Inbox or Spam?

Your email list could be one of your most valuable marketing assets, but it only works if your entire email process is handled with care.

Webinar Transcript

Introduction to Email Strategy

It’s showtime.

Say we get underway.

Thank you for joining us. I’m Alan Gross. I’m joined by my colleague, Deanna Fisher.

And today, inbox or spam, the hard truth about your email strategy. And I gotta tell you, this one this one hits pretty close to home, Deanna, as in this topic is about stuff that we think about every day, that we that we care about every day, and that we try to be helpful on every day. And, as always, our purpose here is to really think about and offer information that it’s kind of predicated on our own experience, things we’ve done right, things we needed to learn from, and hopefully others will benefit by the same.

Those of you who have experienced any of our web sessions know that we really don’t do infomercials. It’s not our purpose.

Our thought is if we can elevate consciousness around what marketing has the potential to do and how to do it well, that helps everybody.

If you have need after the topic like this to dive deeper into your process, to your content strategy, to your performance of these things, If you have questions about how it works in your environment and you’d like to invite us in, we’re happy to help.

But don’t hear any of this as a as a pitch because it’s not.

We’ve got about thirty minutes in the clock to talk through a lot of things that we hope are helpful.

I wanted to say one more thing in in setting this up and really setting the table for for Deanna that we’re not expecting that everything you’re about to hear is new to you.

If it is, okay. Great. If you have responsibility for or oversight of but don’t actually manage email, then more of this might actually be new to you.

But if if you actually are responsible for the performance of these things, then our hope is that you will affirm that you’re doing a number of things, you know, in a way that we regard as best practices and successful.

If there is one or more ideas that you can take away from here to say, you know what? There may be a better way of addressing something that we’re doing today. Well, I hope you’ll find that worth the price of admission.

That’s the whole idea here. So with that, Deanna, I’d like to invite you to take a few moments while while some folks on this on this call with us have ex have certainly had experience, with you directly, for the benefit of everybody here. I’d love to invite you to say a few words about where this information comes from. What informs your perspective and passion for this topic?

Our Expertise on Email Deliverability

Absolutely. Thank you. So I have been managing email sends and list health and, most importantly, increasing our deliverability for over a decade now. And during that time, I’ve seen emails go from the mass email strategy that we all are used to and used to have full inboxes every morning from to these new, legal parameters that are being set, not just overseas, but now coming this way and how we need to react and be proactive in order to maintain our domain reputation and get to those inboxes of not only our clients and referral partners, but those new prospects that we desperately want to nurture into new prospects that we desperately want to nurture into new friends.

Perfect. So we’re ready to dive in?

Absolutely. It’s a broad topic for a short amount of time, so we have a lot to cover.

Alright.

So what I wanna begin with is this, just a quick understanding for everybody. When we talk about what we regard as, you know, the challenge of successful marketing, it means to create, to author the right message, to deliver it to the right audience at the right time, and ideally, the right way.

If you don’t have a compelling message, it doesn’t matter how well you produce it or deliver it. It doesn’t matter that you made it a video or an email or a social post. If you don’t have a message that matters, it doesn’t work. If you have a terrific message, but you’re not putting it in front of the right audience, it doesn’t work. And if you have a great message, but it’s not at the right time, it’s not addressing something that’s timely to them.

To them, it’s not important right now, and it wasn’t work.

The right way says, I have the right message. I’m talking to the right people. I am timely in terms of what is important to them. Am I giving it to them in a way that they’re most likely to be receptive to it?

Which is why sometimes we do a long form article or a short form video or an infographic or as we’re talking about today, an email.

All of these things matter a lot in terms of what you have the potential to be successful for.

And each of these are, as you would expect, topics in their own right, and they’re beyond the scope of certainly what we’re gonna hit today.

But it’s important to say, whatever we’re talking about here in terms of email performance assumes that you’ve nailed the message, and you know exactly who you’re talking to, and you’re hitting them at the right time, and the email is the right way to deliver this message.

Now with all that said, you’ve got a chance to get it right. Because if you don’t, all the rest of it is kinda noise. Don’t you think?

