supercharge email roi

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Supercharge Email Marketing ROI -‐ More Than Best Practices

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Margaret Johnson: Good morning everyone, and welcome. This is Margaret Johnson with Genoo, and it's my pleasure to welcome you to Supercharge Email ROI -- More Than Best Practices. If you're tweeting or sharing, we use the hash tag genoodling. A little word that we use around here, kind of fun, genoodling.

Let's move on, and let me introduce our presenter this morning, the awe-inspiring and totally fabulous Kim Albee, the president and founder of Genoo, as well as our professional services agency, Content Zap.

Kim has recently been named one of the top digital marketing strategists for 2015 by the Online Marketing Institute. At Genoo, we offer online marketing tools and marketing automation too small and midsized businesses.

While at Content Zap, we work with businesses to supercharge your online marketing, and build, and augment your marketing team. If you need a content strategy, for example, ContentZap.com is a great place to start with that.

But if you need software to help you with your email marketing, we have a fabulous platform that Genoo.com. With that, I'm going to turn things right over to Kim, and she's going to dash right in and get started. Go ahead, Kim.

Kim Albee: Thank you very much, Margaret, and welcome everybody, and thank you for being here.

The first question today is, "Why email?" Email has one of the highest our ROIs of any tactic, and that is not decreasing. The Direct Marketing Association reported that you get a return of $40.56 for every dollar that you spend in email marketing.

That's extraordinary. You can get that anywhere else. A current study of consumer habits also found that 77 percent of people prefer email over social media, and the only organic SEO scored better as a lead source over email marketing.

Email marketing is very viable, very relevant. The problem is, most people are having trouble getting their email to really keep paying them dividends.

Today, we're going to really look at how you can, and what you need to do, to make that happen. Email is changing, you have big challenges. The first one is sending relevant messages.

How many of you look in your inbox in the mornings, or during the day, and you get emails that are completely nothing that you're remotely interested in? Exactly. Now, what we've got more than anything, is a challenge to send relevant messages.

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If you're not relevant, if you don't engage your target market, you're in trouble. That means in all those batch and blasts, when you send out thousands, and thousands, and thousands, and hundreds of thousands of emails, and the same one to all the same people, and you get that maybe 15, maybe 20, maybe 25 percent open rate, that means 2, or 2.5 in 10 people open it.

You got to understand that the majority of people, it's falling on deaf ears. The more deaf ears your email continues to fall on, the more your email will end up in the spam folder.

You want to send relevant messages. Identifying segments that will actually boost your engagement is another issue that we see all the time. It's an issue, because with email service providers, it's really hard to dynamically figure out your segments, to just find them, to see, "Well, what are the segments? What are people interested in?"

Why? Because you have to have more metrics than what email service providers can track today. Many of you test things, but you're not testing the best elements. You're fixated on what word will be better, and that's not necessarily the place to be fixated. The place to be fixated is on your engagement.

I don't know that one word in a subject line...you can start there, but we've tested all kinds of things, and gotten very different results. I'm going to go into some of that with you today. You want to look beyond the open rate as a measure of success.

All of us love to do the happy dance when we see a great open rate. When we see a 40 percent open rate or higher, we're like, "Wahoo," and we're doing that happy dance around the office, high-fiving, and all that. You want to be able to do that, but what you don't want to have to do, or what you don't realize, is that that's not engagement.

Open rates are very, what do I want to say? They're nebulous, they're "maybe so, maybe not." Think about it. If you send an email to an iOS device, when somebody opens that email, or they just look at the email, it automatically shows as opened. They may not even read it.

You see? There's things that may show as opens that aren't really necessarily a measure of anybody really engaging with you. Let's just look at that, and we're going to cover that going forward.

What this all points to is content. The fact is, 97 percent of businesses do not have a content development process in place. If you don't have a content development process in place, you are hit and miss.

That means you're flying by the seat of your pants, and your deadline's coming up, you need to get your email newsletter out, and you're saying, "Well, what can we write about? What should we do? What's the topic? How do we get that done?"

That's what keeps you from understanding and having a flow to your campaigns, a flow that's really going to work. Because you're really thinking about, "Well, what do we want





to get them to do now, and how do we do that?" rather than, "What's the long-term goal, and what's the stream, and what's their buying process? Where are people?"

You want to look at all of those different variables. Actually, it's really simple. You want to get personalized and automated with your emails. Segmentation is a huge factor in establishing your relevance. If I go to a big audience, I can only go so shallow. I have to stay shallow. I can only go so deep.

If I went really, really deep into the nuances of car racing, for instance, only because I just did it for the first time this past weekend, but if I go really deep into that to a very broad audience, many of whom may not care about that, then, I've lost the majority of people.

If I know who actually really cares about that subject, about that particular aspect and car racing and the depth of it and I target just them, I'll get unbelievable engagement, you want to think about that. Having access to comprehensive metrics makes a huge difference, and we're going to show you what some of that looks like.

Ready to get started? Here's what we're going to actually focus on for today. I wanted to give you a little teaser at the beginning, but here's our agenda. We're going to talk about how to leverage a single unsegmented list, and some of our experiences doing just that.

We're going to talk about email metrics, and specifically, email metrics that go beyond the clique. The value of a newsletter and a blog feed, we'll talk about that.

Segmenting basics. How do you get to that first segment? How do you even think about that? We're going to give you some ideas about that, and then, we're going to talk about the from, the subject, and the message.

We're going to talk about just some factors to consider specifically, and those are really what I would call tips on your emails that you're sending right now, things to think about right away.

The call to action. How do you format that call to action? What is it that you want leads to do, and how obvious do you make it for them to take that action? Then we're going to discuss A/B testing, how you can figure out what really is working and try different things out.

