In this interview we chat with Jeanne Jennings, the founder and Chief Strategist at Email Optimization Shop, the Programming Chair at Email Innovations Summit, as well as the General Manager at Only Influencers.
The post The Number of Items or Links in an Email Message Doesn’t Impact Your Deliverability appeared first on mailfloss.
I am also a big fan of the way effective email requires both quantitative and qualitative skills. Gathering the data, calculating the metrics, analyzing the data, using what you learn to drive the strategy and tactics, and then working with the copywriters, designers and programmers to implement. It’s a real mix of science and art.
Our number one goal at mailfloss is to make you a better email marketer. We do this by helping you improve your email deliverability rates with our email list verification service. After all, if an email isn’t going to get delivered, what’s the point of sending it?
Secondly, we work hard to educate email marketers on the various topics relating to running a successful email marketing campaign. From time to time, we chat with some of the biggest names in the email marketing space to help educate you on new, important or tending topics.
Today, we were lucky enough to be able to chat with Jeanne Jennings about her experience in the email marketing niche. Jeanne is the founder and Chief Strategist at Email Optimization Shop, the Programming Chair at Email Innovations Summit, as well as the General Manager at Only Influencers.
We’re excited to have Jeanne with us to share her thoughts, insights and strategies with us today.
If you’re in the email marketing niche, this is an interview that can’t be missed.
Let’s jump in.
Hi Jeanne and thanks for joining us today. We appreciate you taking the time to chat with our blog audience today about your experience in the email marketing niche. You have over 20 years of experience as a digital marketer. I know our audience will be thankful for the opportunity to plug into your mind for the next few minutes. So to get things started, please give us a little bit of background about your experience as an email marketer. What was it specifically about email marketing that you grabbed your attention and pulled you in?
Hi Lalaine! Thanks for reaching out to me! It’s an honor to be interviewed!
I kind of fell into the email marketing industry. I’d spent a few years in the digital marketing space and then I was laid off, with all mid-level management, when the dot-com start-up I worked for merged with a competitor.
A former boss who had become a friend had just taken a position with a large traditional publisher. The CEO brought him in to enhance their online presence (this was 2000) and he was building out a team. He had gotten approval to hire a head of email marketing and offered me that position, with the caveat that if I didn’t like it after 6 months, he would find something else for me to do. I loved it!
When I went out on my own, I looked at the other agencies and consultancies that were out there. There were a lot of people focusing on websites but few if any on email marketing strategy. So I started my own boutique consultancy, now called Email Optimization Shop, to help clients make their email marketing efforts more effective and more profitable.
I’ve worked very hard since then and have been very lucky. Most of my clients are medium- to enterprise-sized organizations (AARP, Citibank, Network Solutions, the US General Services Administration), so they have large house email lists, which give us lots of opportunity to do A/B split and/or multi-variate testing. As a result, I have a lot of experience with what works and what doesn’t. When I get a new client, I bring all that experience to the table, and then gain more as we test and learn with their list.
I love email because it’s the #1 channel in terms of ROI, so there’s money to be made for my clients. I also love that it’s a push channel – you proactively send email to your prospects and clients, you don’t wait for them to visit your Website or find you on social media.
I am also a big fan of the way effective email requires both quantitative and qualitative skills. Gathering the data, calculating the metrics, analyzing the data, using what you learn to drive the strategy and tactics, and then working with the copywriters, designers and programmers to implement. It’s a real mix of science and art.
Let’s jump into the interview now by talking about the titles of subject lines. You have some really great content on your blog about the importance of subject lines and one blog post in particular talks about the importance of the first 25 characters. But more specifically, you talk about some case studies where you front-loaded offers into the start of the subject line and you saw an increase in ROI. Is front-loading a subject line with the main hook something that will benefit most types of emails (even outside of marketing emails)? Can you tell us a little bit more about the importance of front-loading email subject lines?
Having an effective subject line is critical to getting your email messages opened – whether they are marketing emails, transactional emails, or some other type of email. Most email clients, be they desktop or mobile, have a limited number of characters which will be seen in the subject line. So, it’s important to get the most important information upfront – don’t bury the lead!
