The hidden opportunities in email marketing
Season 10, Issue 4: An interview with Andrew Beeston
đŹIn this issue:
An interview with email extraordinaire, Andrew Beeston
Ohayo, Mehketeers,
This issue is coming to you from Japan, hence todayâs greeting. Iâm posting the interesting marketing things I find on my travels on the Mehdeeka chat, so make sure you join me!
Did you know the 5th most popular Mehdeeka issue of all time is about company newsletters? Itâs this one:
If you havenât read it, itâs actually mostly about how to promote that you have a company newsletter to get more email captures. This is a topic Iâm oddly passionate about (although that could be said for every topic in Mehdeeka) as usually email captures are poorly thought out and donât lead to many conversions.
Itâs also a topic that I was talking to Andrew about around the time of the issue, and honestly thereâs so much to say it was hard to narrow the scope of the questions. Mehdeeka interviews are usually a tight five questions, but I had to sneak a sixth in for this one!
This email is about emails
Kayla: Obviously the two of us are both big fans of emails, for someone who isnât as obsessed, what do you think is the biggest missed opportunity with them? Whatâs a quick win people are missing out on by not taking a look at their email program?
Andrew: Oh gosh yeah, huge fans of email â and not in like some sort of sarcastic way. Itâs one of those channels where you can experiment with new ideas, get direct results, and not be at the whim of algorithms (well, less than social anyway), and really move the dial on all sorts of top line numbers in your business.
Thereâs a few things that I think Aussie businesses arenât really great at â from lifecycle programs to modular templating their programs for scale.
However, when it comes to ease of execution one of the biggest things businesses are sleeping on is experimentation. Itâs actually not that difficult and really doesnât matter what platform youâre on, so can apply to any business now.
The skill in doing it is being controlled and not just sending out tests without taking a systematic approach to it. Hereâs a simple 3 step process that can form a framework for a system:
Take an email youâre doing now on a regular basis, and build out an idea of what you might like to change to get better results (clicks, sales, replies, more leads). Write down what you think is going to happen.
Take a small group, of people, test your new idea on them at the same time as sending the original version.
Review results, if positive to your hypothesis increase the percentage of people you send to next time.
Repeat this over and over again, taking any lessons into account and roll changes into your normal workflow. This will become a fabulous pipeline of changes that help you constantly iterate, and improve.
The side benefit is any request that comes in from the rest of the company (like hey CEO just wants to do something because of a great idea over the weekend) can be controlled well and become a part of a healthy regime of change.
K: Email crosses such a huge range of marketing specialties, from customer marketing to nurturing through the funnel to pre/post-events, gated content, the list really goes on. How can all of these streams of emails best be juggled so none of them become forgotten, out of date, or worst of all, be sent to the wrong person at the wrong time?
A: Letâs say youâre in a medium sized company of a few hundred people. Email/sms/push/calls and all sorts of content can be going out from all parts of the business, and sometimes across different platforms. In reality some programs will be forgotten as people leave, business focuses change, and platforms get switched.
One of the most effective ways of being aware of whatâs going out is to do the following:
Measure constantly. On a regular basis, be reporting upward the results of programs of work. This covers off two things, making sure youâre aware of whatâs happening across the multitude of comms going out, and also just being accountable for them.
Iterate on the work consistently. Experimentation also helps you keep track of whatâs in the most valuable channel you have. By doing experimentation, youâll naturally be keeping an eye on everything going out.
Document. Itâs easy to ignore, but documenting in either a platform that tracks your emails (p.s. Iâm building one of these), or your companyâs knowledge base - will help be describe whatâs going out.
On the other hand, ensure that your segmentation is clear, and includes rules to exclude people from certain areas. Thereâs no space for it here, but make sure your data flows and segments are described well.
K: Weâve spoken before about how email marketing has a whole ecosystem around it that needs to be optimised, from the design and placement of email captures on a website to the actual content in the emails. Whatâs one area you personally find yourself spending a lot of time thinking about?
A: Honestly, the email execution team in a lot of businesses are often the tail of the dog, just being wagged about without control over other elements of the business that input into their work.
Data is one of those elements of marketing that we all know is important but often is hard to manage. So I spend a lot of time thinking about how better access to data, reporting on that data, and cleaner data impact the whole email function. This means working with other business functions, and having a seat at the table of decision making before it becomes a problem for the marketing team to be able to do their jobs properly.