The truth about open rates, I already gave that away. I've already told you open rates are your least reliable metric. What you really want to look at are clicks. You want to look at engagement, and that's what's important.

We all like to do the happy dance over open rates. We need to train ourselves to do the happy dance about engagement. We're going to talk a bit about deliverability and how to avoid spam, as well.

Email done well builds relationships. David Meerman Scott said it well when he said, "People want to do business with people. We are human, and we crave interaction with people who know us."





This speaks to not only sending emails, but listening. When you send emails, how do you listen? You listen by understanding what people do. Where are their interests, and how do you respond back to that? You have a huge ability with email to measure, and to then respond in very, very tailored ways to the people that you're sending.

Relevance is essential for engagement. Personalized relevant emails delivered at the right time can boost trust and build the relationship you have with your leads and your customers. Leveraging the content pathways that you have assembled can help establish the content that will be relevant.

We talk about content pathways. At contentzap.com, you can look at our blog. We talk about content pathways and how to build them. We have an eBook, all those kinds of things. We'll send that out at the end. I don't think I have the link in this deck.

If you aren't sure about how to build a content pathway that guides leads through their buying process and all of that, you're going to want to get that eBook and really start to look at, "How do I do this well?"

Migrating from batch and blast to truly segmented and targeted sending can increase your campaign effectiveness, and we'll show you the beginnings of that.

Email is absolutely the most personalize-able medium you can use. You hear a lot about social, but social media is one size fits all. You can maybe segment your list and then say, "OK, I'm going to do a post, and I want to target this post to this particular group," but how many people really do that?

Really, people aren't doing that. You post, and all those people who follow you, A, if you're on Facebook, they're not seeing it. Because if you're not advertising, they're not seeing it.

Even then, even if you promote your post, if you promote it to the people who like your page, there's probably only a little segment that might be interested in that specific post. It's hard to target with social, and social is never going to replace email.

Social media and email marketing each have their different characteristics that you really need to optimize to do each one well, and they go together in your marketing strategies, not either or.

Email's big differentiator is that it can be so personalized and targeted to a segment as small as one, and when you start to really look at marketing automation, for instance, you can start to see that hey, somebody downloaded that whitepaper.

When they download it, you can send out a fulfillment email, they can now go get it, then, we start sending them things about what they just downloaded that have them really engaged with that content.

Because you know they're interested in it. People don't just now know what they're not interested in, but how do you capitalize on that interest? How to leverage an unsegmented list.






You want to design your emails to aid segmenting. Why do you want to do this? For one, marketing share reports that your conversion rate will improve dramatically over batch and blast sending.

If you can aid segmenting, and then, you can segment future sends, you can get much better conversion. In an example of this I’m going to walk you through, I'm going to show you how a $600 investment yielded a 48 percent conversion and a 2,500 percent return on investment. We're going to walk right through that today, and the right tools make this possible.

Mostly who we work with, we work with a lot of small and mid sized businesses. We have a lot of people that have really large lists, and a lot of people that have really small lists, and when you have tools that help you segment automatically, it doesn't matter if you have a lot of emails or a few emails.

If you can do this is a more automated fashion, you can maximize your effort and minimize your resource utilization in terms of what it takes to really implement things. That works no matter what size your organization is. Here's a case study. What this is, this is Pierpont community and technical college, and I want to talk about what they did.

They had a focus on professional development, and of course, promotion for their professional development courses. In their email, that they sent out for professional development specifically, they included a selling class that's a personal enrichment class in the bottom right corner of that email, and they sent that email out because they wanted to see what would happen.

Prior to this, they had always kept the two lists completely separate. People are interested in personal enrichment, which is hobbies, cooking and selling, that kind of thing, versus professional development, which is furthering your career, getting a certificate, those types of things.

They wanted to see what might happen. To his changing, initially, what happened is he mined his existing metrics to find out what happened. What he saw, I'm just going to back up a little bit.

What he saw is that that email click, I'm going to go previous a couple slides. What he saw is that previous, that click right there, when he sent the email out, got the second most clicks in the email.

He was like, "Crap." Here's this $50 at most sewing class, and these $1,000 professional development classes, and that's what people mostly clicked through on.

If all you have is an email service provider, that's what you're going to think, and you're going to be sad. But I can tell you, over and over and over, we've seen this. That's what they click through, but that's not where they ended up. That didn't reflect the interest.

In fact, from this email, even though that was the second most clicked link in the email, nobody registered for the sewing classes. Nobody. But they had three people who clicked





through that link that registered into a $3,000 grant writing class. He could see that. Why could he see that? Because he could mine his existing metrics.

He could look at the metrics and he could follow them all the way through, and he can go beyond the click, which is invaluable. To go beyond the click, what did they do beyond that send, beyond that click? One of the things we do with Genoo is we look at what this email caused.

You can see what actually happened, how many page views happened out of people clicking through this email. How many social shares happened out of people clicking through this email. Either because they shared the email itself, or they shared something on the site after they clicked.

And so, you can start to see, what is it is actually being caused? You can click through the graph to actually see what are all the pages, and how many people viewed those different pages. What was their pathway? And what did they all get engaged in, beyond what they actually clicked on?

Here's the thing. When you capture all this stuff, you can start to identify your most responsive. I'll ask you, can you identify your most responsive leads? We know that 53 recipients clicked through the email, OK, fine. We know that we had 315 total site visits, and remember, we had 41 social media shares.

Some of those site visits could have been from a social media share, quite frankly. We also know that we had 42 minutes and 29 seconds total spent on our site from this email.