Poll 1 Question

First polling question. I’m gonna put this on screen, and I’m gonna and invite conversation here. And, Deanna, I’m so interested in in in your perspective is the question I would like to ask all of you is, what’s the primary purpose of your of your, you know, marketing emails? Is it to reach new prospects?

Is it to nurture existing ones? Is it to inform and engage referral contacts who can be so important to us? Is it something else? I realize you may have several different reasons to email.

If you would, please take a moment and respond to which of these is the most important if you had to choose just one. K?

Thank you for voting quickly. We’ll get through these really fast if you do.

We’re most of the way through. Let me give you give you just a couple quick moments, and I think we’ve got everybody. Thank you so much for for participating.

So I’m gonna close the poll, and I’m gonna share the results. And, Dale, tell me if you can see them.

Absolutely.

Okay. Alright. So

Poll 1 Insights

kind of across the board.

And by the way, that’s fine. But what is this what does this say to you?

Well, reaching new prospects is typically what we see a lot of people using email for. It’s we either get a conference list or we get a large list from a data source, and we want to email all in one swoop. What I think is important to note here and kind of subtly informed with our options is it shouldn’t be the same message to all three of these audiences.

So your primary purpose while to new prospects may be one message. It’s very important that we tailor these to others and also make sure that the lists we’re using are of optimal health and timely.

We have one more for you, which

Poll 2 Question

is regardless of your primary intention, how do you generally send marketing emails? Is it from your Outlook or whatever your primary desktop, you know, client is one by one?

Are you using a what we regard as a professional email platform?

HubSpot, Constant Contact, and others are simply examples. There are several others, of course. Right?

Do you use both commonly? Not just occasionally, but do you kinda go back and forth?

That’s a question I like to ask you if you would, please, because that’ll tell us a little bit more about this by the way, there’s a fourth option.

Maybe and that’s okay if you’re not sure.

Give us just a quick response here.

Thank you so much for going so quickly. So results are in, Deanna.

We have Outlook.

We have proper platforms. We have both.

I know you have comment about this one.

Absolutely.

Poll 2 Insights

Well, so an email platform is always going to be the best way to deliver your marketing messages, especially if you’re reaching out to new or unknown prospects.

The amount of information that you can receive from an email platform as well as protecting your own inbox is key to some of the topics that we’re about to dive into.

But quintessential, that data that you receive from an email platform really does make a big difference.

We work with, I don’t know, how many different platforms, you know.

Quite a few.

Right?

And when clients come to us with a desire to launch a new brand, a new company, a new product or service, you know, we often have to stand up an email capacity from scratch.

We understand what it means to be able to do these things.

For those of you that may have responded Outlook or both, meaning that was a choice that you sometimes use Outlook, it’s really important to appreciate, I think, from a professional perspective, what that’s costing you. It may seem like, well, Outlook is free. I already have it. I’m already using it.

I don’t have to pay for a license for it. It may be the most expensive money you’re not spending because Outlook plat email platforms and HubSpot is a is a marketing automation or or CRM or a full blown marketing machine. And, yes, it can be costly. Constant contact, eye contact that we use, and others are not.

Generally speaking, they’re not. The as Deanna said, and she’s gonna get into in a moment, the performance capabilities and the ability to be successful in in in in this idea of more of email is so vastly more advantageous to you with one of those than Outlook.

That for the few dollars you’re not spending, it could be costing you thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of dollars in in performance you’re not getting and you can’t get to Outlook.

We all use it every day. I’m not telling you don’t use Outlook to email one person or back and forth. But if we’re talking about campaigns, we’re talking about reaching large audiences.

There are such significant limitations about it that we really do need to think about it and talk about that. So let’s get into that part. So inbox or span, that was our title here.

The Reality of Where Emails Actually End Up

Fifty five percent of emails land in the inbox. That sounds really not great.

Showing your light. What percentage? That means almost half the emails don’t make it to the inbox.

Worse yet, I say worse relatively speaking, almost a third of emails are disregarded as spam.

That’s an enormous an enormous number, Deanna.

We all get email every day. It’s not unusual to get hundreds, and we just barely get our way through it. But it’s almost like you’re you’re trying to create clarity amongst such noise. You’re trying to bust through someone’s consciousness when all they’re trying to do is figure out, you know, what matters and what doesn’t. Right?

