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What NOT To Do: Email
369 Plays1 year ago
Susan and Jess have made a lot of mistakes in their day. In this episode, they share the email marketing no-nos they've learned the hard way, so you don't have to.
You'll hear:
- How to find your brand's most performant frequency
- Why you don't want as many people on your email list as possible
- How the right sender can boost your open rates
- The big difference between B2C and B2B email tactics
That's Marketing, Baby is sponsored by the incredible people at ércule (ercule.co) and Teal (tealhq.com).
Can't get enough? Subscribe to Rants & Raves, the official That's Marketing, Baby newsletter: https://bit.ly/rants-and-raves-sign-up
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Transcript
Introduction to Hosts & Podcast
00:00:03
Speaker
Welcome to That's Marketing, Baby, the weekly show where two marketing besties talk all things marketing in the world of B2B and B2C. I'm your co-host, Susan Wenegrad, and I've spent over 20 years in marketing, focusing on paid media and email marketing. And I'm Jess Cook, copywriter and creative director turned content marketer. Every week, we'll tackle a topic that's on our minds and hopefully yours too. Ready? Let's go.
Sponsor Shoutout: Air Cule
00:00:32
Speaker
Before we get started, I want to give a shout out to our sponsor, Air Cule. Air Cule is an agency focused solely on organic growth for B2B SaaS brands. I've worked with them before and I can tell you I've never felt so confident and in control of my content strategy, SEO, and analytics.
00:00:48
Speaker
They also have this great free tool, Otomo, that translates Google Analytics into actual, usable data. Which pages are killing it, which ones are declining, and what you can do about it. Check them out and give Otomo a whirl at E-R-C-U-L-E dot C-O. And now, on with the show. Hello,
Hosts' Roles & Dynamic
00:01:11
Speaker
hello. Welcome to episode four, season two. That's Marketing Baby.
00:01:18
Speaker
Here we are. Here we are. I'm Jess Cook, head of content at Lasso. I'm Susan Winograd, demand generation person leaning into the queen nerdy paid, I'll never say I'm a queen, leaning into the nerdy paid media side. I'll say it for you. I don't mind. You're my hype woman. It's like the first few months of working together. I'm like, I'm just going to pay you as a freelancer to be my hype woman. You talk about me so much more kindly than I talk about myself.
00:01:43
Speaker
We
T-Shirt Stories & Personal Anecdotes
00:01:44
Speaker
both have graphic t-shirts on today. What's on yours? This is a Banksy print, actually. Oh, it is. Yeah, I got it in London. They had a whole store of shirts. OK, describe it for the audio listeners. So it's black, and then it's just got kind of like a distressed white inverse of a little girl holding balloons and flying up off the ground. It's very cool. I loved it. I just like the hopefulness of it. Yes, love. What about yours? I see faces. Is that a music group? This is my T-Swift.
00:02:12
Speaker
Is that your era's tour? That's my era's tour. I feel like such an uncool person because I didn't go and I don't have an era's tour shirt. And like every time I'm out there, I see like 50 girls with an era's tour shirt. I'm like, you can order one online. No one will know whether you went or not. Yeah, I know. Yeah. It's okay. When I was in Nashville, I took a trip in May with my dad to Nashville.
00:02:30
Speaker
And they had a folklore sweatshirt that I wanted so bad. All they had left was triple XL. It was gorgeous. It was, it was so pretty. And I was like, it was just so big. I tried it on. I was like, no, my dad was like, I know you really want that. He's like, I can't let you buy that. I was like, like I could go swimming in it. It's fine.
00:02:49
Speaker
Yeah. Well, she just announced like late last night, 1989. Oh yeah. She's doing another Taylor's version comes out. Oh God. I'm excited to hear her version. I know. Okay. We've probably bored everybody. Okay. Anyway. Yeah. If you're not a Swifty, too freaking bad. Sorry. You're listening to two 40 something moms. What do you think we're going to talk about? You swizzle is on the menu discussion.
