Title: 10 Ways to Boost Your Email Campaigns with Emily Caddell
Guest: Emily Caddell
Peter: Before we dive in, I do want to caveat all of this about email campaigns by stating the obvious, is that if you are not doing email campaigns at all to your customers and potential customers and previous customers, you need to start right away. It is the highest ROI thing you can do with respect to marketing your business.
Peter: Welcome to the Biz and Life Done Well podcast, where we explore what it means and what it takes to do business and life well. I’m your host, Peter Wilson. If you’re like me, you’re intrigued by stories of common people who have achieved uncommon success in business and life. Join me as I interview fascinating people about how they got started, their successes and failures, their habits and routines, and what inspires them.
Peter: This week, we’re talking to Emily Kudell, Biz Marketing’s, Director of Marketing, about 10 ways to boost your email campaigns. And we did have a few other articles that we’ll refer to. One of the blog posts was, Do Email Campaigns Really Work? Also, three Digital Marketing Essentials for Weathering a Downturn. Finally, How to Organically and Legally Grow Your Email List.
So we’ll have links in the show notes for that. Without further ado, let’s get started. The first thing that you’ve listed here, Emily is be steady and frequent. What do you mean by that?
Emily: Yeah, so you don’t want to just be sporadically sending out email campaigns that make no sense don’t really have a flow to them or anything like that. Your email campaigns to be healthy and successful need to be steady and frequent. So for example, we send out an email to our email list every Friday. We haven’t missed a Friday in almost two years, every Friday, you should expect an email from his marketing because we keep consistent and steady. So one of my suggestions to help with this is just writing out a calendar plan at the beginning of each month of what content you’re going to share in your emails.
And this can be blog posts, videos, a podcast, anything you want to share with your email list. And really, if you’re creating content that will resonate well with your audience, you’re not going to be seen as a pest, but rather as an educator in your field and people are going to want to get your emails.
Peter: Yeah. One other thing that I was thinking about is if you were going to do emails on a monthly basis, which I think is the least frequent that you should send out emails. I think you should send them out more frequently than that. If you decide to do monthly, you should pick a day of each month, third Thursday of every month stick to that. Go to the calendar, add it to your calendar for the next two years, or just put it as a permanent event in your calendar and use that as your guide.
Occasionally you’re going to have to adjust, but you really need to have a plan to stick to. Part of that is training your audience, so to speak, to expect an email. I can’t tell you how many people say, Hey, every Friday morning, I look forward to getting the email you guys send out. They may not read it, they may just scan it. They may just open it, scan it.
They may not click on it. They actually look forward to it. So in some respects, we’ve sort of trained the audience and that’s by being steady and frequent. And in my last podcast, I talked about random acts of marketing, which is a term that I first heard with Alan Dib of one Page Marketing Plan. And I thought that was really funny.
If you’re just sending out your email sporadically, you end up It’s kind of like random acts of marketing. So again, not going to be very successful and your audience is not going to take you seriously.
Emily: Exactly. And yeah, I think in last week’s podcast, you also mentioned having someone in your organization who can like really be on it and making sure this is getting done because the leader of the organization is not always going to be the one getting this done. They really shouldn’t be. So you need to really assign someone to be taking care of this.
Peter: Exactly. In our case, that’s you. So Yep. Number two is subject line, talking about how important the subject line is on your emails and how that can impact your open rates. Got some notes here about what makes a good subject line.
So what what what are you thinking here?
Emily: Yeah. So according to Mailchimp, it should really be no more than nine words or 60 characters. So this is a great way to kinda keep track of what your subject line looks like. Mailchimp actually has a little section in it that’ll tell you, like, this is a great subject line or it’s not, and you should adjust. So I don’t know if every email system does this, but it’s a great way to at least get in the habit
Peter: of figuring
Emily: it out. And then I think once you kind of start writing subject lines and stuff like that, you’ll get used to it and figure it out. But keep it short, but descriptive to help your campaign perform better. So for example, you don’t want to just to be like, it’s Friday.
Peter: One of the ones that seems to be very have a huge open rate is you’re invited. Dot dot dot. Oh, yeah. That’s like the you can’t overuse that. I mean, you have to be careful not to overuse that, but you were invited.
It seems to be a good one. Moving along, you talk about design matters and the fact that the email needs be pleasing. Now I’ve heard two camps on this one. So I’ve heard some folks that are really sold on no images, just plain text emails now. So what’s your take on this?