My rule of thumb is to make sure that the most important information appears in the first 25 characters. So in the client case study you’re referencing, we tested the control, “12 Days of Christmas Day 9 – 20% Off Every Order!,” against a test that moved the discount to the first 25 characters – “20% Off Every Order – 12 Days of Christmas Day 9!”
Marketers need to think in terms of what is most engaging to the recipient. Does the recipient care that this is Day 9 of the 12 Days of Christmas Sale? Maybe. But not as much as they care about getting a 20% discount. So put the discount first. This small change showed a nearly 15% increase in revenue-per-email (RPE).
You have another blog post on your site where you debunk the myth that short emails are often better. In your case study, you increased traffic to the target website by sending out a longer email with more clickable options. Can you tell us a little bit more about the theory behind this test? Also, doesn’t including more links to the target website reduce your chances of being delivered? How do you balance providing more options with deliverability?
That was another great test we did for a client, just a month or two ago. The client’s goal was to drive traffic to a partner’s website. We had a control email we sent each month that featured one item – it was always a challenge to choose just one, since the website had literally thousands of items. The email always performed fine, but we wanted to see if we could improve it.
The hypothesis here was that if we included more items, more recipients would find at least one that was of interest to them and click-through to the website. So we had the control, with one item, and we created 3 test versions – with two, four and six items, respectively. We started with the control and built from there, so the first item in every email was the same, and the second item was the same on all the test versions and the third and fourth items were the same for the four- and six-item versions.
The emails with fewer items had higher open rates, but the emails with four and six items had higher click-through rates (clicks/non-bounce emails) and much higher click-to-open rates (clicks/opens). The 4- and 6-item emails performed pretty much the same, so our new control email features 4-items. The test confirmed our hypothesis that more items would engage more people.
As far as deliverability… in my experience, the number of items or links in an email message doesn’t impact your deliverability. Getting to the inbox is really about your email reputation; it’s about how your recipients do, or do not, engage with your messages. In fact, because the higher number of item tests showed increased click rates, that will help the client’s deliverability going forward, not hurt it.
That’s very interesting. Let's talk a little bit more about how email marketers can sequence their emails to align with their visitor journey. What effective strategies have you seen used that help email marketers map out their work to best align with their visitor journey? Let's imagine a new business doesn't quite understand their visitor journey yet. They might not have the data yet to make informed decisions. But they need to start somewhere. Is there some type of email sequence automation "template" which acts as a good starting point? Can you explain how you would approach such a situation in more detail?
Visitor journeys are very important; they are one of the foundations of effective marketing in any channel. Even if you’re a new business you should have put some thought into who your customer is and what their journey might look like. One thing that can help with this is starting with some standard journey phases.
For instance, a 3-phase awareness-consideration-decision model can help you think about each phase (gaining awareness, considering options and making a decision) individually and come up with questions/thoughts, actions and touchpoints for each phase. Data plays a role in a journey, but really, it’s a story – you’ve got to go beyond the quantitative into the qualitative to be effective.
Don’t get too hung up on creating absolute journeys – the ideas of journeys are representational. It’s just to allow you to consider and address aspects and elements of the process your potential customer might go through, not to definitively define a process they must take.
What role does educational content play in a drip email sequence?
Non-promotional, or editorial or educational, email is critical to long-term marketing success. If your emails are all just ‘buy, buy, buy’ people will only open them when they’re in the market for your product. Email is so inexpensive that you can probably make a profit doing this, but you’re leaving money on the table.
By including content that provides value without a purchase, you will not only get more people to open your email, you’ll have the chance to influence their behavior. Let’s say someone is an avid hiker and you sell hiking gear. You could just send them email after email offering hiking gear for sale. And after a while they would know this and if they were in the market for a new day pack or wanted to buy some hiking poles they would open and buy.
But if you start mixing in some non-promotional content, like stories about popular day-hikes in their local area or tips for avoiding blisters, that same person would open your email even if they weren’t in the market to purchase anything. You would definitely keep your brand top of mind, for when they are looking to buy something, and you might even influence a purchase they hadn’t previously considered or hasten the purchase of something they had thought about but hadn’t really researched.