00:03:10
Speaker
Okay, so what are you talking about today? What do you go ahead? Okay. What are we talking about? We
Common Mistakes in Email Marketing
00:03:16
Speaker
are talking about email, but with a twist. Yeah. What not to do. Yes. Right. We're telling you guys what to do. We're going to tell you what you have to do.
00:03:26
Speaker
We're flipping it on its head. Well, we had a long summer and we used to be like, stop that. Don't do that. Put that down. Don't stick that in your ear. We thought we'd bring that motherly instinct to the podcast. Yeah, it's cleansing. We had a handful of things. We had a great episode about building an email newsletter and how to grow it.
00:03:47
Speaker
from the ground up and how to grow it. So go back to listen and listen to that episode for sure. That's from season one. But this one, I think Susan and I have a ton of experience in this area of like, how do you really make that work for you? Drive pipeline, build trust, make it interesting, deliver value. Grow it. Grow it. The right way. Yep. And there are some things that we just see people get wrong and we wanted to bring that up. Love it.
00:04:13
Speaker
I think the first one, and I am going to personally start with this one and say it instead of you because this so closely aligns with what I tell people not to use their paid media for too. I feel like it's, they're very synonymous. Do not use your email to just ramble on about your product and try and drive demos. Like I have.
00:04:37
Speaker
At this point, I mean, even though I lean towards paid media, a lot of my like fractional CMO work and a lot of the consulting I do really is about content amplification, which can sometimes take the paid media route, or it's just like, how do we use our stuff in more channels to expand our reach?
Measuring Email Marketing Success
00:04:53
Speaker
And so there's so many similarities between what I see about how people do their email marketing and how they do their paid media.
00:05:00
Speaker
And they try and measure both of these on like these bottom of funnel metrics and so. They feel like because they're like well we're running pay media or we're sending these emails they have to drive demos it's like that's not their purpose they will eventually accomplish that but they do it in tandem with like fifty other things you're doing so you can't measure them on that one thing.
00:05:23
Speaker
There are so many places where they'll be like, well, we don't really pay attention to our email marketing. And I'll say, why? Well, it doesn't drive demos. And I'm like, you can't measure it that way, right? So one of the things that we started, you and I started doing, now I have every brand I work with, I make them do this, is what is the overlap between people that request a demo, were they on your email list or not? And what is that proportion?
00:05:45
Speaker
That is how you measure whether email marketing is doing it or not. It's never going to be a one to one, like sometimes you will. I mean, you'll see people click, you know, get a demo directly off the email, but that's typically not what they're going to do. Yeah. But so many places try and force it to do that and you can't force a tactic.
00:06:02
Speaker
to do something your customers are not reading it for. They don't want to be sold to. They want to learn something new. They want to get some kind of value. It's the same thing with ads, too, these days, especially for B2B. I'm like, stop trying to drive to a demo. They don't want to go to the bottom of the funnel. Stop doing it. So humongous pet peeve of mine.
00:06:20
Speaker
And it's a pet peeve of consumers. It's not even just me. I'm like, you're annoying people. Please stop. Yeah, for sure. And it is a shortcut to getting people to unsubscribe. I don't want to hear about your product every time unless I have somehow raised my hand and said, I'm very interested in this product specifically. I'd rather get some value. I'd rather learn a lesson. I'd rather get some sort of checklist. Give me something that I can use.
00:06:48
Speaker
And then, you know, every once in a while, like I will then tolerate or be very happy to see like, yeah, I am interested now, like I'm ready. Right. So, yeah, I think it's just you've got to use it more as a trust and affinity building tool, specifically if like you're using it as a newsletter. Like, I think that's really the big, the big thing.
00:07:10
Speaker
Yeah. And I would say too, I think the other thing is, does it have to be all or nothing? No. I mean, it seems like a lot of places feel like the email either has to be all about the product and book a demo, or it's really information heavy, and it doesn't mention the product at all, which is fine. But if you can marry the two in a way that feels natural, even better, right? So let's say you're going to be releasing.
