We were recently asked to talk at an Email Marketing Summit by Figaro Digital and our C.O.O. Tony MacPherson presented on “Sweat the small stuff”. A look at all the nuances, the 1 percents that make the difference in email marketing campaigns. The attention to detail that really makes a difference to your bottom line, not a silver bullet but a long term strategic change.
A look under the hood
So, this week with Black Friday in full throw we thought we would give you a sneaky look into what the presenter sees when you go to an event to see a talk on Email Marketing or CRM or any of the wonderful seminars out there. You can download Tony’s presentation here… However, this time we’ve left the presenters notes, the explanation, what Tony was seeing as he presented. This will explain the slides in a way just looking at them doesn’t.
So, we’ve been working with a client who came to us a few years ago wanting to get away from image heavy, WYSIWYG coded emails for their EU region. Meanwhile their US region continued to do things in their traditional manner, not the traditional manner. Things were going okay until they had a crisis of resource and over the last 6 weeks have had to revert to type, and their EU emails have gone back to being the very samey, very US style. The new management team asked us to justify the benefits of going back to proper design and properly hand coded emails with live text and background images, and generally all the cleanliness in the code that comes from not getting a machine to do it.
We gave them the justifications:
Better delivery
More clicks
More consistant rendering
Better user experience
Fewer unsubscribes
More on-brand
Higher revenues
“Designing” by numbers
Ultimately, well designed and hand coded emails would give them small long term gains, they would getter better delivery, better engagement, less churn – not a silver bullet on its own but a really, really good long term strategy. Unfortunately, we felt this advice was falling on deaf ears. We knew the argument that to increase profits you either need more sales or less cost and felt the less cost argument was winning over the opportunity cost argument we were making. Fortunately, we have numbers available to us. Could we prove, using the last year’s numbers that the argument we were making was in fact correct?
So we delved into their data
We had our data team go back and look at a comparison between all factors available to us within their Email Service Provider. We then ran some analysis over those numbers. Since MPP, open rates have been a soft metric and there has been a greater take up of MPP in the US. However their EU data performed at 104% of the US number. But interestingly, in the 6 weeks since changing from proper design and coding to the US style, open rates also fell off by around 104%. Within this period there was also a large data cull in the US of people who hadn’t engaged for a long period and this meant there were 2 months of increased open %’s there. Essentially skewing the figures a little because if you look at the numbers before the cull there it a 116% increase for EU over the US.
More interestingly for me are the clicks, unsubs and bounce rates. As a long term strategy the longer you can keep people engaged on your list and clicking, the higher the revenues. So we took a look at those. The EU emails designed by a designer and coded by hand received approx 3 times the number of clicks per email as the US emails, 3 times! That’s a number so significant as to be impossible to ignore.
Monthly Click Comparison
When we looked into the unsubscribes and bounces we get a similar story, unsubs for both are well under 0.1% which is below industry average with EU being slightly higher but only very marginally and this can be accredited to the fact there was no cull in the EU data and also the US data is less engaged and as such is less likely or able to unsubscribe. If we look at unsubs as a % of opens then EU is significantly lower than the US.
However, what was really interesting were bounce rates, the ISPs were voting with their servers! Bounces for US emails before the cull were at 2.636% and for the EU were 1.223%. The ISPs don’t like image led, code heavy WYSIWYG emails. Interestingly in May where the EU were no longer hand designing and hand coding the email bounces went up from an average of 1.223% to 1.794%. The big drop in US bounces coincided with the cull of the long term unengaged data but over time will gradually start to increase.
Monthly Bounce Comparison
So in conclusion
In a game of inches the opportunity cost of taking short cuts has a dramatic bottom line effect. The stats don’t lie, design great engaging emails, code them by hand, send them regularly and clean your data. A recipe for long term email marketing success over a short term cost saving.
You may be aware that Gmail are about to do something radical, crazy you might say, out there, and it’s going to have an impact on you and your data and initially it’s going to smart a little. However, when you get over the superficial grazes you’ll realise it’s a good thing. It will save you money in the long term and it will improve your deliverability and user engagement within the Gmail framework and that’s got to be a good thing.
What’s the Deal?