Absolutely. And I think most people would be surprised that only fifty five percent are typically landing in that inbox, especially with the others and the filters that now we have AI and machine learning making some of these decisions for us. It’s much more imperative that we keep, our sender reputation clean and active and our lists clean and active, both points in which we’re about to dive in.

The Importance of Domain Reputation

So this really speaking to what some people call domain reputation. Others will you may have heard it as sender reputation.

And if you don’t have a good reputation, you’re in trouble. Right?

We’re talking about emails that come from at your company dot com. Right? Whatever your your email is.

Deanna, when we’re talking about known senders, safe senders, relevant senders, what are we really talking about?

Absolutely. So your domain reputation is what your recipient’s inbox, how they perceive you.

So it’s whether you are known. Have you emailed this company before or this person before? Are you safe? So your domain reputation carries beyond just one person.

It’s the activities of everyone at your domain.

So are you sending to people that bounce often or invalid email addresses? Those are all things that can muddy up your reputation And relevant, this very key. You wanna make sure going back to that right message to the right person.

We have so many scanners, especially in our industry with cybersecurity and safeties.

It’s much harder in a b to b world to keep our domain reputation pristine versus in a commerce world where they let a lot more go, to just a general Gmail account versus a major financial institution.

So we need to make sure that this domain reputation, we stay above board and be proactive rather than reactive because once you get into a deep hole, it’s very difficult to dig yourself out of.

So we talk to clients all the time who say, I have a we have a we have a contract. We have a working agreement. We have, you know, a relationship with this company.

We should be able to email people who work there.

It’s not that their agreement is invalid. It is. They have a business relationship.

Why does that not work in email?

So, unfortunately, while we may have a wonderful working relationship person to person or even in contract form, what’s key is that the email filters and your recipients’ inboxes know that. And that’s something new to the email industry that we’ve been really navigating the waters of is getting a white list or an approved sender status with these agreements.

So getting with the IT department, especially if you’re emailing a mass amount of people at one company domain, you’re gonna wanna make sure that your sender domain is white listed prior to distribution.

If you try and send to a new sender email or a new recipient inbox, and let’s say you have fifty, a hundred contacts, even twenty five if it’s a small company, and you’re trying to hit them all at once, that’s a red flag to that filter that says, well, we’ve never heard from you. How do you know all of us?

It’d be like a new person showing up at your family reunion that no one’s met before. You’re gonna have questions.

And, certainly, technology does as well, but, unfortunately, they work in a yes, no system, not so much in gray. And if you do that too often, you can be blacklisted before you ever get to talk to your first contracted friend.

So on the screen, known sender you’ve spoken to. Safe sender.

Yeah.

It says What do we mean by safe?

Safe. So you wanna make sure that you’re not flooding emails with images or attachments or one too many links. All of those things that, viruses or anything could kind of dig into, those email senders and filters have a spam threshold.

Best Practices for Email Content

So you might be used to receiving sales emails where it’s all one image. It’s a clickable image. Those are very, very spammy, especially to our email filters.

So we wanna make sure we’re keeping that text to image ratio correct.

But my image is a legitimate one, and my all the links in my messages are important because they’re two resources that you need. So what’s the problem?

The problem is, again, if you’re not a known sender, it might be as it might be the most relevant content possible, but that filter doesn’t know. So the more machine limitations that we have or machine scanners that are in between us and the next human, the more we need to behave slightly different in our sense and, frankly, in how things are built.

So the way I’m hearing you and the way Interpret it is that your purpose is legitimate. Unfortunately, you’re behaving in a way that spammers already abuse email. They use lots of links. They use lots of images.

And, unfortunately, they’ve kinda degraded the opportunity for the rest of us who who play by the rules. Right? So if you look too much like them, you kinda get swept up and being treated as if you might be one of them because that you’d say because the technology can’t tell the difference yet.

Precisely. Yes. So the technology is trying to air on the side of caution because its job is to protect the house. So if anything seems suspicious, it’s just gonna say no or redirect you to spam versus an inbox. I’m sure we’ve all had a message from someone we really wanted to hear from that unfortunately got rerouted, whether it’s from a word in the subject line, their domain reputation, or too big of an attachment.

