Top Quotes: “Email Marketing Rules” — Chad White (Part 2)

Triggers

Common triggers and the resulting automated messages include:

Action-Triggered Emails

• Registering on a site > Reg confirmation email
• Signing up to receive email, joined loyalty program > Subscription confirmation request email & welcome email
• Making a purchase > Order confirmation email, activation or installation instructions email, product care instructions email, upsell and cross-sell emails, short-supply, re-order, and replenishment emails, product review request email, service satisfaction survey email, purchase reward email, purchase reward expiration warning email, & other post-purchase emails
• Order fulfilled, shipped, delivered, etc. (related to delivery status of order) > purchase ready for in-store pickup email, shipping confirmation, delivery confirmation
• Approaching or exceeding threshold > Unlocking next level of loyalty program email, goal met or achievement unlocked email, almost out of stored value, credits, minutes, bandwidth, etc. or balance is zero email
• Abandoning an item in a cart > Cart abandonment email
• Abandoning a checkout process > Checkout abandonment email
• Browsing product page without buying > Browse abandonment email, price change notification email, back-in-stock notification email (if it was out-of-stock when browsed)
• Downloading report, etc. > Delivery of downloadable or thank you email
• Creating a gift or wedding registry > Registry welcome email
• Registering for an event > Reg confirmation email
• Making/cancelling an appointment > Appt/cancellation confirmation email
• Crossing a geofence or approaching beacon > Welcome to venue, conference, store, etc.
• Signing a petition, taking a survey, etc. > Thank you email, donation request email
• Entering a contest or sweeps > Entry confirmation email

Inaction-Triggered Emails

• Not having made a purchase in a while > winback email
• Not having engaged with promotional emails in a while > Reengagement or reactivation email, re-permission email
• Not having engaged with website or app or logged into web service in a while > Site, app, or service reengagement email

Date-Triggered Emails

• Providing birth date of subscriber, spouse, children, pets, etc. or date of wedding anniversary > Bday email, anniversary eail, email reminder about or discount for unpurchased items on wedding registry after wedding date
• Making a purchase > purchase anniversary email, term of service or license expiring email
• Date of event or appointment > Appointment confirmation request email, appt reminder email, appt missed notification and reschedule appt request email, event or session feedback request email, other post-event or appointment messaging
• An item is back in stock and purchaser requested to be notified > back-in-stock notification email
• Signing up to receive email, join loyalty program > Signup or membership anniversary email”

“When using behavior triggers, be careful not to cannibalize natural behaviors. Subscriber behavior is wonderful for powering targeted messages, but be mindful of not interrupting natural browsing, shopping, and purchase behaviors. For instance, abandoning carts is a natural part of the shopping process for many consumers. Not every abandoner needs a cart abandonment email.

• Look at your organic return to purchase time, which is when the majority of customers return to their cart and check out on their own, and then set your cart abandonment email to launch shortly after that point. This way, you avoid sending emails to people who would have likely taken action without your email.
• Also, consider setting a minimum shopping cart value to avoid triggering an email when there’s very little revenue at stake. In that same vein, if a lot of revenue is at stake, consider sending more than 1 email.
• Similarly, trigger your winback emails to send just after your average purchase latency, which is your customers’ natural time between purchases.”

“Be careful not to come across like Big Brother when using behavior triggers and personalization. Some customers are turned off by the idea that brands track their email and online activities. Be sensitive to these feelings by:

• Determining the optimal time to send each triggered email, recognizing that might not be immediately in some cases
• Crafting messaging that sometimes doesn’t make it clear their action triggered the email

For instance, browse abandonment emails for high-consideration products could probably go out the next day. And that email could contain a buying guide or other helpful content without saying outright, We noticed you looking at. Although most people would connect the dots, make it seem plausible that the right content arriving at the right time is just a happy coincidence. Of course, order confirmation emails should be sent immediately and have very direct messaging.”

“Creepy data is data the customer doesn’t know you have or you’re not supposed to have.”

“Avoid offering special incentives in messages triggered by a non-purchase. Subscribers catch on very quickly. If you reward bad behavior, you’ll only train recipients to behave badly.

• For instance, if you send an incentive when a shopper leaves an item in their shopping cart, they will abandon their carts every time and wait for the email incentive to arrive before purchasing. You’ll have given margin away needlessly.
• It’s now common for many customers to place items in their cart for consideration later — like a wish list. Rather than offering an incentive, just email a reminder of the item(s) in their cart.
• You can add urgency to these messages by mentioning sellout risks or highlighting the impending end of an existing sale. Depending on the product, you can also highlight reviews, educational material about the product category, or other informational content that might help the subscriber decide whether to purchase the product. These tactics are often enough to spur many subscribers to complete their purchase.
• A subscriber abandoning the checkout process mid-way through is certainly much more unusual behavior. It’s also more directly addressable with an email that clarifies shipping, financing, and other available options. However, incentives in checkout abandonment emails encourage the same negative behavior as they do in cart abandonment emails.
• It’s best to save your triggered email incentives for when you really want to drive action, such as when you want a new subscriber to make their first purchase or win back a subscriber who hasn’t made a purchase in a long time.”

