As marketing professionals, there’s no better way to hone your craft than by talking to your peers and understanding their playbook – what’s working and, sometimes more importantly, what mistakes they made along the way so you don’t make the same ones. While this can sometimes be accomplished at industry trade shows, you’re often among a diverse crowd, not all of whom are tasked with creating a high-performing email marketing calendar.

That’s why Coherent Path recently co-hosted an invitation-only peer forum with Staples specifically designed to bring email marketers together to learn from one another’s experiences – the good, the bad and the ugly. The forum attracted retailers from diverse industries – from apparel and footwear to drug stores and home improvement. Over the course of the day, we heard from Alanna Vallee, senior director of targeted marketing at Staples, who shared how the company is evolving its email marketing program, as well as the solutions they explored along the way.

Following Alanna’s talk, we broke out into roundtable discussions, where retail marketers shared how they are coping with the pressure to send more email to increase revenue,the strategies they are using to combat email fatigue by striking the right cadence of emails to send to shoppers and how that cadence is determined. Attendees shared the strategies they are using to grow the lifetime value of each customer and increase margins, and were candid with their peers about which have not been particularly effective.

We also gave attendees a first look at our new research, which was conducted in partnership with RSR Research analysts to determine which of the top retailers’ email marketing programs are making top grades and which are falling short (to get your grade, click here).

2018 Peer Forums

Interested in talking to your peers about how they are approaching email cadence with general subscribers and those customers for whom they have a complete data profile; what KPIs everyone is being held to and which ones matter most; how they decide how much content to produce; and the biggest challenges keeping them up at night? These are just some of the topics on the agenda for our next peer forum, which is currently in the works for early 2018.

To request an invite, click here.

Also published on Medium.