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A Strong Email List Is the Missing Piece of the Puzzle for Most Marketers

In this interview we chat with Yosef Silver, founder of Fusion Inbound, a digital marketing agency, to talk about how he approaches email marketing for maximum gain.

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A Strong Email List Is the Missing Piece of the Puzzle for Most Marketers

Building an engaged email list can be one of the most profitable marketing initiatives you could put in place.

Introduction

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 Yosef Silver, founder of Fusion Inbound, a digital marketing agency, to talk about how he approaches email marketing for maximum gain.

Without further ado, let’s jump into the interview.

The Interview

You take a cross channel approach when working on marketing campaigns for your clients. In your experience what channels provide the best opportunity for sales conversions? What channels do you generally see as the lowest risk / highest reward?

A strong email list is the missing piece of the digital marketing channel for so many brands. Taking a cross-channel approach to building an engaged email list can be one of the most profitable marketing initiatives you could put in place. This doesn't mean buying email lists — never buy an email list — but think about what you can do within your funnel to have people opt in to your content.

You have extensive knowledge of both marketing automation and email marketing. Tell us a little bit more about your experience where these two worlds intersect. What are some of the most successful email marketing automation strategies that you've deployed and why do you feel like they were so successful?

This depends very much on your niche and the way you approach email and automation. I have found that many people send coupons or discounts, and focus so much on their own brand. When I think of successful email and automation, they have one thing in common. They speak to the value they are adding for the customer. If your content leads with "we" or "us" take another look at the content. It's not "we put this on sale" it's "you can benefit from sale pricing".

Let's talk a little bit more about email opt-in optimization. What type of lead magnets, as well as magnet placements, have you seen used successfully to help increase the opt-in conversion rate of an email newsletter?

Not all opt-ins are equal. Start your segmentation early and tailor the emails to the opt-in. Does the language match the landing page? Does the lead magnet match the ad copy — I know, this sounds obvious but I've seen mistakes happen more often than you'd think. I also recommend refreshing your content frequently. If there are seasonalities in your industry, a lead magnet that works well in spring might not work well in winter.

Generally speaking, once a subscriber joins up for a mailing list, what is a good first email to send within the sequence? In your opinion, what should the goal of the first email in an email sequence be?

I think of the first email as your chance to fulfill a promise. Give the user what they are looking for. Be direct, and create a good first impression. If you promised them a checklist, deliver it. Don't hide it behind another video or another signup process.

Let's talk a little bit more about email marketing and sending frequency. How do you approach email sending frequency for your clients?

You need to really know your audience and provide value with every email. I believe in creating content that will resonate and provide value to the user rather than creating content dictated by the calendar. At the end of the day, the more value you offer, the better it will perform. There's a balance to be found to make sure you have ongoing engagement and interaction too.

In terms of engagement (i.e. opens/clicks) what types of email content have you seen perform best?

I have found that a highly targeted, detailed, and easy to understand abandoned cart email series can have outstanding open rates and drive tremendous conversions. And with the right copy, my testing has proved that you don't need to offer a coupon or discount to convert these abandoned carts into sales.

Lastly, if you could go back in time and give a younger version of yourself three pieces of advice with regards to creating the best email titles, what would those three pieces of advice be?

Don't neglect the importance of spending time writing the perfect subject line. The subject line can be as important as the copy in the email itself.

Know when to offer a coupon or discount, and when to educate and portray value. You don't want your entire customer base to expect a discount every time you email them.

Don't be lazy when it comes to segmentation, use the data available to send emails that will resonate with your audience.

Thank you greatly for taking the time to chat with mailfloss’s email marketing blog readers today Yosef. We really appreciate you taking the time. To our audience, if you’d like to learn more about Yosef and the work he does, you can follow him on Twitter or head over to his website here.

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Gist Email Verification is here!

