Presentation deck from Hubspot Inbound 2014 break-out session.

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4
25 Email Marketing Hacks
& Best Practices to Double
Your Response Rates
Matt Heinz
President, Heinz Marketing

2. Housekeeping
1 Copies of this deck
2 Free Extras!
– Secrets to Successful Email Marketing
– Secrets to Successful Content Marketing
– The Modern Marketer’s Field Guide
3 Email me (matt@heinzmarketing.com) or bring me a
business card with what you want

3. Email Hacks & Best Practices
1 Planning
2 Process
3 Optimization
4 Measurement
5 Integration

4. Planning:
“No, that is NOT a campaign!”
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Planning Best Practices
1 Campaigns vs programs vs “sends”
2 Know the objective (email is the drill, what is the hole??)
3 What is the customer point of view?
4 What stage of the buyer’s journey are you addressing?
5 What is the customer context (i.e. how and when will the email be received?)
6 How will email integrate with other channels or outreach efforts?
7 Is email really the best channel to drive response?
8 List management (!)

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2 Process:
“Why can’t you just send it now?”

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Process Best Practices
1 Have a documented production checklist
2 Have a documented quality assurance process
3 Use Litmus to test multiple delivery formats, clients & channels
4 Optimize for HTML, pain text and image-free viewing
5 Require at least three subject line options in your creative brief
6 Require a creative brief (!)
7 Coordination with sales efforts
8 Sales enablement packages to support follow-up

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3 Optimization:
“Counterintuitive usually wins…”

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Optimization Best Practices
1 Test days of the week
2 The “from” line – people vs. buildings vs. “do-not-reply”
3 Resend to unread prospects
4 What are you doing with transactional emails?
– Format, calls to action, etc.
5 Video embeds (one:many and one:one)
6 Mobile optimization
7 Triggered responses (based on lead scoring or predictive analytics)
8 “You” vs “I” messaging

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Subject Line Best Practices
1 Test (no subject)
2 The pros & cons of “RE:” and “FW:” subject lines
3 Tease, Personalize, Prioritize, Numbers
4 35-50 characters max to optimize for opens, 70+ characters to optimize for clicks

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Transactional Email Best Practices
1 Does marketing “own” the email?
2 What else does the recipient need to know?
3 WHEN should they get the email?
4 Transaction vs. Experience
5 Out-of-Office Emails

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Other variables to drive response
1 Intro/teaser headers
2 Clarity of call to action
3 Contact information in the salutation
4 PS content
5 PPS content

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4 Measurement:
“Did it work?”

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Measurement Best Practices
1 Which metrics really matter?
2 Leading vs lagging indicators
3 Integrated systems tracking post-click conversion
4 Long-tail tracking impact (in isolation & across campaigns)
5 Don’t take inactives too seriously

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5 Integration:
“Email does not stand alone…”

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Integration Best Practices
1 Channel coordination: Email, Web, social, offline, events, etc
2 Sales coordination: Scheduling, follow-up materials, email/phone/VM sequences
3 Post-campaign segmentation: Opens, clicks, unresponsives, etc.
4 Progressive profiling

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Other apps worth checking out…
• MailCharts – What your competitors are sending…
• TimeTrade – Let prospects schedule meetings with you immediately…
• unroll.me – Unsubscribe from all of your spam at once…
• Signals – See exactly who’s engaging with your email in real-time…

18. Reminder!
1 Copies of this deck
2 Free Extras!
– Secrets to Successful Email Marketing
– Secrets to Successful Content Marketing
– The Modern Marketer’s Field Guide
3 Email me (matt@heinzmarketing.com) or bring me a
business card with what you want

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Thank You!