Despite persistent rumors that email is dead, research shows that email is still the most preferred method of communication. Clearly, email is not dead - but it is evolving. In order to stay effective, marketers must evolve along with it.
Watch this two-part webinar series on engaging email marketing! You will discover best practices for making your email campaigns more personal and relevant. The series, led by industry experts Jon Miller and DJ Waldow, will discuss email marketing best practices, address the five key attributes of engaging email, and will provide you with useful strategies to make your emails more engaging and more effective!
3. #RevEngine #DG2EEM @jonmiller @djwaldow
Today’s Topics: Part 1
• What is “Engaging Email”?
• Segmentation and Targeting
for Relevance
• Tips for Writing Emails That
Get Opened and Clicked
• Email Testing and
Optimization
And, join us on Sept 4 for Part 2!
• Building and Maintaining a Quality List
• Trends in Email Deliverability
• Conversations, Not Campaigns
• Coordinated Across Channels / Email and Social
• New Metrics for Email
• Trends in Email Technology: Moving Beyond ESP
4. #RevEngine #DG2EEM @jonmiller @djwaldow
Quick Housekeeping
• Chat box is available if you have any
questions
• There will be time for a Q&A at the end
• We will be recording the webinar for
future viewing
• All attendees will receive a copy of the
slides/recording
• Twitter hashtag: #DG2EEM
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The Key to Relevance is Behavioral Targeting
Tactics to Increase Email Engagement
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Example: Topic of Interest Triggers
• Attends event
• Downloads content
• Click email
• Fills out form
• Score is changed
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Standard Nurture Triggered Interests Lift
Open % 21.7% Open % 34.0% 57%
Click to Open % 23.4% Click to Open % 37.1% 59%
Click % 5.1% Click % 12.6% 147%
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Want your emails to get opened and acted upon?
OF COURSE!
Make sure it does one (or more) of these four things:
1. Solve his problem
2. Save her money
3. Make her smarter
4. Entertain him
Educate, Don’t Sell
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Sesame Street Asks Obama Campaign To Take Ad
Down, Anderson Cooper vs. Star Jones, Die
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Sesame Street Asks Obama Campaign To Take Ad Down,
Anderson Cooper vs. Star Jones, Die Hard Obama Supporter
Freaks Out
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One Oil Change, Three Oil Changes with Inspections, or a
Four-Wheel Alignment (Up to 78% Off) | 10 or 20 Gym Passes
(Up to 69% Off) | Salon Package with Cut, Style, and Two-Color
Highlights; Shellac Manicure; or Acrylic Nails (Up to 51% Off)
An actual Groupon subject line
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There is no “optimal”
length for an email subject
line. YOUR audience
determines that! #DG2EEM
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Let’s talk
from names
• Company or Brand
Name
• Product or Service
• Personal Name
• With a Phone Number
• Campaign-based
• Gimmicky
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Mobile Design Options
Scalable
• Clickable and the type is
readable, even when reduced
50% in size.
• Avoid large widths and includes
big type and big buttons.
Responsive
• The layout of a page responds
based on the proportions of the
screen on which it’s presented.
Pay as much attention to the pre-
header as you do your subject line
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Eight Tips for Pro Testing
• Start simple
• Test one element at a time
• Control for time of day and day of the week
• Keep a log of all your tests
• Make sure testing is part of your day-to-day
processes
• Run tests on groups that are small, but large enough
to determine a clear winner
• Don't forget that small differences can be significant
• Listen to what your tests tell you
74. #RevEngine #DG2EEM @jonmiller @djwaldow
10 Tweetable Takeaways
1. Email Marketing is NOT dead – but it sure is changing
2. Engaging email is trustworthy, relevant, and conversational
3. The smaller your email send, the more engaging it will be
4. Behavioral targeting can increase engagement by 50% or
more
5. Relevant emails require moving from dumb lists to a smart
database
6. Send timely, targeted, valuable HUMAN email
7. It’s okay to use free and ALL CAP in a subject line. Test what
works best for YOUR audience!
8. There is no “optimal” length for an email subject line. YOUR
audience determines that!