Factors That Impact Your Domain Reputation

So these small things can really hinder where your email ends up, especially going back to those new prospects that we wanna target.

Alright. So we let’s talk about this a little more, factors that impact your domain or your sender reputation. Right?

You’ve used the term spam many times or in the last couple of minutes. Right?

Clearly, if people don’t recognize you, they weren’t expecting this.

They likely didn’t opt in, by the way. And, that is an expectation of email platforms. It’s not just you’re loading a list and sending, it’s that there’s an expectation. It’s implicit.

In fact, you have to check a box typically to say, yes, I have an opt in relationship with these people. They are expecting they have they have asked us to email to them. Right? Or they have invited us to do so.

If folks hit that box that says, I don’t know who you are and you’re noise to me, you’re spam.

It doesn’t take many of those to put you over the cliff, does it?

No. Not at all. And in fact, gone are the days of we purchased fifteen thousand contacts from a reputable source.

They definitely work in our industry. Let’s send an email and see what happens.

People got mad. Just like our mailboxes used to be full of postcards from items we don’t need, and we call them junk mail and immediately take them inside to the trash.

People were getting annoyed with our inboxes, and that’s what’s happening now. So we’re having to make sure that our engagement levels, our clicks, our opens, are continuously growing, and these contacts are in fact engaged. If you send to large lists and no one’s opening, no one’s clicking, that’s a major indicator that you weren’t wanted here. You weren’t invited. So you’ll get those negative spam points.

Authentication protocols used to be something that we could just recommend.

Now will talk about similar, won’t we?

We will for sure. Very important in the technical side of, you know, this chat.

Obviously, sending volume and frequency. If you don’t send anything for a really long time and all of a sudden you have fifteen thousand new contacts that you wanna send everything to in one mass mail, well, that’s gonna raise some flags. Right? How did you make that many friends so quickly?

So that and, of course, all of this culminates into the importance of your list health and quality over quantity.

We’re gonna talk about list health as well.

Sure. So we’re gonna talk about the email authentication protocols, engagement metrics.

We’ve talked about content quality a little bit. We’re gonna touch on it in this session even though we’re not able to talk about how to construct and how to write and how to, you know, perform for this moment. We do have some guidelines that we wanna at least offer.

It’s really as simple as saying, hey.

What do you think is important and what do you think is not?

And we’ll just we’ll be candid. We’re just gonna tell you what we think matters and what doesn’t.

Of course, as Deanna just said, list health. And we say health, that’s a broad word, but it really it means quite a lot. So let’s talk about this.

The Importance of Sender Reputation

Center reputation.

Right?

There are fact here, seventy nine percent, the statistic of email delivery issues are related to sender reputation.

I guess to interpret that positively, it means you can cure almost eighty percent of your the problems you’ll ever have if you stay clean on your sender reputation.

Right?

And these are four huge ways you can really mess up your reputation.

Why don’t you take us through these, Deanna? And I’m really interested in in a in a kind of a kind of a quick overview as to what they mean, what the impact is, and whether they’re temporary or permanent. Basically, if if you if you decide to ignore them or don’t apply yourselves to them. And by the way, whether you’re doing these yourselves, whether you have oversight of a group or department, that does this, or you just wanna have just recognition of it, you know, in your company, these are these these might be the most important things you take away from this session.

Consequences of Poor List Management

Correct. This a, big topic, a big detail that typically gets very little airtime, when you’re talking about your email tactic or strategy.

So most of these are all buildable, but they have long term consequences if you don’t keep an eye on them. So mention quickly list health. Sending the purchaser scraped list without cleaning.

No matter what your source of that list tells you, based on my own experience and those of others, there will be some sort of bounce rate. So even if this a conference list that you just attended, the likelihood that someone has maybe changed companies within the three months that they registered for this event or domains have changed.

Always important, especially if it’s a purchase list from a ZoomInfo or competitor nature.

They say ninety nine percent valid. I can assure you. Run it through a system before you send. You will not get every word that you paid for.

And, unfortunately, it can have major repercussions for you outside of just that purchase price.

Email Authentication Essentials

Skipping authentication. This something if you don’t do it, it will be permanent.

