1-Minute Marketing with Email Experts

Creating the right personalized content is absolutely a gate to get an engagement from your subscribers. So how do you do it? You make sure you're using email intelligently, you understand the data, so you can send the right message to the right person at the right time.

Alright! So when you're thinking about creating empathetic emails for your brand you really have to think about the needs that your emails are serving for your customers rather than what needs they're serving for you. So the question I like to ask myself is why am I sending this email right now? And what problem is it going to solve for my customers?

Cool, so making emails interactive...Actually, I had this conference where someone did say something very interesting which is the best and simplest way to make interactive email is actually have content that people want to interact with. I think good copywriting and good imagery get people engaged. That's the best interaction you can hope for.

Yeah, with this one, with interactive emails being quite a complex thing, what I’d advise is actually try and look at what people are already doing. Start with something really basic. So, it might be a carousal or something, or something that really simple; it might be a drop-down menu, hamburger menu, or something like that. And, actually spend some time investigating and experimenting with it.

Don’t try anything you don’t know, quite anything on your own to begin with. Just try and find out how it works and what’s happening. And, then, plan and create project of your own, but start with a simple one, understand the process and the techniques required to make interactivity work. And, then, you can progress and actually think about “how can I make interactivity something that’s going to add value to an email?” Don’t just do it for its own sake but what’s actually going to give a great experience for somebody using that email, and that’s what I’d say to start with.

Well, I would suggest to join networks. So, there are some fantastically sources out there like the 'Women of Email' or the 'Email Geeks.' This is where I started learning more about my coding, and so if someone is running a show on their own, this is where the best help would be received.

I think to build your target audience, probably stems from high interaction from the digital channels as well. To make it sure you’ve got the next right, there are strategies, so how let interact with your emails; with your AMP users for example, how to grow and maintain, rather how to maintain the database is obviously around relevancy. 

So, segmentation, when the relevancy comes, how do you place the content to the users, what devices they use—all ties in nicely with the likes of responsiveness and accessibility.

So, the top thing not to do in email marketing is—don’t batch and blast. Everybody talks about having respect for your consumer, and obviously you should do that, but really, just have some respect for yourself. Do email properly.

Typography really does play a part in subscribers’ reading style. This is because some people just prefer to scan through an email, and some people actually like to read an email in more depth. So a good practice is to actually break up text within an email with headings, and use the headings to convey the message in simple terms so that even just reading the headings will convey what the email is about.

And then, following it up with the call-to-action that makes sense according to those headings, and then with the text that gives more value to the copy and helps somebody to dig a bit deeper to really understand and engage with the full content.  

A lot of people think that emotional intelligence and data are really disparate concepts, because it's kind of like right brain–left brain theory. But, I think emotional intelligence and data in marketing work really nicely together—because data takes all ambiguity out of the conversation, data can make previously contentious conversations really easy to have, so talking with your internal peers about, "Okay, well, the data is telling us that we need to do this thing." So, it makes it a lot easier to take opinion and subjectivity out your question.

Well, I actually hand code all my templates because I find that templates out there are not providing enough responsive behavior across the email clients. So, I code with the fluid-hybrid approach that will allow emails on Gmail to stack and behave responsively. 

Accessibility is the key for email marketing! Devices change everyday, we need to access a wide range of people, to be covering some of them stressed from what they might have as a disease they might be epileptic, they might be dyslexic. So, we need to make sure that everyone from the wide range in forms of what not and what devices they have to read our content. It's vitally important for the future.

The things that can go wrong when you make an email so, you get the wrong content and you get the wrong links. So, ways to avoid that or ways people commonly get that wrong is that they take last week's email they clone that over, and then they make a new email. So, a better way is to start from scratch each time therefore you know you've got to change everything before you send it.

Some technique to ensure the quality of the emails before you send them include going through and actually making sure all your links work, your images render correctly, doing testing in different email clients to make sure that your design looks as it should do in different email clients and just generally giving everything a once-over, before you press the send button.

Testing, testing, testing! I test my email work on live devices. I have a little bit of live devices to help, and I use Litmus a tool in order to cross-test all my emails across the platforms.

Alright, this is quite a really easy one. Essentially, make your text larger—16px size is what I’d set minimum. I also recommend 18px for text on a mobile phone, the reason being that the high definition displays that we have nowadays actually decrease the visual size of the text. So, it’s compensated by using 18px—makes that text a little bit larger, so that essentially is a really easy way to help visually-impaired people. 

In terms of screen readers as well, having an HTML text rather than text and images will help people who’ve text read out to them from an email, and will solve the problem for a lot of people. 

When you're thinking about email deliverability, it's a big subject, but if you're just getting started, the main elements that I suggest you focus on is really maximizing the positive engagement with your campaigns. So, it's a lot easier to get email marketing right than it's to fix it.

So, focus on positive engagement, minimize negative engagement, and really think about what your customers want from you, and how can you deliver it in your messaging.

So, things to track when you're making an email...hmm, we can track everything; we can track opens, clicks, engagement. We can have a look at conversions, and stuff. That's great! Tracking as much as possible is very important. The thing I'd say is what lessons you learn from it. Don't take the numbers as Gospel. Read into them, see what is actually true, what isn't actually true. Don't just base decisions very actively on these numbers; think about what they mean and then base a strategy on that. 