Email marketing is really about relationships – and relationships involve more than just ‘buy now’ messaging.
You’re deeply involved in the email marketing community. In addition to being founder and chief strategist of your own consultancy, Email Optimization Shop, You are the Programming Chair of the annual Email Innovations Summit, and General Manager of Only Influencers, a community for email marketing professionals. You also serve as Vice President of Client Strategy and Creative Services for Red Pill Email, a full-service front and back-end email marketing agency. This broad exposure gives you a perspective that not many people have. What would you say are the three biggest challenges that email marketers that you speak to face? How would you suggest they start to overcome those email marketing obstacles?
I do wear a lot of hats! And it’s very busy, but it’s very fun! I love my job(s)!
In a way, email marketing is its own worst enemy. It’s so cost-effective to send email that it’s not difficult to make a profit. So, companies get complacent; their email marketing program is bringing in money, so they don’t pay much attention to it. They just let it roll along.
What many organizations don’t realize is that with just a small investment of time, money, or both they could dramatically improve their ROI in the channel. So I think that’s the first challenge – to think beyond the returns you’re getting now, realize that you’re leaving money on the table and implement a strategic A/B split or multi-variate testing plan to boost performance.
The second has to do with the value organizations place on email marketing technology versus people with solid email marketing experience.
I see so many companies that happily invest in expensive email marketing automation programs, artificial intelligence (AI) tools and other whiz bang stuff. But those same C-level executives don’t understand why they should hire people with high level email marketing experience, send their lower-level email marketing staff to conferences and training workshops or bring in an outside consultant to help them improve their email marketing. It’s a shame, because the technology alone isn’t enough to really optimize a marketing program.
The third challenge is new regulations around data, privacy and consent. The California Consumer Privacy Act went into effect on January 1, 2020. It, along with the European Union’s General Data Privacy Regulation (GDPR), are changing the balance of power.
Suddenly consumers are being given the right to determine what data organizations collect and maintain on them, as well as how it’s used. And we’re not done yet. Many other states have CCPA-like regulation under consideration and there’s a feeling that something will be done at the national level soon.
Organizations that have strong positive relationships with their customers and prospects are likely to flourish under these new rules, while organizations with neutral to negative relationships will suffer. Think about it. There’s probably at least one brand you trust that delivers you customized or personalized content that you value – and you’ll be fine with that continuing.
But the thought of a brand you don’t know or trust have all sorts of personal information on you –- these new regulations will give consumers the power to stop not just the sale and use of their data, it will allow them to demand that organizations ‘forget’ about them by deleting it all.
This shift in power isn’t going to end anytime soon and the marketers who have strong positive relationships with their customers and prospects will flourish, while those who don’t will suffer.
As Programming Chair of the Email Innovations Summit, you’ll also be moderating that event. You'll be speaking at the Email Innovation Summit this year. Speaking of innovation, which companies do you believe are doing an exceptional job of staying innovative within the email marketing space? What about them makes them so innovative?
There’s a lot of innovative stuff going on in email marketing right now, in the technology arena but also in process and approach.
BIMI holds a lot of promise, both for improving deliverability and for more strongly branding email messages. Matt Vernhout, from 250ok, is part of the working group for BIMI so he and his team are doing a lot of innovative things there (it’s still in beta) and he’ll be at the Summit to share his knowledge with attendees. He spoke about BIMI at the Summit last year (here’s a blog post he wrote based on that presentation), but there’s a lot of new information now that we’re closer to launch so I’m psyched he’s coming back to update us.
AWeber is doing some innovative things, like sentiment widgets, quizzes and image carousels, with AMP. They wrote a great article for their blog on it, with lots of real world examples. I don’t yet have a speaker nailed down to talk about AMP at the Summit, but I can promise you there will be one.