Emily: Yeah, so I think the plain text email camp is like, oh, it’s more personal. It feels like it’s coming from someone that you maybe know type of thing. But I also think there’s a spot for what we do where we include a graphic in the beginning. It’s a clear like, we’re sending you content, we’re sending you information, we’re not selling you a sales pitch. So I think you kind of have to pick and choose which way you’re going.
I think when you’re sending out content, like we are, I think you do need to keep design in mind and not just have it be a plain text email.
Peter: But
Emily: yeah, if you’re more trying to create a open conversation, or again, do a sales pitch, then I think
Peter: that’s Then that’s the that’s the place for a plane. Yeah. That’s right. That that’s more of where a you’re using maybe a drip campaign or some sort of sequence of emails you’re sending to a potential customer. Whereas one of the things that I like about the graphics that our designer Marcel puts in our emails is that they’re always on brand, so they always match the branding that we are trying to portray with our business.
Emily: Exactly. Yeah, so very important to keep your branding. But I also don’t want you to overstress about the perfect graphic, more the overall design of your email. So a couple of things I have to consider is, is the text of the email readable on desktop and mobile? Because some email systems will not automatically change the text for dot desktop Yeah.
And
Peter: a portrait or a square type event. And then when you’re on a desktop, it’s always landscape view aspect ratio. It looks complete.
Emily: So you really need to, when you send a test of your email, you need to check it on your phone and your desktop. Just make sure the overall design is pleasing, easy to read. And then the last one is just if the call to action button stand out, and we’ll talk about call to action next, but just making sure that those are something that’s easy for someone to see where they should click in your one
Peter: other thing I was gonna, that we should bring up is the graphic work. I know you have used Canva in the past to do your graphic work, maybe not as much now with Marcel on board, but that seems to be a pretty powerful tool for developing graphics pretty easily.
Emily: Yeah. Yeah. I really don’t think you need to have a professional designer on your team if you are not a marketing company or something like that. Like a roofing company, you do not need your own designer. You can
Peter: either
Emily: have us do it or if you’re doing a quick thing, it’s super easy. It’s super simple to teach someone.
Peter: Exactly, hire a marketing company to do it for you or use some simple tools. So item number four on the list of 10 ways to boost your email campaigns is call to action.
Emily: Every email should have at least one call to action. If you are not putting some kind of button in your email that directs people to your website, then you are missing out. There’s just a huge, huge opportunity there to have people to drive traffic to your website.
Peter: So what is a call to action?
Emily: So a call to action is like a button at the end of your text or somewhere in your email that’s like read more on this blog post. Or for example, on our podcast, we say listen now. So that’s two ones that drive drive the traffic. But then also a call to action could be at the end of your email, having some kind of contact for your company. So we have like a hyperlink to our business phone number at the bottom.
Quick, easy. Someone can click it and it’ll immediately start calling us. Or a call to action is a good way to send people to your contact form on your website. Just some way that people can go to your website and read more about what your content is, but also so that they can contact you.
Peter: Right. One other thing that I heard from Alan Dib with the one page marketing plan, and you’re going to hear more and more about this as we go forward, dear listeners, is making sure that the email address that your email comes from is actually an email address that is monitored. Don’t send it from no reply at blah, blah, blah, folks would like to reply and actually encourage people to just hit reply if there’s something that you want to get some feedback on. And we’ve always done that. My email address is the one that we currently send from.
Number five is social.
Emily: Yeah, so this is another easy, easy way to just drive some customers to your social media platforms with the caveat of if you don’t ever get on the social media platforms and post current things, then maybe you don’t want to include it. But maybe it’s a good way to encourage you to go use these platforms. Really examine which profiles your business is using. So we use a lot of LinkedIn at biz marketing. We use Instagram.
We use some Facebook. So those are the ones that we include in our email, but utilize which ones that you’re going to actually use and send people to.
Peter: Yeah, like if you’re Twitter, God forbid. Put the Twitter link in your email. We kind of touched on this already, but let’s just recap here, mobile first.
Emily: Yeah. So mobile first, most people are going to read your email on their phone. That’s just a reality.
Peter: And they may open your email on multiple devices as well.
Emily: Yes. Yeah. Mean, someone could open it on their mobile and then be like, I’m gonna get back to that on my desktop later, vice versa. But regardless, your mobile needs to look the best. So really go off of the design of the email based on how your mobile, how it looks on your mobile.
So again, test your email. Don’t just put it together, send it out without testing it. Like we test every email that we send out just to make sure everything looks good.
Peter: Sometimes there’s minor tweaks. Sometimes we’ll notice a typo. Yep. Whatever. Yeah.
Test. Definitely. Test Now this is kind of an advanced tip here. Tie your email to landing pages. I would say this is not necessarily for every single email you send out, but it’s certainly relevant to folks that are really looking to get marketing benefits from and sales benefits from their emails, which is tying your email to landing pages.