So, what exactly is this Gmail Purge, you ask? Well Google have decided to have a spring clean (although they’re doing it in winter) – from December 2023 they will start deleting Gmail accounts that haven’t been opened since 2021 and their policy will be to start removing accounts that haven’t been used or logged in to for a 2 year period, including content within Google Workspace (Gmail, Docs, Drive, Meet, Calendar) and Google Photos.
WIIFT: What’s In It For Them
Well there’s two things at play here in my opinion, one is what they say and one is the real benefit to them.
What they’re saying is this…People want the products and services they use online to be safe and secure. Which is why we have invested in technology and tools to protect our users from security threats, like spam, phishing scams and account hijacking.
Even with these protections, if an account hasn’t been used for an extended period of time, it is more likely to be compromised. This is because forgotten or unattended accounts often rely on old or re-used passwords that may have been compromised, haven’t had two factor authentication set up, and receive fewer security checks by the user. Our internal analysis shows abandoned accounts are at least 10x less likely than active accounts to have 2-step-verification set up. Meaning, these accounts are often vulnerable, and once an account is compromised, it can be used for anything from identity theft to a vector for unwanted or even malicious content, like spam.
Here is the hidden benefit for them…Deleting hundreds of thousands maybe millions of accounts and their associated storage issues will clean up and declutter servers all over the world reducing storage costs in the process.
Let’s be honest we’re all guilty of digital hoarding, of keeping every email, attachment, and cat meme that’s ever graced our inboxes?
The Panic Button: Time to Tidy Up
In the spirit of keeping calm and carrying on, Google have given us a bit of a heads-up. They sent out warning emails, to the accounts we’re not using! But also to those recovery accounts we’ve provided them. These emails served as a gentle nudge for users to take a peek into their dusty email archives and decide what to keep, what to delete, and what to send down memory lane.
The Digital Memory Lane
For many, sifting through their Gmail accounts is like a trip down memory lane. Old love letters, long-forgotten concert tickets, and emails from a bygone era when “BRB” was the height of texting sophistication all resurfaced. It was as if our digital pasts were being laid bare for us to explore once again.
But, of course, we also discovered some rather peculiar items. Who knew we’d still have emails from that long-lost pen pal we met on a forum dedicated to the art of knitting miniature tea cosies? Or the relentless stream of promotional emails from a shop that mistakenly thought we had an insatiable appetite for knee-high socks with cats wearing monocles?
Google’s Offer of Hope
Thankfully, Google wasn’t out to be the villain of our digital tale. They offered a glimmer of hope to those who found themselves facing the dreaded purge. The option to prevent the impending data deletion was there for the taking.
All users had to do was simply log into their Gmail accounts and send or receive an email or two. Voila! The digital guillotine was halted, and your precious electronic mementos were saved for another day of reminiscing.
Alternatively you could…
Use Google Drive
Watch a YouTube video
Download an app on the Google Play Store
Use Google Search
Use Sign in with Google to sign in to a third-party app or service
Conclusion: What does it mean to the email marketer
For us as email marketers we’ll see an increase of Gmail hard bounces which will in turn reduce our list sizes. And while no one wants their list size to reduce the truth is, these accounts may be owned by your customers but they are not being used by them, they’re not engaged with your brand in these accounts and you are better off not sending to them anyway.
The benefit is twofold, you reduce your per campaign cost, if only by a small amount, but also you improve your user engagement with Gmail and as a result will be more likely that more of your email will be placed in the appropriate Gmail folder for your users to engage. Ultimately, although not a silver bullet, it may improve your customer churn rate and we all know those that stay and pay are the golden customers.
Just because you can do something doesn’t necessarily mean that you should! It’s an old adage and one many email marketers would do well to consider before embarking on their email marketing strategy.
If we start from what is possible the prospect of drawing up an email marketing strategy, budget, resource and timelines is daunting. I like to start from the other end, not what is possible but what does the business need. It sounds simple and the oft flippant response is more sales but that doesn’t always hold true. So start with a blank canvas and decide your business’s short, medium and long term goals. They may all turn out to be the same – sales, sales and more sales.
If that’s the case your email marketing strategy is a fairly simple one. Build product led emails and send them to everyone on your list as often as you can. Automate basket and browse abandonment, cross sell in sales notifications and dispatch notices. Sounds simple doesn’t it? But in truth this approach, even if your end goal is more sales, tends to be a short term solution. Data apathy, data churn, price marginalisation, stock management, all tend to make this approach, in isolation, one that’s unsustainable long term.
