1. Email marketing secrets
that most marketers don’t
know
By Elizabeth Yin, October 30, 2014

2. Who am I?
● EIR at 500
● CEO/co-founder LaunchBit
(adtech for SaaS, Batch 2, acq
by BuySellAds ‘14)
● Xoogler product marketing
● BSEE Stanford, MBA MIT
Sloan

3. Today’s talk is on
● Overview of email marketing
● Improving your open rate
● Improving your click-through-rate

4. Email marketing means so many
different things...

5. Newsletters are a great business...

6. ...but only if you
● Can get signups specifically for your
newsletter
● Have high engagement (open rate / CTR)
● Get scale
● Have high value brand advertisers in your
industry

7. Here are the numbers:
● $20-$50CPMs for email ads
● $100-$300CPMs for dedicated emails
100k subscriber list w/ daily email (at ave
$30CPM) -> $1M revenue per year

8. But use transactional emails for marketing
● Emails should be
○ Dynamic
○ Personalized
○ Differentiated

9. What can transactional emails be used for?
● Keeping your audience engaged
● Nurturing leads via drip sequence
● Thanking your audience

10. What “numbers” should I
be aiming for?

11. Letter from a YC founder

12. A pretty good open rate is 20%

13. But open rates decline

14. You need to look at cohorts

15. What does average open rate mean?

16. A couple ways to
increase your open rate

17. A/B test subject lines ONLY if...
● You are sending the same transactional/drip
emails over and over
● AND you send 100k+ emails per month

18. Try different subject line formats

19. Send at a different time

20. A couple ways to
increase your click-through-
rate

21. We analyzed lots of emails...

22. Most people click on the first or
second link (< 5 links)

23. Put your call to action upfront

24. Breakdown of the campaigns we
analyzed

25. Doing the math...

26. People click “evenly” on 5+ link
emails

27. So, reduce your links...

28. Digest emails “teach” people to click

29. Non-black fonts have a significant
impact on click-through-rate

30. One-column newsletters have a low
impact on click-through-rate

31. Questions?
elizabeth@500startups.com