You want to design your emails intending to segment, so the quote is, when I design an email, I have links to each target based on different interests, or based on different outcomes.

If I'm sending a broad-based newsletter email, I want to be able. My goal out of sending that is not only to see my conversions of things, but I want to be able to segment out of that.

I don't want to then know what people are still interested in. I want to know what people are interested in, so I can peel them off, and actually, send to them.

Actionable metrics create auto segments. What they're saying here, you can click through the recipients and see what they viewed, who is interested in each topic, and then, you can automatically take actions based on that.

Google Analytics will give you things in aggregate, so if you go through the trouble of setting up all your conversion and all of your goal metrics within Google Analytics, still the best you've got is aggregate metrics.

With Genoo, what you can do with marketing automation, right now you can go to that lead level and see exactly was interested, and then, take actions accordingly. I can take a list of folks, and then I can move them directly into a nurturing sequence, or I can put them into a different lead type.






I can group people differently, and one of the things that was set in this case study was I don't need to know my segments ahead of time. I can send my emails, and I can determine different things that I know people are interested in, and then, I can go see what really was the thing of interest for people, and I can start to design how I follow-up and do a fast follow.

I don't need to have everything thought through ahead of time. A centralized lead database allows you to see your activity over time, if you have a centralized lead database that automatically de-dupes, so that your leads are only one lead record, all the way across. Now I can see things, and in this case, because it's a school in this example, I can see the last registration date for an individual.

I can see what category and class actually talk, things like that. I can drill into lead behaviors to get better insights. I can see that somebody came out and spent three hours on the site. I can see how many different visits they've had, how much time they spent, for instance, if I wanted to drill.

Now, when leads make it over to sales, this is the kind of stuff that shows real interest, the kinds of things that sales can follow up and inquire about. Insights lead to discoveries that impact your results, for each visit, you can see how people spent the hour and 34 minutes on your site, and how they navigated during your visit.

Where did they spend your time? Where did they go? What was really interesting to them? You can focus your efforts, clicks don't tell the whole story. Like I said, this person went in through a sewing link, and ultimately, ended up checking out through a supervision class, an accounting class and all of those sorts of things.

The takeaways from this particular case study is with typical email marketing programs, all you know is that they click through sewing. With this approach that I've just shown you, and these metrics, the real intent, the real interest based on where time is being spent beyond that initial click, it will surprise you.

Somebody may click, that's what got their interest, just like when they read the subject line. Boom, you get their interest, OK good, now you're reading their email, and you click through. Boom, they click through a link, and now, they're looking at that landing page, where else can they go? What else could they be interested in? How curious are they?

That's an intriguing thing to start to play with. You're going to want to look at that, and being able to see that helps you develop and target better content for your leads. It also helps you see, or helps these guys see that personal enrichment classes can be an entry point they gets people exploring what's available.

Think about it. It's continuing education. A lot of times, these emails are going to people's home email address. They get home from work, they're tired, they don't want to think another thing about their job, or about work, or how they can do it better. They want to relax. What are they going to click through? Some thing they have an interest in, like sewing, or whatever their hobby is.





Now, they can look at that, but what they found out it's an entryway. It could be a gateway for engagement, and then, they go right to the things that are really are going to hit the payday for them. That's an interesting take away, and they are afraid to do it before, and with these metrics, they can do it.

Let's look at another case study on segmenting. We had the opportunity, and this was a few months ago, to email, to send to a large list of 160k plus, mainly B-to-B marketers. We had a series of webinar is that we wanted to use as a lead gen opportunity.

We designed a series of invitation emails, and sent the first one to the entire list in sets of about 40,000 each. We did different things and we sent it out. You can see, we just sent a broad email. We had a webinar, we had a WordPress, and then we had something about email, "The single biggest reason your emails don't get read."

A little download, and we wanted to send it out to see where people segmented out to. Now, what we found in the send results, you can see we had a really low response rate. This was the very first send of a very large list, but what we saw is that we had 56, 58 people share us to social media, and we had a number of page views.

You can see the 9,000 opens out of all the people, the page views and all of that. I can click through that, as I said before, and I can see where people clicked. Where was that interest distributed across the people who opened? I could see the social shares, and I can actually click through and see where people shared.

We did only one re-send or additional sends, only to the people who opened that first email. This is one of them. If they opened the email, we sent them a more formal email about that specific webinar that we are interested in having them sign up for. The results from that second send were fairly amazing.

If you can see this, we had a 49 percent open rate from the second send that only went to the people that opened that first send. It went out to 9,300 people, and we got a 49 percent open rate. That's pretty cool, and then we had 153 total clicks, we had 132 page views, and they went out, we could see where all they went.

You can see which link they clicked through and where they went, all of that in terms of what other pages did they look at, and how many people shared this on social media. We used the broad send to segment, and then, we took everybody who exhibited some interest, and we followed up with them. We maximize their future engagements based on interest.

We've continued to do that. We've sent again, to that really broad list, and that more people can open. In fact, on our last webinar, which was about buyer personas, it was an awesome webinar with Adele Rivera.

If you weren't on it, you should watch that webinar replay, but what's interesting is that we did a send the day, the morning of the email. We sent it out really early, to that really large list.



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We ended up having over 100 people register in that webinar in the morning of the webinar. It was amazing. That was really quite a learning experience for us, so we're playing around with that.

Just today, we keep that practice. Even for today's webinar, what I know is that 42 of the people on the webinar today registered are brand new leads for Content Zap and Genoo today.

That was just a measure of today from having done that right now last minute email, and we also did a Facebook ad. We did those two things, and we have to go look at the metrics to see more about what they came from. Now, what I want to talk about, that's the value of doing broad, then, segmenting interest in following up. Yeah?

