emailexpert Forum comes to London for the first time on 16 and 17 November. Around 250 people, a Grade I listed church in Marylebone, and a programme designed to start arguments.
The email industry tends to meet in halves. Deliverability people go to one set of events. Marketers go to another. Each half then spends the rest of the year complaining about the other.
The London Forum puts both in the same building for two days. It runs on 16 and 17 November at St Mary’s Marylebone, and more than half the seats have already gone.
The Message and The Machine
There are two stages. The Message runs upstairs in the Great Hall and covers marketing, CRM, lifecycle and the commercial side of the inbox. The Machine runs downstairs in the Undercroft and covers deliverability, infrastructure, standards and security. One ticket covers both and delegates are free to move between them. We expect heavy traffic on the stairs.
The arguments
The programme is built around questions this industry cannot agree on. The names below are people who will be in the room and have form on the subject. Session line-ups come with the full programme. The confirmed roster will be made available this coming week.
Is cold email a legitimate channel, or spam with a sales target? Raymond Dijkxhoorn co-founded SURBL and runs a blocklist. He will be there. So will Spamhaus and Yahoo. Anyone defending the practice will be doing so in front of the people who decide what gets blocked. We expect this to be one of the liveliest hours of the two days.
Has deliverability become an excuse for bad marketing? When numbers fall, placement gets the blame. Sometimes the email was simply poor. Laura Atkins, Steve Atkins and John Peters of Marigold have opinions on this, and none of them are shy.
Is email measurement now largely fiction? Opens are unreliable. Bots click links. Attribution depends on who is holding the spreadsheet. Kath Pay and Chad S. White of Zeta will be on hand to help you tackle those kinds of questions.
Should the ESP be a dumb pipe? Platforms filter, optimise and enforce more each year. Mike Hillyer and David Harris are among those with a view on where that responsibility ends.
Then there is AI in the inbox, where Marcel Becker and David Finger both work close to the question of whether summaries and prioritisation help recipients or get in the way. There is the question of whether the CDP is dead or has finally become useful. There is how often to send, where Dela Quist and Kath Pay are friends who may well disagree. Sarah Ebner comes at it from newsletters and the Financial Times. And there is the big one: who decides what deserves to reach the inbox at all.
The room
St Mary’s was designed by Sir Robert Smirke and completed in 1824. It is a long way from a hotel ballroom with a patterned carpet. It is five minutes from Marylebone station and about eight from Baker Street.
Full tickets are limited to less than 250, roughly a tenth the size of the big London marketing conferences. That is deliberate. At this size you can find the speaker afterwards and tell them they were wrong.
The programme is not for sale
Zeta Global and GreenArrow Email are the headline sponsors, with Bouncer, KumoMTA, Netcore Cloud, Halon and others behind them. Sponsors get a small number of brief promotional moments, kept clearly apart from the sessions. The FAQ sets out the detail. Open submissions have closed, and the same tests of relevance and originality apply to sponsors, advisors and first-time speakers alike.
The practical bit
Welcome drinks are on Sunday 15 November. Forum runs Monday and Tuesday. The Gala is on Tuesday evening and is ticketed separately. Wednesday has optional activities for those still standing. Monday’s happy hour runs until 19:30. emailexpert
The full rate is £725 plus VAT and covers both days, both stages, lunch and refreshments, and Monday evening. Members get a discount. Once the main tickets are gone, a few limited-access tickets may follow, without lunch. If lunch matters to you, and at a two-day event it should, book now.
Disclosure: emailexpert organises Forum. The sponsors named here are commercial partners of emailexpert.
