Collecting Better Data to Send Even Better Emails

Nina Stepanov | Inbound.org (HubSpot)

Two quick notes about this presentation

It’s an adaptation of a post written by my fellow team member, find it here: https://goo.gl/SjegLN

It’s intended to be referenced after this presentation, so I’ve intentionally made it as something you can return to and understand without feeling completely lost.

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Email is dead.

No it’s really not...

81% of US online shoppers are more likely to make additional purchases, either online or in a store, as a result of emails based on previous shopping behaviors and preferences. - Harris Interactive

72% of consumers say that email is their favored conduit of communication with companies they do business with. 61% say they like to receive promotional emails weekly and 28% want them even more frequently. - MarketingSherpa (2015)

68% of consumers find email to be their #1 preferred channel for receiving commercial messages. -CG Selections "National Email Onderzoek" (2013)

66% of consumers have made a purchase online as a direct result of an email marketing message. -Direct Marketing Association (2013)

1 in 5 (19%) of consumers said they read every email newsletter they receive just to see if something’s on offer. - Forrester Research "North American Technographics survey" (2014)

In 2014 consumers delete less promo emails without looking, down 25,4% relative to 2010. - Forrester

Research "North American Technographics survey" (2014)

…further proof of it not being dead.

55% of companies generate more than 10 percent of sales from email. - Econsultancy

"Emailmarketing census"(2014)

Marketers consistently ranked email as the single-most-effective tactic for awareness, acquisition, conversion, and retention. - Gigaom Research (2014)

Email is almost 40x better at acquiring new customers than Facebook and Twitter. -McKinsey & Company (2014)

42% of businesses say email is one of their most effective lead generation channels. And for B2B marketers, 88% say email is the most effective lead generation tactic. – Circle Research

(2012)

Your emails just suck. Plus, there’s a lot of new stuff on the

market.

Bots, desktop notifications, text, social media, Slack, and so on are coming onto the scene with new ways to notify consumers

Email is a well-established source of information. It’s easy to use and getting even easier (and prettier).

Email belongs to no one. It’s not a startup or big business that controls your usage of it (except spam, don’t spam).

Alternatives to email are great, but email is not dead.

It just needs a tune up.

Story Time

Inbound.org

A community of marketers who:

• Ask and answer questions (Q&A)

• Share awesome content from around the web

• Write their own original content (Inbound Originals)

• Find and post jobs

Our Goal and The Big Gnarly Problem

Goal: A lot more weekly active users

Problem: What started as a community of SEO’s sharing content, couldn’t last…

Our total number of engaged WAU was flatlining at 350-400 per week for almost 18 months!

...but what would last?

Our Solution: Q&A Threads driven by Personalized

Emails

Q&A is hard, engagement is even harder.

To do list:

• Increase the number of questions asked on inbound.org

• Solicit answers using hyper-personalized emails

But How?

1. We wanted to just use Gmail, but that’s illegal…

2. Then we decided HubSpot would do the trick.

3. We used plain text templates and sent to a subset of our contacts.

4. People clicked through and left a comment on the discussion!

By sending these emails to highly-targeted

subsets of our 150,000+ members, we’ve

been able to get those questions answered

and build out our original content on the

site!

But Why? Sounds like a lot of effort.

People hate being marketed to.

People like to be treated like people.

People in your database are not all the same.

This isn’t rocket science, but it definitely takes time.

What does this mean for your business?

Stop treating your email list as a single entity!

Answer this:

What are you offering and how can that be applied to the different groups of people that you’re selling to?

The Steps to PersonalizationPre-Work: Come to terms with the fact that not everyone in your list cares about every single update, promotion, or

change to your business, but some do.

Review what data you currently have. Is it enough?

Here’s a sampling of just a few of the data points we use to personalize our emails.

• Job title keywords and titles - “manager”, “writer”, “SEO”, “consultant”, etc.

• Social media bios keywords (Twitter and LinkedIn)

• Pageviews - including keywords and exact match URLs and slugs

• Company name - keywords and exact match

• Profile data - skills, location, badges, job seeking status, karma

• Industry - in the company name (a HubSpot contact property)

• Followers and following (Twitter)

• Last actions - Last seen, last karma events, last comments, last post

• Lifecycle status - (members with full profiles are more likely to contribute)

• Number of comments

• Persona

Figure out how you’ll collect the data you need from old and new contacts.

We run on-site and email campaigns to encourage users to fill out profile information.

Pro Tip: Onboarding is a great tool for collecting nice-to-have information

Create lists based on the data and activities of your contacts in regards to your business and elsewhere.

Here’s a small sampling of our lists

Don’t forget your suppression lists!

• Email throttles

• Personal contacts

• Banned accounts

• Timezone

Personalize and prioritize your communication.

An example of 1 of our personalized emails

Personal email checklist

Why they’re being emailed

What the thread is about

What they can bring that’s unique to the conversation

Call to action: post in the comments

Link

Sign off

Now, do a little dance!

A few takeaways… 8 to be exact.

Personal emails are personal.

Be ready for the responses and reactions, and don’t forget to be respectful.

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Don’t burden your contacts with too much email.

Throttle your emails, and consider a separate, longer email throttle period for your more personal messages.

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Personal emails is more than just using a *|Firstname|* merge tag, plain template and sending from your own email address.

Make it patently clear why you’ve chosen themin your email body.

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Check and validate your data before using it, especially if you’re using that data to personalize your messaging.

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Suppress or customize your sends to people who already know you.

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Try (and test) keeping your emails short and asking for only one thing, but tweak your messages to different segments to make your calls-to-action more appropriate.

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Be aware of when people are likely to open email.

Schedule or suppress to avoid sending in the middle of the night or outside their working week.

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Create standards and conventions to make your marketing operation more efficient.

But don’t be afraid to break those conventions!

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Wondering how to get all that data?

A final note.

We will not be doing it this way forever.

This methodology is sound, but it may not work for you.

Just treat your people like people.