Email marketing is harder than ever, with increased inbox competition and less visibility into open rates. Here are five steps that will enable you to thrive in this environment.
This content was first published in the No Best Practices newsletter on 8.15.2021.
A few troubling trends have been swirling around in email marketing land.
First we had the “email renaissance”, as rising paid social acquisition costs drove marketers to diversify their channel mix. The result? A lot more brands sending a lot more email. So much email that The Atlantic recently paid a journalist to investigate.
Because of this dulge, consumers may be tuning out this channel just when we need it the most. “Cookiepocolypse” has come for Facebook, but in a few short months it will be coming for email too.
This puts marketers and brand owners in a really tough spot: the channels we depend on are more competitive and noisy than ever, and we will soon have less data to inform our decision making.
For email specifically, emails opened on the native iPhone email app will no longer provide open rate data. Most of the guides to navigating this change talk about hacks for recovering that data. But that’s just putting a bandaid on what is shaping up to be a long-term trend.
This is a guide for future-proofing your email strategy in a world where data of all types will become increasingly harder to come by.
Some of my recommendations might be out of your wheelhouse, or require resources you don’t currently have. And you may already be doing some of what I recommend. I’m going to list them in ascending level of effort (easiest to hardest).
1: Audit Your Email Marketing Tech Stack
The average person’s inbox is full of noise. To cut through, you need both strong creative and personalization. And to achieve both simultaneously, you need the right tech.
Ask yourself these questions about your current ESP and CRM solutions:
- Am I able to pull in products directly from my web catalog without coding them individually?
- Am I able to build triggers based on users’ site behavior (ex. Abandoned carts)?
- Am I able to build segments within my email list based on a user’s purchase history or past interaction with email?
- How easy is it to launch a single email with multiple creative versions, based on a subscriber’s email segment?
- If your email marketing stack consists of Shopify and Klaviyo, you’re probably wondering why I’m even bothering to ask these questions. But believe it or not, there are some outdated “enterprise” ESPs that will charge you $25-50k to implement a single feature from the list above.
If you currently use one of those ESPs, get a cost and timeline for implementing this list of features now. If the costs are too high, or the timeline spans past the end of the calendar year, make a plan to replatform…ideally before holiday.
Walking into holiday 2021 with a batch and blast email strategy is like bringing a knife to a nuclear standoff. You’re likely to be obliterated.
I almost never use this platform to tell you that you MUST do anything. But if you thought your Facebook Ads performance was shaken up by Apple…what’s about to happen with email will be even more disruptive and potentially destabilizing.
By the way…if you use any vendors with “open time technology” (cough…Movable Ink)…that’s going to get messed up by iOS 15 too. So make a plan to replace your most critical capabilities with first party data solutions.
2: Study Engagement Patterns While You Still Can
Open rate data hasn’t been taken from us yet, so this is your last chance to analyze how new subscribers interact with your email program. You want to dig into the following questions:
- On average, how long does it take a new subscriber to purchase after signing up?
- What is the distribution of purchase duration? For example: 50% of new subscribers buy in 30 days, 80% buy in 90 days, etc.
- On average, how many emails does a subscriber open before they purchase?
- What are the average open and clickthrough rates for buyers and non-buyers after 30 days, 60 days, etc?
- Why is this important? You can use this data to keep your list clean after we lose open rate data. One common segmentation strategy is removing subscribers if they haven’t opened within six or 12 months. When iOS 15 rolls out in full, you’ll no longer have the data to do that effectively.
But if you know that 80% of new subscribers purchase within six months of signing up, you can reduce email frequency after that cutoff if the subscriber hasn’t purchased yet.
You can also use your analysis to start thinking of email signup as an onboarding process instead of dumping new subscribers immediately into your regular marketing sends.
If you know you have 30 days to convert a prospect, you probably want to focus the majority of that time on content that would be most relevant to a newbie. The “Florals for Spring” email going out to the rest of your list probably ain’t it.
