled with for emails are type of content, HTML versus text, video, quality of list and offers.

Trend #2. Year of Web 2.0 The whole story on the effectiveness of social networking is still being written chapter by chapter - despite plenty of successful marketing stories. Facebook and MySpace got the lion's share of attention. But, with no tried-and-true ways to get involved just yet, just getting started seems to be the way to go for many marketers, with trial and error the best teacher to date.

Trend #3. Test, test, test Tweaking your marketing efforts through testing can make a real difference. Indeed, getting involved in any marketing effort without testing is very risky. Tests on timing, educational information versus sales pitches, and offers are among the top focuses of efforts.

Submit Your Stories As you read through your peers stories, think about your own campaigns and test results. Do you have a story other marketers could learn from? If so, let us know. We're always looking for marketers to interview and test campaigns to cover.

If you are interested in what "wisdom" we've collected in past years, be sure to read any of the last five Marketing Wisdom Reports.