9. Beauty is in the eye of the subscriber
10. Listen to what your tests tell you
@jonmiller
@djwaldow
#DG2EEM
My name is Jon Miller, VP Marketing and co-founder at Marketo, and author of the DG2MA.Today, I’m thrilled to be joined by Lorena…I’m @jonmiller, and Lorena is @harrilor, so please feel free to engage with us during or after the presentation on Twitter using #DG2MA
Please note that today’s webinar is being recorded. It will be available on-demand soon after the conclusion of the webcast.We will conclude today’s event with a Q&A session. Please feel free to submit your questions throughout and we will get to as many of your questions as we can. You can enter questions by typing your question in the box on the left-hand side of your screen. <pause>
Not that long ago, there were few 3rd party sources of information – information scarcity – which meant that a buyer had to get most of their information from sales.It also meant we lived in a world of attention abundance, with fewer channels competing for a buyer’s attention.
But now, there is an explosion of readily available information… This is a recent phenomenon… According to IBM, we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data — so much that 90% of the data in the world today has been created in the last two years alone.IDC report, Extracting Value from Chaos, says that that amount of global digital information created and shared worldwide has grown 9-fold in the five years to 2011 to nearly 2 zettabytes (2 trillion GB), and should quadruple again by 2015All this data = buyers today are more empowered. The Web provides them with instant information gratification. They can access detailed specs, pricing, and reviews about goods and services 24/7 with a few flicks of their thumbs. Meanwhile, social media encourages them to share and compare, while mobile devices add a wherever/whenever dimension to every aspect of the experience. Result: 65-90% of buying process is complete when consumer is walks into store/branch/dealer, or contacts salesRequires deep changes in how we market to consumers.So, how are we as marketers doing responding to this?
So how are we responding to this? Not good.So between the marketers that are still batching and blasting, or sending personalized messages that aren’t relevant right now, this is kind of what it feels like to be a consumer today. On any given day, the average customer will be exposed to 2,904 media messages, will pay attention to 52 and will positively remember 4 – SuperProfile 2010
Your consumer is like a sponge, and all those marketing messages are like the water.How do you ensure that your message is the one of the 4that get absorbed into the sponge? After all, a potential buyer can only absorb so much, and your competitors are vying for their attention too.
Think about it: you probably pay the most attention to emails from friends, family, and colleagues, people with whom you have genuine, trusted relationships.Sure, the relationship between a brand and a consumer is never exactly the same as the relationship between friends and family, but marketers can narrow the gap.Brands can enjoy some of the benefits of a trusted relationship by marketing to the buyer in a natural, non-marketing-speak way that truly engages him.The best marketing doesn’t feel like marketing at all.------------The answer: our communicationsmust be more trusted, more relevant, and more strategic. It must be more engaging. Traditional batch and blast feels like shouting, engagement marketing feels more like a natural conversation. Notice how these women are engaged in conversation. There’s talking, but also listening going on. And the conversation, at least by the looks of it, seems to have a flow to it. [Refer back to this throughout the presentation: how important it is to effectively listen to online body language.]
The answer: our communicationsmust be more trusted, more relevant, and more strategic. It must be more engaging. Traditional batch and blast feels like shouting, engagement marketing feels more like a natural conversation. Notice how these women are engaged in conversation. There’s talking, but also listening going on. And the conversation, at least by the looks of it, seems to have a flow to it. [Refer back to this throughout the presentation: how important it is to effectively listen to online body language.]
So how can we be more relevant and engaging?You can’t be relevant if you’re broad.We know batch and blast does not work – it is simply less engaging. One way is to be more targeted – smaller sends = more engaging. Engagement Score enables marketers to quickly judge how effectively each piece of content is engaging prospects and customers over time… combines open, click, unsubscribe, conversion, and so on into a single metrics. “Segmented email campaigns produce 30% more opens than undifferentiated messages.” — Monetate’sIntelligent Email Marketing that Drives Conversions (2012)
Not all segments need to be different email versions
The key to relevance is behavioral targeting.So you want relevancy and engagement – but this requires sophisticated targeting that combines online body language (web traffic, search behavior, email response) plus transactional data plus with lifestyle and demographic data (personas)When behavioral cues are not used, email can be experienced as a dissonant interruption. What the sender considers a coordinated "drip campaign" may feel more like water torture to the receiver.