You must authenticate with DKIM, DMARC, SPF.

These terms, they are fun acronyms, and, unfortunately, I’m not talking sunscreen. But we need to make sure that this applied prior to sending or if we’re already sending that we make sure that everything is authenticated properly.

If you send to a strong filter in our industry, they will automatically blacklist you, and you’ll have to talk to their IT to manually get back as an approved sender because it’s just too big of a risk.

Ignoring those bounce rates or spam complaints, that is a buildable offense that once you get in the dark, email compliance and filters again can blacklist you. We don’t want you to get there. And sending too frequently to massless without engagement growth, I spoke to that earlier.

These patterns matter. And as we’re working with computers that are checking our analytics, data points matter. So dates, times, frequency.

We don’t have a nice person at a desk that we can talk and say, but we have this very important message. So we are working with a black and white scoring system here.

So of all these, I think cleaning cleaning utilities are it it might be the only one that it has. It costs dollars. The others cost time. Right?

Correct. Yes.

But even cleaning utilities are really inexpensive. They’re only a few dollars per thousand or a few dollars for several thousand.

Correct. Yeah. No. The cost of cleaning not only is low financially. Normally, it’s like an eighth of a penny per name or less than that.

But the cost of cleaning is so pale in comparison to the cost of repairing your reputation.

Just the time cost of the human to identify the issue and then the reputation repair plan, which sometimes can be six months long to get out of these holes.

Yeah. Jail. Email jail.

Just just for for those of you who may not have direct experience with with a cleaning utility, we’re talking about automated platforms. You upload lists, and they will respond with a report back to you that these names are good. These names we’re not sure or these are probably good. These are names we’re not sure of at all, and these are bad.

Is that about right, Deanna? Right? Yeah. Those are the top four main characters. Guidance. It’s guidance to say, listen.

You’re you’re in the green over here. We’re not sure about over here, and if we wouldn’t email to these over here at all. Right?

Absolutely. Yes. And when we get later on, you’ll see how low of those thresholds we have for those bounce and spams.

It’s not a lot. So you just mentioned, a few of these. We’re only gonna spend a moment on them because the truth is we’re more interested in in your awareness

Diving into SPF, DKIM, and DMARC

of this than learning how all these things work. But give us a really quick snapshot of what what these are and why they matter.

Absolutely. So these are three different security protocols, all within a different, capacity.

But it verifies the authenticity of your domain, the authenticity that it is you, in fact, sending these on behalf of your company, and it prevents anyone from being able to spoof or send fraudulent messages appearing to be you.

This a new trend in email we’ve all been seeing, and we certainly don’t want anyone to be misrepresenting us.

And this one quick way to do that.

And then from what we can tell, it may seem like that the platforms are being difficult or there there there’s more hoops to jump through.

They’ll tell you it’s to protect you and your reputation.

Wink, wink. It’s to protect them.

These email platform, that’s their business, is to manage email on behalf of thousands or tens of thousands or hundred thousands of country companies. Excuse me.

They wanna make sure that their reputation to send emails is protected.

So they will enforce this downstream to all of us as customers to do the same. Here’s a new polling question.

Poll 3 Question

The primary notion of your emails. If you think about what kind of emails do you generally send, do you inform?

Are they informational?

Are they newsletters? Are they articles?

Are they perspectives in that form that you can see in the body of the email? Or are they do they tend to be invitation to take an action, to do something, to sign up, to download, to watch, to participate in something?

Give us a quick response to this one if you would have, and then we’ll we’ll we’ll talk really quickly about as to why might this be really important.

Alright. Great.

Poll 3 Insights

So here’s an unusual one, Deanna.

We got a unanimous result. We don’t often get many, but in this case, it was unanimous on the a side, which is informational, more newsletter, more article.

This wasn’t really a gotcha question, but we asked it for a really important reason. Right? By the way, there wasn’t a right or wrong here, but there was a right here.

And I’m gonna skip ahead, you know, maybe one slide here.

Engagement Metrics Overview

When we talk about engagement, we talk about the purpose of why are you emailing people.

Notice the notice the buttons on excuse me, the stats on the right here. Okay?

These are considered positive. These are considered good.

