Hard-won advice on how to perform an email marketing audit and optimize an existing email marketing program to thrive in a post-iOS15 world.
This was first published in the No Best Practices newsletter on 5.16.21.
What follows is hard-won advice on how to audit and optimize an existing email marketing program.
I’m framing this from the perspective of a new Email Marketing Manager or Director who is about to inherit an existing program with some history. But the underlying concepts are still meaningful if you’re just getting started.
I have used these strategies as part of brand turnaround and repositioning efforts. This advice has been pressure-tested in multiple challenging environments. Let’s begin…
Email Marketing Opportunity Selection
Very few people will admit this but…as a digital marketer specializing in a single channel, many of the factors that determine your success or failure are out of your control. If you want to win, you need to play the right game.
Most of the email advice I’m going to share will be very hard to implement if these red flags emerge during the interview process:
- The brand is locked into a long term relationship with an antiquated ESP and does not have the intention or resources to change.
- There is no easy way to access subscriber data, and no connection between the ESP and web or transaction data.
- There are customer acquisition or retention issues that impact the entire business, but the business is not acknowledging them or working to fix them.
- You won’t be given technical resources in proportion to the technical complexity of the existing email marketing stack.
- A cross-functional partner has outsize control over the email production process. If the CEO reviews every email, or if emails are treated like a magazine layout in the year of our lord 2021, RUN.
- Ask explicit questions during the interview process to suss out these situations.
Email File Audit & Diagnosis
Email marketing is primarily a retention channel. This is the stream of influence in email:
Business health -> Customer file health -> Email file health -> Email campaign performance
If campaign performance is suffering, you need to determine how far upstream your problem truly lies. You can’t subject line test your way out of product-market fit issues.
To diagnose the existing email file, you need to slice and dice it into five segments:
- Buyers who opened in the last 30 days
- Prospects who opened in the last 30 days
- Buyers who last opened 31 days – 6 months ago
- Prospects who last opened 31 days – 6 months ago
- Anyone who has not opened in 6 months or more
- The list above is ordered from most to least likely to respond to ANY tactic you implement. You should start to track the size of each segment weekly and make note of which campaigns they respond to.
Email Marketing Tools Audit & Diagnosis
Next, you need to determine if you have the right tools and people for the job at hand, mise en place.
To run a modern, competitive email marketing program you’re going to need the following capabilities:
- Personalize and add content to your transactional emails
- Trigger emails based on web behavior
- Trigger emails when a user’s behavior shifts them into a predetermined segment
- Personalize marketing emails based on a subscriber’s purchase history (at a minimum)
- Execute multiple versions of an email without hand-coding and staging each version for delivery.
- Provide personalized product recommendations
- This is what it will take to escape from “batch and blast” purgatory. Word on the street (aka my professional network) is that batch and blast email has become less effective over time. So some ability to personalize is critical.
If your brand is running on Shopify and Klaviyo, all these bases are covered. If you’re running on some mishmash of “enterprise” solutions, your first job may be integrating the ESP and the website to cover these bases. That could take six months and five figures…ouch.
This is why opportunity selection is so important (see step 1)
Basic Email List Segmentation Strategy
Now that you have your basic segments, here’s what you should focus on for each group (numbered per the list diagnosis section above):
Get engaged buyers (1) to purchase more. This is the core audience for any channel-level tactics you may want to test, like subject lines, send times, or creative formats. Fair warning: this group may be very small.
Get more engaged prospects (2) to buy. One way to do this is by reexamining your welcome series (if you have one), taking this group out of the normal marketing email cadence, and rerunning them through the welcome series.
You’ll want 5-7 emails that address “why you”. This means speaking to the unique value proposition of your brand, which I’ll cover in more detail in the next newsletter. Most welcome series don’t do this–they slap down a 10% off code, showcase some popular IG posts and call it a day.
Get buyers and prospects who opened 31-180 days ago (3&4) to engage with email again. The best way to do this is to remind them you exist via channels that are harder to ignore, like paid social. Turn your new welcome series into a series of paid social ads and get this group back on site, maybe even purchasing. Email engagement should follow.
Evaluate the quality of subscribers who haven’t opened in 6+ months (5). You’ll want to run this audience on paid social for 30 days with a mix of informative content and ads that do a hard sell. Email whoever remains here at the end of 30 days and give them a last chance to explicitly opt into your list. Then drop them from daily marketing sends.