The metrics I advise on—the key metrics I advise on are conversion rates—obviously, that's ultimately telling what your emails are producing/selling. If you move to focus on engagement, I think ultimately an important one by delivery is backtracks. So, if your backtracks are quite high, there's something wrong with your data, which really and adversely affects your delivery.

If you're just getting started with email marketing, the email automation workflows that I recommend you look at to boost conversions are your welcome and onboarding program to drive your first purchases, and your abandoned basket emails to drive people who have almost gone through the process, but haven't quite got there yet. And, don't forget—send series of email, not just a one-off to make sure that you can deliver the information that's right for them, to encourage them to take that action.

So, I get asked a lot how to design emails for better customer retention. And the answer is—there’s a design thing; if your emails are ugly, nobody’s going to look at them, and you’re not going to retain customers. But, if your emails aren’t useful, then you’re not going to retain consumers. It’s more important for your emails to be useful than is pretty, as more important for them to be pretty and boring. 

Okay, yeah, there are quite a few hacks. One of my favourite ones is the one to solve the problem of using widows in text. Widow is basically when you have a single word on the last line of a paragraph, and in typography terms, that’s a bad thing. And, you can fix that by putting what’s called a non-breaking space between the last word of the paragraph and the word before it, which effectively joins them together and avoids this widowing. 

And, this non-breaking space is which you put in between. You do have to be careful about this because if you go wrong with which is before the last word, you join those together, you have quite awkward spacing. So, you have to weigh up what the best option is in terms of design, look at it in context, and make it as one. So, yeah, this is one of the best ones I found and used it quite often. 

By making it easy for users to access the call-to-action early in the email, I believe, if you wrote a neat headline, a good short explanation, and a call-to-action—for users that like to scroll and need more information, I would repeat that call-to-action in the bottom of the email so I don't make them scroll up again.

As someone who is not a city girl myself, I have an analogy for this that I think makes a lot of sense. To me, the experience of achieving 'Email Marketing Zen' feels much like sitting down in a quiet dinner party with friends. And, historic marketing has been more like forcing someone to walk through the Times Square against their will, the taxis coming at them, there are ads everywhere—it feels very overwhelming! 

And I think AI has really enabled us to be more thoughtful about when we talk to people, the ways in which we do talk to them, and I think that conveys more of that dinner party, creating-relationships feeling than just throwing things at people.

I guess going forward, responsiveness is something that can never really change. I mean…it’s a way of future-proofing something, you know, if you’re viewing something on smart watch or from a mobile device—it’s something that’s always going to be responsive. It ties in nicely with accessibility as well, so it’s something that’s constantly is there.

So, the reason we have all those regulations in email industry is because of the emailers themselves. If we do email properly, the regulation doesn’t matter. There’s nothing in GDPR that wasn’t a best practice long before the GDPR was ever heard of. Do the email right, have respect for yourself, make the decisions, and regulations won’t be a problem.

So, emails have evolved since GDPR and we had to evolve. All the email tactics—you’ve got things like opt-in, double opt-ins; we can’t just assume someone wants to hear from us. A great example for us is how booking confirmation emails, we can’t put any direct marketing messages in there. Everything has to be so functional in those emails, so we really need to be careful on the content and the words we use in our messaging. 

So, technology has proven a lot of our previous beliefs wrong in recent years. And I think a really cool example of that is how Phrasee is using AI to show that humans react to all sorts of different emotions and subject lines. I think historic knowledge or conventional knowledge has told us that people react to things with a lot of exclamation points, or you know, 60% off, and things like that. 

So, historically marketers have been using a lot of fear tactics in their subject lines to motivate people to do the right thing, and I think AI is showing us that really we're more effective when we use language that is positive and helpful, and motivates people to be the best versions of themselves, rather than just to dump all their money on you.

Seeing the future trends, in terms of visual things recently, no so much accessibility things or typography things, but the use of illustrations in emails is a trend that’s growing really nice where it’s giving some personality to emails.

Using animations (animated GIFs), but using those with purpose is really important as well to kind of convey the message of the email rather than just having a kind of fancy or gimmick-y. Yeah, those use of images is something that email marketers can really use to enhance the messaging of their email. 

So, I'm an artist and musician.That's why I have kind of creative background, and I find that plays an important role in my marketing, and that enforces me to think a little more flexibly about how we're doing things. I don't have any of that historical background of necessarily what always works in the past, because I come from a background where you get up on stage and you improvize.

And, so, I think that plays a role in that. I'm willing to take some risks and be a little more playful with my marketing, because I know that's just rewarding from a human perspective, when people see something that's still like for creative or artistic in one way or another—it kind of, you get like a little spark, but you don't necessarily see with regular advertising. So it's something that I try to keep in my mind before I work on my marketing.

Yes, it's absolutely true! You know the software that you use is only half as good as the data that you put in; and, also, the accuracy of that data once it's in there. So, it's vitally important to make sure that the data you have is as accurate as possible. The way you do that is just to use the tools as much as possible, so that becomes the single source of truth for your data. And then that means that because you're using it all the time, you know that the right data is in your tool. 

For example, you could use some more specific UTM text on the CTA button I just mentioned—that one on the top and one on the bottom, and find out if more users actually click further down the email or further up, so that would give us more information about preferred positions for calls-to-action.