Maybe not great, maybe not unbelievable, but these are solid. If you were hitting these numbers, you’d say, hey. We’re good. Right? Open rate, twenty two percent.

Click through rate, six and a half percent. And, of course, you want those to be high and you want the others to be really, really, really low. And you were just saying a moment ago, the tolerance for bounces is really tiny.

It’s very the one for spam, which means if you didn’t clean your list and you just didn’t know that a whole bunch of people weren’t there anymore, Not it’s not nefarious. They’re just not there anymore. You could have a whole bunch of bounces.

Right? Which means you could be out of bounds before you knew it.

Well, consider a list of only a hundred people. If one person bounces, you’re now in the red for that hard bounce.

So there’s not a lot of No.

There’s not a lot of room. No. Yeah. But what’s the consequence of what’s the consequence of being out of bounds, from an email platform perspective?

So from a platform perspective, you can certainly put be put on a probation period.

That some platforms, it’s as little as two weeks. Normally, it’s a thirty day manual review probationary period if you are out of bounds with hard bounces or unsubscribes and spam. And what that means is before you can send anything, someone on their team is going to manually review your message and your list to make sure, hey. Have these contacts been engaged before? If they’ve never been used before other than that one email that got you in probation, you can’t send.

And it’s not something that we can talk our way out of. It is these are hard guidelines of you need to learn your lesson, clean your list, or adjust your message.

So one message that you send out and you’re hoping you get responses could lead you to not be able to send anything for thirty days, and that’s beyond the email reputation scores and filter consequence.

So if you’re depending on we have a campaign to send messages every week, every two weeks, every four weeks for the next twelve months, and you hit one of these roadblocks, one of these speed bumps, it can seriously affect your campaign.

Absolutely. And it’s not just on a campaign basis that should be put on that probationary period. It would be your domain.

It’s your account, you’re saying?

Correct. So let’s say this was a new prospect email campaign, but now you have a critical client message you need to go out, but you’re in a probation phase. So that could be delayed. It could be denied, and it’s just a speed bump, like you said, that could greatly impact any email sends for a minimum of thirty days.

So the click the click through right here, six and a half percent.

Right?

It’s not enormous.

Mm-mm. Not everybody’s clicking through. It’s not and by the way, we say click through. We’re saying you clicked on something in the message to click through to the website.

Right? It was read the article here. It was watch this here. You know, click follow a link to do something.

Right?

And the bar is not very high. It is like one out of three people have to do it, otherwise, you’re not engaged.

A, people are busy and people are not always motivated and it’s a different thing, but this saying six and a half percent. Think back to the question we asked here a moment ago.

Right?

Are your messages more informational?

In our last poll, those of you who responded said pretty much universally, we fit here.

Right? If you’re if you’re putting the article or that newsletter in your email and you’re not inviting somebody to click through to read it on the website or engage with it, you have a zero percent click through rate because you didn’t give them any reason to click at all.

Which means even though you may have been informing them, it may have been useful information From an email perspective, they look disengaged.

And this something we see often.

Having that long form full content in the email body, you think I’m being helpful. Here’s the whole story.

But you’re not being helpful to yourself.

So doing a shorter form teaser style message with a click through is really where you’re gonna get those critical engagement metrics. Without this open rate or without this click through rate, again, those filters are saying, okay. But other people didn’t engage with your content. Other people didn’t see that your other messages had value, so why do I believe that this one is different?

Challenges of Email Engagement

Because you’re not just building a reputation off of one set.

If you do a mix of these, you’re probably fine.

What we see sometimes is, though, that the campaign and but sometimes the only output from a company to customers or prospects lives on the informational side.

They send nothing but good information. They here’s our newsletter. Thank you for opting into our newsletter. Here’s our latest article.

There’s nothing wrong with the information, but if you never send any in from anything out that ever invites engagement, invites someone to take a step well, first of all, you’re you’re depriving your your your marketing. You’re kind of taking the oxygen out of your marketing in terms of sharing with them more because email is a very limited little box as a client. As a technology, email only allows some things. You can’t play videos typically in them.

It doesn’t run animations very well. It doesn’t scale to different size screens very well. It just is what it is, and it’s okay for text.

