Click to go to the piece that sounds interesting:
Ann Handley, digital marketing pioneer, writer and speaker, shared her thoughts on how to make a great story that sells.
Everybody likes good stories. What differs a story that sells from any other story is the perspective: customers need to see themselves in the content that we’re producing.
The story should be about your customer, not your product.
“We have pizza” by Pizza Hut is an example of company-centric storytelling. But even if you love your product and see how much value it can bring, customers need more than that. They need to see themselves in these stories.
For example, if you sell liquid detergent, your story should not be about how great it is at cleaning, but about how happy your customer is, now that the clothes are clean and fresh and they have more time for a glass of wine with friends instead of doing laundry.
This is what you can do to make your customers connect emotionally to your product:
Lauren Gannon, SVP at Professional Services Epsilon PeopleCloud Messaging, told a story about how personalization has evolved during the existence of email and talked about top trends to use in 2022.
Personalization has changed a lot in the last 15 years. Fun fact: the famous movie “You’ve Got Mail” with Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks gave it a big push. After this movie went on screens, email started to be regarded as something more creative and personal than before.
In 1999 desktop gave way to mobile devices and it changed the way how emails were consumed: they became a more personal experience.
This year, with the iOS update, customers got more control of what they will receive. So personalization is now more complicated for marketers than it has ever been. Here are the personalization trends that will rock your email campaigns in 2022 even with the privacy changes the iOS update has brought.
Frank Hoffmeier, senior manager of client solutions at Moz Group, gave precious insights on how the so-called “emotional-logical sandwich” approach can transform your email marketing performance.
When people make decisions about a purchase, do they use logic or emotion? Or both? And if both, what’s the smart way to combine it? Frank Hoffmeier shared a 4-steps formula that explained what approach you should use at every stage of a purchase.
Kristin Bond, a co-founder and board member of Women of Email, talked about how email marketers actually became email marketers and gave advice on how to thrive in this career.
In August 2021, Kristin surveyed 252 email marketers about their careers. This survey cannot be really called statistically significant for the whole email community, but it shows some quite interesting facts about what brought people to email marketing.
Here are fun (and insightful) facts about careers in email:
People didn’t really choose email, life kind of threw them into it. Here are a couple of examples of how that happened:
“Someone asked me to come run email, and I thought “How hard could it be?”
“Needed someone to code an email. I raised my hand…”
“Applied for a customer care job at a startup, and the owner said: “Hey, you’re a writer, can you learn email?”
What to do if you feel like you’ve hit the ceiling:
Tip: Don’t focus too much on job titles. They aren’t even the same across companies.
How to prepare for a career change:
Oracle’s Chad S. White shared his thoughts on Apple’s new privacy features and how marketers can adapt to them.
Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) is a new feature introduced with iOS 15. It hides some of the Apple Mail users’ information like open behavior, IP address, location, and device information. Apple will pre-fetch every email’s content which means that in addition to the “real opens”, there will be so-called “Auto Opens” which are fake.
Specialists expect 95% of Mail app users to do it eventually. We’ll feel the real impact in early 2022.
Yet, your strategies need to remain the same, only tactics will have to change:
Today, opens are central. Prepare to rely on other metrics:
Restructure email journeys. Since you won’t be able to heavily base them on opens, consider:
And finally, ask yourself:
How much of your audience is affected by the MPP? Do you have much to worry about? How long are your email journeys and how much do they rely on clicks and opens? Change your tactics for the better.
Anne K. Tomlin (Founder, Emails Y’all) and Shani Nestingen (Lead Product Designer, Target) gave their tips on how to create emails that reflect your audience. All of it.
It’s more vital than ever to create messages that speak to every one of your subscribers. Adopting an inclusive outlook not only fosters a culture of respect and belonging, but it’s also good for business. It shows your customers that you care and you can be trusted.
Here’s what you need to do to incorporate Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion (DEI) in your emails in a natural way:
Look at your customer and subscriber data to improve personalization:
Enhance accessibility to make your emails usable and readable to all people:
Represent all voices through copy and imagery:
Audit your content with your team’s help.
Meagan McGinnes (Senior Editor, Newsletters at WBUR) and Dan Oshinsky (Founder, Inbox Collective) talked about WBUR’s email strategy.
WBUR is a public radio station located in Boston. Here are their 5 newsletter strategy lessons that any business can learn from:
If you’re just getting started with data, start small:
After learning that their listeners might be interested in the political coverage, they launched Mass Election Prep resulting in 80% of its subscribers opting into the regular newsletter.
Content is still king:
When they started, WBUR’s newsletter had no strategy for growth and no conversation with readers. They launched 7 new newsletters with a personal approach. As a result, they experienced 83% list growth from January 2020 to January 2021.
If you’re asking the audience to listen, you need to do the same:
By making their newsletter a less formal product and by asking questions and encouraging replies, WBUR got the list with 50% of contacts having the 5-star rating in MailChimp (highly engaged).
Don’t put yourself on an island:
WBUR has cross-functional meetings on any product, including newsletters which helps them create messages that resonate with their audience.
You never have all the answers. So keep asking questions:
Don’t ever stop, continue to be curious and wonder how to do better and improve.
Jon May (Email Marketing Manager, RAC) loves A/B testing, has a lot of experience there, so he decided to share his thoughts on the best practices for running A/B tests.
Find A/B testing too complex? Here’s a nice outline of what it is and why you need it (or not!) and what to look out for.
Why do A/B testing? (and when not to)
A/B testing:
When not to A/B test:
How to build a test theory
A template test theory:
I think that [item to test] will [increase/decrease] the [metric] by [a little 0-5% / a bit 5-20% / a lot 20%+] because [reasoning].
How to analyze results
Email creative metrics:
Email program metrics:
Financial metrics:
Business/product metrics:
