33. Mesurer les perfomance à chaque étape:
5 - Evaluer
Nurture
Program One
Set –Up
Complete
Jan Feb Apr May Jun
Engagement
Score = 70
4x the # of fast
leads (<1
month)
compared to
pre-nurture
2x the # of
opportunities
With
Optimisations,
Engagement
Score = 80
May
2x the # of
MQLs
compared to
pre-nurture
Exemple:
Email marketing is a core channel for marketers
Compettive and increasingly difficult to break through the noise and connect with your customers
Marketo’s 5 must have’s for successful emailmarkeitng
According to Return Path, only 79% of commercial emails hit the primary inbox. That means 1/5 end up in junk, spam, hard bounce or go undelivered. If you are counting on all 100% of delivered emails to hit the inbox and 1 in 5 do not, that’s a BIG deal!
Also, how many times have you ever looked in your spam folder and clicked a bunch of those emails? Probably not often. When we see that something has been determined spam, we tend to keep our distance.
I’m going to break down email engagement into 5 manageable focus areas for us to work through. In regards to design, we will go through the basics of what to consider when it comes to well designed emails, then in the content section we will go through the processes of producing great content and subject lines. Third, we will go through the ABCDE’s of things to consider when building your nurture programs and then we will end with resources to help you improve your deliverability metric.
So let’s begin with design, which really come down to the following five basic things. Font, Text Size, Color, Branding and Images and when it comes to email design less is always more.
Because you have a very limited space to work with when it comes to email design it’s incredibly important to make sure your visual message, which consists of image and text, is incredibly clear and concise. To do this make sure that your H1 is bold, legible and decisive. Your H2 is where you can add in pertinent details such as date or location. Balance your text with your image in a way that makes your message pop out more than the image itself. The banner of an email is about attracting a person’s attention to have them want to read the body of the email, but at the end of the day its also about getting them to do the required action you want so including a clear CTA can help that desired behavior.
Something to take into consideration is that people consume your design on different browsers and now on different screens. Making sure that your email is responsive on a mobile phone is incredibly important in making sure your emails are well-designed. In this case you have even less space to work with so get straight to the point by keeping images to a minimum and make the CTA even more clear.
The image alt tag is also an important element of the email that you shouldn’t over look and is often forgotten – it’s a second chance to promote information in your email. As you can see, the top version was an email sent without any alt tags, and the one below it has the call to action: Download the Social Media Tactical plan, which you can update in the image description.
Image descriptions are also important when the image view is disabled or turned off. Even though the image is what you hope someone sees that’s not always necessarily the case and so make sure at least there are image descriptions for someone to read.
Lastly is HTML vs Text. People forget that not everyone consumes an HTML email and they forget to update the text version of that email which can often make it very messy and very difficult to read. People view on mobile vs computer, they view with images and with alt tags, and they also view HTML vs Text so make sure to update the text to look well formatted.
4:20 Minutes
I’m going to break down email engagement into 5 manageable focus areas for us to work through. In regards to design, we will go through the basics of what to consider when it comes to well designed emails, then in the content section we will go through the processes of producing great content and subject lines. Third, we will go through the ABCDE’s of things to consider when building your nurture programs and then we will end with resources to help you improve your deliverability metric.
So far, we’ve learned some super cool (and easy) to increase opens and clicks. This third tip though is going to do wonders for your email marketing!
Deliverability: hitting a recipient’s inbox (emails delivered/emails sent)
Hard bounce: a permanent failure to deliver an email, usually a result of the email address being non-existent, invalid or blocked.
- A hard bounce not only hurts your deliverability numbers but also hurts your reputation! The less hard bounces, the better.
Soft bounce: a temporary problem with email deliverability that can be due to an unavailable server or full inbox.
Spam trap: When a sender repeatedly hits a dead email address, it will hard bounce. When an internet service provider sees senders repeatedly hit a dead email, the ISP activates the dead email to receive email and then reports the sender as a spammer. When you hit a spam trap, it will hugely affect your reputation, your deliverability, and your inboxing.
Sender Score: Return Path’s free reputation rating for email senders. Scores range from 0-100.
Five years ago, getting your email delivered was a matter of having the right email address and that the email was not super obvious spam. By that, I mean your email didn’t say FREE in all caps 50 times.
But in today’s world, avoiding spammy words isn’t enough to hit the inbox. Big internet service providers have followed Gmail’s push towards an engagement model. What does that mean? You may have noticed that Gmail now has tabs: one for primary email, another for social, and a third for promotions. Hitting that primary inbox is increasingly difficult because now Gmail looks at several things:
Continuously opened emails
Unique clicks as well as multiple clicks
Scrolling
Frequency of engagements (does the recipient open emails and engage with them regularly)
In order to make sure you get delivered in this tougher email saturated world, what should you do?