Margaret: Hi, I just want to interject here. We had an extremely relevant question that it's right now, which is someone asked a question about investing time in the people who did not open the email. I want to just articulate this for everyone, marketing, you only have a finite bucket of marketing time, right?

Spend the marketing time first, with the people who have exhibited some kind of an interest. Don't spend your finite marketing bucket trying to get the non-openers to open, get the openers to engage.

It just positions you as a different level, and I don't know if you want to expand on that, but it seemed worth interjecting at this point, because it was so relevant.

Kim: Thanks for that, Margaret, and I appreciate it. Yes, absolutely, if you focus, what we do is we take the people who don't exhibit interest.

Yes, we will send to them again, but we will only send to them for a new opportunity. We don't continuously send to the people who don't open. It doesn't make any difference, so you give them, every now and then, you send it to the people who don't open.

The people who do open, believe it or not, continue to open. It's amazing, what we've seen is that 49 percent open rate, it's only dropped as low as 32 percent, and then, it goes back up.

It hovers between 32 percent and in the 40s in terms of opens. What we want to do is, we're going for more engagement for the people who are interested, and show that interest.

Absolutely correct. It's not like you leave them, but you don't hammer the people who aren't doing anything, because all they're going to do is get mad at you and opt out of your list.

Opting out of your list, and I'll say this right now, is not something to fear. It's something to be thankful for, because if you continuously send it to people who do not open your email, you're telling all the ISPs out there that you send irrelevant messages.







The more you can maximize your open rates, your click through rates and your engagement, then, the more the ISPs are going to note that I deliver the email to the inbox.

It's not so much correlated to the IP address that you're sending the email from. It used to be a lot. So much more of it now is correlated to the domain you're sending from, and the reputation of your domain.

Now, that's not to say you can ignore your IPs, because you have to pay attention, and we do that. But what we're seeing, by and large is that we can have, and we saw this test happen. We can have an email address that goes into the spam folder from one domain, that goes into the inbox from the other domain, same email servers.

It is your domain that is going to determine where your deliverability occurs, what you want is engagement. You when people opening your emails, replying to your emails, engaging with your emails, clicking through your emails, all that kind of stuff. You want that, we'll talk more about that down on deliverability, but it just led me right into that.

Let's talk about the value of a newsletter and a blog feed. If you have a blog, then, sending a newsletter can be made infinitely easier. I'm going to talk you through exactly how, now. You want to set up your newsletter to pull from your blog feed, or from your RSS feed. Really simple syndication feed.

You want to be able to place that blog feed right in your email, and give it some parameters. You can even have multiple newsletters and filter what you pull from the blog feed based on categories of your blog. The benefit here is that you focus on your blog posts. If you can set up your newsletter, let me go into this.

Here's a case study, and then, I will get back to what I was just going to say. We have a guy called Ron Morris, and he's just an awesome fitness guy. If you want a guy who totally knows his stuff, you should go check out RonMorrisFitness.com.

In his blog, he's got video blogs. He does video blogs on a regular basis. Now, one of the things that we did is we took that blog feed and we created, this is the feed. I'm just showing you the raw feed here, but we pulled it right into an email. As he has new blogs hit, his email will go out every month, I think is what we have set.

It will have four new blog posts in it, right in the feed. He does a little header at the beginning, a little intro, and then, he does a sign off at the end, and in the middle, he has a blog feed. That thing's set to send every 30 days, it has our schedule to it. The same email can go out over every current schedule.

And so, we embedded it in, and this goes out, so he can see the blog items from the newsfeed. These are only the ones that haven't been sent yet, the coolness of this is that you put this RSS feed in.



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The way that our email processing works is that if there are new blogs in the feed at the time the send is to happen, that they were already in an email, then that email will not go out.

In other words, we're not going to send redundant RSS items, and so, if there are things that there's nothing new when you go to send that email, it will just schedule for the next send, and it will not send the email out and duplicate the RSS feeds. Added smarts, right?

You can see, here's the RSS, the blog items from the RSS feed. Here's the personalized introduction text, and here is the signoff and signature. That's just set up, and it just goes.

All he has to focus on is getting his video blogs done and uploaded, and that's it. And then schedule the newsletter to go out on a recurring schedule based on the frequency that you need.

We've seen people who do it every 15 days, we've seen people who do it every month, et cetera. Another way to do this, you do a newsletter and it's not based on your blog feed like this, but you actually put a newsletter together, and you send your newsletter out every month or every quarter.

That's fine, but here's the thing, what about the person who subscribes to your newsletter the day after you sent it? Do they have to wait a whole month, or three months to get your newsletter?

What you can do is, you can set up your newsletter on a recurring schedule to send only to those recipients who haven't yet received it. You can have that check and send daily or weekly so that as soon as they sign up, they're going to hear from you pretty close right away.

All the people who haven't yet received it, and it's your exact newsletter that you sent. Have that done up until a week before you send your newsletter, and now, you're staying top of mind. That's something that you can do with, just think about how you can use that, that level of automation to keep you top of mind present.

Because if somebody signs up and they don't hear from you for three months, they're going to not remember that they signed up, and you're wasting all of that good energy, and that good thinking of why they sign up in the first place. You want to be able to do some things like that.

Now, scheduling to send on a recurring schedule every month, every two weeks, and it will only include blog posts that you have in some of your newsletter. Apply filters if needed, to allow for topical newsletter sending.

If I had particular people interested, only in one particular topic and other people in another topic, and I blog on all the topics, then, I could pull and filter specific things out and set up multiple newsletters that can go out.

Then you only focus on your blog posts, that's a little summary about how you can apply that. Now, let's talk about segmenting basics, and let's talk about demographics. That's





your normal and standard segmentation, I get this all the time when I talk to people about, "OK, who are your segments? What do you have?"

They say, "Well, we've got this," and it's all about the demographics. It's based on the attributes of an industry or job title, or a company size, and that's all fine for first tier segmenting. That's great. It ties well to personas. In certain cases, if you do the persona were, again, I will pitch the beware of buyer persona webinar we did last week.

But for high-level segment and content pathways, it ties well. Can you determine these dynamically? You can, they can be saved as a recipient list, and you can use smart rules to activate how you send the people, because this is information you know about them. If you can get that information, you can do some automatic segmenting.

Here's the other thing, this is going beyond that to what he really hits your relevancy and engagement, and that is behavioral activity. If you can segment based on behavior and activity, and you cannot do this well with email service providers, because they are list based, not lead or activity based.

You can have the same person in multiple lists, and if you send the multiple lists in one email, you'll end up sending duplicate emails out. You want to know that. You want to have something that's lead based. You want to be lead centric, not list centric.

You want comprehensive lead metrics with a centralized lead database, when somebody fills out a lead capture form on your website, does it go into an inbox somewhere because the information got captured, and then, you forwarded into an inbox so that you'll get it?

And then what? Big it's buried in your inbox. It should go into a centralized lead database, and then, forwarded to an email so that you know it's there, and can take appropriate action if there is a reply that you need to do.

But you wanted in a database, that you can then track everything they are doing, and take actions based on it without manual input of information into something else.

You want to see what a lead or a group of leads are interested in. What have they downloaded? Where have they spent time? The opportunity is really to go deeper with content into areas that they will truly value, so stop just hitting the surface. Take some time to dig a little bit into it, to go deeper.

Automation based on activity triggers can ensure the right message at the right time, so somebody looks at something, they look at a page, they download a file.

Whatever they're doing, you can send an email trigger based on that. If they come in, and they have a particular characteristic that you know, like the ones that responded to, "Do you have WordPress?"

They filled out a lead capture form, they entered for a drawing to win a $100 Amazon gift card. Then in the background, we automatically updated, via SmartRule, we automatically update is that their CMS is WordPress. Based on that, we can then trigger and do other things, if they're specifically WordPress centric, for instance.



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You want to go beyond the click, and look at a lead's interest. You want to see, where they spend their time, what were they most compelled by? Now, tracking lead behaviors across all campaigns is what's interesting, and it allows you to identify who might actually be sales ready. Using lead scoring, using activity stream, what have they showed interest in, what have they opened, what have they done?

Where have they shared you on social media, now all that stuff? Now, it allows you to target leads in ways with your messages that are going to totally engage them. Because if you have this kind of smarts, you can do a lot of things that you can't do if all you have is a list, and all you see are the clicks and the opens.

If you can't see comprehensive behavior, you can't really do this kind of stuff. But if you can, you can only segment and target manually. Once you get stuff proved out, you can segment and target automatically, and that can be amazing. Your ability to target expands your possibilities. Here's another example I'm going to do.

It happens to be Pierpont again, they did some stuff in the first three months of using Genoo that was pretty astounding. What I want to talk about is, they have this class that's called Federal acquisition management, and it had been around, and it was lessening and engagement in terms of registrations into the classroom.

They thought they would probably be stopping delivering the class, no longer delivering the class, and this might be it's last year, but they thought what the heck, they had always wanted to do a lunch and learn. They had always wanted to do a lunch and learn, they could never do one. Why couldn't they do one?

Because they could never segment their list in a way so they only invited the people who are relevant for the class. With Genoo, they could. They could actually segment their list so that they only invited the people to this lunch and learn that are actually qualified to be in the class.

The case study, they did an in-person lunch and learn. In their town, they went to the restaurant, they reserved the back room of the restaurant, they set up the landing page.

In the lead capture form, they sent out an email to these people, drove them to a landing page and registered to attend, and then, they sent out emails reminding people what it was coming, and then, they had 25 people show up at a lunch and learn.

They could do all the follow-ups, it was all automated. There was no staff time that it took, for people to register for this event, this in person event.

They could follow up with emails, remind people it was coming, it was a nice lunch. Their instructor gave a presentation, because she'd rather give an in-person presentation with a PowerPoint than do content that they could use to do a blog post or drive presentations that way.

She actually preferred this presentation format. What they did is they gave the presentation via PowerPoint to these people. It was a nice lunch, soft cell, focused on







providing value in the future of Federal acquisition management. They leveraged the online tools for the off-line event. They sent emails, invited to a targeted list.

They used a landing page lead capture form, and they triggered people into a follow-up email campaign to remind people about the event. They printed a list of those who registered, right from that lead type, they just printed out the registrations for easy sign-up on the day of the event.

Here's what they got. The results from the lunch and learn, total people at the event? 25. The number who registered into the class, right from the event? 12. That's 48 percent conversion rate, OK? The total expense for the lunch and learn, $600. The total cost of the class, $1,250.

$1,250 times 12, divided by...and then, you look at that $600, they had a 2,500 percent return on that lunch and learn investment. That's amazing, and that comes from being able to target. That's a multi-channel campaign, it was an off-line event, right?

That's what they got. They I did up having more registrations than that come in for the class, and they had more concentration of individuals in the class per company than they ever have before.

They had a really, really successful class, maybe one of their most successful in terms of numbers of participants, and it's one that they thought was losing interest, right? The takeaway is, the ability to target effectively based on both demographic and behavioral data can provide far greater ROI and conversion than general marketing and content, going out to your list.