You can automate these strategies with the right tech. I.E. when a subscriber crosses the 31 day mark since their last email engagement, drop them in the paid social and/or email welcome series (if they haven’t seen it before).
Rethinking Marketing Email
A surprising number of brands still use “batch and blast” as the cornerstone of their email strategy. And I understand why…it “works” (until it doesn’t).
Batch and blast “works” because, at any given time, there is an audience within your email file who is “ready to buy”. If you email the entire file every day you’ll reach the majority of those people in the same way a broken clock is right twice a day.
But this strategy isn’t convincing anyone to do anything. To prove me wrong, stop sending email and measure how many members of your file purchase anyway…if you dare.
You can get more out of your marketing sends by grouping them into 3 strategies:
Batch & Blast. Ok, there are some messages that you should push on everyone in your file: new product launches, public sale launches, and a few critical brand-building moments.
Brand Building. This is content that builds affinity for your brand and does not hard sell. It should be interesting! Send this to less engaged subscribers, new subscribers, and prospects. If you’re running a content newsletter, allow anyone to explicitly opt in.
Category Promotion. In the fashion world these are emails with subject lines like “Dreamy Dresses” and “Florals for spring? Groundbreaking”. In an ideal world you would limit these to people who purchased the featured category, people who purchased an adjacent category*, people who engaged with those categories online, and new prospects/customers.
*Adjacent category example: people who buy shoes on their first purchase tend to buy wallets on their second purchase, so you could send a wallet email to both shoe and wallet buyers.
There are probably communications you send that don’t fall into one of these buckets. But the key question you need to ask yourself before each send: who is REALLY the relevant audience for this?
Email Marketing Automations 101
There are endless options for building out automated email flows, but I’m going to share foundational tactics that will work for almost any brand with a few tweaks.
I am assuming that you have a basic connection between the website and the ESP, but do NOT advanced behavioral or predictive modeling.
Transactional Emails. These are emails like the order and shipping confirmation, aka the only emails your customers are guaranteed to open. Think about how you can maximize this real estate to get them to opt-in or purchase again.
Abandoned Checkout. Send if they have started filling out the checkout but did not complete. Remind them to complete the order with a direct link to their semi-completed checkout. Provide minimal messaging or distraction.
Abandoned Cart. Send if they have products in their cart but did not make it to checkout. Include recommendations if possible. Include offers/promos if you’d like.
Abandoned Product View. Send if they viewed a product but did not add to cart. If you have the resources, create an email for each product (or your biggest sellers) explaining why it’s so good.
Welcome Series – Prospects. 5-7 email series explaining “why you”. This should illustrate your unique selling proposition as a brand. If you don’t know what that is, you have bigger problems than email marketing.
Welcome Series – New Customers. 3-5 email “onboarding” series. If there are tips and tricks for using your products you can include them here. Tack on a second purchase offer for customers in your top 10% of AOV after your return window has elapsed.
2nd Purchase Thank You. One simple email thanking them for purchasing again. Most of your customers will not make it from “one and done” to purchase #2, so celebrate it. Could be all text.
Lapsed Customer Winback. Email customers who have not visited your site in six months or purchased from you in one business cycle*. Provide winback offers for those in the top 25-50% of LTV. Show them what’s new, remind them why they loved you.
*A business cycle is the amount of time it takes to run through your entire launch and promotional cadence. In Fashion, it’s usually 6 months: season launch -> Friends & Family -> End of Season Sale launch -> Clearance period. Your business may be different. If you don’t think you have one, use a year.
Closing Notes
First: there are a few meaty topics I didn’t cover here, including lifecycle strategy, landing page experience and list/audience development. But I’m writing this in a Google Doc that’s already 5 pages long so…
Second: you may have noticed that I am essentially asking you to send a lot less email. If you follow my plan, you will quickly discover that a large proportion of your subscribers don’t even open your emails.
Maintaining a big but disengaged list is a distraction. It obscures your understanding of the real value your list is driving. And it results in higher costs and more technical complexity for relatively little payoff.
If these strategies make you nervous, you can continue to batch and blast while measuring performance across the five segments I outlined at the top of the newsletter. You’ll quickly discover that there is almost nothing you can do to re-engage someone that hasn’t opened in 6 months.
The strategies outlined here will help point your focus in the right direction: growing your new, engaged subscriber pool and optimizing your core, engaged subscribership.