00:07:36
Speaker
had an episode a couple of episodes ago about product launches, right? Like if you know you're going to be launching this thing that solves this problem, if you have a whole bunch of helpful content about that problem and you're also in so, you know, tackled or whatever.
00:07:48
Speaker
educate, like giving some really interesting information, be like, Oh, by the way, this is actually what made us add this new feature we're rolling out. Like it's a natural way to just say, Hey, we're going to be offering this thing, but it's not like all about the product. It's not trying to force a demo. It's just seamlessly integrates with here's why we made this by the way, those kinds of mentions, I think feels so natural. They don't feel salesy because you're providing a whole bunch of information and then it's sort of a, by the way. Yeah.
00:08:16
Speaker
And you can't do it every time. No, I actually just wrote down, oh, by the way. I feel like if you can think about your email as everything before the, oh, by the way. Exactly. That's how you should be thinking about it. Yeah. Assume that that's going to be a PS. Yeah. Right? You're only allowed to get a PS. Maybe that's your criteria. We just made up new criteria. Yes. If you're going to talk about your product, it would have to be something that could fit into a PS. That's right.
00:08:42
Speaker
There's your rule. See, okay. We just told you what to do instead of what not to do. Dang it. We already messed up. But yeah, that all of those things, all of that. All right. I'm going to have you take this one too. Cause I think this is
00:08:55
Speaker
your area of expertise.
Growing Email Lists with Paid Media
00:08:57
Speaker
Yeah. So the next one is don't assume that your paid media has nothing to do with growing your email list. And this was something that you and I did really successfully together. And this kind of ties to what an earlier episode we were talking about, about making content for
00:09:16
Speaker
people that like, if they're not in that niche you're going after, they would just glide right by it or not get the joke or, you know, it's like you need to make it like try and exclude people. Yeah. Right. It's like the thing that we had worked really well was we had a sense of humor about creatives and marketing. And when we started growing our email list, we're like, let's see what it costs us to get a sign up. But then also how long do they stay? Do they stay engaged? Are we just,
00:09:42
Speaker
getting signups that churn, right? Yeah. But you can do it in a way that's actually not terribly expensive. And obviously, it's relative to like, what does your product cost? What is the lifetime value? So whether paid makes sense for you depends a lot on that. But I see so many places like they really want to grow their email, and they have tons of site traffic, and they don't run like instant lead form remarketing ads on Facebook.
00:10:04
Speaker
Or I just see these really easy remarketing opportunities that they don't, and it's just money left on the table. I mean, future money, future purchases left on the table. And it doesn't have to cost a lot. It's like if you just want to run it as remarketing, it's like this person came to your site. Now granted, that's been a little impacted by iOS 14, but it's like they came to your site and they did something.
00:10:26
Speaker
Yeah. And why not just remark with an ad saying, hey, we put out this, manage whatever expectation it is. But it's kind of like we put it out one time a week. And I think that that's the other piece is like being very specific in what you say about what they're going to get and what it provides. We also saw our signups get a lot better. Yes. But it doesn't have to cost a lot. It's like it's something you can start small until you figure out what are those messages that resonate. But I just see that as such a gap. So many places don't use paid media to grow.
00:10:55
Speaker
It's one of those areas where, especially on the Facebook side, it can be done for really cheap. I mean, you don't have to remarket only to people that were on your site. You can remarket to people that watched your videos on Facebook or post. There's so many engagement signals that are on there that you could use to be like, hey, do you want to take the next step and be on the newsletter? And so many places don't do that. And it's such an easy win.
00:11:16
Speaker
Yeah. And I would say you don't want as many people as possible on your list. You want as many of the right people as possible. So I think your point about exclude people is really important for email health purposes. You don't want 10,000 people to sign up and then
00:11:33
Speaker
8,000 of them are not engaged, don't care, eventually unsubscribe, never open. That is not what you want. So again, I think just going back to that idea of it's some sort of inside joke or something only they would care about or some sort of little wink to that specific group of people so that you're just getting that small niche to sign up. Yep, totally. I love paid media for that, but I see so many places. They think it's what not to do, right? Yeah.