If you’re looking for a Gist email verifier, look no further because mailfloss has you covered with our Gist integration. Email verification for Gist is important mainly for three important reasons, all related to maximizing your email ROI and profits. email verification helps you get your emails delivered to more real people because it increases […]

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How To Clean Email Lists With Gist

Getting started cleaning your email lists with Gist is easy with mailfloss. Once Gist is connected, you can let mailfloss automatically clean your emails lists with Gist going forward. Here’s how to do that.         Step 1. Visit the integrations page Visit the integrations page by clicking on “Integrations” in the left […]

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Gist email verification options using mailfloss

If you’re using mailfloss for Gist email verification, you have five options at your disposal. Before explaining the five options, make sure you have properly connected Gist to mailfloss. You only need to do this once and from then on mailfloss will be able to automatically perform email verification for the connected Gist account. Here’s a screenshot of the […]

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From Experience, the Welcome Email Will Be One of the Top Performing Emails Sent

In this interview we chat with Jenna Tiffany, the founder of Let’s Talk Strategy, a UK based marketing firm, about her work within the email marketing industry.

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From Experience, the Welcome Email Will Be One of the Top Performing Emails Sent

When a new person subscribes to your email marketing, greet them, thank them and set expectations with them. It's best not to wait until they make an order with you or abandon a shopping cart before you send them an email. Send them a welcome email, and start building that relationship with the new subscriber from the beginning.

Introduction

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 Jenna Tiffany, the founder of Let’s Talk Strategy, a UK based marketing firm, about her work within the email marketing industry.

Without further ado, let’s jump into the interview.

The Interview

Hello and thank you for joining us today to talk about your experience as a digital marketer Jenna. Can you kick off the interview by telling us a little bit more about what attracted you to marketing in the first place? What made you want to start your own digital marketing agency and consultancy?

My passion is to improve the customer's experience, whether that be when a visitor first lands on a website, the email campaign they have received or an experience instore. Marketing can shape a customer’s experience with a brand creatively. I am a creative, analytical and strategic thinker so for me; Marketing was a great fit.

I have worked in marketing for over ten years, and during that time, I've worked in marketing teams within organisations in banking, retail and travel. I then moved agency side and worked with a variety of different companies in a strategic consultancy role. I always had the ambition to run my own marketing agency, and for me, the right time to do so was when I turned 30. Of course, it was a risk to step away from a full-time job and go it alone, but I have learnt so much along the way. After being in business for three years, the Let’sTalk Strategy team have been lucky enough to consult with some of the biggest brands in the world and two offices in London and Lisbon it has been a risk worth taking!

You have over ten years of experience in the email marketing and consultancy space. What are some of the biggest changes you've seen in the email marketing space during that time?

The most significant change I have seen has been the move of email from being seen as purely a 'batch and blast' communication channel to being used more strategically. Email consistently achieves the highest ROI above any other digital channel but yet still receives the lowest percentage of the marketing budget. This has historically meant that email has been seen to be the channel to drive a quick buck and in doing so to use it in a very tactical way. Email has enormous potential to deliver if used strategically, and I've seen a significant shift in the channel being used more in that way.

You actually have a service and tool where you help people track their competitors emails. Very interesting! What are the main takeaways marketers can get from analysing their competitor's emails?

Our partner, Altaire, is the provider of the tool called Competitor Email Monitoring. As email marketers, we all have the habit of subscribing to our competitor's emails that end up filling our inboxes! The tool does all of this for you, and more, it analyses the subject lines used, time of day the emails are sent and the emails in a customers journey too.

There’s a lot of insight that can be gained, such as design inspiration. Email marketing can be used to engage with subscribers visually, so being able to collate lots of examples of email design starts to broaden your email design horizons! It's also good to keep your finger on the pulse of your competitor's activity as much as possible.

Speaking of email segmentation and targeting, what segmentation and targeting strategies do you often see misused or underused? Why is proper segmentation so important? What can businesses do today to start better targeting their emails?

