Stan Dahl, Brian Johnson and Jason Henderson discuss best practices and current trends in email marketing.

Topics include:

• How much info should you request in your opt-in
• What to test regarding your opt-in “bribe”
• how to segment your list
• how to speak with each segment.
• Best tools to use at the start and as you grow
• The most important part of your subject line

Jason Henderson and Brian Johnson give their secrets to effective email marketing

2024 Notes:

• Bronto is gone. Dozens of email sending services remain.
  
• IMPORTANT: Your email sender has SPF, DKIM, and DMARC setup instructions. If you don’t follow them, your business emails will mostly end up in the Promotions, Bulk, or Spam folders.
• Google Tools come and go. For Google’s most up-to-date tools and best practices, head to Gmail Postmaster Tools.

2:55: Current Best Practices (Jason):

Opt-ins: More and more people aren’t asking for first name. They are going more for quantity than quality

Jason thinks they may be making a mistake because there is so much more that you can do with a name than use it in the subject line… e.g. prefilling fields, offering one-click webinar registration

Most people don’t mind giving their first name so you may have to look at other reasons why your opt-in rate is not as high as you might like.

Your “from name” should be consistent, so people aren’t confused and miss some of your emails because they don’t recognize the sender.

14:28: Good index for the opt-in form from Marketing Experiments:

Appeal: 0=no interest, 1=possible interest, 2=high interest

Exclusivity (of your incentive): 0=anywhere else, 1=somewhere else, 3=nowhere else

Very few people test their incentive for opt-ins. Is it something people can get anywhere (ie some type of PLR) or is it exclusive to you? Test the incentive itself and different formats (audio, video, PDF, or combination)

6:00 Tools (Jason):

There are different tools depending on what stage you are at. Get Started and then change as you grow.

Aweber, iContact are good to start with. Each have their plusses and minuses

5K and above: LyrisHQ and Bronto

8:45: Customization of the emails (Brian):

The company has over 1,000 segments. This is not necessary at first. Just get started and grow as necessary.

They layer their contact segments:

Master Layer (A-D) depending on how much they spent. A’s are their best customers. D’s are active and opt in but haven’t bought anything. They talk differenty to each of the groups.

Second Layer: Habits and who they are. White collar vs blue collar,, where they came from, what they are interested in (hard core entrepreneurs vs internet marketers), what products they actually bought and if they bought it directly or through an affiliate, or if they bought someone else’s product through their link.

Third layer: Very specific information about the contacts. They get specific information about where (within a promotion) they lose people, how people travel through the funnel.

For example, they may have a promotion and use a 5-email series They have links to tell exactly how every one reacts…what links they click on, if they registered for a webinar, if they clicked on a reminder email, if they click on a certain video, eg if one of the reminders has a video from Jay Abraham and they watch that. If they show up to the webinar, if they click through to a sales page. Lets them analyze where they are dropping people so they can see what is going on and where they can improve.

11:56: They use different language based on the knowledge they have. For the same product they may send and email out to good customers saying that they are getting a sneak preview because they are good customers. The email to the part of the list that has never bought would be totally different (you’ve received a lot of free stuff, now it’s time to buy).

Sometimes if they are releasing a product or promoting a JV product they will send to a list of people who purchased a similar product and mention the product that they already purchased, saying that this will supercharge it (or whatever the connection is).

They may also do regional references. Once there is a snowstorm in the Northeast when they were starting a promotion, so they sent a different email to people in the affected area, talking about the snow, keeping it relevant to the product.

You could also segment by sex, and talk differently to each.

At the base level you should at least use A-D segments.

Infusionsoft has made it much easier. It was like hiring 5 new people when he signed up because of the automation it allows. Once the campaign is built he doesn’t have to touch it again.

15:40: Stan: Trackable links: Every link is a unique string that tells what action you took, and lets you do a specific action, eg it might tell the program to take you out of one category and put you into another (or just add you to another, depending on the circumstance)

One thing you should always to is if someone bought something, stop sending him pitches for the product. Then put him in another campaign where he is thanked for his purchase and maybe sent some more bonuses.

You don’t have to start at the top. Develop the storyboard and tweak as you go using the intelligence you receive. You can tell what works and what doesn’t work.

Brian: This is even more important if you have a small list, because each sale is so much more important to your business.