But if I talk to you on twenty different topics and twenty different emails, then I’m hoping that you read every single one of them where the entire library of them lives on the website. I can tell you a much bigger and broader story and be helpful to you in a way that one email typically can’t. Besides which, you remember those those open rates we talked about a moment ago?

Right? Twenty two percent.

Twenty two percent is considered a decent open rate, which also means, unfortunately, almost four out of five people didn’t open the message at all.

That is a continuous challenge is how do we get through to the other seventy eight percent.

We can’t pat ourselves on the back too much because we have a decent decent open rate. What if we had a fantastic open rate? We got fifty percent.

We blew, the industry away. It still means that half the people we wanted to share something important with never got the message at all, which is what do we do typically, Deanna? We send them another message.

Correct.

And another message and another message. And guess what? We get no open rate. We get no click through rate, and our and it depresses our sender reputation because we keep we keep swinging, and we keep missing the ball. We keep swinging and missing the ball. And we think that by trying, we are engaging, but engagement is not what we do, it’s what they do.

And I think I would ask all of you think about what does it mean to look at the performance of the emails you’ve been sending and ask, are we hitting are we achieving the success that we need these emails to do?

Let’s continue real quick. I’m mindful of the time we have. We set this probably for a few minutes too short as a as a as a session. And if you guys can hang on with us, it would be great. If you happen to have to drop off, we will, of course, we’re recording this and we’ll share this back out. But we’re gonna we don’t have that many more slides, but they’re they’re important if you can stay with us.

Crafting Quality Email Messages

We talked about the top of this content quality, of course, is essential.

Right? Right message, right time, right people, right way.

This session isn’t about how to craft that message and how to craft that subject line. We know and and, Deanna, you and I do this all the time.

We know how important the subject line is. As in if someone doesn’t see that as interesting as they’re scrolling, it doesn’t matter how fantastic your email message was. They never saw it. It’s like, see you.

It never happened. It’s a tree fell in the forest. Literally, the all the work you put on the body, if they didn’t find the email subject line compelling enough to bother to click and read. Right?

Well, and the most important thing with subject line is not only to be compelling, but to put your main idea first. It is very small. Think about how many people are checking their email on mobile. That’s even less characters. So you don’t wanna put the most compelling part at the end of that sentence.

Not just the sentence. Just as a hint for general content writing, we should do a session that. Don’t bury the lead.

Bingo.

How many times do we remestag is that are three, four, five paragraphs long and at the end? And here’s what you need to do now, assuming people read all the way down and they just don’t.

They read the first line or two, and if there’s not an action in there that seems urgent, that maybe all they they bothered with. Let’s continue.

Short Form vs. Long Form Email Content

We think about short or long form. Now this technical. This isn’t content as such, but it might inform your review.

If you look back, what have you sent out over the last, you know, three or six months? Take a look.

Was it short form? Was it long form?

There’s a there’s a wink wink here as we were doing this ourselves, which is, you know, when do we use long versus short? And the answer is, you can see, we don’t advocate long form ever.

Now have we have we ever sent them? Yes. Because we were asked to, and we did, and we did the best we could with it. Or sometimes it was just a requirement of some particular moment.

But, otherwise, if it’s a marketing email, then our purpose is to be powerful. And we powerful means to drive traffic, you know, and to and to engage, which we’re not gonna be as successful long versus short. Short means it doesn’t mean crush your message. As Deanna said earlier, use email as a teaser.

Here’s something I have something really important to tell you. Here’s why. Click here to read the article. Click here to watch the video.

Click here to download the infographic.

Whatever that is. Be really succinct in the in how you use email.

Why? Because you’ll get better results.

More people will respond, and that’s the whole point is that they’ll get it, they’ll appreciate it, and they’ll respond.

We tend to get very we get really diminished results when we go long form.

Chapter
The Value of A/B Testing

Deanna, I want you to talk to this because this one is something that not not everybody does and not everybody appreciates.

It’s this notion of testing, and we think of it as an AB test. Now what does it mean to test subject line, body image, video, call to action layout, list segment?

That’s a lot of things to test.

Absolutely. So it’s a lot of things to test. But as we put on here, only change one variable at a time. Just like any other experiment, if we start moving multiple things around if with each test, we won’t know what worked versus what didn’t. So this may be testing over a long period of time or multiple messages as it’s better said.