Email drives sales
So what to do, as in truth the ultimate goal of any marketing comes down to sales. We dress it up as brand awareness, customer retention, brand engagement, social media presence – but ultimately all marketing has one goal and that’s to drive long term revenues. So, if we accept that we need to plan our email marketing to fulfil long term revenue targets. This is done using a combination of sales and value-added content which engages the customer as well as sells to them. In essence you need to become the trusted source in the inbox. This has its challenges because marketers have an irrational fear of being seen as spammers. In his book, “Fear and Self-Loathing in Email Marketing”, Dela Quist says: “It is time, for legitimate email marketers – who bend over backwards not to be seen as spammers – to stop feeling so guilty about something they don’t even do”. It really is okay to send an email a day, or even two if you have something new and interesting to say.
In order to understand how best to use email we first need to look at how the long term goal is achieved.
List growth
New customer acquisition, grow the number of people you can realistically sell your products and services to. The more people on your list who look like the other people on your list the better.
List retention
This is like the silver bullet. Grow your list using customer acquisition tools and reduce the churn in your database. Increase the time someone stays a customer then the return on your initial CPA becomes exponential.
Automation
Automate touchpoints to deliver relevant and timely content. Keep your user engaged, recognise special life events and deliver new purchase user guides/vlogs/updates.
Example email automation workflow
Loyalty and incentive programs
Make your user feel special, make them part of your inner circle.
Targeted communications
Segmentation in the data based on generic product offerings. Utilising the one-to-one marketing tools available to you to customise your one-to-many emails.
One too many sales emails
Don’t be frightened of emailing everyone in your base every time you have something to say. The idea of one-to-one marketing is in truth not achievable because you’re just not sure what I want next. It’s okay to assume I want something I looked at, just don’t assume I don’t want something else as well or instead.
Next, we will look at how we utilise the strategies outlined above to maximise our customer relationship and ultimately drive higher, long term revenues.
Let’s take a look at how you go about implementing some of the ideas mentioned. It’s time to flesh out the opportunities afforded by the medium of email marketing.
List growth
How do you go about growing your list? You can do this in many different ways, each one having their own level of effectiveness. The standard tools available are:
Newsletter sign-ups:
Have a clear and obvious way of letting people sign up for emails, hiding your newsletter sign up at the bottom of the contact page is almost apologetic. You’ve paid for the eyeballs, now try and capture them. Place the sign up somewhere obvious. Also, look at using downstream popups to incentivise sign up.
White paper downloads:
Put your valuable content behind a simple sign up to access a download page. In old fashioned sales you’re always taught to get a name for a name. No difference here, you have valuable content, the price of which is an email address.
Competitions:
Run competitions on your site, and in your existing email encourage people to sign up to be entered. If possible, give away experiential prizes rather than material ones. People are much more likely to enter a money can’t buy competition.
Referrals:
Incentivise your base to refer people like them to sign up for the newsletter or sales emails. Remember, people know people like them, if they enjoy your emails so will some of their friends.
Example sign-up page
Point of purchase:
Be it on or offline, when someone makes a purchase it is the perfect time to ask permission to market to them via email. Make sure your staff do this routinely if on the phone or face to face in store. Make sure your site has a very obvious sign up tick box available when checking out. If at all possible also advertise text to email gateways in store and incentivise those.
Rented lists:
As long as you manage your expectations, renting lists can still be an effective way of building your database.
List retention
List retention for me is the silver bullet, if you can reduce your churn while at the same time growing your list you should be looking at exponential growth in revenues. Email on Acid believe in a “70/20/10” rule for brand emails. This means 70% of emails should be educational demos, tips, storytelling or advisory information. 20% should “centre on content from thought leaders, creating a feeling across your list that your brand is giving them exclusive access to content” and the remaining 10% should be product-focused. This rule is said to establish valuable relationships with your customers making them feel important, which they are! The more important they feel, the more engaged with the brand they will be.
Automation
Take some of the workload away and automate as many of your emails as possible. There are many tools available to help you collect site side data, send an API call to your email platform and subsequently trigger a timely email reminder. These types of communication tend to have the greatest open and click rates and the highest ROI.
