Shmuel’s Speaker Journal Recap: Emailing 2020, Prague

Email Marketing and the Jigsaw Puzzle

Email marketing is like doing a puzzle. If you don’t have a plan, the pieces will never come together. And I spoke about this concept recently at the Emailing 2020 conference in Prague. Well attended, this is the largest independent conference dedicated to email marketing in the Czech Republic, and my presentation was well received.

The topic of my talk focused in on how exactly to put the pieces together and I presented three ideas to power your email marketing efforts into the next decade:

1. Nomenclature and how to “secretly” lace in important information into your campaign names.
2. Split-test optimization and how to run these ever-important campaigns effectively.
3. How to optimize sending to ensure you gain the highest engagement rates.

The Art of Naming an Email Marketing Campaign

The way we name our email marketing campaigns is super important. Because finding out what specific topics — or email marketing campaigns — are doing best in your email marketing program is imperative.

But how do you glean this information from potentially hundreds of emails?

Well, before sending any campaign the best thing to do is come up with and define a well-structured, thought out naming convention to your emails that suit your needs. The reason for this is that when it comes time to analyze your email marketing campaigns you can use Excel and pivot tables to help you sort out a lot of this data.

So, here’s tip #1: Always infuse your email marketing campaigns with a nomenclature – which is just a fancy word for a naming convention.

For more on this, check out why the underscore is The #1 Unsung Hero of Email Marketing.

How to Avoid the Split Testing Blues

If you’re not split testing any of your emails, you’re missing out. Now, while you probably cannot split test every email, but you should take the time and make the effort to split test your campaigns. After all, it can help you improve your results BIG TIME!

Now, what’s the worst thing about split testing?

In my experience, the worst part of a split test is when the results to dead even. I call this the split testing blues or the apple dilemma.

The apple dilemma is when you’re looking at two apples and they appear to be more or less identical. However, if you look at from a different light and know specifically which elements to test, you will be able to see the difference very clearly – like seeing the difference between a Granny Smith apple and a Pink Lady.

And my top hacks let you see things much more clearly.

One: aim. Without a doubt, you need goals when you’re split testing.

The #1 rule is understanding what you are aiming for. That’s right, you can’t split test if you don’t know where you stand right now. Don’t fall into the trap of, “well, this looks good.” Before you launch your campaign, have clear goals, e.g., “we want to improve the open rate by 10%,” or “we want a 5% increase in click-through rates.”

Two: differentiate. This is where I see many people fail.

Be bold and try taking an unorthodox approach to split testing. I brought up the idea of emojis to drive this point home because did you ever notice how many emojis there are nowadays? Some of them are just so similar. And if you are going to take a conservative approach with your split testing, then there’s a good chance you’ll end up with the same results.

Three: harness our differences for the good.

A simple way to getting around “similar” subject lines is to have two people come up with them. We are not identical – we all have our unique look and we all think differently – so having two people come up with content can be very beneficial for producing powerful content that will produce better results.

For more ideas on split testing, check out The Absolute Worst Part Of A/B Split Testing.

Engage to Engage People and Email Clients

Finally, the last phase of my presentation centered around engagement. In a customer-centric world, how can you not focus on subscriber engagement!

To do this, think like a potential customer or a lapsed customer. Because when you do that, you’ll experience your brand like no other and be able to get the right messaging to convert them and bring them back, respectively.

But equally important is to engage the email clients. And by this, I am talking about showing Gmail, Yahoo!, Outlook, etc. that your customers want to receive your emails. Always remember the following methods for engagement, both positive and negative

The 7 Factors for Customer Engagement Success

1. Opens
2. Clicks
3. Forwarded Messages
4. Replied Messages
5. Emails Marked “Not Spam”
6. Emails Marked “Spam”
7. Emails Deleted Before Reading

So how does one engage for the sake of engagement and email marketing metrics?

The first thing that you need to do is listen. Listen to what the customers are looking for. And do you know where you’re going to get this information from? From your customer service team (they have all the information: the good, the bad, and the ugly!) and also you will learn which type of content “ticks” when you do your deep dive campaign analysis!

Use targeted campaigns to your most engaged subscribers ask them questions so that they reply to the email. If you’re using “noreply@email.com” stop it. Allow your customers to reply to emails – you can get this to route to your customer support queue – because this will help with engagement and deliverability.

For more information on engaging content, check out this article and ask yourself: Are Your Email Marketing Campaigns Engaging?

One More Email Marketing “GIFt”

During my speech, while talking about how to engage your subscribers, I ventured off onto the subject of using GIFs as an engagement technique.

I’ve personally seen that this technique of using GIFs can raise click-through rates by 12% when testing it versus static JPEGs. Safe to say, GIFs are click magnets! However, you need to know how to do it right.

Well if you’re reading this, then I’ve got a reward for you! Check out my guest post on Email Audience, which delves into this subject. The title of the article is: Put Some Action in Your Call To Action with animated GIFs