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Making Your Startup Awesome At Email: Part 2

Sat, 20 Mar 2021 17:55:46 GMT

Earlier in Part One , I shared four simple introductory tips on how to build up your email marketing muscle as a startup. Here are four more ways to make your email efforts more effective.

Segment your mailing list

Content strategy is about getting the right content to the right people at the right time, not identical content to everyone. The members of your mailing list are not homogenous. They are at different stages of engagement with your company, have unique needs, use your products and services in different ways, are different ages with different incomes, etc.

So as soon as you're able to, a ) sync your lead and customer data points to your email platform and b) automate segmentation of the audiences within your mailing list. That real-time sync is critical. People's statuses change over time, and segmentation based on static info can quickly go out of date. There are countless way to segment your list, but I suggest the following buckets as a starting point:

leads (people who've subscribed to your mailing list but havenʼt yet subscribed to your product/service or purchased);
customers (those who HAVE subscribed to your product/service or purchased);
churned customers (those who have closed their account/cancelled their subscription to your product/service);
partners; and
competitors (youʼd be surprised how often competitors will sign up to your mailing list to see what youʼre doing/get ideas, particularly in B2B market).

This allows you to upgrade from a one-size fits all messaging approach to a customised approach—sending targeted emails to each audience. The more you can customise your email content to each segment's needs, interests and position in the sales cycle, the stronger your engagement rates will be (which means more people are seeing and hearing what you have to say).

Here's a real life example: earlier this year I helped Rotor Videos promote Spotify Canvas video creation to its mailing list. Every email was on the same topic, but the positioning of each varied strategically:

Emails sent to independent musicians in the leads bucket focused on how Spotify Canvas videos can help them increase fan engagement and Rotor's low price per video.
Emails to record labels in the leads bucket emphasised how these videos can help them ensure their artists look professional on Spotify, increase listening time and streaming revenue, and highlighted how affordably they could make a high volume of these videos for their entire roster of musicians on Rotor's subscription plan for labels.
Emails to subscribers in the customers bucket stressed fan engagement, speed of creation, and reminded them that these videos were free to make on their plan.

So different benefits were communicated to each audience based on the the most relevant problems they're trying to solve, and different purchasing pathways were highlighted depending on who they were and how they were currently engaging or we wanted them to engage (make and buy individual videos vs. make and subscribe for multiple videos vs. make and maximise the value of your current plan).

Segmentation also lets you easily exclude members of your mailing list that donʼt want to contact. For example, you might want to temporarily pause comms to recently churned customers rather than immediately and repeatedly hit them with product info right after they've left. Or maybe you never want to send emails to competitors.

Set targets and measure

How can you know if you're doing a good job if you don't define what good looks like? When it comes to email engagement, every industry's benchmarks are different. For example, according to Campaign Monitor , in 2020 the average open rate for the retail sector was 12.6% while for non-profits it was 25.5%. These are overall averages:

Open rate: 18.0%
Click-through rate: 2.6%
Click-to-open rate: 14.1%
Unsubscribe rate: 0.1% (note that anything over 3% is cause for concern)

If your startup's emails are already performing better than this, well done you! Set new targets and aim for new PBs. If you're not hitting benchmark averages yet, these provide a target to work towards.

Focus your messaging

Once while discussing emails, a marketing colleague said to me "I don't care what they click on, as long as they click on something." It really irked me, because that is not strategic thinking. That is closing your eyes, throwing a dart, and hoping to hit something.

User experience designers are extremely familiar with the paradox of choice . Basically, user research shows that the more options you give a person, the less likely they are to make any choice at all. Overwhelmed, they engage less or sometimes choose nothing and walk away—never a desired income in business. We can apply the same science to email strategy in order to improve effectiveness and engagement.

As much as possible, decide on what's the most important job you need that email to do and limit it to that one primary focus. Going back to my previous example with Rotor Videos, each of those emails was focused solely on making Spotify Canvas videos. We didn't list other services. We didn't link to related blog content we thought they might also enjoy. The goal was to make them aware that they could use the product to create Spotify Canvas videos, quickly communicate the benefit of doing so, and get them to login and start creating. That's it. Anything else would have risked distracting them from the primary objective.

What about newsletters you ask? Monthly roundups? Those emails have to, by their nature, have more than one item. True. But you can still apply this principle of restraint to be strategic about how much and what you include—sharing only what you should or is most valuable to the audience instead of everything you could .

Hyperlink everything

Ok...not literally everything. But while your email's focus should be singular, the routes you provide to the final destination should be many. Often inexperienced marketers will only hyperlink the CTA button itself, but the idea is to make it as easy as possible for recipients to get to where you want them to go. So you should give them a few different ways to get there. Hyperlink your lead image, because people instinctively click on images, and hyperlink in the body copy wherever it makes most sense to click through to destination page. Don't overdo it and fill your body copy with heaps of hyperlinks, but one or two will draw the eye to key phrases and improve click through rates.

Making Your Startup Awesome At Email: Part 1

Sat, 14 Mar 2020 19:09:54 GMT

Email might be my favourite channel for communicating with leads. It's direct to an audience who has ASKED to hear from you, is satisfyingly measurable, and can offer precise detail on who did what (depending on the marketing automation you're using). So here are some very simple, introductory tips to help any startup kill it at email.

Keep quiet until you have something worthwhile to say

One of the biggest mistakes I see companies make is valuing their desire to keep in touch with leads above their leads’ need to hear from them. It still surprises me just how much outreach is driven by FOBF (fear of being forgotten), yet they are decidedly unphased by what I'll call FOPPO (fear of pissing people off).