Being able to mix online and off-line can make excellent sense, and email with other online tracking and capabilities makes more efficiencies possible.

Here's some tips for your emails. Send from a real person, please. Please, please, please stop the noreply@, the info@, the support@, stop it. Send your emails from a real person. People know emails sent from reply@, from info@, from support@, what that means is you're not interested in engaging with them and talking to them.

What you're interested in is them doing exactly what you want them to do. That is not effective. It's going to become less, and less, and less effective.

Talk about inbox deliverability, if I was an ISP and I saw an email come from noreply@, unless it was a transactional related email, I would look at some other factors, it would be on high alert for me. I just want to say, emails sent from those sorts of email addresses don't have recipients feel like they're getting an email from a person.

Remember, at the very beginning, the quote from David Meerman Scott, "People do business with people." You want to make yourself more human, not more institutional.

Because those, by definition, coming from that, are impersonal by definition. Subject lines, get people to read further. If they aren't interested in your subject line, I don't care how much time you spent on that email, it will not matter.





And so, ask yourself right now. Look at how much time you spent laboring over your email copy, the email look, the whole thing about your email. Look at how much time you spend on that, and then, compare that to the time you spend plopping down a subject line.

You spend a fraction of the time on your subject line, and you don't usually give yourself 10, challenge yourself to come up with 10 possible subject lines, and then really, look at what's the best one to use.

You just plop one on there and go, right? We see this all the time, is why I'm saying it. I'll call a spade a spade, very few people spend time on the subject line.

And yet, if people don't look at that subject line, or they don't look at the corner pocket, I'm not going to tell you what it is, but we have a download that will tell you what it is. That's one of them I will talk about at the end.

But if you don't pay attention to your corner pocket, and you don't pay attention to your subject line, chances are your email isn't going to get opened. if it doesn't get opened, all that precious time you spent on that email content will make no difference. You want to watch your length on your subject lines.

If you're going to the mobile inbox, and there is a picture of my old iPhone. If you're going into a mobile inbox, you want to think about 35 viewable characters at most.

35 viewable characters. The desktop, you've got about 75 viewable characters in your subject line. Think about what goes in the front of your subject line, don't save the goodies for the end. Have them be at the front.

Subject line tips, you want to be really careful to take studies at their word. Everybody is going to tell you, here are your tips and your subject line and all that. I always say test your audience, with your subject, with your particular, what they're interested in. I would always say test.

Google this phrase, "optimal length of email subject lines," and you'll get a variety of subjects and results, and you can check them out for yourself. The better you know your audience, and understand what engages them, the more success you will have.

Which is why once again, I'm going to promote our beware buyer personas webinar that we did last week. It's a way to make information and insights completely available to you from your marketing campaigns, and you want to know your audience.

The better you know them, you'll understand what engages, and you can lead them for your buying process. You will have more customers to keep then.

Spend time on the subject line. I'll just say it again. I can't say this enough, right? Spend time on the subject line. As marketers, we fuss over the email, and then, we spend about five minutes or less on the subject line.



http://contentzap.com/beware-of-the-buyer-persona



I have A book recommendation for you by Robert Boduch, "Great Headlines Instantly." Get that book. You can buy it off Amazon or Barnes & Noble, go get it and read it.

A lot of it is consumer focused, but take it, use it, put formulas together. Take those formulas and use them, OK? Now, what's your response to your greeting? "Dear subscriber," or "valued customer." If I'm a really valued customer, then, why are you saying valued customer? Why aren't you saying, "Hey Kim!"

Would I ever say, "Dear Kim"? Do you guys write Dear Kim letters? Dear John? Do you put, "dear" in an email? I've never seen it from someone sending me an email. I've seen it from automatically sent emails, and big batch and blast emails, but I never see them from emails that want to relate to me.

The greeting here doesn't convey that the recipient is special, but rather you're lumped into a category. You know right off the bat that this was a mass email, and it's impersonal. I would ask you this, are you too formal for the world we live in today?

In the world we live in, think about it. We have gone majorly casual. It used to be that I had to wear a suit, pumps and a bow tie, and all that to work every day.

Now, I wear jeans and I can dress nice, but hey, I can do that. Just look at the world we live in, and be appropriate to that world, be appropriate to the way people are addressed in emails, and then, have your voice for your emails correspond appropriately.

Those are some things to think about. Now, craft to the right and best message. You've got to know, what is your objective in sending this email, what is it you want? What do you want your recipients to do? If they don't do that, what else would you like them to do? Be specific so that you understand what it is you're doing with this email.

Now, there's a great book, I'm going to recommend another book to you by Victor Schwab, How to Write a Good Advertisement. This book was written way back in the direct mail days, long before email was probably even a glimmer in somebody's eye, and it's still super relevant today.

Do yourself a favor, you can also get this book. But it's a short course in copywriting, and it's great. To know what a geek I am, I read it while I was on vacation in Mexico one year. I sat in the sun, and I read this book. That's a geek, I'm a marketing geek. Yes, OK.

What you want to do, it's Very good, it has a very good things for you to consider about how you actually engage. If you're using responsive emails, or if you're interested in people seeing your email in a mobile device, then, make sure they can. Make sure that your email doesn't look like this.

Here's the top, here's the middle. This is in my smartphone, and here's the end, and we've got the picture. That's all the message I got, I hit "delete." If you don't know whether your email is going to look good in a mobile device or not, it's worth testing. Don't be sending, and this is from a very popular sender in the marketing world.





It's amazing to me that they don't test their sends on a mobile platform before they're sending that out, because I constantly get these. If I really want to see what the heck is in the email, I have to view it in a browser. Let's talk about A/B testing. Decide what you need to test, and what will be considered a success.