Changing a few of these items will help you see which engagement points matter. Maybe the call to action works better in a text link versus a button.

Or the subject line, you have one that’s a little bit more provocative and one that’s more business speak. See how your list segment and your or better known as your audience responds to it, and then craft your future messages to those that perform best.

Optimizing Engagement Through Testing

Ultimately, we want that engagement score high, and we want our recipients to look forward to our messages.

So by crafting it the way that they like and they best respond to, we can move that forward.

So the big key here, the one idea here called out on the side is when you’re gonna change these variables, only change one at a time. And that may seem like, yeah.

But we’ve actually seen folks say, well, we a we’re AB testing. This one has the a version of the subject line, the body copy, and the call to action. And the b one has a different subject line and a different call to action and a different layout. Well, you’re testing different things.

It becomes impossible to know which was the which was the variable that caused people to react more to one than the other. You just have to limit to one at a time. Right? Otherwise, it’s just it’s interesting, but it becomes, unknowable as to what you’re getting out of this. So at least at least think about this.

Think about not all of these are to be tested every time.

For example, if you’re not sure what kind of a layout works best for some kind of a message series, then you might AB test the first message or two. But once people respond to a layout, you say, well, that’s our layout. We’re gonna use that layout going forward. We don’t have to AB test that one ever again.

Or if the responses were so close to 50-50 that they weren’t really conclusive, then go with the one that makes you feel good and be done and move on. Right?

But there are some things, like I said, hey, call there’s there are stats that say, I think, what buttons that are called action buttons tend to get clicked more often than text links. Right?

If you wanna test that idea, do that. And if it proves to be so, then you’re done. You don’t have to AB test that over and over. I will say that we test subject lines more than we do anything else.

Absolutely.

We also know from from history, emails that have images in them are more interesting to people than text only in emails, generally.

And emails that have video in the subject line or have a video thumbnail, they get better open rates and better click through rates than emails that do not. That’s just a broad statement, but it assumes you have something that’s interesting for them to see and to watch and to do, but it can make a difference.

Yeah?

Best Practices for Using Images in Emails

And one quick point regarding images, make sure that you don’t put your most compelling statement in an image.

Why? Why? So I think the latest stat is about sixty four percent of people have their images by default turned off, especially if you’re a new sender.

So you might have the greatest statement, something that will change their life. But if it’s hidden behind an image, they may never see it because it maybe never loaded.

X there when the image goes.

Exactly. So, you definitely don’t want above the fold to be a complete image with big flashy stuck because someone may never see it. So making sure that if you do have critical information in an image, it is also written in the text.

Always good advice.

Very important, especially for events, date and time. Alright. We see that the most.

Just very quickly. We always talk about lists to keep them clean, keep them active, keep them interested. Right?

Absolutely.

Keep them fresh, which also means use them.

That is the list you haven’t used in six months, you dusted off, is not gonna perform well, which is why we talk about cleaning.

Let’s very quickly close on what to do next, Deanna.

Chapter
Next Steps and Resources

Absolutely. So with this replay, we’re also gonna send a checklist that you guys can utilize.

It mentions these high level topics that we talked about and also ways that you can see how your email performance measures up and areas to look at that might need improvement.

Of course, as we start at the top of this, email deliverability and email health is a major topic that, frankly, we just are running out of time. So if you have any questions or if you heard something interesting but you wanna dive deeper, please don’t hesitate to reach out.

I can get deep into the weeds on some of these things or stay high level, but I wanna make sure that if any of these topics sparked an interest or a question or a concern that, you know, we’re here to help, as friends, as colleagues, as partners here in the industry. We all do best when we succeed.

Thank you for that. And to all of you joining us today,

Let’s Talk About Your Email Closing Remarks

let’s talk about your email. As Deanna said, we are here to help. And if you’d like just to run a question by us, we’re here. And if you’d like more than that, yeah, of course, we can dive in.

I hope you’re enjoying this series. We’re enjoying thinking about these topics and thinking about ways in which we can be helpful in expressing them. And if you have ideas of topics you think would be interesting to have us cover, please, drop us a note or give us a shout. We’d love to hear.