In smaller companies it may not be too much of an issue, but where there are longer development cycles, more complex and legacy data systems, or just plain old matrixed organisations that are hard effort - this is one critical piece of the email world.
K: Whatâs your take on email frequency? Whatâs too much, and whatâs too little?
A: Relevancy determines frequency. The more relevant your emails are, the more you can send. The more you know your audience, and the more segmented your message, the more you can send.
Adam Ferrier in his book Stop Listening to the Customer talks about customers buying at two points, triggers (high intent caused by something in their world) and reconsiderations (second purchases soon after initial purchases). I think the closer you are to these, the more email you can send.
There are a few other things that help ameliorate sending âtoo manyâ.
Using intelligent sending to assess the interest of a subscriber and automatically removing them if theyâre showing email fatigue.
Tying in non-email data like web visits, offline contact, sales team interactions etc to assess digital body language, and relevance of content.
Actually there are so many more nuances to talk to frequency. I could talk forever on this.
K: What experiments are you currently running? Email changes so regularly, whatâs an experiment youâll just always have running?
A: I ran personalisation experiments where we pitted human curation of email against AI/machine learning personalisation. This was a part of a bigger project that saw us increase revenue from email by around 200% Year on Year.
We were sending across a few million emails, to check if either machines could personalise or humans could personalise better.
Turns out for that experiment â it was a combination of human curation AND personalisation that won.
Which of course meant we just needed to work on our AI personalisation algorithm â which in the end got far better results.
Iâm always running experiments on new ideas too.
One of my favourites was automated subject line testing that was forever on. We categorised 16 different subject lines, ran them across a few million emails each, and found principles which drove opens a lot more. Once we did this, we rolled these into the next set of experiments.
K: Whatâs the minimum list size youâd aim for before running experiments?
A: I wouldnât be doing heaps of experimentation under 1,000 - and would want at least 2,000 to start doing bigger tests. Reason being, you want some level of statistical significance to be present, and smaller lists will be easily skewed by different results.
K: Where do you go for inspo and best practice? Are there any particular resources you check, or do you just subscribe to a million different company emails?
A: Okay, so I collect emails from businesses (Iâm building something to help with this!), and I run my own experiments on my own lists to help me come up with ideas that people arenât always doing.
Other than the always great Really Good Emails, there are a few people within Australia that I have conversations with that drive innovation. Itâs more a personal network I guess.
Twitter used to be good for this, but everyone nice left.
Thereâs also Email Geeks - a Slack channel thatâs global, and has a really great dynamic group of people who help each other.
One thing though I caveat about looking at other peopleâs work, is that honestly - you never know what the results are. Itâs all like window shopping without trying anything on.
So no matter how good emails look, they may not suit the business needs, or outcomes.
Thatâs why I always like to just try things myself :)
Other links: Email Marketing Rules and the Litmus blog
This Mehdeeka, brought to you by the Mehdeeka Pricing Masterclass
Am I sponsoring myself? I guess so. Come to my pricing masterclass in Melbourne on November 26! Itâs all about positioning your price so prospects say âthatâs a great dealâ rather than ghosting you at the last second. Using pricing principles, influences, value propositions, testimonials, and a bunch more things you can use to bolster your positioning, youâll also walk away at the end of the day with a practical implementation of what you learned in the form of a pricing page.
âA workshop with Kayla was an invaluable investment for our team to better understand all lenses of pricing and provide clarity on what to focus on. Kayla is incredibly talented, professional and great to work with.â - Alex, CEO of Mojo Crowe
Suitable for anyone in your biz working on pricing, whether thatâs you, your founder, GTM team, or product team!
All the details here:
âIâd recommend this pricing masterclass to anyone who has reviewed their pricing and never quite understood why it hasnât landed with a customer, itâs the mix of the theory and the revision of that theory but then also the practical application in a calm, friendly settingâ - Jack Chivers, product lead
Ok, cya for now!
Kayla
Itâs cliche to say this, but opposite to social media, email marketing is a channel where you own your audience data. If usage of your major social channel drops, your email list will be there for you. So, on top of all the other benefits, there is the control factor.