Another company I’ve approached to speak at the Summit is Aviation American Gin. Their recent riff on the Peloton commercial was pure brilliance and got a lot of attention, but they had been taking a pretty innovative approach to email even before that. They were sending hilarious emails claiming to be from Ryan Reynolds, one of their founders and one of my favorite actors, to their house list. I am really hoping to get someone from their marketing team in to speak at the Summit (if anyone from Aviation is reading this, please reach out!).
Finally, a lot of email marketing departments are turning to agile development. This is another area we’ll have someone at the Summit speaking on. Redefining the workflow so that a minimum valuable product (yes, I know that it’s traditionally minimum viable product, but after a few years working in agile I think the minimum valuable product is actually a better goal to shoot for) is something that will focus and streamline production processes and help increase ROI.
We’ll also be talking about video and audio in email at the show. The former has been around for years but really hasn’t lived up to its hype (but maybe it will in 2020) and the latter is somewhat new. We’re experimenting with audio in email for one of my clients – I’ve very excited to see how (if?) it boosts response.
Finally, if you had the opportunity to sit down with a younger version of yourself who was just starting out in email marketing today, what piece of advice would you give yourself specifically relating to increasing the ROI of an email marketing campaign?
Wow, you saved the most thoughtful question for last! I would tell younger Jeanne a couple things.
First, email isn’t in its infancy anymore. When I was coming up in the industry we were doing things for the first time, we were trying to figure it out, there was no blueprint to follow. But now all that knowledge is available – for free – on the internet.
Many of us who were involved in the early days of the email marketing industry were very generous about sharing what we were learning. David Daniels, Loren McDonald, Ryan Phelan, Chad White and I, just to name a few – we were all in the thick of it and we were all writing articles and blog posts and being interviewed. And most of that information is as relevant today as it was when it was published (and I believe all of us are still publishing new information).
So when in doubt search the internet for the topic you’re interested in and read up. If you can learn from the mistakes and successes we had back then (and those we’re having now) that will help you increase your ROI.
Second, get involved in the email marketing community. At many organizations, the email marketing team is small, half a dozen people or fewer; sometimes only one person in an organization is dedicated to email. By becoming involved in a community specifically for email marketing professionals, like Only Influencers, you gain a peer group that you can learn from, network with and be supported by. We are one of the few industries that has a community like this – use it.
Third, make sure you carve out time each week to invest in your own career. Often these activities will also positively impact your employer and the email marketing work you’d doing for them, and that’s great. But be sure that at least 10% of your time is spent on building your own skills, thinking about your next career move and staying abreast of changes and innovations in the industry. Getting out of the office to attend a conference at least once a year (more if you can) is critical.
If you can join us in Las Vegas in June 2020 for the Email Innovations Summit, great! But if not, be sure you get to some type of conference or workshop training this year. If your employer won’t cover the cost, tell them what you’re doing and ask if they will consider the days you’re out of the office as work days (as opposed to vacation or sick days), if you cover the out-of-pocket cost yourself.
Thanks again Lalaine, for the opportunity to share with your blog readers! I always invite people serious about good email marketing to connect with me, either on LinkedIn, via my Email Optimization Shop blog and email newsletter or through the Only Influencers community. Hope to see you all somewhere soon!
Thank you Jeanne! It was a pleasure having you speak with the mailfloss blog audience today. We learned a lot!
Need an email marketing strategy? Follow these 7 email marketing strategy tips to make 2020 your best email marketing year yet.
The post 7 Email Marketing Strategy Tips to Make 2020 Your Best Year Yet appeared first on mailfloss.
In a world where everything is continuously changing, one form of marketing seems to reign true no matter what happens. Email marketing is still a robust and powerful way to reach an audience and sell to them. The United States is expecting to grow its number of email users to 255 million. That's pretty much every grownup they have.
And having a solid email marketing strategy is the key to getting to those users. Out of those people, there have to be a few you could market to and make some money, right?
The problem is, a lot of businesses don’t understand how to handle their email marketing properly. As a result, they think it doesn’t work. The conversion rates are low, their emails end up in the spam box, and so on and so forth.
These 7 email marketing strategy tips will ensure none of the previously mentioned falsehoods happen to you!