The (misguided) logic is that frequently emailing leads with something—anything—is better than only emailing a few times a year. Obviously if you have great, relevant content that's of interest and value to your audience (and you have the engagement metrics to back that up), then a more frequent comms schedule is no problem at all. Nobody ever complained about getting too much quality content. But if all you have to say is a series of:

Wanna buy our product?
Hi again, we still have this product you haven't bought.
Check out this new thing we added to our product.
Get a discount on our product!
Did you see that discount we sent you on our product?
Last chance to get that discount on our product.
Did you hear this person likes our product?
Here's another, different discount on our product!
Wanna buy our product now?
How about now?

...then you’re setting the stage for major engagement, sales and conversion problems down the line.

"... emails about the same thing(s) over and over don't teach audiences to value products or remember them. It trains them to ignore you in the inbox."

I've seen companies whose entire email histories were like this, yet marketing wasn't contributing to sales. Why? Because emails about the same thing(s) over and over don't teach audiences to value products or remember them. It trains them to ignore you in the inbox.

Unsubscribes are the typical defence for this practice; ‘ It’s okay to email a lot because nobody’s unsubscribing. ’ But don’t let a low unsubscribe rate, alone , lure you in to thinking that your heavy email cadence is harmless (less than 1% being low). That's only one metric of engagement. What do your open rates tell you? Your click rates? Your site’s Return Visitors rate? Your conversation rate from email-offer-to-sale?

The desire (and pressure) to hurry up and sell today can obscure the long-term damage you’re doing to your funnel. Certainly, being the top-of-mind solution is optimal when your audience is ready to buy…but not if their prevailing thought is ' Man those folks are annoying spammers .'

"Don't make recipients guess what they should do once they're done reading your copy."

The moral of the story? 10 great emails/year balanced between useful non-sales content that makes your audience's life easier and emails that promote your product is far more effective than 52 emails/year that basically offer the same information every time. It's not easy to convert site visitors into leads, and that will be wasted effort if your email habits teach them that what you have to say is noise rather than noteworthy and nourishing.

Always A/B test your subject lines

Assuming that you have no issues with email deliverability (ie, you're not being blacklisted by email clients, email addresses in your database are legit, and your delivery percentage is in the very high 90th percentile), getting people to open your email is the first hurdle in email engagement. And A/B testing subject lines is a super-simple way for your startup to increase email open rates.

A/B testing (also called multi-variate testing) lets you to try out different subject lines (or calls-to-action, or email copy, or different designs) on a small portion of your mailing list, and then send the most effective version to the majority of them. I suggest you A/B test all emails you send to a decent sized mailing list (say 200 recipients or more), but it's particularly important for nurture or drip emails that will automatically be sent repeatedly as new leads enter your funnel. These are emails that fire off behind the scenes and are easy to forget are operating, so you want the strongest possible versions of those emails working for you.

Most email automation software makes it easy for you to A/B test. Typically you:

key in Subject A and Subject B;
specify what percentage of your mailing list you want to send A to;
specify what percentage you want to send B to;
set how long you want the test to run for; and
select what metric you want to use to decide the winner.

I usually send A to 15% of the audience, B to 15% of the audience, use open rate as my success metric, and run the test for a minimum of three hours. The automation would then send the tests to 30% of the specified audience, and once the time had elapsed, automatically send the winning subject line email to the remaining mailing list.

Always include calls to action

For every email you send, you should have a desired outcome next step in mind. What is the objective of your email? Maybe you want them to read your blog article. Maybe you want them to watch a video, or redeem a discount code or register for a webinar.

Don’t make recipients guess what they should do once they’re done reading your copy. Use clear calls to action (CTAs) to tell them explicitly, set the primary CTA in a button to make them easy to spot when scanning the email (and secondary CTAs as text links), lead with verbs, and keep them short (3-4 words). Examples include:

Read more
Find out more
Register now
Book your spot
Watch the video
Buy now
Learn how
Schedule a meeting
Request a demo

Why? The harder you make them think, the more likely it is they’ll just move on to the next email in their inbox without taking any action at all.

And as with the subject line A/B testing, try out different CTAs over time to see which work best with your particular target audiences. Depending on your offering and audience, a more formal tone like Register Now might perform better than a casual CTA tone like Snap Up Your Seat , or vice-versa. Experiment to see what you can learn.

Send emails in your recipients’ local time zones

Subject lines are a major determiner of email open rates. Time of day received is another—so much so that there are countless articles online declaring the optimal times of day to send in order to get you the highest engagement rate. Until a few years ago, we had very limited control over when an email was sent. You could select your day of week, and you could select one time slot based on your own timezone. So if you were based in NYC you might choose to send your batch email at 2pm YOUR local time. This will have worked fine for anyone whose target audiences all resided in the Eastern time zone. Everyone in your list would have received the email at 2pm. But more often our leads reside globally in multiple time zones, so leads in California would have received that email at 11am, those in the United Kingdom at 7pm (after work) and those in Turkey at 10pm.

About three years ago, marketing automation platforms started introducing timezone sending. In Mailchimp they call this feature Timewarp. Others haven’t bothered to give it a catchy name, but all major platforms I’ve used have it. This feature is a godsend to those of us who care about email customisation and optimisation. The functionality allows all recipients to get your email at your desired time in THEIR time zone. So using the example above, NYC, California, United Kingdom and Turkey recipients would all get your email at 2pm THEIR time.

It’s a simple tactic that can significantly boost your open rates by preventing any global audiences from getting emails from you at the break of dawn or after bedtime…unless that’s what you want.

I’m about to make these four habits standard practice with a new client, so I’ll report back on the uplift soon!