Have a specific measurable result. When you decide what you want to test, you have to look at what we need to test. Where are we having issues? If your open rate is low, look at your subject line.

If your open rate is pretty good and your click rate is low, look at the body of your email. If your conversion rate is low, then, look at your landing page that you're sending them to.

You want to get all of those things working together. You only want to test one thing at a time, only one thing at a time. What do you want to test? The primary things to test are your call to action, your offer and a subject line. You only want to test those three things.

The other things that you can test are the layout of the message, personalization, body text, closing text, images, but the best things you can test where you're going to get your best results are your top three those are the things to pay attention to in your testing if you really want to get good results.

Again, only test one thing at a time unless you're going to use a multivariant testing tool. If you're using A/B testing, one thing at a time, find out what works. Do you want to test the entire list? Generally, you want to test your entire list, because that's going to give you the best and most accurate picture, response and engagement.

But if you have a very large list, you may want to only test a sample, and then, test the largest table you can afford, basically, because your emails do cost you money.

If you're trying something edgy, you might want to limit how many people see it, just in case it really flops. In that case, you might want to test only a portion of your list.

If it's a limited time offer, and you need to maximize conversions, then, you might want to run a small test on a few hundred recipients and send the winner to the your entire list. Those are some things, of what kind of a list you want to test the larger your test sample, the more accurate your results will be.

For smaller lists, A/B testing can be really valuable, but you've got to ask yourself, will it alter what you will otherwise get if you used both your A and your B as sends to your audience?

This is what we talk about a lot with people. Don't just send one email, for a webinar, we send multiple emails. We don't just send one email. We send all kinds of different formats, and flavor, and content, and pictures, and all kinds of things.

We want to test all those things out. We know that we're going to get more registrations closer to the webinar that we will further out. If we sent the first email we send as the last





email we sent, it would probably still perform better than the first email that we send. Why? Because it's closer to the time of the webinar.

Those are just factors that you've got to think through. But I say, if you're a smaller FMB marketer, and you're struggling to put a single email together, then, when you work so hard to put two good emails together, then freaking use those emails, because you're going to see results. Is it worth your time to do A/B testing, and pick the one that works, and then send amount? I'm saying no.

You may disagree with me, that's OK. But we've seen that it's ineffective, and inefficient, to send only one email to your audience on a specific subject. It's just an effective. You want to send two or three emails on that subject, only to the people who haven't yet clicked through and taken the action you want them to take.

You send to the people who haven't yet done that. You don't know. Maybe they were busy. They really wanted to, and then, they forgot about it. Boy, then, your email came in again. They went, "Yes. I wanted to do that before." They take that action.

Oftentimes, if you send multiple emails, the second email will get better results than the first one. That's what we've seen. It would be a better use of your time to maximize your results and efforts and use both emails, rather than trying to figure out which one will be better.

Here's an example, A and B. We had two of these that went out for a webinar. We had results. I'll show you the results in terms of opens, open rate, and that sort of thing.

This one got a 13 percent open rate. This one got a 12 percent open rate, but check out the difference. This one actually got shared to social and followed by social.

The people who completed the form, 35, versus this one we had 69 people complete the form, registering into the webinar. We had 55...sorry, not 35...55 versus 69, but we had people share us on social. We had 150 page views versus the 187.

Did one of them win? If I was just looking at webinar registrations, yes, but this one, the first one, didn't get shared to social. The second one did.

A word about open rates. It's a really unreliable metric. As I said at the beginning, you want to be more interested in click-throughs and what happens beyond that. You want to be hungry for what's working, rather than a simple open metric that lets you do a happy dance. You want to be able to learn and improve.

Quick word on deliverability and spam. With B2B markets, you deal with corporate spam filters managed by corporate IT, and oftentimes, unnecessarily lock down. With B2C markets, you deal with cable providers, Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, all that kind of stuff. Engagement matters, clicks, replies, if you want inbox delivery. They're paying attention to who you are.





Ask your subscribers to white-list your email and have a page that gives them instructions on how to do that. Avoid being seen as spam. We have a post that has a downloadable spam word list.

You can also Google spam words to avoid and get yourself familiar with all the things that you should not have in your email list or in your emails at all, the words that people mark as spam.

Adhere to good CAN-SPAM practices. Make unsubscribing from your list super-easy, like one click. Not click and "What email did we send to? Enter that in, and now, we'll take you off our list." You want to just be really easy to get people unsubscribed.

Here are the additional tips. If you want to know about corner pocket, you'll get this first one, the single biggest reason your emails don't get read. That's at bit.ly/gscoop1-1. Then, if you want to look at email marketing lists or listening, you want to get gscoop2. That's at bit.ly/gscoop2. Those are the ones that you want to download.

Take the first steps. Evaluate your email sending capabilities. Determine what you can and cannot do from what I've outlined here. Not all email service providers allow you to easily segment or include an RSS feed. They don't have the metrics and capabilities that I've outlined here.

If you're interested in finding out more about Genoo, we'd be happy to talk to you. No, we're not a tough sell or a hard sell or anything. We just want to do what works for you.

Create an email to your target audience. Do this. Construct an email for your target audience that will allow you to further understand what they're interested in.

Include at least three different links back to your site or blog, that allow you to determine meaningful distinctions for segmenting. Do that. See what you get. Follow up. Follow through with that segmenting.

Here are the key takeaways. Email's one of the most powerful tools you have in your online marketing arsenal. It's possible to start with an unsegmented list and to start to build segments you can engage. We showed you a couple of examples.

The metrics that are available can make a huge difference, huge difference in your email effectiveness. Metrics are key. The ability to go beyond the click can provide insights that you would otherwise miss completely. Open rate is the least reliable metric. Use good sending practices. Make opt out easy.