If you’re not segmenting your email subscriber list, you’ve already lost. It’s critical to the success of your emails that you don’t keep all your eggs in one basket. Think of why Google ads are so successful.
We’re online looking up vegan food markets, and all of a sudden, we see a bunch of ads for vegan related foods, ingredients, etc.
Would it make sense for those same companies marketing to us to send ads related to pork and beef?
Of course not, but some work goes into that.
Businesses should split up their email leads into different lists based on location, age, education, job, knowledge, preferences, and anything else you can find. Luckily, there are plenty of tools out there to help with this.
How can you learn more about your audience's desires through email? What if you already have a list, but you want to segment them to personalize your marketing? Here’s how you do it:
If you want to know more about your audience, go ahead and ask them a few questions? If you’re a personal trainer and want to know more about your audiences' goals quiz them and offer a reward for their effort.
Another great way to split up a list is by the individual action of the lead. This strategy is popular in e-commerce and emails will send based on actions. For example, whether the lead added something to their cart, abandoned it, or made it into the funnel.
You can go as far as creating hot zones on your website. When a potential lead hovers over a particular area of your website and backs out, that's the trigger. Send them an encouraging email about how close they were to completing X and getting Y.
Why waste any time when you don’t have to? As soon as the subscriber opts into your list, have them fill out a little survey for an instant reward. Think of it like when Burger King or Mcdonalds ask you to go online and do a survey to win a free sandwich.
You can ask them personal questions based on your niche. For example, if you're running a digital marketing agency that helps other agencies grow their business, you could ask questions like:
Once this happens, you can use your email automation tools, and it will segment the audience for you based on their answers.
Personalization and email segmentation go hand in hand, you can’t have one without the other. Once you have all that precious data about your subscribers and you’ve segmented them properly, now you can get down to some incredible marketing.
Experian found that when they personalize their emails, they experience a 6x growth in transaction rates. That’s nothing to bat your eyelash at!
What do we mean by personalization? We don’t mean you need to customize every email to the last period. But you do need to include some of those aspects that you’ve acquired from the previous section.
First, let’s start with your email headline.
When an email lands itself in your inbox from something you’ve subscribed to, what does it say?
“50% off SALE for 2020” or “GET IT NOW (emoji emoji emoji), these are spammy as heck, and they don’t work. These headlines can be ineffective and may land you in the spam folder. And once you get too many emails flagged for spam, you’ll end up getting your entire domain flagged.
We’ll get to some finer details at the end of the article on how to stay out of the spam folder.
Your email header needs to scream, “I wrote this email for you.” If you can do that, you’ll experience 50+ percent open rates, no problem.
A little email marketing psychology might help.
A favorite header that I use is “Question about [company name].”
It’s simple, but it works because it uses personalization, is concise, and invokes curiosity. You would have to know the company name for this to work, but the added effort results in better open rates. You won't have to worry about getting emails opened with this simple headline.
Now let’s talk about the body of the email.
The body needs to have talking points from the client based on the information they gave you. Maybe they’re struggling with something, and you used that to segment them. Use that information to your advantage!
If your emails don’t look amazing on mobile, forget about it. By 2020, this shouldn’t be news to anyone. That said, almost half of all emails sent aren't mobile optimized. How is this possible?
If you don’t understand what mobile-friendly means, let’s take a second to bring back the basics. Websites and emails appear differently on different devices. If you build your email on a desktop, you need to make sure it looks great on mobile and tablets as well.
You might be using a font that is too large and mashing too much content into your emails. As a result, someone opens the email on their phone, and it looks like an intro to the next Harry Potter book. They’ll never read it!
Here are a few ways to ensure your email looks beautiful on mobile:
Most email marketing tools will have the ability to create mobile-friendly emails. You don’t have to worry if you’re using one of them. It helps to ensure they look good by checking them out for yourself on every device. Keep in mind that emails can look different depending on the recipient's ESP and whether they’re using Apple or Android products.