18:50 Jason tells a story about using first names in places other than the subject line

20:20 Brian: Can pass the name to a dynamic page. They are taking it further now and allowing people to self-select…answer a few questions. It makes it look like they are making it more personal. This also lets you take people down different paths that are targeted to them.

22:25: Stan talks about the fact that if your email ends up in spam boxes there is no one to talk to to find out what the problem is. You have to do a lot of testing to figure out what is going on. It starts out with your server, then goes through other servers that have their own filters, any of which could affect your deliverability.

Rule of thumb: The lower the barrier to entry for an email service, the more chance they will have spammers using the service. Then you could be lumped in with them and you could be labelled a spammer because of someone else’s practices just because of the sender URL.

Jason: You should tell your affiliates not to use your domain in their emails because if they start spamming with their sales email, your domain could be blacklisted. Even if you had nothing to do with it.

Stan: People always ask what is the “magic” subject line. The most important thing is the “from” name, not the subject line. Great subjects come and go and tend to tire after awhile.

28:21: Brian tried to start introducing the company name instead of Rich Shefern’s name as the sender and it was not successful. The company isn’t well-enough known that people would recognize it and the engagement went way down. They want to use the company name so they can start introducing more products and not be so tied to Rich’s name.

30:00: Stan: 2 ways to get labelled as spam: Sender/domain or content. You should use a rating service to tell you what in your email might trigger spam filters. You will get a “spam score” that will tell you what factors may affect deliverability.

Stan told a story about once when their emals were getting labelled as spam. They spent hours agonizing it, rewriting it, etc and then realized that the problem was that they had the word “watch” in the subject line. The filters took that word and assumed that the email was trying to sell watches.

31:58 Jason: Re: tricking spam filters. Don’t try misspelling words, because that is a red flag, because spammers do it all the time.

32:45: Jason tells a story about how using a survey killed deliverability but had 75% increase in response.

33:20: Jason tells a story about using sex in the subject line of an email (he is selling a product that has nothing to do with sex).

Question and Answer section:

34:35: Does video work in email?

Brian segments those that react to video and those who don’t. Depends on the channel, market, channel. Have to test.

Stan: A lot of clients who tested video stopped using it. The problem was that it was rushed out and not done well.

Have to be careful with video (backgrounds, etc can affect the effectiveness).

37:21 What are the best incentives to use?

Jason says you have to test.

Stan: You have to track sales as well as optins. You also have to take into account the traffic source.

38:25 Person name vs company name as “from” name: Brian says that their brand is the people, so that is what they use. When they tried to get away from that it didn’t work because the company doesn’t have the name.

Stan: Depends what you are selling. If it is more of a product it might be better to use a company name. You have to train the contacts.

40:32 Does text vs HTML affect deliverability? Jason: Most people who say HTML is bad are formatting wrong/using way too many images. There really is no difference.

When you send HTML you want to have it formatted properly, not too many images or images that are too large and a plain text alternative. Then you will be fine.

Stan and Brian: When we tested it, HTML actually did a bit better than text-only.

Brian: You also have to test on different devices, expecially cell phones.

43:20: Why do some emails arrive after the event is finished?

Brian: It is mostly because we are not allowing for the fact that the list is so large that it may take several hours to send out an email

Stan: Sometimes it is just a busy day and the email isn’t sent out by the ESP (ie Infusionsoft) on time.

Brian: Time-sensitive messages can be sent by text, as well.

Jason: you should have as many contact points as possible (blog, FB, Youtube, etc). Also make sure you do things far enough in advance.

Or it could be the recipient’s email client that is causing the problem.

51:00: Conclusion by Jason: Basic rules

Be relevant. Keep track of traffic source, what they were interested in, why did they sign up?

Start building a relationship immediately. Be a welcome guest, not a pest.

Don’t violate their expectations. Don’t just send them promotions because the promotion was popular with other segments of the list.

Don’t make it hard to unsubscribe. People may just hit the spam button if they can’t find the link.

Brian: Putting a lot of blank space above your opt out link is called “opt out padding” and it will hurt your quality score with the ESP.

1. Open an account with an email provider.
2. Create a bribe that is attractive to your audience.
3. Create an opt-in box that features the bribe.
4. Start sending traffic to the opt-in box.
5. Test different bribes to see which works the best.

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Jason’s recommendations:

Aweber

Icontact

LyrisHQ (now owned by Aurea)

Bronto