Counterintuitive email marketing tips
True confession: I’m an email slob. I get hundreds of emails every day, to multiple email addresses I set up over the years, and I’m drowning in them. My inbox is a disaster zone.
Sound familiar?
As a consumer, it’s overwhelming. I file them. I delete them. I save them. Sometimes I even read them. My inbox is practically at capacity. It feels like TOO MUCH EMAIL.
As a marketer, it’s overwhelming, too. I plan them. I write them. I test them. Sometimes I even think I send a lot of them. But as I’ve learned from Jay Schwedelson of Worldata, there’s an excellent chance I’m not sending enough email. Mind blown!
How to stick out in the inbox
The key issue is pretty simple: how do you get your email noticed in a sea of messages?
The answer seems counterintuitive. Send more!
This advice flies in the face of all I’ve read or been taught about email marketing. For years, I, along with other marketers, salespeople, fundraisers and so on, have been told that sending too much email will leave us in the junk folder or irritate our audience. Even worse, we fear if we send too much our audience will <gasp> unsubscribe.
It turns out that advice is outdated. It’s a holdover from the early days of email marketing. As Jay explains it, when email was in its infancy, using words like “free” in a subject line was a sure fire way to get your email opened. Unfortunately, spammers figured this out, too. (Viagra anybody?) Email service providers got involved and began filtering out words like “free” into the junk folder in an effort to protect users from spam and only allow legitimate messages through.
Today though, the technology has gotten sophisticated enough that email service providers no longer filter out emails for the words they use. Instead, filters are triggered by your technical reputation -- your sending IP address and your sending domain. According to Jay, “97% of filtering has literally nothing to do with any words or any content you do.”
So how do you improve your technical reputation? Through engagement. And how do you engage people with your emails? You send enough to get them to notice so they’ll actually open and read them!
How do you quantify email engagement?
In his presentation, Jay suggests that if you’re not sending at least 6x per month, you’re missing out on engagement. When you send an email that someone opens and clicks on, email service providers recognize this as engagement. That means the NEXT email you send is more likely to end up in the inbox and not the junk folder.
This is starting to sound a lot like the frequency and repetition formula used for advertising, isn’t it?
So how do you pump up that email engagement?
Now marketers should start to feel more comfortable. After all, engagement is what we do, right? I know I’m more in my element when I start thinking about how to get people to open what I send. As usual, it comes down to a few key things:
Knowing your audience
Relevance
Timeliness
Do you know your audience?
It’s hard to communicate with someone when you have no idea who they are or what they care about. Have you created audience personas? If not, this is a critical exercise to go through. I’ve created my own template that you’re free to use. Download it here. Then segment the heck out of your email lists so you treat people like the individuals they are, not the amorphous, easy-to-market-to-blob you wish they would be.
How relevant is your message?
You know your audience - great! Now there’s no excuse for sending a message that falls flat. By the way, what is your message? Have you created a message map outlining your product or service? Do you know just what part of your message will resonate best with your audience above? Best figure that out if you don’t know it yet.
Timing is everything.
It’s hard to sell Santa hats in June. Or bikinis in November. You know your audience, you’ve nailed your message - now get it in front of people at the right time. Solve their problem. Do it now. Or do it later. The point is, do it when your audience and message align...like selling Santa hats to Santa impersonators right before Thanksgiving.
Testing, testing, 1-2-3
None of anything I just wrote matters if you don’t test though. I’m not a huge analytics nerd, but I do like to understand if what I’m sending is getting through. This means monkeying around with A/B testing (assuming that your service provider has that capability and you have a statistically large enough sample). Swap out the subject line. Or send one with a graphic and one in plain text. Find an element (just one) and test it like the mad scientist you are. Over time and thanks to ongoing analysis, you’ll figure out which emails you send resonate best. And then...you’ll send more ;)
Interested in seeing the same presentation I did? Check out Jay’s conference talk, which is very similar to the one I saw at Inbound 2019. Since his company is constantly crunching the data and identifying trends, I recommend following him to register for upcoming webinars on email marketing. Shout out as well for his great tool, SubjectLine.com - mission critical for testing those subject headers.
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