Shorter emails convert better. Write clear and concise email copy. Keep your subject line concise and make sure the pre-header is clear. This is the section of text that pops up in your inbox before you open the email. That way the potential reader understands what's in your email before they open it.
One huge mistake we see a lot of people make is they use graphics in their emails unnecessarily. Your cute call to action button might look great on desktop, but on mobile it's clunky, takes forever to load, and is hard to click on. Keep it simple and don’t include too many graphic elements if you’re trying to make your emails look great on all platforms.
You should have a wide assortment of trigger emails throughout your funnel that takes the human aspect out of the game. For example, you should have an email when someone subscribes to your list.
This is where you want to get to know them. Ask them personal questions to understand how to market to them down the road.
When someone purchases something from you, there should be a thank you email with information about what they need to do next. You shouldn't have to send all of these emails yourself.
There should be negative trigger emails; we talked about this a bit before. If you’re in e-commerce, you should have an abandoned cart email. If you use Facebook Ads, you should have an email for when someone opts in but doesn’t purchase or follow through on the funnel.
A popular marketer by the name of Dan Henry does this well. If I click on a piece of content from him and back out within five minutes, I will see another ad saying something like:
“Hey, so I see you clicked my ad but never opted in, that stinks. My course does blah blah blah blah here have a free gift.”
You get the point.
This strategy is done automatically without him having to lift a finger; you need that in your business.
We’re getting down to some nitty-gritty expert tips now. Believe it or not, the time that you send your email matters tremendously. It’s not so much the exact time you send but the variations of times you use.
If I was trying to sell someone a course on opening a barbershop I may use good content to build an email list first. Then later, I would try to sell more courses on the back end.
If I send emails to my list at 10 am, and I haven’t had any results. Do you have any idea why I’m not getting results?
Maybe people are busy at that time. I should experiment with different days and times to measure when the subscribers will interact with me. My subscribers might be working at that time, playing with their kids, eating breakfast, or whatever.
The bottom line is, you need to send your emails at all different times and days, so you eventually hit that sweet spot.
You want your call to action to come as soon as possible in the email. That is the main point of this section and one of the most significant aspects you should understand about email marketing. People don’t have a lot of time, and our attention spans continue to get shorter.
No one cares about your trip to Aspen and how you dreamed of starting your own ski shop in the mountains. And now you’re coaching others about living their dreams. They don’t care!
Your email should do the following things (and only these things):
That is it! If you’re doing anything else in your email, you’re wasting time and hurting your conversion rates.
If you’re stuck in the spam or promotions folder, you’re paying the ultimate price. There are a few critical things you can do to ensure this never happens to you.
Limit links and media - If you include too many links, pictures, graphics, or gifs in your email, you’re setting yourself up for failure. There are constant algorithm changes that impact the way Google determines if an email is spam. You’re putting a target on your back if you have more than three different links in your email. (this includes your signature).
Recipient not found - Make sure you’re cleaning out your list frequently. If you bounce too many emails, Google will see you as a spammer, and you’ll end up there. Most email marketing tools provide a way for you to clean up your list and remove inactive emails. We do this for you automatically at mailfloss.
Stay away from spammy language - You should rarely write free, sale, 50% off, buy now, get this, or similar things in your emails. Save them for the big sale occasions if you must. You want the email to deliver, and you need to have a positive reputation for your domain. If you’re always pushing sales and deals to your audience with aggressive and promotional language, you’re increasing your chances of getting labeled as spam.
Save the promotional emails for the big events like Black Friday or Christmas.
It’s no secret that your email marketing strategy is a direct reflection of your success. The power of email shows no signs of slowing down. So make sure you utilize these seven tips so you can have a successful campaign in 2020 and beyond! And don't forget to use an email marketing checklist.
In this interview we chat with Adam Q. Holden-Bache, the author of "How to Win at B2B Email Marketing: A Guide to Achieving Success."
The post Email Frequency Doesn’t Have To Be Complicated. Just Push Frequency Until You See An Uptick In Negative Responses appeared first on mailfloss.
Best practices in email marketing are to capture your leads where they express interest then nurture them by providing informative, educational content.
