Email Tips and Tricks

I stopped off at the casino and grabbed a coffee. Good. End of Dana Cash Creek. Cash Creek. Do I smell like cigarettes? No.

Welcome to the marketing team of one podcast where we have conversations about the issues one person marketing team face when trying to meet their goals with limited time and budgets. Now, here's your host, Eric and Mike. Mike. I've been thinking about emails. Emails. Yeah. I'm inspired by some of the new, it seems like.

I don't know. There's a lot more if value in the emails I'm seeing lately in some of my stuff. Do you, do you value your emails? Is there any emails that you, or do you just rampantly toss all of your emails out? Oh, well, I think it depends on the email. There are some that there are no, no question asked.

Delete, I don't even have to go right any further. Okay. Some like unsubscribe right away. I don't need to, you know, so I, I try and be good about. Hmm. Unsubscribing from things that have no value to whatsoever. Whatsoever. How do you un, like, do you have like a set time every year or something you're like, all right, I'm gonna just unsubscribe from all.

I try and nip it in the bud pretty quickly. Like, oh, so you're just constantly Yeah. I got something yesterday. I was just like, what? Who? Huh? No. How many emails you get in the morning when you wake up? You roll over, turn on the laptop. Ooh. 20 to 40 probably. Whew. I got work to do. Okay. Yeah. Good to know.

I've get 150. Oh gosh, that tells me I need to unsubscribe a lot. Yes, yes. A lot. But there are some that I really love. What un what emails do you not un Oh, I mean, it is funny 'cause like there's some, there's like no questions asked. I'm gonna delete or unsubscribe. There's a whole other set of like no questions asked.

I'm gonna open it and read it as quickly as I see it in my inbox. Like Wow. Yeah. And I think that, um. Some of the, I, a lot of them kind of deal with their, they're educational in nature. Mm-hmm. They are kind of scratching an itch I have, whether it's a problem I'm continually facing or something that it, it feels like an enrichment process.

It's helping professional development correctly. Yeah. Something like that. Okay. Yeah, no products. I don't, I, I, I tire of the product things, there are some product based ones that I keep going because I'm like, yeah, I know, I know I'm gonna delete them for a long time, but I wanna know if like, hey, if this thing's gonna be 40% off, I want to be able to take advantage of that.

Is that, do you have, I know you've got probably a home email. Yep. Do you, is there a division there? Like all the product emails you, you open at on the home emails? Yeah. That personal home thing is, yeah. Is all. Yeah. But you're rarely buying products at work other than maybe software as a service stuff.

Yeah, or learning stuff. Learning stuff, yeah. Educational. That's what you're, okay. Yeah, but I don't, I don't know. I like, I, I think there's something to be learned by that spectrum. Mm-hmm. You know? And what we see as. You know, ourselves and you know what people are doing. And so I thought it'd be a good idea to kind of talk about that.

'cause I think there's, there's probably a lot of, a lot of solo marketers that are, they hear stats, like email is the most effective way. Mm-hmm. And there's all the benefits, you know, that you've got your, your list that you're, that you own, you know, you're not, um, and you, you can build a following and, uh, and.

Loyal customers through that email list, but. That, that seems like a far off vision and mm-hmm. What, what can we do to get there? What can, should we do it? You know, that I think there's a lot that we could talk about. Yeah. There's a ton of value in having that list. I mean, that is really something that is, it's almost a walled garden that year.

Complete control over. Yeah. They're an audience that's locked in. They have not unsubscribed. Yep. And they're, they're waiting for your next. Whatever message or whatever, but I think you need to treat that as kind of sacred that list and don't do things that are, that I see in the emails that I don't question delete or unsubscribe.

Mm-hmm. Because like if you're doing things that are getting people to unsubscribe right away, your email marketing objectives are not gonna, you're not gonna hit any of those objectives. But I mean, I mean there's, there's something to be said of that email. A regular email campaign can is the main purpose is to keep you, it's an awareness play, right?

Right. You just keep seeing that brand show up, and as long as it stays in the inbox, as long as it's not being, you're not unsubscribing, you're fulfilling part of that mission, so you're helping a lot of those people. By not unsubscribing, you're still, you're welcome. Their brand is still bouncing around in your head, even if it is.

Delete, delete, delete. That's the point is like, that's one of the points I think that we're getting at is even at the lowest, even if they're not engaging or clicking on it and reading it, there's a brand awareness that pops into your head when you see that email. Even if you're deleting it without even reading it, you have to be delivering some value.

So let's talk a little bit about email marketing strategy. 'cause I think that's really what we're focused on today here a little bit. Um, what if I. I am wondering about like the differences between product based companies and service based companies and the differences between is there something that we could talk about, and I'm not crafting this, please cut this out.

You know what I mean? Like the, there is a big difference in it, but, but I mean, do we want to address that here? I don't know, because we gotta, um. We got, we're trying to fit this in under 30 minutes. Right. I wouldn't worry about the time so much. Well, I think it's just like, I, I am worried about time today because we have limited time to record too.