00:12:03
Speaker
Why would we spend pay? Because they just think about, usually they suffer from the first affliction, which is that their paid media just needs to drive demos. And they're like, not a demo, must not spend money. And I'm like, oh! I'm like, these are your future demos, and you'll get them for so much less, right? Because you're paying a few bucks to get them on the list, and then that's it. You don't have to keep going after them with really expensive conversion-based stuff.
00:12:24
Speaker
Yeah, you're going after them with a free email. Yes. Instead. That's not all about you. Brands love to talk about themselves. So for the next one, I want you to do this because you are the content and persona and segmentation queen. So I'd like for you to discuss this one.
Importance of Email Segmentation
00:12:40
Speaker
Okay. Don't.
00:12:42
Speaker
send the same message to everyone. So take a look at how it might make sense to segment your email, right? Now, there are times when you're going to have a very large list of people that may need to know the same thing, but how you deliver it can be slightly different. That's Marketing Baby is sponsored by Teal.
00:13:02
Speaker
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00:13:22
Speaker
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00:13:36
Speaker
Okay, Lasso, for example, we cater to like 10 different personas because there's a ton of different types of people that work at event production companies that can use Lasso. There's people in the warehouse, there's the owner of the company, there's the PM or the producer, there's the labor coordinator, right? And so all those people
00:13:55
Speaker
We would want to say essentially the same thing to them, but in a way that hits on their individual pain points or makes sense for their individual role within the company. Take a look at when you're thinking about, okay, everyone that we cater to needs to know this new product is coming out, or this change is happening, or we have this great new video series, or whatever the message is.
00:14:18
Speaker
how would a junior developer want to hear that? And how would the head of engineering want to hear that? Very, very different. How would a CFO and how would a CMO need to know the same kind of product news is very different, right? So think about that.
00:14:35
Speaker
It also is really great for learnings. You can then start to see like, ooh, these personas are really engaged and these ones not so much. It can then inform what you do on down the road. We're going to really double down on these couple of personas because we've seen in the past, they're really engaged in what we send them over a couple different emails.
00:14:59
Speaker
It just kind of helps to split those things out so you can get the messaging just right and you can learn something a little deeper. Yeah. I love that point about the different roles. It's a good one. So this was another one. I actually learned this from you and it was interesting to see, it just had never occurred to me to do at the time and now it's like second nature to me. Yeah. But your email should never come from a company. It should come from the person that wrote it or it should come from the founder or whoever. I mean, it doesn't have to be the actual person that wrote it.
00:15:26
Speaker
Yeah, a person. It should come from a person. Yep. So tell me a little more about that. Okay. So something that I found kind of the hard way was, you know, we were sending emails from the company, the Fastly team, the Marpipe team, and the content was really good, but no one gets excited to get an email from a company. The only time I get excited is when it's like Abercrombie and Fitch, they're having like, you know, 40% off. And I'm like, yes, please. I'm like that with athletic.
00:15:58
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. It doesn't matter who it came from. But with B2B, again, we've talked about this so many times, humanizing B2B is so important. And when you see Jess at Lasso in the subject line, you're much more, people just psychologically are more inclined to open it.
00:16:14
Speaker
and to trust it, right? So something that we started doing was it came from a person. So the from line was a person at company. And then inside the email, there was a picture of the person. There was their name, their title. I've even seen some companies do where it's like a little nice scripty font that kind of looks like a signature, right? Anything to make it feel like someone hand wrote this to you or hand type and just makes it feel more personal.
00:16:43
Speaker
And then it also gives you license to get a little bit more personality in there as well, which never hurts. So if the sender is kind of someone that's known to have a big personality, like you can feel free to play around with, like, drop a GIF in there, right? Be really casual. Have a joke or some interesting parentheticals, right? Things like that really make it more exciting for the reader. And then a plug for our newsletter on that, because all of ours include a meme from each of us.