The sort of things you can try are…
Welcome/acquisition:
Welcome programs work best when they come as a series of emails which lead the recipient down various paths of action dependent on whether they open and click a particular email or take a specific site side action.
display block workflow
Basket abandonment:
Someone has put a product in their basket on your site but not completed the purchase in a timely fashion. Post that data to your email automation tool, most of those on the market (ours included) can handle this easily. This data will then populate a predefined template and trigger an email to the recipient encouraging them to complete their purchase. Fresh Relevance in their Rip Curl case study show in excess of 10% of those customers receiving a basket abandonment email go back to purchase the item.
basket abandonment uplift from Fresh Relevance
Browse abandonment:
Almost identical to Basket Abandonment, Browse Abandonment happens when you implement business rules such as “identified email address has viewed a product 3+ times without going further, trigger this template with this personalisation in it”. These type of emails are seen to generate in excess of 3% increase in sales.
Event led:
Birthdays, anniversaries, insurance renewals, these type of emails just sit there in the background and trigger daily depending on when someone matches the criteria. This is a simple but effective way of increasing your brand loyalty and triggering clicks back to your site. In their birthday email, Audit Experian said birthday emails out perform promotional emails in nearly all KPIs
Experian Birthday Emails Campaign Audit KPI’s
Cross Sell:
Not only should you cross sell in your order confirmation emails but also dispatch notifications, delivery confirmation and in truth, any other order point of contact. Forrester Research found a 10% increase in AOV on purchases where a recommendation was clicked on.
I am just scratching the surface of what’s possible with automation, essentially, if you can whiteboard the process we can implement an automation program that will sit in the background and increase your revenues from email.
Loyalty and Incentive programs:
This is just an extension of the Nectar, Clubcard, MyWaitrose (other loyalty cards are available) card you have in your wallet but in an online format. Richer Sounds do this very well at point of sign up. You’re encouraged to be a VIP and you’re told what you’ll get by becoming one. It helps with both list growth and list retention.
Targeted communications:
Your email platform will almost certainly have the functionality to segment based on any data held within your database. You can then send targeted communications to people based on the products they’ve previously bought, those they’ve browsed, those that compliment previously purchased products, the list is almost endless. You can do many different targeted emails or if you can code using the dynamic tags, or outsource that bit to an agency like us, you can build one email that dynamically inserts the relevant targeted element based on the data. It is also possible to use some of the personalisation tools out there to scrape in particular offers from your website in real time and drop them into the dynamic personalised section of the email.
The takeaway
The possibilities and the opportunities afforded to you by utilising the tools available and the skills of a professional email marketing company can have a material effect on your bottom line. It is no coincidence that the companies who have fared better in the current pandemic are the ones whose online presence and email marketing programs are constantly pushing the boundaries, whereas the ones that have struggled were slower to embrace the opportunities afforded them by the technologies available.
Is ChatGPT for email marketing subject lines the Messiah or a very naughty boy?
So with Intuit Mailchimp running nationwide radio advertising announcing its new subject line analytics tool, for the record we built something very similar back in 2018 and you can read about it here. Subject line optimisation and the role ChatGPT could have in it has become increasingly prevalent. Every second post on LinkedIn seems to be about ChatGPT and how it’s going to revolutionise content writing and that includes subject lines.
Having tested ChatGPT for subject line content generation exhaustively, here are my thoughts. I preface this by saying these are my thoughts, not that of the business but those of one cynic who works for the company, just in case Microsoft come after us. Needless to say my conclusion is… ChatGPT is a fraud! There I said it.
ChatGPT does not generate better subject lines for open rates. I can’t write email copy using it without having to edit it enormously. Actually taking more time on the edit than it would if I wrote my stream of consciousness!
For the purposes of this blog let’s concentrate on subject lines. I asked it for 5 subject lines for an electronics company selling TVs and it came up with the below.
The results were as follows
Generate 5 email subject lines
Now I thought these a bit “Stateside” and as I am based in the UK and wanted to compare it to UK companies’ subject lines I changed the question to reflect that…
Generate 5 email subject lines in the UK
ChatGPT thought it important to inform people that this was for UK TVs showing a scant understanding or “intelligence” of the actual requirement. Now some of you will say that perhaps I should have been smarter with my question but and here’s the rub – if I can be smart enough to ask the question in a way that ChatGPT spits out a killer set of subject lines, then I can probably write those subject lines myself way quicker. I’ve already spent more time than I’d like to have done asking the 2 questions and not getting answers I could use.