So, um, I wonder if, if we get more into, I mean all, I think most of the guidance is generic enough. Yeah. Okay. Right, like focused on what company customers want and problems they face. I guess that applies to any, so we're talking about email marketing strategies, messaging strategies. Where do you begin?

Why? Well, I mean, we know, I guess we know why is there's a brand awareness thing. You want to provide value for your customers and you want to maintain some sort of level of communication with those customers. It's email by a lot accounts is a very, the return on investment. Is very high if you do it right.

Mm-hmm. So it's worth pursuing unless your audience just isn't an email type. But I think by and large, almost everybody should at least consider email and, and as part of a, a marketing strategy, it is the platform everybody still goes to when they turn on their computer and go to work. Specifically, or Yeah.

Yeah. As much as everybody wants to kill it, it's still, yeah, it's still out there. Um, so what's the best way to start? I mean, like, what, what, how do I begin this effort? I think, I think if you start, if you, you've gone through the first thing and said, Hey, is email right for me? It probably, it, it probably worth pursuing.

Mm-hmm. You're there. I think one of the first things is like, what do you wanna get out of it? Like what are your goals for it? Right. Do you want to. Do you want to build, uh, a list of people? Is, is your goal to grow your list? Is your goal to, in increase sales, um, get really clear on what your, what your goal is?

I think that'll help make some of your later decisions a little bit more clear, because you've got, you've got the goal that you're striving for. Mm-hmm. And I think that. That plays into, um, your overall strategy quite a bit. Um, and so sometimes if your goal is to make sales, you're gonna put more CTA heavy emails, you're gonna put together more CTA heavy buy now emails, buy now, you know, sign up here.

Sign up. Yeah. Yeah. Um, but if you're really just trying to build, uh, build a relationship and stuff like that, you, you're probably not gonna be as. Call to action heavy, you're probably gonna be leading with stuff that's a little bit, maybe a little bit more informational. Mm-hmm. A little bit more, um, play engaging and helping people solve secondary issues that maybe aren't the ultimate.

Call to action. And I would argue that part of that strategy kind of falls into line with Seth Godin wrote a book called Permission Marketing. Yeah. Recommended. It's kind of an older book, but it still plays true in the sense that there's a big focus on, it's almost a relationship you're trying to build.

Trust is really hard to find, and you can't just buy trust from people. Yep. And having this constant drip of communication with people providing value, helping them. It builds some of that trust. I, I think those call to action ones, those product specific ones, um, or the, you know, the, the hard sell Yeah.

Emails. Those can get, wear, those can wear over time, right? Mm-hmm. You don't, I think if you sent out a daily email with, um, trying to sell a product, it's gonna wear on people. You're not, they might not have 'em very long. Mm-hmm. But if you can provide value outside without asking for a. Action on the other person's side, um, and mix that into your strategy and have some of those, you know, action oriented emails or those asks of your audience.

That's a healthier mix. And I think you want to, we've talked to, I think we've talked on other podcasts about this, like this idea of, you know, having like a 80 to 20 split, like provide value 80% of the time and then ask 20% of the time. Mm-hmm. So I think that's a good overall strategy to keep in mind, but making sure that you're.

Again, thinking about how that fits into your goals for. And your goals may range on that spectrum depending on what you're offering. Is it a commoditized thing that you're offering service or product? Mm-hmm. I would argue that you're probably more on the CT a buy now. Yeah. Realm. Because if it's commoditized, you're competing only on really price.

Correct. If you're more in the. Expertise. I do this great. I'm one of the best ex in the world, whatever that thing is. And you're trying to sell long term maybe relationships or business partnerships or things like that, that's gonna be much more on that 80 20 or maybe even 90 10, where you're not asking hardly ever, you're just give, give, give.

And then, oh, by the way, if you're interested, yep. Sign up here or whatever. Yep. Okay. Yeah, for sure. So yeah, I think setting goals is a huge thing. Um. I think another thing to keep in mind is audience and like knowing, knowing your customers, know your audience. Be like as much as you can. Mm-hmm. Any information you can get about your audience, the better the what do they want?

What do they need? Mm-hmm. What problems they face. Um, I think that's good that, that will help you create content that resonates with them. And if you're not. If you're not thinking about them, you're probably, your emails marketing efforts aren't nearly as effective as they could be. Hmm. I've found, especially recently, there's a lot of, um, there's a lot of good tools.

It might not be practical as a solo marketer to go out and start interviewing all your customers and mm-hmm. You know, like you're, you got a whole bunch of other things to do. You don't, you can't get a lot of like, firsthand information from people that would be ideal if you can. Right. But like, I've seen, like, there's a, um, like in chat GPT, there's these idea of these like custom gpt where they, they.

Fit a certain mm-hmm. Certain task or something. There's, I think I've seen a few of them now that are like these persona generators and you can feed in a persona of your ideal customer and interact with chat GPT, and it gives you really good ideas about like pain points and everything. So you can use that to get a deeper understanding of this like.

Proto persona of who you're going after, and that can give you some good ideas when it comes to brainstorming ideas for content, for emails, or even like. Lead magnets or things that you can put together to try and grow your list over time. Yeah. The lead magnet thing is very important too. That's kind of before we even get to doing the email.