3: Move Away From Batch & Blast For Good
Batch and blast is the reason that email marketers avoid signing up for emails in their personal lives. My life is hectic and so is my inbox. I don’t need five emails per week that feel like they were written for someone else.
Brands default to batch and blast for two reasons: it’s easy and it works. Except both of those statements are false.
Developing five to seven emails per week (or more!) is not easy. Marketers often find themselves reaching to develop content to fill those slots, and that is reflected in the quality of the email itself.
And batch and blast only appears to “work” because we rarely dig into which segments in the file are driving our sales. We think of the email file as a money tree that we can shake indefinitely, when in reality it’s a well that will run dry if not given the chance to replenish.
I’m not going to give you a full email segmentation strategy here, but these are some thought starters:
- What segment of my file REALLY LOVES EMAIL, and will open and click most of what I send them?
- How should I treat recent buyers and recent site visitors differently from the rest of the file?
- How can I convert new subscribers ASAP, before they get bored (see rec #2)?
- What can I do to re-engage subscribers who appear to be getting tired of me, and when should I throw in the towel?
4: Tell New Subscribers Exactly What They’re Getting & Offer A 30 Day Out
You may have noticed that fewer customers are opting in to email, and the ones who do opt in are less likely to stay subscribed or engaged. The growth of eCommerce over the past 18 months led to email overload, but few brands have made moves to differentiate their email offering or outline a real value proposition for signing up.
Why would I sign up for a brand’s emails, especially because I know from past experience that they’re likely to bombard my inbox? For the most part, brands give the following sales pitch: “be the first to know about new product launches and sales”.
Okay…I just purchased from you, and I barely know you. Why is that relevant, unless I’m seeking out a deal? What if you turned things on their head and crafted a pitch specifically for new customers? (Hint: if your business is growing, most of your customers will be new.)
Here is the pitch: we’ll only email you for 30 days. We’ll send a maximum of 3-4 emails per week. All the content will be related to what you just purchased OR it will be entertaining. At the end of the 30 days we’ll give you the option to opt-in to STAY subscribed, otherwise we’ll remove you from all further mailings.
Why is this pitch superior to the status quo? It puts the customer back in control. Email marketing shouldn’t be something you inflict on your subscribers. It should add value to their lives. And if you don’t manage to add value in the first 30 days, your subscribers have an easy out.
5: Develop Or Acquire A GOOD Content Newsletter
It’s pretty ironic that creator-driven newsletter platforms like Substack and Patreon are thriving while marketing email is becoming less and less effective over time.
But you have to admit there is a meaningful difference between content written about a subject you care deeply about by a writer you greatly admire and “Out Of Office: 40% Off Summer Shorts!”. Your own email subscription and consumption habits may even reflect this difference.
So, what if you were to take some of your considerable resources and partner up with a writer who is already covering a topic relevant to your brand?
What if a furniture brand partnered with an interior designer to share one weekly tip for livening up the home? What if a golf apparel brand partnered with a sports writer to cover one iconic hole at one iconic golf course per week?
There’s a reason this piece of advice is #5 on the list aka the hardest to implement. In my experience, consumer brands typically don’t have the in-house skill set to get the most out of content.
The first mistake is offloading the responsibility of content creation to an intern or junior team member moonlighting as a fashion blogger. So the topics are not relevant or interesting, and the quality of the writing itself is not that good.
That’s why I suggest partnering with an experienced writer with an editorial background, or one who has already developed a sizable following. Canadian fashion retailer SSENSE does a really good job with this (just check out their homepage).
Once you have content people actually want to read, you can use it as a hook to encourage more people to subscribe. The trick is–to keep them subscribed, you’ll have to keep your commercial messaging very sparse and strategic. But once a prospect has purchased, you can increase the frequency (within reason).
That’s It
Hopefully these five suggestions have given you a solid framework for future-proofing your email strategy. Repeat after me: I will not batch and blast.