Here’s an example of how Marketo created even more relevance.Topic of interest nurturing: Nurture tracks based on four different topics that we thought our customers were interested in (email, social marketing, marketing automation, and Microsoft Dynamics). Welisten for signs that may be interested in this (events attended, web visits, keywords used etc.), and if so assign them to the specific track nurture track. If they get to the end of that specific track, we put them back to regular until they do something else specific.
Result: Big lift!More on our blog about this: http://blog.marketo.com/blog/2013/06/topic-of-interest-based-nurturing.html
purchase history, deposit, withdrawal, cart abandonment, data usage, etcCLOSING:Fundamentally, consumers increasingly expect companies to keep seamless track of their purchasing history, communication preferences, and desires. They know how much information is available, and expect marketers to use it. They expect you to know the answers questions such as: What did they want? What did they look at? How did they react? … and then to use that information to create more relevant interactions. Consumers look for a unified and personalized experience across all of your touchpoints: your website, social media and photo platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram), email marketing, etc. Whether they’re in front of their computers at work or in lines at post offices on their mobile devices, they expect an experience that’s streamlined and consistent — and it must be personal, too. They also expect you to recognize them — this is where it becomes critical to capture and store data over time and across channels — and then feed them the exact information they want at the moment you interact with them.
Email service providers traditional don’t help much. ESPs tend to only track email behaviors (open, click) in their local database. Lacking connection to other buyer touch points, standalone email services are unable to inform communication with more personal behavioral cues.But for more sophisticated targeting, they rely on technical databasesThese lists come from complex queries written by technical experts, not marketers. This includes API calls, SAS queries, and some email providers even tout the fact that their queries can be written in “good old fashioned SQL” (they even provide functionality for handling situations where the SQL-queries time out!)Don’t use dumb lists, use a smart database – easy!!And easy to change
While this may be straightforward for programmers, it’s a foreign language to most marketers…This makes the marketer reliant on technical resources for anything that’s not simple, especially anything that incorporates behaviors beyond email open and click
…showing all the types of data Marketo collects, pointing in towards a person Web, Email, Social, CRM, Campaign History, Transactions….Unified view of the customer with Marketo.
The answer: our communicationsmust be more trusted, more relevant, and more strategic. It must be more engaging. Traditional batch and blast feels like shouting, engagement marketing feels more like a natural conversation. Notice how these women are engaged in conversation. There’s talking, but also listening going on. And the conversation, at least by the looks of it, seems to have a flow to it. [Refer back to this throughout the presentation: how important it is to effectively listen to online body language.]
If a device does not support responsive design, then it will be scaled. So it’s worth thinking about a scalable design, nonetheless.Give your pre-header language the same care and attention that you apply to your subject line, and avoid simply displaying ‘view in browser’ text.
Start simple. Test subject lines and headers first. It doesn’t take a lot of time or creative work to come up with a few simple variants, and the return can be significant.Test one element at a time. If you test more than one element, you won’t be able to tell which variant drove the success.Control for time of day and day of the week. If you’re testing other variants, then send on the same day and at the same time to eliminate the timing variant.Keep a log of all your tests. Record your findings so you can refer back to the specific variables tested and, more importantly, learn from them.Make sure testing is part of your day-to-day processes. Testing doesn’t have to be daunting, and it shouldn’t be something you put off due to a lack of resources — it should be part of your daily routine.Run tests on groups that are small, but large enough to determine a clear winner. The winning variables should then be incorporated into your larger mailing.Don’t forget that small differences can be significant. This is especially true if your sample sizes are large. VisitMarketo’s The Ultimate Guide To Test Statistics to learn all about this. And for those of you who self-proclaim, “I’m not good at math”, we’ve got a handy A/B testing calculator you can use. (This calculator was originally designed for landing-page conversions, but it works great for email numbers. Just replace “page views” with “emails sent,” and “conversion rate” with “click-through rate” or “open rate”.)Listen to what your tests tell you! All the testing in the world won’t matter if you’re not making decisions and modifications to your campaigns based on what you’ve learned. Unused data is sad data, indeed.
My name is Jon Miller, VP Marketing and co-founder at Marketo, and author of the DG2MA.Today, I’m thrilled to be joined by Lorena…I’m @jonmiller, and Lorena is @harrilor, so please feel free to engage with us during or after the presentation on Twitter using #DG2MA