According to Return Path, only 79% of commercial emails hit the primary inbox. That means 1/5 end up in junk, spam, hard bounce or go undelivered. If you are counting on all 100% of delivered emails to hit the inbox and 1 in 5 do not, that’s a BIG deal!
Also, how many times have you ever looked in your spam folder and clicked a bunch of those emails? Probably not often. When we see that something has been determined spam, we tend to keep our distance.
Your reputation as a sender is crucial. Email deliverability is more and more about your reputation as a sender and less about the actual content of your emails.
Be sure to follow this proactive checklist to give your emails the best chance of hitting the inbox:
1) Give your subscribers a good reason to opt in and once they have opted inset clear expectations about what’s to come. (this is how you build trust).
2) Verify all new email addresses before sending your messages, and regularly scrub your contact lists to remove inactive addresses.
3) Make sure the vendor you choose is sophisticated enough to handle bounce codes, feedback loops, and connection optimisation.
4) If your email marketing service warns you that you have complaints made against you are high, please take the warning seriously.
5) Get your email reputation score to learn what you need to change about your program in order to improve your reputation and your things like your inbox placement rates.
Your reputation as a sender is crucial. Email deliverability is more and more about your reputation as a sender and less about the actual content of your emails.
Be sure to follow this proactive checklist to give your emails the best chance of hitting the inbox:
1) Give your subscribers a good reason to opt in and once they have opted inset clear expectations about what’s to come. (this is how you build trust).
2) Verify all new email addresses before sending your messages, and regularly scrub your contact lists to remove inactive addresses.
3) Make sure the vendor you choose is sophisticated enough to handle bounce codes, feedback loops, and connection optimisation.
4) If your email marketing service warns you that you have complaints made against you are high, please take the warning seriously.
5) Get your email reputation score to learn what you need to change about your program in order to improve your reputation and your things like your inbox placement rates.
Did you know that when an email goes to the spam folder or junk folder, it still counts as delivered?
So you might have a 99% email deliverability rate, which seems awesome, but only 50% of those emails actually hit the primary inbox. And if you’re like any business that relies on email marketing to drive revenue, 49% of your emails going to spam or junk is a BIG deal! But how would you know if that’s happening?
Luckily, there are tools that measure inboxing, which is the percentage of delivered emails that actually hit the primary inbox.
Did you know that when an email goes to the spam folder or junk folder, it still counts as delivered?
So you might have a 99% email deliverability rate, which seems awesome, but only 50% of those emails actually hit the primary inbox. And if you’re like any business that relies on email marketing to drive revenue, 49% of your emails going to spam or junk is a BIG deal! But how would you know if that’s happening?
Luckily, there are tools that measure inboxing, which is the percentage of delivered emails that actually hit the primary inbox.
Saviez-vous qu’un email arrivant en spam ou en junk folder était considéré comme délivré ?
Certaines solutions permettent de le mesurer
Lower your soft bounce threshold
The less times you soft bounce, the lower the risk for a hard bounce. This keeps your sender reputation up and email lists clean. Internet service providers love seeing companies send to clean email addresses and they’ll reward you by letting more of your emails hit the primary inbox.
The two campaigns we made at Marketo were:
For any email that has soft bounced more than 10 times in the last 90 days, flag it as invalid, which removes that email from any future email campaigns. (this campaign was essentially a clean up for all of our past soft bounce history). And since a one time clean up doesn’t necessarily solve everything, we implemented the second campaign.
This one is a triggered campaign, meaning it listens for actions to happen as opposed to looking for actions that have already occurred. It listens for any email that soft bounces at least 6 times in the last 30 days, flag it as invalid. This campaign continuously scrubs our database. So the more campaigns we send, the more scrubbing that takes place.
Remove all hard bounced email addresses after one hard bounce
Remove emails that hard bounce once. Trust me, it’s not worth trying to email them again! You do not want to hit a spam trap or get blacklisted!
Scrub your lists using external data vendors!
Like I mentioned in earlier slides, using external vendors to validate your email lists really helps to keep your lists fresh! Do this bi-annually or annually to catch bad emails. A really great vendor that I’ve used in the past is FreshAddress.
Make sure that you only send to emails who are opted-in
This one might seem silly but try to only send emails to people that want to hear from you. If you send unwanted emails, more people will mark you as spam, which lowers your sender reputation and will hurt your deliverability. It’s not worth the risk.