00:17:11
Speaker
That's right. We both come up with a meme for our react. That's right. So just saying. That's the kind of come our trademark thing that we do. That's just kind of the people we are. We're handcrafting memes over here. So yeah, I think it just makes so much more sense when it comes from a person. The open rates are higher. The engagement's higher. It just feels so much nicer. Agreed. So this kind of actually feels somewhat related to that in that don't just not send emails and then like eight months later send one.
00:17:41
Speaker
And
Email Frequency: Finding the Right Balance
00:17:42
Speaker
be like, Oh, my, well, our open rate was only 5% and we had no click throughs. Our email, like email doesn't work for us. Yeah. Half those people probably forgot they even signed up. They don't know who you are. I mean, you haven't sent enough to understand what they do and don't connect with. So you might've just completely missed the mark on what you sent. Yep. They haven't heard from you at all. They don't know what to expect from your emails. So you're going to hurt any effort you have. Like I think people get.
00:18:08
Speaker
scared about sending email and like there have been brands like, Oh, it's just been sitting and I'm afraid to send anything. I'm like, just send it and call the list. Right? It's like, just send it. It's like, I know you were really happy that, you know, in your heyday of drop shipping, this brand had 25,000 people on the email list. They haven't been emailed in two years. You're probably going to lose like 90% of them.
00:18:26
Speaker
But you have to start somewhere, right? And it's kind of like we said, I'd rather have quality over quantity. So if you have an email list that's just been sitting there and you haven't sent it, just bite the bullet. And if nothing else, maybe you send an email saying, Hey, haven't been in touch in a while. We're like, just be honest and say we are, you know, we've
00:18:43
Speaker
built out our email, our email channel, you're going to be hearing from us once a week and give them the option to opt out. Don't be afraid of that. I mean, it's not a bad thing at all. It's like, I don't get emotional about people unsubscribing because I'm like, it's just not the right person. And that's okay. Totally. So I think sending too little does put you in an awkward position and a lot of brands are like, Oh, we'll just start sending stuff and maybe they won't notice. They'll totally notice.
00:19:04
Speaker
I think it's actually to your benefit to either like have a sense of humor about it or just be direct about it. And don't think you're going to like trick them into being like, cause I mean, odds are they're probably not going to open it anyway. You know what I mean? So it's like, they're either going to unsubscribe. They're not going to open it. And a bad open rate isn't great anyhow. So I would probably try and get them to open it and decide yes or no.
00:19:24
Speaker
and fix the sending too little problem. I mean, it sucks if you're in that situation, some places just bandwidth, especially B2B startups. They had someone that did it, that person left. They're like, I don't know. I don't know what I'm doing. I don't have time for that. And there's a million reasons why it happens, but try and fix it. Don't just let it go on that way. Yeah, absolutely. On the flip side of sending too little and then trying to make it happen,
00:19:47
Speaker
is sending too often. And that is also a problem. I saw a meme the other day that was like, does anyone know where I can get really, really nice comfortable shirts and also an email every day for the rest of my life? And it just like, it hit home because it is sometimes when you just, all I want is like the 10% off coupon, right? And then they take that as a liberty to like send something to me.
00:20:13
Speaker
Every day, twice a day sometimes, right? So I think with B2B, there is even less tolerance for that because you're not even giving me a coupon code, right? It's got to be something really interesting because I can't get a freebie. Yeah, exactly. So it had either be really good content, like really good, which is hard to keep up at a high high cadence. It is, yeah.
00:20:41
Speaker
or you need to cut back the cadence. So something to keep your eye on is your unsubscribe rate. That will tell you like, if you're sending too much, people are going to be like, this is a barrage. I feel like I'm getting like costed by this company and do not want, right? And so just watch that unsubscribe rate. I would say send as often as possible that you can keep that unsubscribe rate low.