So then I took a real life situation.
I took 5 subject lines from a client which had been used in specific campaigns and asked which one it thought would be most successful. The first time I did it, it ignored the first subject line because I hadn’t put it on a separate line from the question. It then subsequently said the following…
Which subject line would perform better
So I asked my question again but this time put the first subject line on its own in the question. ChatGPT then contradicts itself from the first set of questions and decides that the subject line that was missed out was in fact the best but the one it previously said was the best is now not so good because it’s too generic. But it doesn’t move it down from 1st to 2nd but from 1st to 3rd!
Which of these subject lines would perform better
So I asked it to rank them in order of effectiveness and it said this
Rank these subject lines by performance
What happens if you apply real intelligence instead of artificial?
Now I have real life data, I have a subject line tool which we built in house, which I can ask the above questions and get real answers. You can read about it here or Dela Quist’s SubjectLinePro or even Intuit Mailchimp’s version of our tool but ChatGPT, well I found it wasn’t useful at all. In fact it got things completely wrong.
So in order of their effectiveness in real life marketing solutions the rankings were…
1. Superb Sale savings… starting online today!
2. Our best 85” TV megadeal ever…
3. Samsung, LG TV and soundbar offers for an improved home cinema experience
4. Inflation-busting TV megadeals including a Samsung 70″ at £699…
5. Bring your TV to life
And to remind you what ChatGPT said
Samsung, LG TV and soundbar offers for an improved home cinema experience
Inflation-busting TV megadeals including a Samsung 70″ at £699…
Superb Sale savings… starting online today!
Our best 85” TV megadeal ever…
Bring your TV to life
At least we all agree that last one was the least effective. So my advice is, while AI is great and ChatGPT in particular is fun to play around with I will take real intelligence over artificial intelligence any day of the week! So in conclusion ChatGPT is a very naughty boy!
Does MPP solve a problem that didn’t exist… or worse?
Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) sounds like a good thing, yes? I mean who wouldn’t want to protect their email privacy? Over 89% of Apple iPhone users are on iOS 15 or above and according to Campaign Monitor over 97% have adopted MPP. You’d have to be mad not to want Apple to help you with that!
MPP represents a juxtoposition of ideas
Well this email marketer might just be howling at the moon because as I see it Apple hasn’t really fixed anything. Nothing was broken. All that was happening was machines were keeping track of which emails you opened so that marketers could use that data at a macro level to offer you more and better stuff or new and better deals. They could determine which email addresses were disengaged. That information could then be used to either stop marketing to you (probably a good thing if you are no longer interested) or they could incentivise you to re-engage with them. That means bigger and better offers. Surely you’d be mad not to want that? Now those two views are juxtaposed.
They’re behind you
Masking your IP address means the marketer doesn’t know where you are. Now, this is a good thing only if you owe them money and or are stepping out on your partner who happens to also be an email marketer. Otherwise all masking your IP address does is stop the marketer sending you deals for a coffee at your local Starbucks, other coffee establishments are available.
There’s gold in them there emails!
Email marketers have a choice – ignore the open mail stats as the soft metric they are or ignore MPP. Guess what? The key goals haven’t changed. At its most basic, email has one job – to drive traffic and ultimately revenue. Email marketers are still tasked with the basic KPI’s they had before MPP. So which of the two options do you think they took?
If it helps, email is a cheap commodity with a ridiculous ROI. So, tasked with the same targets, they have ignored MPP and now if you opened your email or if Apple did it for you, they’re sending you the follow up. I’m guilty of it myself. Our automated campaigns go on a time-sensitive basis starting from the opening of an email, whether MPP did it or the user did it. The result is more users are getting more email, not less. And that email is less targeted because it often relates to an email you didn’t open yourself. The marketer doesn’t know that. Rather than risk losing those that did open the email, and that will be on average maybe 20-30% of the MPP users, they’ll email them all.
The right to forget who you are
Guess what some of the more responsible marketers do? They follow best practice in order to keep their data set clean. That means removing people who haven’t opened an email in a fixed time period. That might be 3 months, 6 months, or perhaps a year. No one who has adopted MPP has been removed by these people in the last year. That’s not because they don’t want to. But how can they tell who actually is engaged and who isn’t?