Stop sending to old emails!
Old emails are dangerous business my friends. Someone that hasn’t engaged with your emails in the past year is not likely to engage again. In fact, it’s more likely that the person will just mark you as spam because they don’t want to hear from you any more. Even worse, the email might go bad and be converted to a spam trap!!!
If you send to your engaged audience, your email metrics will increase. You’ll see higher opens, more clicks, lower unsubscribes and less spam clicks. As a result, internet service providers will say “Hey, that sender delivers emails that recipients love! People can’t seem to get enough. Let’s make sure that more and more of their emails not only get delivered but hit the primary inbox too”.
Lastly, a really great tool for measuring and optimizing your inboxing is Return Path. You’ll be able to measure all of your email campaigns. Return Path also gives you tips for how to increase your inboxing for unique internet service providers and it’s EXTREMELY valuable. You should check them out.
Now that we’ve discussed design, let’s move on to helping you improve your content and subject lines
The first part of great content is making it personal. I always think Netflix do a really great job of this. They personalise the subject lines by using your name, but they also personalise the email by recommending shows and movies that you may be interested in. Using personalization of name or company tokens can help you increase your open rates. The power of personalisation comes from the accuracy of your data, so if you have the data make sure you are leveraging it to help capture people’s attention.
The first part of great content is making it personal. I always think Netflix do a really great job of this. They personalise the subject lines by using your name, but they also personalise the email by recommending shows and movies that you may be interested in. Using personalization of name or company tokens can help you increase your open rates. The power of personalisation comes from the accuracy of your data, so if you have the data make sure you are leveraging it to help capture people’s attention.
A great example of a company leveraging data is Fitbit. Every week I receive an email that lets me know how many steps I’ve taken and my total distance covered. They are doing a good job of storing my active data and feeding it back to me in my emails. Add in firmagraphic and demographic data to make your messages even more powerful. By segmenting effectively, you can create targeted emails that result in higher engagement. E.g. a group organized walk or fun run in Dublin.
This idea of effective segmentation as a way to improve your content is further bolstered by this graph. What you see here is that there is a direct correlation between the size of the send and engagement. The engagement score here is the combination of open rates, click through rates, and click to opens. More to the point, smaller sends are typically more engaging than large ones.
Aside from Personalisation - Behaviour is an important element to designing successful email campaigns that attract attention. Companies are getting very sophisticated in how they listen for action on a website and then follow up with a relevant email later. This study from MarketingSherpa shows that being relevant and engaging with your audience requires sophisticated targeting that combines online body language (like website traffic and browsing behaviour) with lifestyle and demographic data or (personas)
When behavioral cues are not used, email can be experienced as an interruption.
In regards to how you can apply this to your own company, when someone downloads (B2B SMB) one of your assets you can set up a trigger campaign that identifies that behavior and maybe recommends a similar piece of content they may be interested in. In this example when people visit our website we send them an email of the top 10 sights people visit to make sure they were able to find what they were looking for
Another great way to keep your content at a high standard is to implement peer reviews. At Marketo all of our work is actually reviewed by a peer before being sent to a manager for sign off. This provides a feedback mechanism to your work that can allow you to improve your content and take another reader’s perspective into the mix.
Also developing your own email marketing check list is important. In it you can include company best practices that make your emails consistent and on brand. Here are just a few examples of check list items we have at Marketo broken down by different categories.
As humans we are incredibly prone to errors and the errors we make tend to always be the same ones so in your checklist include biases you have in your writing or mistakes you’ve made in the past so that you can catch them early.
La personnalisation avant tout pour une meilleure expérience client
Utiliser la donnée client pour être pertinent
S’appuyer sur le comportement
Méthologie et processus
Now that we’ve discussed design, let’s move on to helping you improve your content and subject lines
The reason to consider nurture as a part of the way you send emails is because if we look at this compiled data of emails sent at Marketo, what we notice is that when you just send a regular email by itself, indicated by the blue line, the avg click rate and the avg click to open rates are incredibly low. The best performing emails are the ones that are in a nurture and of course the ones that are triggered by a behaviour. So what actually makes an email in nurture so much more effective than a regular batch and blast email?
The answer is the nurturing is about having a conversation with your audience, whereas batch emails are just sending emails to an audience regardless of who they are and the behaviours they exhibit
So how you do think about building your own nurture or improving what you have? Here are the 5 core elemtns to help you think through your nurturing campaigns. Everything begins with the audience you want to communicate with. Then you need to make sure you have the resources to build the nurtures that you want. Nurture is not just email, but it’s the integration of all your different channels. Once you have all these things it’s time to define what experience you want your target market to have and then evaluate what are your success criteria are.