Landing pages, by that you’re talking about a specific page on your website that’s not your homepage, that is dedicated to the topic that that you’re talking about. So it’s a great opportunity to use landing pages. We also use landing pages for advertising campaigns where if you have like a summer special, so that would be a great example. If you have an email going out that says summer special, you could link to that summer special and have clearly say, get the special now or something like that. And it would just go to that page.
Emily: Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. And the big thing on this landing page, part of it is that you’d need to have some way to contact you. So it’s not just going to a random page.
You got a blog post on there. You’ve got the summer special or whatever. Big part piece of it is that you need people to be able to contact you about what you’re sending them to.
Peter: Yeah, so that call to action.
Emily: Yep, the call to action is very important on these pages.
Peter: Yeah, so landing pages is a little advanced because you are going to have to create new pages on your website. That’s something your marketing company can do for you. It’s a little more difficult if you’re just going to do it on your own. If you have a marketing plan where you’ve actually planned out a month or more, we recommend six months of content and strategy, then you would have already had this in the queue. You can build these ahead of time too.
Could do your summer, fall, winter, and spring special landing pages. We’ve got a client that we do that for and we just rotate them around. It’s the same link. But it’s funny when you don’t promote the link, nobody goes to that page. Yeah, it’s a great tip there.
Make email shareable.
Emily: Yeah, so this is just really making sure that it’s easy to have someone share whatever piece of content you’re sending them in an email. So for example, Mailchimp will make like a URL of that email. So it’s really easy to send just that URL to someone, but just making sure your email is shareable at the bottom of your email, that if someone wanted to share it to their social media or send it to a friend, again, this is maybe one that you might need some help walking through, but it’s a good way to just get easy, shareable.
Peter: Yeah. And have easy ways to share the sign up with somebody. Exactly. Number 10, in many respects, probably the most important is track and analyze your results of your email campaigns.
Emily: Mhmm. Yeah. So if you follow one piece of our advice in this podcast, track your results. We are all about tracking your results, whether it’s through email or through other means of marketing. If you’re not tracking your results, you don’t know where your money is going.
You don’t know if you’re spending your time and money right. So you need to be tracking those results because otherwise you could just be sending email after email and they’re not hitting home with any of your audience. No one’s really reading them. So it’s really important to look at these numbers. Like what’s your open rate?
Are people actually opening your emails? Or are they just seeing them and deleting them? What’s your click through rate? So are people actually clicking on the links that you have set up in your email and which links are they clicking on? So this is a good way to see if someone clicking on the image that has a link on it.
Is someone clicking on my first call to action? Is someone clicking on my contact us call to action? It’s very important for you to see which ones people are actually clicking. And then are your emails converting? So this is a good way to go check Google Analytics, see if your conversion rate on your email is actually happening.
Are people filling out contact forms on your site or calling you because of the emails that they’re receiving from you?
Peter: And that’s really important in that, you got to do it more than once to really know how you’re doing. You really have to be regular and then begin you to see trends like what days of the week people open it more, what headlines are people most interested in. We’ve got links in the show notes for this article. So we’ve created a blog post that includes these 10 ways to boost your email campaigns. Then we’ve also got in there links to the other blog posts that we’ve created for email related.
So first of all, we’ve got the do email campaigns really work? Yes, they do. Three digital marketing essentials for weathering a downturn. One of the major things is email campaigns because your list is something you own. Nobody else controls it.
It is your list. It is gold. A lot of companies are sitting on gold mines of past and present customers that they could be mining for additional sales and referrals. And it’s really a basic marketing strategy that you must take advantage of. Almost any company should be taking advantage of that.
And finally, how to organically and legally grow your email list. So those are three. Emily, it has been great to chat with you today about this. And anything you wanna add in wrapping up here?
Emily: Yeah. Like you said at the beginning, if you’re not doing this regularly and frequently, you need to be. And if you need help doing it, contact us. But this needs to be happening. Emails are one of the simplest ways to get new business, get repeat clients coming back to you, and you need to really be doing it.
So.
Peter: Yeah, it’s a way to build trust. Say that before somebody does business with you, they need to know, like, and trust you and that ongoing stream of email creates trust. So that’s really important. Well, thanks again. Forward to seeing you next time.
Peter: Thanks for listening to this episode of Biz and Life Done Well with Peter Wilson. You can subscribe to us on iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and most of the other popular podcast platforms. Please tell your friends about us and leave us a review so even more people will find out about us. Thanks again. We’ll see you soon.