At mailfloss we’re focused on helping email marketers get the most from their email marketing campaigns. We do this in a few different ways. First, we help email marketers improve their deliverability through the use of our email list verification service. Secondly, we work hard to educate email marketers on the various topics relating to running a successful email marketing campaign.
Today, mailfloss had the opportunity to chat with Adam Q. Holden-Bache, the author of "How to Win at B2B Email Marketing: A Guide to Achieving Success." His book guides readers through all aspects of an email marketing program, including strategy, data, design, delivery, testing, and analysis.
Holden-Bache currently serves as Lead Strategist at Indiemark, an email marketing agency that has been in business since 2009. Previously, Adam spent 19 years as CEO of Mass Transmit, an award-winning email marketing agency.
Adam is also the lead email instructor for the American Marketing Association Digital Marketing BootCamps and speaks or teaches at many notable email marketing events and conferences.
mailfloss is lucky to have Adam with us today to share his insights about what it takes to run a successful email marketing campaign with our blog readers!
Without further ado, let’s jump into the interview.
First of all, thanks for joining us today Adam to talk about your experience in the email marketing space. You’ve been in the industry for quite some time now and you’ve grown quite a following. First of all, congratulations! Can you begin by telling us about what elements within email marketing you’ve seen change over the years and which elements have stayed the same?
Email marketing has been an essential marketing channel since the mid-1990’s. We’ve seen a lot of change in the industry, but also a lot of consistency. What hasn’t changed is that email marketers always strive to achieve better results with their campaigns. That’s where Email Industries plays a big role. We help many brands identify areas of weakness, create better campaigns, and improve their email marketing results.
In your list of services, you include “List Growth and Lead-Nurturing Strategies”. Considering that one is centered around getting an email in the first place, and the other is about keeping it, how do they align together? What strategies do you have that include both of them, that, when used properly, increases the overall success rate?
List growth and lead nurturing go hand-in-hand. If you are successful at acquiring new subscribers but do nothing to educate and nurture their interests, then the leads have minimal chance of providing any business value. Best practices in email marketing are to capture your leads where they express interest then nurture them by providing informative, educational content. Once you’ve demonstrated your expertise, conversions will happen with minimal selling tactics. Provided there is no major financial hurdle to overcome, many leads will convert simply because you’ve demonstrated expertise and have created a situation where they want to do business with you.
One of the biggest struggles for email marketing is executing a solid win-back strategy, which is something I see you also help with. It really seems that once a customer hits the dreaded unsubscribe, there’s no getting them back. What are your thoughts on this? Do you think it means the customer has left the funnel for good? Could you share some tips on how to get those customers back on the list, and into the sales funnel?
You can’t market to an address that has unsubscribed, although we have built an audience of previous subscribers and tried marketing to them via Facebook ads. The results weren’t as good as targeting new leads, so we typically don’t try to re-engage those that have unsubscribed.
However, retaining existing customers is a key focus of ours with our client campaigns. Marketers that deliver value with every message have very low unsubscribe rates. We also recommend re-engagement campaigns which we send to the non-engaged subscribers, typically those that haven’t opened or clicked in X timeframe or over the past X number of campaigns. The sole purpose of re-engagement campaigns is to activate the non-engaged recipients to revisit the emails, and we typically reward them for doing so.
You have a statement in which you say your goal is to “... help you proactively avoid interruptions to your email deliverability... recover more quickly from active interruptions...mitigate the risk and negative impact of future interruptions”. Could you give us some examples of what the “interruptions” are, and the negative impact they have on your email campaign?
This is directed towards email deliverability, and many factors can influence whether a message reaches the inbox, and if so, where it displays. Some of the more popular issues here can evolve around being blacklisted, customers identifying messages as spam, sending from a new domain, or other types of negative feedback. We are able to help brands with deliverability issues by researching the problem, identifying a solution, and providing whatever services are necessary to improve inbox placement rate.
You have a Linkedin group of “email marketing gurus”. In the group, you encourage the members to “discuss email-related topics with the world's leading email marketing experts and practitioners.” What are the top questions or discussions that come up in this group?
