CSA Summit 2019: Email Marketing Alive and Well Through Standards and Inspiring Technologies

• Success through standardization and individuality – email experts to meet at the CSA Summit 2019
• Industry self-regulation ensures better customer experience for recipients

33 years after Her Majesty sent her first email, email communication is alive and kicking – and, as has always been the case, not everything about it is bright and shiny. Spam and phishing mails in electronic mailboxes continue to annoy recipients and not only damage the reputation of email itself as a medium, but also of the sender. Email is also barreling ahead with the reputation of not being “hip” enough do justice to the expectations for individualization of today’s consumers.

Legal regulations, such as the EU General Data Protection Regulation, obligatory since May 2018, lay down who is allowed to send emails to whom, and on what grounds. But it’s not as easy as it seems, as the daily flood of spam demonstrates. Email marketers, Internet service providers, and email service providers have been working together for years now to turn email into a better and more trustworthy marketing tool. The magic word here is “self-regulation”. How this can work, and what technical specifications exist, will be topics of discussion for experts from around the world at the CSA Summit from 10 – 12 April 2019 in Cologne, under the motto “Email – Just For You”.

Email as trustworthy marketing tool

“From the technical point of view, everyone can send out emails to their heart’s content,” says Julia Janssen-Holldiek, Director of the Certified Senders Alliance (CSA). Emails are quick to create, platform-independent, measurable, and above all, they cost nothing. That should make them the ideal marketing tool. Unfortunately, though, the email and its sender do not enjoy the best of reputations in many places. Among other things, this is because time and again recipients discover emails in their inbox that they simply don’t want and with content which does not interest them. However, seeing as not all senders see complying with prevailing law as a priority, and the prosecution of every individual case is unrealistic, it is necessary to place emphasis on self-regulation.

One important component of this self-regulation is the mailbox provider. For the benefit of user experience, mailbox providers have set their filters in such a way that recipients should only receive emails that they actually want. Certain technical standards also need to be fulfilled in order for emails to pass through these filters. What these standards look like will be dealt with in a special workshop at the CSA Summit. The mailbox providers themselves are naturally particularly interested in compliance with these standards, and in ensuring that the user experience of email recipients is as positive as possible. So they are also working – at times together with senders – at improving the customer experience of email recipients and at protecting them from unpleasant surprises in their inboxes. These developments will also be handled on the main day of the Summit, with this providing an insight into what emails will look like in the future. New technologies are enabling a customer experience which no longer has anything in common with email marketing as a boring push-channel, but which can instead inspire recipients.

Collaboration for personal and individual emails

Even if you assume that an email is “legally clean” and up to the standards of the mailbox providers, it is still a long way from clear whether it will be successful and that the recipient will react in the way the sender hopes. “Our motto, ‘Email – Just For You’, highlights on the one hand the demand of the individual email recipient to receive only serious, relevant information by email, tailored to his or her individual needs. On the other hand, the motto is also intended to illustrate the professional desire of the marketer to build a close, personal, and ultimately profitable connection with existing and potential customers,” Julia Janssen-Holldiek explains.

The more personal and individual an email is, the more relevant it will seem to the recipient. A range of presentations at the CSA Summit will therefore look at the question of how to optimize the user experience of email marketing through interactive emails or on the basis of customer feedback, while maintaining trust in “email” as a channel through compliance with standards.

At the Certified Senders Alliance’s CSA Summit, being held this year for the sixth time, email marketers, Internet service providers (ISPs) and email service providers (ESPs) from all around the world meet to exchange information, ideas and experience about email marketing. Detailed information on the CSA Summit 2019, such as the agenda and the registration form, can be found online at https://summit.certified-senders.eu.