Part of that, the idea behind the lead magnet is you put something out there that people traded their email for, and then you're building your list. They've opted in, they're signed up, and they want to see what you're saying. So that's kind of the, the strategy behind Ali. Yeah. I think most of the stuff we'll talk about today is so much more about like your, like I.

We're, we're ignoring the, the big question, like how do you grow your list? I don't think we're gonna address a lot of that right now. No, but I think there's stuff that we see in the email. Emails that we get and then we see that, um, there's some definite characteristics with all of them. Mm-hmm. That hold true.

And I think that's, that's what we wanted to cover mostly today. I'm thinking about frequency and is that part of the strategy too? When you're designing the content around who your audience is, you're aware of who they are, then you start to develop it, maybe. Bouncing back and forth with chat GPT with this prototypical customer, proto persona.

Proto persona. Oh my, sorry. That was very inside, very inside language. Uh, let's let, let's just say your ideal, you know, customer profile, that what's nice is you can load that in and then interact with that customer. Yep. And they give you information back that then you can use to craft those emails. Then I've had one that I've got had in my, you know, list of.

Chats for a few months now, and I just, I keep going back to it every once in a while to ask further questions about it. And so it's not just like a one time, one sitting type thing. Mm-hmm. It is like, that's the, it's almost like. Interviewing that, having that person on call to interview them about, Hey, what do you think about this issue?

Or this, this want, yeah, I built one that's like you so that I don't have to bug you and I can just ask it, Hey, can I do this? And it's usually no, of course, but yeah. Yeah, yeah. So I assume the instructions you have in there is pretty simple grunt. Mm-hmm. Yep. Si say no. Yeah. And that, and that's all it does every time you, uh, you ask it something, well, it's like a, yeah, it's like three notes on a piano kind of a thing.

And then when that, then there's a translation stuff that takes place to translate what the grunt is back to, into English. So, but it's works, you know, it's like the three chord power pop kind of thing, right? Like, yeah. Yeah. Okay. Nice. Cool. But that's a really helpful tool. Yeah. I think that that's what's really amazing about AI is you can really design, yeah.

I think it's enabled that, like brainstorming slash uh, I keep, uh, I think Microsoft did a great job calling it copilot. Mm-hmm. Even though I'm not using the Microsoft one, but I do, I so often now I see chat g PT as a copilot in these kinda like, brainstorming and bouncing ideas and being able to quick, quick touch research, uh, on the needs of the audience as we're, as we're trying to build out.

Different marketing campaigns. Yeah. So, so I think that's super important. I think that like, being able to know that customer is super important. I think one thing that I see a lot, I think a lot of people reach to, you'll see it all over the place, is that, um, they, they start off on an email marketing campaign and their first idea is, well, we need to send a newsletter every, a monthly newsletter.

And yeah, I think that's a bad idea. For a lot of reasons. There's a weird thing that comes with that word newsletter. I think a lot of people have. It's a varied translation of what does that mean? Like, I just cringe when I hear newsletter. I'm like, I've seen it go, go two ways. And I think the, the newsletters carrying a lot of weight.

I, um, I've seen newsletters that are really good. So like there's, there's whole businesses, like people especially, this is more on like the thought leadership space and stuff like that. They build businesses on their newsletter and they might call it a newsletter, right? Mm-hmm. But I don't think most businesses, when they say, put out a newsletter, are thinking in that, in those terms.

What they're doing is, it's a mechanism to remind people that are out there by talking all about themselves and things they did. Mm-hmm. So, hey. We just had a luncheon here, Hey, we are at this or this or this, you ate lunch. Awesome. Like, like, eh, don't know about that. I just, I think it ignores the step before Yeah.

Like knowing who your audience is and, and speaking to, to them. You have to have your most fervent fans might care that you did that luncheon, but you're not talk. I mean, that's a, that's a select few, right? That yeah. That's not bringing a lot of value to the table. So the other thing is the. The cadence of that back to you asked about mm-hmm.

Like frequency and stuff like that. A monthly newsletter, like you're, you're showing up once a month to talk about yourself and then that's it. Mm-hmm. Like, I, I don't, I would question the effectiveness of that, of that. I would, I think you'd be better off skewing your newsletter to. If you are gonna do the newsletter and you're gonna call it a newsletter, I think you need to be providing a lot more value on a more regular basis.

And the value needs to come from not talking about yourself all the time. You need to talk about the talking about something that's very common amongst your ideal s Well, like could you do like case studies or like customer stories? That one's interesting because I think there that case studies can be very, very valuable, but you're not gonna hook me to read it by saying, Hey, this is a case study.

You know what I mean? Yeah. Like, like I, you'd have to tell a story about it that lands with people and there there's some messaging and phrasing that you could do to kind of pivot the presentation of that case study. Mm-hmm. But I wouldn't lead with, Hey, this is a case study. Yeah. It's like a case study is really valuable when somebody's.