The biggest segmentation area that is still massively underutilised is with new subscribers. When a new person subscribes to your email marketing, greet them, thank them and set expectations with them. It's best not to wait until they make an order with you or abandon a shopping cart before you send them an email. Send them a welcome email, and start building that relationship with the new subscriber from the beginning. From experience, the welcome emails will be one of the top-performing emails sent. I wrote a guide with Smart Insights about how to create an effective welcome journey.

Let's talk about email content for a moment. What strategies do you see perform well time and time again when businesses are sending sales-focused emails?

Firstly, having an email strategy. It’s astounding how many organisations still don’t have an email marketing strategy. All of the time and effort is spent on crafting a beautifully written and designed email campaign without first defining what the objectives are for the campaign. What is the goal of that particular email campaign?

Once the strategy has been defined and analysis has been conducted to understand more about your subscribers, the next step will be then to determine what are the best tactics to use to engage them. This varies from organisation to organisation. Personalisation and targeted content are one the most common ones, but this is all dependent on your subscribers. There is a balancing act when using personalisation, it needs to not feel like personalisation to be successful. Targeting a person because you have the data (and consent to use it) without defining the value in doing so is just doing so because you can.

Variety in the type of emails sent is also a consistent finding. We all get bored by hearing the same thing, watching the same thing and reading the same thing. This is no different in the inbox. If your friend kept telling you the same story over and over again, you'd probably try to either change the conversation or avoid them for a while. This is the same in the inbox. We need to stop thinking about the inbox as something that is disconnected from reality and humanise the communications we are sending.

What companies do you think are doing a really good job in terms of creating an engaging “voice” in their email campaigns? What makes their choice of “voice” so interesting to you?

Urban outfitters demonstrated their personality and a clear understanding of their audience with the GDPR related email that they sent.

Acknowledging that their subscribers and customers regularly use WhatsApp, they replicated the design in their email content. This could have been a very dull legally written email campaign, but instead they looked at this creatively and really stood out from the crowd without losing their brand voice, like many other organisations did.

Lastly, what new technologies or strategies do you feel most excited about in the email marketing space? What makes you excited about these changes?

Voice and AI for me are incredibly exciting. Voice technology brings another dimension to email marketing, and I am eagerly watching the uptake of this innovation. AI is an area that I have a massive passion for when it is used ethically. I consulted with a brand that was struggling to engage their subscribers. AI was a clear technology choice to test and learn from in optimising email subject lines. The results within the first three months were outstanding, and even with the substantial investment, it recouped the costs within those three months. The organisation rolled our AI internationally across the organisation and haven't looked back. But I will caveat that an organisation needs to define their strategy first before running to AI. It will not solve a problem if you don't know what the problem is or what you're aiming to achieve.

Thank you greatly for taking the time to chat with mailfloss’s email marketing blog readers today Jenna. We really appreciate you taking the time. To our audience, if you’d like to learn more about Jenna and the work she does, you can follow her on Twitter or head over to her website here.

14 Email Marketing Stats for 2020

Looking for email marketing stats? Check out our article on email marketing stats for 2020 and beyond. The email marketing stats mentioned are some of the most eye-popping stats around and prove that email marketing is still the king of marketing channels.

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14 Email Marketing Stats for 2020

It’s no secret that marketing, as we know, is always changing. Email marketing is only one facet of the entire marketing game, and it’s experienced its shares of ups and downs. One thing that remains true about email marketing is its power and control over the digital marketing world.

No one can argue that email marketing is still a powerful strategy for generating attention, creating an audience, and scaling a business. With that comes some incredible email marketing stats that continue to show us how vital email is in the grand scheme of things.

Here are some of the most eye-popping email marketing stats of 2020 and beyond.

1. More than half the world's population will use email by 2023.

At one time, it wasn’t uncommon to send ten emails and have a 100% open rate as well as a 100% response rate. Not everyone was using email, and the ones who were using it trusted it without question. We weren’t inundated with spam and other factors that made us distrust email.