With that, I'm ready for questions, although I know I went a little bit long. We're just on the hour. Maybe one question. I know that some of you have to leave. Maybe we can take one or two.

Margaret: We did get a lot of questions during the session. Thanks to everyone who was keeping the question box busy out here. We did get all of them answered in line. However, there were a couple that I think are really worth sharing with the audience. I'm just opening up that pane to go pick one now.





http://bit.ly/gscoop1-1

http://bit.ly/gscoop2


For those who joined late, the session is being recorded. We will get you a link to the recording first of the week. It takes us a little while to process that.

One of the great questions that we got was "Do you think it's really invasive to send three emails a week, even if the objectives are different, like invitations, content, newsletters, et cetera...

Kim: I love that...

Margaret: ...but ultimately, from the same sender.

Kim: Yeah, I love that question. I will tell you, I did an email...I did a challenge years ago, and it has proven true. Results of that have proven true, I'm going to share them with you.

I did a challenge where I was going to send an email every day for 30 days, and I sent out to the list, which was all these people at the time and said, "Hey, if you want to get this..." Thinking that a few people, poor souls, would take...

200 people signed up to get an email from me every day for 30 days. Margaret, can you mute for a second? Then what happened is, at the end I did this, and I wrote emails every day. It was a challenge to see if I could actually create and generate that kind of content over a 30 day period, which I can.

I proved that to myself, that it's possible to do this, even on a busy schedule, flying coast-to-coast for meetings, and things like that, I still did it. I only missed one day, that's an aside.

The thing that happened after that was, we did a survey of all the people that graciously participated in receiving these emails and asked them, "Was it too much? Was it too frequent?"

To a person they came back and said, "If it's relevant to me, I'd take an email every day." That is amazing. What we've learned, and we practiced this, is that we focus on engagement. We focus on making emails that matter to people, that provide value to people. That's what we want.

If it's not valuable to them, and they want off our list, great, they should get off our list. I don't mind the opt outs, because I want the people who are engaged, and I want to know that we're engaging them. That's what I would say, is that you can send them every day if you need to. Don't wear out your list.

Make sure that what you're doing is relevant, and valuable to them, otherwise don't do it.

Margaret: I just want to toss this one in for the benefit of the people who are still with us. We've got a great question about, "What's the optimal time to send...?"

Kim: [laughs]





Margaret: "What's the optimal interval between newsletters?" Now, let me finish.

Here's the thing folks, I'm just going to go ahead and provide the answer to this question. The answer to the question, "What is the optimal interval between sending newsletters?" is that there is no right answer.

Here's why. It depends on your audience, and how interested they are in your topics. It also depends on your capacity to generate content. Do not decide you're going to go on, "Were sending a newsletter every two weeks," and then, totally stress yourself out about coming up with enough content for a newsletter, because you'll start focusing on the wrong stuff.

It depends on your audience's capacity to absorb what you have to say, the content you're capable of providing, and furthermore, what you are doing with that information after you deliver it.

We call a newsletter a broadcast email, it should lead to different attractors, or offers, or actions that you want people to take. That allows you to do some segmenting.

You could send a newsletter every week. You could send it every month. You could send it bimonthly. It's got to be high-value, and it's got to be something that your audience is interested in. Most importantly, it's got to be good content that you've spent the right amount of time to create.

If you can do that in two weeks, and deliver a newsletter every two weeks, that's great. But if you can't, don't.

Kim: Yeah, that's really, really good. I will also say that for every month you go without communicating with people on your list, your list degrades in value. Your list will degrade in value. In other words, people will forget about you. They'll forget that they were ever engaged with you.

Then, when they finally do get an email from you, maybe six months later, they won't know who you are. They'll be like, "Whoa, what's that?" and, "How did you get my name?" And all that kind of stuff. Just know, that for every month that goes by that you don't email, your list degrades. It's not still valuable.

Margaret: We do have questions continuing to come in, but because of the time constraint, we're going to answer those off-line. Thank you a lot. We've had some excellent questions. I hope we've provided some valuable information to you this morning. I think we need to wrap it up...

Kim: Yes.

Margaret: ...and encourage you to go visit us, follow us. Find us at ContentZap.com/blog is where our past webinars are posted. The Content Zap site is out there for you. Go ahead, Kim.




http://contentzap.com/blog



Kim: One of the things that I'll say, for those of you still on, check out our webinar that's starting next week.

It's a three webinar series, and it's all about lead nurturing. We're going to take you through, step-by-step, over three webinars in three weeks, about exactly how to get nurturing really, really going for you, like no kidding.

If you're interested in nurturing well, and giving yourself some ways to start nurturing, you're going to want to be on those webinars. With that, that's at ContentZap/events is where you would go to find out those webinars and register. With that, I'm going to say thank you so much, and stay tuned.

We'll get the recording out here to you guys early next week, and you'll all get an email about it. Thank you so much, and we look forward to seeing you on one of our next, and upcoming, webinars.

About ContentZAP ContentZAP! Is a professional services digital marketing agency. We understand marketing technology and how to leverage it to help grow your business. We work with companies of all sizes to develop and implement content strategies, plan nurturing and follow-‐up sequences, or to augment content development.

We sponsor events and webinars that provide practical, very useful ideas and strategies that will help marketers be more effective quickly.

Sometimes reverent. Sometimes irreverent. Always relevant.

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About Genoo Genoo is one of the most full-‐featured marketing automation solutions available, and targeted to the small and midsized business space. We love helping companies succeed with their marketing, and we are committed to building the best and most useful integrated digital marketing tools available!

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