Summation
So I’ll continue to howl at the moon and thank Apple for thinking this through and solving a problem… that didn’t exist. Be careful what you wish for, people!
Who amongst us hasn’t had that conversation with friends? “I just had a conversation with Homer about holidaying in the Maldives. Up pops an advert for holidays in the Maldives on my Facebook”. Or “I was talking to Marge about a trellis for my garden. The next thing I know Facebook is advertising trellises”. One might be worried that their phone is listening to them!
Well, Apple are about to change all that. At their WWDC 2021 conference yesterday (Worldwide Developers Conference), they announced changes to privacy. Which they hope will prevent such tracking and unsolicited targeted ads.
How will this impact email?
Where these changes may impact us as email marketers is in relation to the new Mail Privacy Protection function in the Mail App. Essentially, it’s designed to allow users to control whether they pull the open mail gif. This provides ESPs (and by extension our customers) with Open Mail stats, as well as IP and browser information. Watch this YouTube video from the conference. We’ve snipped it from around the 51 mins 20 secs mark to jump straight in. When you watch it you’ll see the pun was intended!
Currently we don’t have the details as to how they’re going to do this. Maybe images will be turned off by default. Perhaps they’ll have a huge list of ESP tracking domains as a lookup. And it’s possible that key indicators such as 1×1 pixel gifs will be detected. When we have more details, we’ll let you all know.
For right now, expect email to change. Email opens is already a soft metric and about to become even softer.
Why is it more expensive to do something in house?
Just recently our sales team have come across a number of potential small business accounts which have said; We manage email marketing ourselves… It’s become a part of my role and I fit it in when I can… We’re too small to outsource… We use the DIY email builder for our emails… We can’t afford to go for email marketing outsourcing.
The answer to all of these is simple: You can’t afford not to outsource and here’s why:
As a small business you need to leverage every penny of your resource to it’s maximum. If you’re an SME you probably don’t employ a marketing manager, a designer, a coder or a database administrator. This means someone on staff is muddling through, it might even be you.
Whoever it is has a value beyond just their salary.
The Marketing managers role (or your role)
Whilst they are conceiving an idea, writing a brief, writing copy, designing and then trying to build an email they are almost certainly not doing what you are paying them for. The same is true whist they are maintaining an email database and trying to segment your list for more targeted mailings.
And it doesn’t stop there. Once they have managed to do all these things are they then going to test that your email renders as it should in all the major browsers, on all the main smart phones and tablets and finally all the major versions of Apple Mail, Outlook and other office based email clients?
What if they find a rendering issue, which if you’re using a WYSIWYG editor to build and update templates you almost certainly will? How long will be spent trying to fix it before giving in and sending the email despite its issues? Below is an example of a simple 2 image and a few lines of copy email and a bunch of code spaghetti added by a WYSIWYG. Imagine then having to try and edit that!
All this code spaghetti added by a WYSIWYG Editor
How much is a poorly rendered email going to impact your ROI from the campaign? What perception will your recipients have of your brand if the email is difficult to read, is missing images or just plain broken? Below is an example of an email built with a WYSIWYG rendering in Outlook 2013 and Apple Mail, as you see the first one is a brand car crash!
How Hypnos email rendered is Outlook 2013 and Apple Mail
Are they likely to engage with that email or future emails you send them? What is the cost of losing an engaged user because their experience with your emails is poor.
If you add up the physical cost in terms of time, the opportunity cost of lost sales today and lost customers tomorrow and weigh that against the cost of outsourcing – which could be as little as £250 a month – the question becomes not can I afford to outsource but can I afford not to?
Associated benefits
There are other benefits too. Outsourcing your basic email broadcasting also allows you to outsource the clever stuff, such as triggered emails which have higher open and click through rates.
You are able to automate welcome programmes, birthday messages, anniversary of purchase, the cross sale, order confirmations and dispatch notices.
Getting these and other automations right give your business a more professional look and improves customer confidence because you’re sending the right messages at the right time.
The benefits outweigh any physical cost, with hard earned customers staying and paying for longer whilst helping grow your database and increase profits.
The real cost of email marketing outsourcing is your bottom line. Contact Tony, tony@theemailfactory.com or call 0131 557 7780 today to see how we can help.