Checking you out in a sense. Yeah. Like validating what you do and making sure that there's legitimate customers who've Yeah. Found value in what you're providing. Yeah. They're in that consideration phase. Like, or should I move forward or not? And, and stuff that maybe we're beyond, it's very valuable. Yeah.

Right. But these are probably people beyond that phase. Right. Or not even to that phase yet, or not. Yeah. Okay. Like you've, like, you've made them aware that you exist. Mm-hmm. And you've provi provided something that they want to be kept in the loop on. Mm-hmm. You know, but they're, they're, I think there's a healthy place for it.

I think it's a nuanced thing. I think it's how you, how you add it to the, the table. Yeah. It's also the, you know, I think of like, uh, some of these that I've seen and unsubscribe from talk about, you know, this person in this department did this thing. Like, I get it. You're trying to build. A team and rapport within the team and there's, there's places for that.

Yes. But maybe not in a newsletter or not in an email message or something like that. That sounds more like a social media, maybe a LinkedIn thing. Totally. Or something like that, where I think that comes back to the goal too. Yeah. Like is your goal to create like. That seems like a great internal email to spend to send to your big team.

Like congratulations, all that stuff. Mm-hmm. But does it match the audience? And it doesn't match the goals that you, you've set for everything. Yeah. That makes sense. Yeah. So we've got our strategy, we've got our audience. We have powered up chat. GPT built our agent or our proto. Yeah. Who's the persona?

Proto Persona. Thank you. I need to Yeah. Tattoo that on my inside, uh, forearm. Yeah. What's the next step? We're we gotta start doing planning? Doing planning? We gotta start doing it. Okay. We gotta, yeah, we gotta start. What's the first step? I think, um, planning ahead is, well, it's essential. Um, but I also think that if you can batch certain activities mm-hmm.

You can, you can be, it's less of a drain mm-hmm. On things. I, uh, I've been in this situation where I've tried to. Do the emails right before we need to send them out. And that's not fun at all. Mm-hmm. It's, it's stress inducing, right? Like if, like if I could sit down and knock out three or four emails at a time, that'd be great.

But I think what, so, but you could do it in phases too. Like I think if you've done, you've, we're following these steps, right? We've got our strategy, we've got our audience. Um, I think brainstorming a list of common. Of what your topics are gonna be? What, like what, what are things you can talk about? Um, dump 'em all out and then start choosing a few of them to, um, that you, that you feel like you can Yeah.

Move forward on. And then scheduling those out, like put 'em into a schedule. Um, determine a schedule that works best for you. Like if you're, if you're not doing it all the time, I definitely wouldn't do daily, you know, like mm-hmm. I would, I mean, I think weekly is a good. Good cadence, but it depends on your industry.

It depends on, I think there's this, this weird like chart that's like if you're the less frequent, the more content maybe and the more frequent, the less content kind of a thing. Yeah. Like I know I get an email from Jonathan Stark every single day. Yeah. Like even on the weekends. And they're great. I read 'em because I know that it's a low.

Time commitment thing, and it's, it's like three sentences, right? Yeah. Sometimes it's like, yeah, exactly. Three sentences or a paragraph. Yeah. And it's no art, no design, no nothing. It's just I know what I'm getting. It's really solid. Good. Just, Hey, by the way, here's a reminder. Think of things like this. Do this, consider this.

Here's a story. Yeah. But you gotta, but you're putting a lot of pressure on the, on the big ones. If you have low frequency, right, that's true. Like you really need to deliver. Yikes. Okay, so there's a happy medium. Yeah. Okay. But I, I mean, I think batch if po if possible, like, and then just, um, but find a FA frequency that you can, that, that works for your, based on all the other priorities, try and.

Get ahead of things as much as possible. Batch, if you can batch the creation of a batch, the topics of it. Um, the great thing about email is you could sit down, I mean, in theory, if you had two days free mm-hmm. You probably could do, you could do, you know, a quarter's worth of emails. Yeah. Um, assuming it, there's a lot of other factors in there, but like, if you're doing more, like, more like kind of thought leadership type.

Or educational stuff, you could write a bunch of 'em in one sitting and schedule them out. Like get 'em into your email program and schedule it out Yeah. To happen. And then you can let that roll while you're working on other things. Yeah. So that's, that's the case with some things, but not, not all things.

So it's nice to have something that you can do ahead of time and then just let run while you focus on other high priorities. So you just talked about writing? Yep. The stuff. What about like design, because like isn't the visual side of things, isn't that an important piece to this? I think this is something that we see a lot that goes sideways.

Super important. And I'm not, when I say design, I'm not necessarily saying that every single pixel or everything needs to be Oh, scrutinized. Sorry. Okay. Darn. But I think you should have a very, very good and flexible template that you, a lot of thought has been put into. Mm-hmm. Design thought has put in, been put into, do you change, how often do you change that or is it just like, run it, figure it out, boom, that's it for the year, this quarter, or the whatever.

I wouldn't change it too much because the, another one of my big. Yeah. My big things is consistency, right? Like I, when I think of design, I think of it's an extension of your brand. And if you're changing the designs and, and things look so different between things, yeah. You're undermining maybe the, the consistency of your brand and everything.