In 2019, email grew to 3.9 billion, and it’s expected to grow to 4.3 billion users by 2023. That is officially half of the world's population using email for some purpose.

What this shows us is that there is an incredible opportunity for those who are willing to reach out and grab it. Your audience is on the other side of that send button.

2. Billions of emails get sent daily.

source

It’s expected for the daily email number to increase to around 347.3 billion by 2022. That number is ridiculous for a few reasons.

First, it shows you that email marketing isn’t going anywhere. When paid ads first came on the scene, everyone thought that was the end of email marketing. What happened?

Over the past three or four years, we’ve seen a steady decrease in the success of paid ads on platforms like Facebook. At the same time, email marketing continues to grow.

3. More and more people believe in the power of email.

80% of business owners and professionals believe that email marketing is a significant driving force in their business.

Why is that? We think it’s because email creates retention with an audience. You have a lot of opportunities to build trust and rapport with your subscribers through email marketing.

Throughout this whole process, you aren’t simply selling yourself over and over, as many marketers do in other industries. Email is a slow and patient game that works well for those who are willing to play it that way.

4. Search can’t compare to email marketing.

source

Want to hear a staggering statistic? The average return on a Google Ad is two dollars for every one you spend ($2-1).

The average return on email marketing is between 37 and 42-1.

How’s that for a pattern interrupt?

Many of us don’t see email marketing as a serious ROI generating strategy in business, but it is.

5. Social media can’t compare to email marketing.

We’ve talked about this a bit, but it’s worth mentioning again. Search ads cannot compete with email marketing, and neither can social media.

On Facebook, people are shut off to everyone wanting to engage with them that most have turned away from the platform for business. Truthfully, if you want to stick to any social media for business, you should leverage LinkedIn. But that should all come secondary to email marketing.

6. Most businesses communicate via email.

Both consumers and businesses still use email to communicate. The most important factor to keep in mind is how they often communicate with people outside the organization. So that is why you need to keep email as a popular marketing strategy.

72% of people use email as their primary point of contact when conducting business. If you’re trying to sell something to someone, you’ll want to use email as your way of getting through to them.

7. More transactions occur through email than you think.

A case study by Monetate found that 4.24% of email marketing traffic will make a purchase compared to 2.49% of search engine traffic and .59% of traffic from social media - The American Genius

This statistic is mind-blowing because it shatters what most people believe about email marketing. Many people think that email is the slow and dying process of sending newsletters to people who will never reply or read the email.

People who believe this are not doing email marketing right. This statistic shows us the power of email.

The people who are actually going to buy something from you are on your email subscriber list; these are your buyers. They’re not on your social media page, and they’re not always in the search engine.

At some point, they decided to subscribe to your newsletter because they were interested in knowing more about what you have to say. That means they wanted to do business with you, but they might need some more time to build rapport.

That is what email marketing is all about; it doesn’t always mean it has to be a slow process.

8. You need to optimize for mobile-first.

Let’s get real; we all know that mobile optimization is no longer an option; it’s a standard. In 2019, 62% of emails were opened on a mobile device, so we’re going with the majority. When you’re designing your emails and writing your copy, you should assume you’re writing to a mobile audience.

9. People actually enjoy receiving emails.

Another huge misconception is that people don’t like receiving emails. In fact, if you take the right approach with your email marketing people enjoy receiving your emails when they’re relevant.

69% of customers say that they’re influenced to buy something based on an email they received. Why is that email marketing statistic important?

We think it’s important because it shows that email marketing plays a role in the consumer buying process. Even if you feel that your efforts haven’t been living up to the hype. Somewhere out there is a person who is currently sitting on a decision. You might be able to send them the right personalized email to tip them over the edge.

10. Emojis are becoming more popular in emails.

Ah yes, all you need to do is throw an emoji into your email and boom; you’ll increase your open rate by 56%.