Audience – Target market, sub segment, behaviour
Ressources – Who is accountable?
Canaux – Multi-channel experience
Parcours – Story arcs
Evaluer – Criteria for implementing nurtures
The first question you should always ask yourself is WHO you should nurture. It is important to get buy- in from stakeholders and understand where there are opportunities. Bring together your key stakeholders and define exactly who it is you should be marketing to. What data fields do you need, what minimum requirements do they need to meet in order to be a part of the target market.
An email best practice tip is to have your marketing operations team build an approved set of mutually and non mutually exclusive segmentations that are easily referenceable. This will greatly help in minimising issues you have when sending emails.
On some marketing teams, all lead nurturing is managed by one person. In other organisations, it is divided amongst several people.
The key thing to remember is lead nurturing is really a co-existence of two opposing variables: creativity and logic. It’s both an art and a science. Your nurture team needs to produce compelling content, but it also needs to perform complex marketing operations.
So consider hiring for the following 2 roles
Nurture content manager
Nurture operations manager
C is for Channels and in particular the multi-channel experience
For nurture to be effective, you have to think outside of just email. It is most effective when it is aligned to buyer behaviour and their communication preferences.
Now that you’ve got your team together, you’ve defined your target market, you’re able to properly identify and qualify them, its time to think of the story you want to tell them.
The best way to do this is to determine how many emails you want to nurture a particular audience with. Let’s go with 10. The first 2-4 emails tend to be the most important because they either capture the attention of your audience, or they are the ones that people unsubscribe from. This is where you should place your best performing emails. Once a person has unsubscribed from your emails, there goes your ability to tell someone a holistic story about your company.
At Marketo our philosophy is to always start with light and engaging content like infographics or videos, and then move on to meatier pieces of content like eBooks or definitive guides. Finally you can include some product promotions, but do them carefully, sparsely and intermittently. You don’t want people to feel sold to and unsubscribe from your content. Nurture is all about engaging with people over a long period of time. At Marketo we have a rule of thumb called the 4-11 rule. For every four entertainment pieces, we send 1 soft promotion like a research report (Gartner or Forrester report - independent) and 1 hard promotion like attend a demo or visit a pricing page (Marketo centric).
Also be conscious that even though you create a story arc of emails 1 through 10, doesn’t mean that a person will read and receive all of them. Maybe a mix of all.
It is very important before you even start on any nurturing project to make sure that the team is aligned on objectives and outcomes. Evaluate what does success actually look like.
18 Minutes
Now that we’ve discussed design, let’s move on to helping you improve your content and subject lines
This means we have a responsbilitu to use our tools and technologies to build trust with customers – AND to comply with privacy legislation to protect our companies in all relevant global markets.
This is truly a balancing act – and marketers must be knowledgeable and nimble
Here are some voluntary steps that will get you in line with upcoming privacy changes:
“Trust Me” seals. Do a quick search, and you’ll find a number of certifications, or “trust me” seals, which you can post on your website. These verify that you’re upfront about your use of visitors’ personal information. While the European Interactive Digital Advertising Alliance, a cross-industry self-regulatory initiative, has perhaps the best-known program in the EU, it remains to be seen how effective programs like this one will be in gaining consumer trust worldwide.
2. Clean up your current lists. Make sure your subscriber lists are up to date. Consider getting rid of “dead weight” — names that have been on your list for a while and never generate any engagement. Start with a clean-ish slate.
3. Stay up to date. Privacy is a topic that is in flux, so follow thought leaders to stay informed. We recommend: • Duncan Smith, a U.K.-based expert on compliance problems, data protection, and privacy audits: @Duncan_iCompli • Laura Atkins, an Email Strategy and Delivery Consultant, Word to the Wise: @wise_laura • Liz Smyth, Marketing Director, Marketo Europe: @lizsmyth
4. Raise the privacy bar in your organization. Work on the business case. Demonstrate that you can affect sales by raising trust with your target audience. Make sure you understand how privacy affects people’s behaviors in your particular business.
5. Find out how your target audience feels about privacy. Ask them directly. Get feedback on your current practices. Do some A/B testing.
6. Use personal data to deliver demonstrable benefits. Think back to the Amazon.com example. Such companies successfully gather enormous amounts of information about customers and use it to build successful relationships.
7. Conduct privacy impact assessments. Privacy by design — the ability of consumers to precisely dictate how you can track and use their data — is on its way. The sooner you start assessing your privacy practices, the better off you’ll be.