So that makes sense. I think especially for something like email, I think people are gonna respond a lot to the content of the email. Hmm. But that, I do think that design is. Is important in that you should follow as many design best practices as possible, like with, with type sizes and colors. And, um, just make sure that you're not doing anything in those emails to distract people from the message you're, you're trying to get out there.

Email's tough 'cause there's so many technical limitations to what you can actually put in an email because it has to disperse out to so many different types of devices and there's. Platforms and software and all the things. So you kind of have to simplify what that design is, which is helpful.

Sometimes that's a really helpful process to just make it as elegant and simple as possible, but try to make it as distinct as you possible can. Whatever relates to your brand, and if people are gonna see it a lot, don't put in there like a fluorescent header or some crazy, your brand, unless you're shocked, but.

Oh yeah. I think it depends, right? Like the, the reality is that for EA lot of emails, like they're, they're glanced at really quick. Mm-hmm. Try, people are trying to make a decision whether they need to even invest any time into this thing. Yeah. Do you wanna spend. A ton of time doing a custom design for each one of these Yeah.

Emails. The return on that investment, especially if you've got one, your one person mm-hmm. It, it's probably not gonna be there because it's taking away from some other things that you probably need to work on. So, yeah. My, my instinct is to find, find a good. Like create a template that has flexibility to do a bunch of things that you know you, you're gonna be doing.

Mm-hmm. And ideally, by the time you're designing, you already have an idea of what your topics are, are what you're gonna be covering. You're gonna have a good idea of what your, your email toolkit will need. Right. And you can utilize that. And don't get into custom coding things. No. Just don't, don't, there's enough templates out there that will help you build whatever.

Is gonna work for your organization. Yeah, you don't need to get enough. My hairline used to be about right here until I started doing custom coded emails and then it just, heavens. The other thing too that's really important to consider when you're designing it is don't just look at it on a desktop.

Don't just look at it on your phone. Look at it on all the different devices, right? Like send tests out and make sure that everything looks fine on an iPad and all the different tools right there. I mean, especially, I think you can nip a lot of that in the bud. Early on, like if you are creating your own, like templates and everything like that.

Yeah. Being able to run through things. Um, there's, I know there's tools like Litmus and there's probably a bunch of other ones that are integrated into different software platforms that will give you a screenshot of how they look on different common mm-hmm. Email clients. And I think that's essential early on.

'cause yeah, it, it can get a little, uh, a little weird, um, probably, yeah. And so. Um, as time's gone on, I've, I've opted to simplify the, the emails and, and use a lot of the, the, the tools that the email platforms have built in there and try not to stray too much from that because they're already coded to standardize against a lot of those things.

Yeah, that's one of the big reasons why, like, going into custom code emails that you have, you're gonna end up spending a lot of time troubleshooting things. Um. And like for example, this, uh, this is old news to a lot of people, but like way back when Microsoft decided that with Outlook, instead of using their web browser rendering thing, they decided to change it to use Microsoft Words rendering thing.

And so, and that decision even to this day, hampers the way what HTML emails can look like and everything. Mm. And so don't like, I. Just custom coding email things is just a, a road to pain. So like, I think sticking with the tools that are provided by your e email and trying not to stray too much from that is, is gonna be smoother.

Yeah. But you always should be testing these things out on, as in many different email clients and softwares you can get your hands on. And if you have a limited stack. You use one of these email testing platforms, like I, I feel like there, there was a time way back, I, I'm talking like maybe 10 years ago where we were in the game of building custom emails, but I, I believe we actually built websites cheaper than sometimes some of the website or the emails that we were building.

And it's weird. Like does, it was amazing. That we could spend that long. Mm-hmm. Trying to troubleshoot something that there was this patience. Yeah. To get it out there. But there's, it is just, yeah. Well, litmus, maddening. Litmus was crazy 'cause it would show you. Here it is on 60 different platforms, and you're like, wait, there's 60 different platforms for email?

Because it's just, yeah, like don't even go there. It is a disaster zone. Just stick with the platform templates. Yeah. So I mean, err on the side of simplicity. Yes, as much as you can. It's a quick. People are breezing through emails quickly. Now it's a valuable spot. Definitely. But it is. It is something people will scan more than, yeah.

Sit down and read. There are only a few emails that I actually save file, come back to and sit down and read them. Yeah. Most of the time I'm just looking for quick, quick hits, quick bites, where's the value? You know, which really leads into the other, one of the other things I wanna talk about, like, I think, um, there's a tendency to, I.

When people are writing, this is more about writing and everything like that. I think being concise and being kind of ruthless in your editing mm-hmm. Is super important. Um, depending on the type of email you're doing, some, some formats lend to that better mm-hmm. Than others. Mm-hmm. Um, but if it is some kind of email where you do have to write a bunch of words of like maybe paragraphs or something like that, edit ruthlessly cut out stuff that, that, that doesn't need to be there, um, break it up.

But in that text. Cut out what doesn't need to be there. Like be, keep an eye on that. Just know that you have limited time and limited attention on that. And, um, if there is something behind that that needs to be, yeah, maybe, uh, hopefully it's on your website. Provide a link to that so if people are interested, they can read the, the full accounting of it or something like that.