Wait, you thought we were joking? No, we’re serious. According to Campaign Monitor, emails with emojis in the subject line have a 56% higher open rate when compared to plain text. It’s important that you don’t come off as spammy, so we don't suggest overdoing it.

11. The subject line is the most important part of your email.

Continuing with the trend here, you want to pay close attention and spend the most time on your subject line. Many email marketers and business owners struggle with getting their subscribers to open their emails, so you must get the subject line right. Otherwise, everything else is a bust.

Emails with personalized subject lines get opened 26% more, and 82% of marketers keep the subject line at less than 60 characters. Keep that in mind next time you’re blowing through your subject like it doesn’t matter!

12. Spam is leaving the door wide open for “real” email marketing.

It seems like the spam box gets more and more full each year. Do you want to know why? It’s because email providers are cracking down. Business owners are getting smarter. And marketers think they can “fast-track” their way to the top with spammy email copy.

It doesn’t work that way, and it hasn’t since 1997.

69% of email recipients can tell by the subject line if an email is spam. This statistic means that they can simply look at one sentence and determine if your genuine or not. With that, 45% of all emails are considered spam, so you can understand why we’ve become so good at detecting it.

Listen, you can’t do a lot of things in emails anymore. You shouldn’t talk about get rich quick schemes. You can’t promise anything you can't deliver on. Don’t try to sell someone something of no value. As a matter of fact, just send a blank email and let them figure it out. (haha j/k)

But really, don’t be a spammer. You need to provide value in every email you send, and that needs to be clear right off the bat. Take this as a good example:

“The KEY TO MARKETING SUCCESS lies within: Ending in 24 HOURS!!!” or “Most marketers never reach their goals without a mentor: Do you have a mentor yet?”

If you were selling business coaching, these might be two examples of email subject lines you would use.

The first one sounds like a million other useless emails. So even if you’re providing a ton of value inside, it won’t matter because the email will never get opened. (it’ll be in the spam folder)

The second subject line appeals to a person's emotions and makes them feel like they need what is inside the email. It does this without appearing spammy or “false prophet-y.”

13. Segmentation and personalization are becoming the new norm.

Some people will say that email segmentation is a new thing, but we don’t believe so. People have been personalizing and segmenting their audience for a long time, but now it’s becoming the standard. You can’t have a successful email marketing campaign if you’re sending the same email to 10,000 people, it's not possible.

You need to segment your email list based on different factors such as demographics, gender, age, opt-in method, time of day, and so on.

Users experience a 760% increase in revenue from segmented campaigns. You need to break apart your audience because they have different interests. How would you feel if you went to a restaurant and they only offered you one item?

Later on, you find out that they had 15 other options, but they didn’t bother to offer those options to you. And they forced you to have the chicken when you wanted steak.

That’s what a lot of email marketers do. They have a variety of different services that are sure to please someone, but they’re only pushing one at a time to everyone.

When you split your audience and personalize the emails, it allows you to give that person exactly what they need at the right time.

14. Engaged email recipients turn into share happy referrals.

According to Quicksprout, email subscribers are 3.9 times more likely to share your content on social media. What does that mean for you? It means that if someone chose to subscribe to you, it says that they’re interested in you. If they’re interested, they will likely share all your content and possibly become a “raving fan.”

It’s essential to treat your email subscriber list like an exclusive club. Make sure you’re offering special perks to convince people to subscribe. And show current club members some love by providing them with the value they want.

We would recommend using a social media tracking tool so you can find mentions of your business on social as well. If you find that someone shared your content or said something nice about you on Facebook, you might want to gift them a reward.

Or, if someone is out there bad-mouthing you, than what? This provides you with an opportunity to address the situation and stomp on it before allowing it to get worse.

Final Thoughts

There are hundreds upon hundreds of email marketing stats that continue to impress and amaze us. What amazes us is the fact that people are still not willing to build an email list after watching others succeed for years. (don’t be those people!)