The Email Marketing Gurus LinkedIn Group is largely comprised of email industry professionals, so the most popular questions tend to be around email platforms or their functions, issues that can’t be resolved, and questions about deliverability. The members of that group are great at offering ideas or solutions, so it continues to be a fairly active group that provides value to the email professionals who seek email marketing answers.
Also within the group, are there any common issues that seem to arise on the regular? Like, something all businesses developing their email marketing often commiserate over?
Deliverability frequently comes up because many email professionals are on the marketing side of things, and don’t deal with the technical aspects of email delivery. Luckily we have several email deliverability experts in the group who can provide quality feedback. There are also a lot of jobs posted there, as there seems to be more openings for email expertise than there are available professionals!
Let’s talk about frequency. There are a lot of differing opinions about this. Have you tested your own theories about how often emails should be sent? What were some of your findings?
Frequency doesn’t have to be complicated. What we do is push the frequency until we start to see an uptick in negative responses (unsubscribes, spam complaints, or simply a decrease in opens/clicks/conversions). Once you see that bump, you reduce frequency.
However, the bigger issue here is offers and content. If you send quality emails that recipients enjoy receiving, we’ve found very few people will unsubscribe no matter what the frequency. The problem is, most brands can’t produce enough high-quality content to get close to their frequency cap. But in short, the more high-quality email you send, the more opportunity you have for conversions. More emails = more revenue.
Tagging on the above, do you think what you discovered is applicable across all niches of online marketing? Like, would someone selling software need to send emails more or less frequently than someone selling pet supplies?
Products that have a longer lifecycle don’t need to send as frequently as products that are purchased frequently. However, you need to be in the inbox when that moment occurs when someone is ready to purchase. We help brands with their products that sell every couple of years (think appliances, software, automobiles, computers, etc.) send email on a regular basis for that very reason. If someone is ready to purchase, you need to be top of mind. If recipients aren’t unsubscribing, then they may be waiting until the time is right to reference your email to trigger a purchase.
Let’s talk a little bit more about “voice” in email marketing. What are some strategies (or voice types) you’ve seen work really well in the world of email marketing? What advice would you give to email marketers about creating their “voice” and who are some great examples of companies who have nailed “voice” within their email campaigns?
We’ve found that brands that can relate to their audience tend to get the best results. Depending on the brand, the “voice” can be significantly different. Higher-end brands should be more formal. Businesses need to adhere to a certain level of professionalism. But less formal brands can be more personal.
All brands should find a voice that works for them. But if you can, always push for a more conversational, less business-speak style. Recipients tend to want to read in a tone that is similar to how we speak during conversation.
Finally, if our readers had to focus on just one aspect of their email marketing strategy to fine-tune into perfection (i.e. lead generation, win-backs, streamlining, etc.), what would it be, and why?
Email is only as good as its weakest link, but there are three things that we routinely see that always needs attention.
1. The Inbox Display (From Name, subject line & preview text).
Most marketers spend 99% of their time on the email message, but fail to recognize that without a recognizable From Name and an effective subject line and preview text, their email will never even be opened. Marketers need to pay more attention to these items, and continuously test to figure out what works best.
2. Automated Emails
Many brands are either not setting up effective automated campaigns, or if they are, they are not revisiting their results frequently enough to maximize their value. Brands need to recognize that their Welcome Message is probably going to be their highest performing email, and their abandoned cart, re-engagement, anniversary and other automated emails need to be continuously tested and evaluated to get the best results.
3. Working towards goals (typically conversions)
If the reason why you sent the email campaign is “because my boss told me to” or “because it’s on our schedule”, then you probably aren’t going to get positive business results. Every email should have a goal. Is it education? Retention? Engagement? A purchase? Whatever it is, work towards that goal and give recipients an easy way to achieve it.
Well said! Thanks for joining us today Adam. We truly appreciate you taking the time to chat with our email marketing blog readers about your experiences and insights. We truly appreciate it. To our blog readers, if you’d like to learn more about Adam’s work you can follow him on Twitter or head over to Indiemark's website here.