Or if you've got another, like, I like your tip too, like break it up. 'cause if it's, oh this, this makes me think of these funny stories or this. These certain use cases, well maybe just show the one and then if you really liked all three of those use cases, whatever they are. There you go. There's two more emails maybe.

Yep. You know, think about it in those terms. One of the other things that I really like about the emails that I read that are not concise, what I like is that they'll give me, um, some of the ones that I read will be like, uh, this'll be the most fulfilling four minutes and 29 seconds of your morning. You know, they give you, give you a time, read, give of how long it reads.

I think that's great, which is really helpful. 'cause then I know, okay, I'm gonna file this or I'll come back to this at 11 or whenever I have that. Down five minutes, I can go back to this and read it and I will go back and do that. One of my favorite emails that I get, and I think they send three a week now, it used to be just one, um, is called Demand Curve.

And it's all about, they, it's marketing techniques for SaaS startups mm-hmm. And everything like that. And there's a lot of good stuff that applies beyond those industries. It's pretty wide. Um, they're longer emails, they're covering a certain topic, but they do. I don't know that they have the time thing on there, but at the very top they introduce, Hey, here's what we're talking about.

This is what we're covering today. Mm-hmm. And there's, I'll be honest, I love that newsletter. That's one of the ones that's an instant open and I'll read it, but, um, I might not read all of it. Like if the, if the introduction it that they talk about, what they're gonna be talking about. If it doesn't match something that I'm, yeah.

That I, I can move on. And, but I love that. Yeah. I think it's a great courtesy to provide people like, Hey, not everything's gonna be for, for everybody, right? Like, but let here, let's hint this and so you're not wasting your time. Yeah. Um, another one that I like that I think is really interesting, it's much more journalistic and it's communication arts.

I don't know if you get that email, but I get that every day. They have a great system where it's basically three links is thinking about this, and then it's a link and it's boom. It might be another article outside of communication Arts. Yep. Might be another website. I learn a lot from those I love and they're so quick.

I love when people put that stuff in there. I love those references and everything like that. James Cleary wrote, uh, atomic Habits. His is really, his, his is really good and he's got some thoughts of his own thoughts. He's from others. He's got references. They're, it's a really good. Good, uh, model. And I'm never gonna unsubscribe.

I don't read all of them. Yeah. But I'm never gonna unsubscribe 'cause there's always good stuff in there. What el what else attracts you to some of those? Speaking of the concise, because there's a balance there. It's like I need value, but I, you know, like we talked about Jonathan Stark being like three sentences kind of a thing.

There's other that are more like three paragraphs and those I find myself tending to like just scan and maybe. Delete or file for later. So there's that, that scanning thing. I think the first thing that I look at. Let's talk a little bit about subject lines. Is there a strategy? What, what do you recommend or what were you thinking about?

I think there's a whole art to that. Yeah. And I don't have, I don't, it's, I think so much of it is contextual and everything like that, but, um, you, you have to, you have to hook people. You have to do something that's gonna. Prompt them to read it to at least open it. Right. So not just the title of your company?

No. And newsletter. Yeah. Yes. That's a good way to get me to not open it. Okay. So, you know, like, and there's a lot of testing. You can do AB testing on titles and stuff like that. I think that's the the something that should be part of the regular Mm. Kind of. So you send, you segment your audience and send this email.

A lot of tools have that ab testing on the, on the subject lines to see what works and stuff like that. But if you're not to that point yet, and I think some of them need a certain level of mm-hmm. Of people to open to even make it valuable to test. But, um, if you're not at that point yet, like think about what's, what's a big takeaway.

For the email, what's a way you can hook people and build interest into it, um, and, um, play with it. Um, but um, is there a specific word count that is magic? Is it two words? Is it five words? Is it 25 words? Yes. I think, I think as, um, a lot of, a lot of the tools now have a guidance on, yeah, I forget what the exact character count is.

You wanna stay. I mean, as concise as possible, remove any filler words. Mm-hmm. Um, and, um. Yeah, but pay, I think that's a, that's could be a podcast episode. All to itself is like how to hook people in as few words as possible, and that applies so much into subject lines. Do some of these platforms and the platforms we're talking about are like MailChimp or Active Campaign, HubSpot, all these Yeah.

Are yeah. Platforms that you can develop these campaigns on. I'm imagining that, and I don't know for certain, maybe you can tell me. Is AI involved in like scoring and helping people score their content once they get into building these? Um, there's a lot of tools out there that will do it. Yeah. And some of them are integrated into, I think it just depends on the platform you're on and everything, but if I was one of those platforms, I would be trying to build that in as much as possible.

Makes sense. Because that's what's gonna keep sticky. Plus they have all the data, like they know what gets clicked. Yep. You know, like, oh, okay, we've got all the stuff built. We got the campaign, it's been running. I mean, how, is there a review pro? Like what's the next like we gotta review it, right? We gotta probably look back on it.

Yeah. I think you always have to be looking at your analytics and not every day, not every on an item item thing, but it's probably helpful to structure some kind of like regular review and your performance on the these emails, because there's clues within those emails that will tell you, you know. Open rates, which are, that's a little fuzzy thing because of mm-hmm.

Devices and everything, but click clickthrough rates and everything. What there's, what kind of emails were getting open more often. What kind of emails? Were getting more clicks, like use that to tune the creation. It's kind of like a loop, right? Mm-hmm. You go through there, brainstorm your, brainstorm all your ideas, create the emails, run those.

Then look at what worked and then when the next time you're going through and you start creating, take what you've learned in those things and then see, see if you can get a better product. A better email product based on the analytics that's provided. So maybe speaking to marketing teams of one that have limited resources and time.

Maybe they sit down and they write out a month's worth of emails or two months worth of emails. Get those in the pipeline, get them programmed, get them all set up. Next time they go back two months later and write the next two months of emails. Yeah. Then maybe that's when they take a look at this. But you could do a review and like, Hey, what worked?

Yeah. What didn't work? Like we've put together a spreadsheet of all the different, um, emails that were sent out with the subject line, the open rate, the click through rate, um, and what the, the type of email, so like for this, this particular one, there was. We had a mixture, our strategy had a mixture of direct asks of people.

Mm-hmm. Or more, kind of just more helpful information. Mm-hmm. Um, and we categorized all those things and we saw that, that there were certain emails that, um, that just weren't doing it. And so we decided we weren't going to, we weren't gonna do that type of email anymore. Hmm. So it's really helpful to use that data to.

To inform your future actions. The data too. The performance of that email. It could be measured, you said cts? Click through rate. Yep. Open rate. Yep. Is there any other important number around this? 'cause those to me seem like pretty easy. Those are the two main ones, right? Yeah. Uh, I guess the o the other one to really keep an eye on is your unsubscribe rate.

Like how, how often are, are you. You, there's gonna be some churn. You just have to acknowledge that that's gonna be, that's gonna happen. Um, ideally you're adding people more than you're mm-hmm. But the argument is that the people who unsubscribed weren't in your audience anyways. Yeah. So you weren't gonna get anything out of it.

So it could be a healthier list as a result, but you do wanna keep an eye on that. Like, if you're sending something, like, I would keep an eye out for an email and if it, it had, there's gonna be a. A regular, kinda like. Average of what you expect for unsubscribes. Maybe it's one or two or three or something like that.

But if you, let's say you were averaging like three unsubscribes per email. Like if you had one where you had like 20 something, I would look a lot closer at like, okay, what do we do in this email wrong? What happened here? You know, like, avoid that. Yeah. Um, so yeah, just don't, don't ignore those analytics.

Don't just like send it out the, out there and, 'cause that's. That's a way of seeing what your audience is doing, but also look at it with a healthy eye in the sense of don't be just constantly looking, looking, look like, just give it time a little bit and we will talk about that in a little bit. Yeah. But I think it's, it's a, it's a measured approach and don't get hung up on that all the time.

Yep. Every time, just pick your moments on when you're looking at those analytics and maybe it's quarterly, monthly, something like that. Yep, yep. What technical types, do technical issues ever come into play and affect that a little bit or I, it's something that happens, especially if you're getting, if you're brand new into this and you're setting something up, um, there are.

There's domain ver verification processes that you should go through. Absolutely. And, and all the platforms will warn you about this. Mm-hmm. But make sure that you're, that you're adding like the proper, like it's a DNS setting that these are DNS settings that you wanna make, and those are gonna ensure that, um, when you're, it verifies that this, that your.

Email provider. Mm-hmm. So let's say it's MailChimp is authorized to say they are your company and send on your behalf. Mm-hmm. If you don't have that in place and MailChimp is saying, Hey, we're this company, but the domain stuff doesn't match up or it hasn't been verified, it's more likely to land in spam or get caught up in people's firewalls.

So it never even sees the intended target. So keeping an eye on those things, um, is super important. There's um. There's some tools. One I like to use a lot is called MX Toolbox, where you can put in your domain name and it'll keep an eye on your, your, um, standing on certain things. Um, do you have to go back into your DNS records with your, it's, that's under your URL, correct?

Yeah. Your DNS. Yeah. So if you've registered for it, it, we could spend, actually, it would be an anthology to talk about DNS, but in general. In the most simplified way, if you register your domain name, something like GoDaddy, right? They will, they will have the tools that say this domain name points here for your website.

It points here for your emails. Mm-hmm. And there's a whole bunch of other things that get kind of added onto that. And the more sophisticated your marketing. Text tech stack gets, the more you'll have records for this, there'll be multiple records. Multiple records like, Hey, this is where our email service provider for marketing lives.

This is where our, um. Customer portal lives, you know, it gets, it gets crazy. Well, I, I wanna mention it because I know from firsthand, I mean, we, we had a client at one point that got red flagged because they were identified as a spammer because they didn't fix some of the stuff you're talking about.

Exactly. The email company that they were using didn't go back and verify and do all this thing, so all of a sudden. The the worst case scenario, the nuclear option is all of a sudden none of those emails go out because you're automatically tagged as a spammer. The wor the, yeah. The worst case scenario is not these marketing emails that are really just awareness things like business critical emails that are being sent get caught up in all of a sudden those aren't.

Yeah. Yeah. And like, can you imagine business running without email communication? Wow. That was a long time ago. Kind of sounds like a dream. Yeah, but it's not a real, it it's, but, um, at the beginning of my career. Yeah. So, so that technical stuff is not something to be ignored. You definitely. And if you, and if DNS stuff is not your bag, few people's It's not.

Most, it's not. Yeah. But find people, someone who is mo some of those stuff for people who know what's going on. They are very simple changes to make. Mm-hmm. Talk to somebody, talk to a tech person or something. Get those things sorted out and make sure that you're in good standing. 'cause you could do all the work.

In the world that we've talked about already, and if you've got those things wrong, it's gonna be all for Naugh. Well, and the problem is, is it's not like you just, oh, I fixed it and then boom, everything's working again. It takes a long time for that stuff to kind of work its way through the system. Just like when you launch a website, like boom, okay, the website's live well in 24 hours.

Everybody in the world will be able to see that website. It's not like it's just an instant on off switch that, you know, there's a lot of. Work, inner workings that go on in the background. There are things you could do to minimize that time and stuff like that. Yeah. Some of those providers will say 24 to 48 hours.

Yeah. But, you know. Well, what, we've learned a lot about email, it sounds like. Um, yeah. You've given us some really good guidance on the best way to kind of tackle a successful email campaign. Get started, get going. Yeah. What are your final thoughts? I mean, what, what's the, what's the leave? What do we, what do we wanna walk out the door with here on this?

Okay, so, I mean, all the stuff we decided we're gonna do it. Yeah. It, you're not commit, commit, like, do it. Know that this, you're not gonna see results right away. This is a long tail game. Like you're, you know, like two weeks, right? Yeah. Well, time is, time is just a construct that's, you know, that could be messed with.

Yeah. Right? No. Like this is like, like think of this as something you are going to do in perpetuity. Whoa. I think you should Come on, I think, I think you should think about it this way and yeah. Um, if you're gonna do it, do it. Okay. Don't give up on it. Know that it can build over time and that, but you're not going to, you know.

It's not gonna work right away. So in a sense, you need to kind of look at this as like a lifestyle choice. Yeah. I have now. Bought a pet monkey Yeah. That I need to take care of. Yep. Maybe it's a little less maintenance than a pet monkey. Yeah. But in a sense, right. It's like, but yes, commit to it. Like I, I I think there the, it's, there's so much, there's so much material out there, there's so many places to learn all the intricacies of what we've talked about and how to build it out.

And there's so many success stories of what people have done. You follow all the best practices that it can be very, very effective. Mm-hmm. But none of those say I've, I've mobilized an email. I, my email marketing took off in 30 days. None of them do that. Okay. So long. It's all, it's a long tail game. Long commit to it.

Okay. But your patience will be rewarded. All right. Yeah. I think that goes with any kind of, when you speak inbound, inbound is a very long game. Yep. Thing. It's building that relationship. It's a long-term thing you're dating in a sense, right? Yep. It's just you're, you're going through getting to know you and.

Establishing authority and building trust and all those things that just don't, you just don't snap at your fingers and all that stuff happens with people. Yeah. You need to think of this as kind of the same way. Yeah. There's a lot of great resources too, I think online. Oh my gosh, too. I mean, you could spend.

Weeks studying all the intricacies of that. Is there any online sources that you've referred to in the past that really help you? I was afraid you were gonna ask me that because I don't have any top of mind. There's been like, my mind is a mixture of all these like great ones. I'm in a lot of ways, I'm gonna point a lot to um, um, HubSpot has Yeah.

Great learning resources that are free. Mm-hmm. Um, they are more. A lot of 'em are HubSpot centric, but the, but you, there are some core principles that apply everywhere. Um, gosh, what are some other great ones? Well, it's like all the platforms do a really good job of educating their yes customers. So I think start there, right?

Whatever platform. Start, start the platform you're on, like, like. I mean, there are some that are, that are not as, depends on your platform really. If you're, if you're doing like one of those top 10 ones, you're probably fine, but if you got a little bit more obscure one maybe. Maybe they're not as strong that way.

You never come up short, Mike. You're always rich with the resources. So we look forward to seeing that. I do love, I do love building up that bank of resources, that's for sure. That's right. You've inspired me many times over the years. Anything else, Mike or are you good? No, no. I think email's good. Okay.

Email can be good. Can be good. Don't, don't, don't do newsletters. Good. That talk all about yourself and um, I. Commit. Like if you're gonna do it, do it. Okay. Be consistent. All right, Mike, I've learned a lot. Thank you so much for all the insights. Thanks for having me.

Thanks for tuning in. For more information and other episodes, subscribe to the marketing team of one podcast on YouTube, apple or Spotify podcast networks. You can also chat with us on the r slash marketing team of one subreddit or visit marketing team of one.com to learn more.