Hey everybody! My apologies on a slightly delayed start to the Email World Day 2 Live Blog. Yesterday was a long day and I had a slower start than anticipated this morning. You can only work for an email marketing company and ignore your inbox for so long. However, I’m here now, I’m good to go and I’m especially looking forward to two presentations from Benchmark’s Director of Sales, Daniel Miller. There’s been a lot of great presentations, but I know he’s gonna kill it. I won’t be live blogging his portions of today. I’m going to be operating a Twitter Q&A for attendees during that time. People just can’t resist an opportunity to #AskAndy! Plus, both of Daniel’s presentations are available as webinars. You can register on our site.
- 4 seconds: how long you have to grab an email reader’s attention.
- Pay attention to the conversations your audience is already having and put your own spin on it. Google trends, Reddit, etc.
- Subject line grabber words that work: alert, breaking, bad news, affiliates, limited, new.
- Grabbers that don’t work: urgent, report, trial, free, last chance, discount.
- Write in a tone you would use having a cup of coffee.
Dustin’s presentation features video in addition to slides. So much more engaging. Not hard to see why video emails would engage more too.
The Blueprint:
- Intro
- Story
- Offer
- Body
- Close
Case studies are more effective than testimonials.
3 Step to Success:
- Design Your Marketing Funnel
- Create Your Funnel Content
- Build Out the Funnel
- It’s targeted
- It’s engaging
- It’s relevant
- It’s cost effective
- It’s quick and easy to deploy
- It drives revenue
- It’s the profitable component of everything else he does online
- It’s been around a long time and isn’t going anywhere soon
Or at least that’s the theory, he says. Have we been duped? Not if you’re doing it right.
Problems with Monthly Newsletters:
- Too much content.
- Not enough quality content
- Bad timing
5 Alternatives to the email newsletter
- A genuine, targeted offer
- A customer testimonial
- An event invitation
- A quality piece of though leadership/strategy
- A single, timely news article
Another presenter using video. It really sets the presentation above the rest.
- 72% of people say they’re never more than 5ft away from their phone.
- Keep your promises, but change up the experience.
- Be the digital water cooler.
- Your main competition: Grumpy Cat … and every other piece of viral content online.
- The name of a sender/brand is 7x more influential when an email is opened on mobile.
- Less content is more on mobile.
- The “West Coast Offense” for email: short strikes
- Mobile friendly destinations are a must.
- Revenue per email grew 8% from $0.13 in 2011 to $0.14 in Q4 2012
- 82% of people open email from “companies”
- 64% of decision makers read email via mobile
- People scan … put your best stuff early on
Jim Ducharme just came to thank me for the kind words in this Live Blog. Thank you, Jim. If I hadn’t learned from guys like you early on, there would never be an Ask Andy today.
- Takes additional time
- Pain in the neck
- …but it’s worth it
Clearly, he’s never tried Benchmark’s A/B Testing tool.
The preheater is your new friend. Figure out how it works, then optimize it.
- A continuation of the subject line
- Place it at the top of the message, hidden with CSS, if need be
- Customize text version