Yesterday I conducted another Thought Leaders Summit for MarketingProfs. This one was on email marketing. I had the pleasure of facilitating a conversation between some leading minds in the email marketing space, including Jim Sterne, author of several excellent books on email marketing and a founder of the Web Analytics Association; Shar VanBoskirk, consulting analyst with Forester Research; Eric Kirby, Senior Vice President and General Manager for Email Solutions at DoubleClick; Chris Baggett, founding partner of ExactTarget; Rok Hrastnik, owner of MarketingStudies.net and author of Unleash the Marketing and Publishing Power of RSS; Chris Price, managing director of Permission NZ Ltd; and Neil Squillante, president of LandingPage Interactive. We covered a lot of ground during the summit, including:

• whether email marketing as we know it is doomed
• the role of RSS – to replace or to augment email
• reliability of email tracking
• navigating past spam filters
• CAN-SPAM legislation
• extraordinary versus ordinary email campaigns
• top most effective email marketing tactics
• objectively selecting an email marketing vendor
• what the future has to hold

This was the third Thought Leaders Summit that I’ve had the pleasure of conducting for MarketingProfs, the first two being on search engine optimization and business blogging. I look forward to the time when we have a library of Thought Leaders Summits available for marketers covering all the key areas in marketing, particularly online marketing. Our next summit will be on buzz marketing. The line-up for that one includes: Emanuel Rosen, author of The Anatomy of Buzz; Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba, authors of Creating Customer Evangelists; Harvard professor David Godes; Jonathan Carson, CEO of BuzzMetrics; Dave Balter, founder of BzzAgent; Luanne Calvert of Mixed Marketing; and analysts Jim Nail and Gary Stein. The audio recording, transcript, and summary of yesterday’s Email Marketing Summit will be available in about a month’s time. I’ll let you all know when they’re ready.