00:21:04
Speaker
Yeah. Right. Like if they don't mind the rate that you're sending and you're sending at a decent rate, like keep it there. So long as your unsubscribe rate doesn't skyrocket. Yeah. I love that advice. And I think sometimes people underestimate how often that could actually be. Yeah, totally. I see a lot of places be way overly conservative. I'm like, why don't you just try? I had this discussion with the brand. I was like, why don't you just try? They're only doing once a month. And I'm like, I'm like,
00:21:29
Speaker
to try, try twice a month. Yeah. And part of the problem was they felt like they had to have, again, they weren't repurposing. Oh boy. I know you love that. They put all this pressure on themselves to like come up with new stuff every time. And I was like, well, instead of having one big, long newsletter at the front, why don't you send two and have one article in each, right? And their unsubscribe rate didn't change.
00:21:50
Speaker
Like it stayed the same. Open rates stayed the same. I was like, now you're getting like double the impressions and you have not sacrificed anything for it. So exactly. Yeah. 100%. So smart. I actually just had another what not to do thought based on something you just said. Okay. Don't lead with something that is not going to be indicative of how the rest of the, the experience is going to be.
00:22:12
Speaker
Ooh, so good. That's why it's funny because I run a little handmade e-commerce company on the side. I don't offer a percentage off for that reason because my stuff doesn't go on sale all that often. I'm blessed in that I don't have to run sales very often. But it's like I don't want to set the expectation you're getting this 15% off coupon. And so by joining the email, that's what you're going to get, right? Yeah. It's like I offer a free room spray when you sign up. So you get a free gift.
00:22:41
Speaker
I think there's less psychological assumption you're going to get a free gift with everything. Do you know what I mean? So it's like, make sure you're aligning. And I don't know what the equivalent of that would be in B2B. I'm sure there's a great analogy time here that ding ding that I could be doing. But I don't know what the equivalent of that would be in the B2B world. Well, I think what you point out here is really interesting is that like, it can't be click baity.
00:23:04
Speaker
Don't use something in the subject line that doesn't then get me into something that makes sense in the body of the actual email, right? So I think that's kind of the equivalent. It's like I've seen emails before where it's like the subject line really gets me because it says something kind of weird or intriguing and then I get inside and I'm like, well, all it was was trying to get me to open the email. There's nothing in here to follow up. Like tell me why they said that. Like that drives me nuts. So like, if you're going to do that, if you're going to have
00:23:32
Speaker
kind of an intriguing, interesting headline that kind of leaves a little bit to the imagination or gets people to wonder. You've got to deliver. You've got to deliver on the inside. Yeah. So I think that's a great point. Yeah. I thought of that while you were talking. I was like, that's definitely a what not to do. Yeah, for sure. All right. Well, there's your whole big list of what not to do, y'all. Yeah. Now you know. Don't do it. Don't do it. I'm going to slap your hand with a ruler from afar. Exactly.
00:23:58
Speaker
All right. Well, this has been amazing. I know. We're on to episode five next week. Yeah. I believe it.
00:24:06
Speaker
I know it. Flying by, but also shameless plug. If you are not part of our LinkedIn followers, yeah, hop on that. And then also if you are not part of our newsletter that we send every Wednesday, rants and raves, make sure you hop on that too. Yeah. Join the party. We're having a great time on LinkedIn. I promise we don't talk about Taylor Swift in it. Well, I might. I actually think I had something about Taylor Swift in it.
00:24:35
Speaker
Okay, well, she filled her quota then. So there we go. Yeah. So now I won't do it again. Thanks for listening to That's Marketing, baby. If you dig what we're putting down, be sure to subscribe and share with your marketing besties because you know, hot marketers don't gatekeep. And if you're like, this is not enough. I need more. We got you.
00:24:51
Speaker
Ranson Raves is the official newsletter of That's Marketing Baby. Every week, Susan and I share one thing we love and loathe in the world of marketing. Get on the list at That's Marketing Baby dot com. Okay, bye!