“Maintain a minimum return on touch. Most marketers would never dream of sending an email that asked subscribers to spend a dollar or less. They instinctively know that wouldn’t generate a sufficient return — neither for the effort to create the email nor for the time asked of the subscriber to read and consider the email. Yet, if we don’t set the proper parameters, our marketing automation will happily send emails on our behalf with an insufficiently low return on touch.

• For instance, if a subscriber abandons a cart with a few dollars’ worth of merch in it, will an abandonment email be triggered? Will a series of abandonment emails be triggered? If a subscriber buys a similarly low-value item, will a product review request email be triggered?
• For both individual triggered emails (and especially series), ask yourself if the resulting email touch is worthwhile in relation to the potential for email fatigue, unsubs, and spam complaints.”

“Place a cap on triggered email volume and establish a messaging hierarchy. Triggered messages are one of the best ways to deliver more email to your most engaged subscribers. However, even the timeliest and most relevant emails can become excessive if too many messages arrive too often.

To keep this from happening, consider setting up the following controls:

• Set conditions. Sometimes a simple behavior trigger is too blunt and it needs an additional level of detail. For example, if a customer browsed a product page for only a few seconds and then abandoned the page, they may not be a great candidate to get a browse abandonment email. In contrast, a person whose time on the page was over a minute will have demonstrated much more intent and be a much better candidate to receive that email.
• Similarly, make your triggered emails responsive to the circumstances of individual subscribers. For example, if a subscriber signed up for your emails via your FB page, then don’t send the email in your welcome series about your FB presence.
• Set a cap. Place a cap on how many triggered emails a subscriber can receive over the course of a day or week, and limit how frequently a subscriber can receive the same triggered email. For instance, if a subscriber browsed one product category and then another an hour later, you probably shouldn’t send them a browse abandonment email for each product category. You should pick one.
• Establish a hierarchy. In addition to caps, establish a message hierarchy to give priority to the most effective triggered emails. For instance, if a subscriber left an item in their cart after browsing several items, you’d probably want to send a cart abandonment email instead of a browse abandonment email. Similarly, you might want to delay a product review request email if it was scheduled to go out on the same day as a birthday email to avoid having the two messages compete with each other.
• Moderate repetition. You shouldn’t send the same browse abandonment email again if your subscriber returns and browses the same product category the next day or perhaps even a few days later — although you’ll probably want to do some testing to find out what the best minimum interval is between browse abandonment emails.”

“Use segmentation, triggered emails, and other tactics to send your most engaged subscribers more email. A small % of your subscribers drive the majority of your email marketing revenue. Increase the opportunity presented by these high-value subscribers by sending them additional targeted messages by:

• Using segmentation and suppression lists
• Setting up triggered emails that respond as they engage
• Presenting them with opportunities to opt up into additional mailstreams. Those additional mailstreams could be for a loyalty program, offers from sister brands, or emails on other topics selected by the subscriber. When seeking these additional opt-ins, make the signup process and explain what’s in it for the subscriber.”

Personalization

“Depending on the size of the personalized content block, the default could be a CTA to supply the missing data point. For instance, your emails could highlight Special Deals at Your Local Store. Subscribers who’ve indicated a favorite store would see the deals, while those that haven’t would see a CTA to Tell us your favorite store to see these deals.”

“In addition to time of day, you might also see a benefit in optimizing the day of the week to send your emails. Targeting different days of the month, especially those around common paydays like the 15th and last day of the month, can also be fruitful.”

“Always balance subscriber behavior and preferences with your business ops and concerns. For instance, the timing of a promotion or event or the hours of your stores will drive the timing of the email promoting it. Also, call center hours and staffing should be considered. Send time optimization isn’t just about maximizing opens and conversions. It’s also about maximizing the chances that subscribers will have a great customer or user experience.”

Landing Pages

“Design well-branded landing pages and email admin pages that offer a clear path forward after an interaction. Brands sometimes direct subscribers to barren pages with no branding, navigation, or path forward. This experience is most prevalent on pages that confirm an opt-out, a preference change, an email signup, and other admin functions. However, it also occurs on email landing pages for videos, surveys, and other special, one-off content. Often, these are the result of templates provided by ESPs and other vendors. In most cases, you can customize these pages to offer a better experience. Dead-end pages such as these prematurely end brand interactions and make bad impressions. Always offer path forward for subscribers to take once they’ve completed an interaction offered by an email.”

“Don’t remove a landing page too quickly without providing an alternative. Some subscribers will click through an emails days or even weeks after receiving it, so removing landing pages when a product sells out or a sale ends can generate 404s for subscribers. This frustrates and confuses subscribers, who might be unsure whether they’ve arrived at the right page or if a product is still available. It also fails to capitalize on their interest.

For product pages, if you plan on restocking the item, keep the page live. Consider offering visitors the option to sign up to receive a back-in-stock notification email when the item is available again. If the product was one-of-a-kind, consider redirecting visitors to similar items, while also notifying them that the item they originally sought is no longer available.

For sale event pages, consider redirecting visitors to a current sale page or posting a message that the sale has ended and suggesting other pages for them to visit.”

Workflows and QA

“Create brand guidelines specific to your email program. Brand guidelines typically include approved logos, indicate which fonts can be used and in what situations, establish a color palette, and more. However, not all of these design decisions smoothly translate to email because of limitations of the channel, such as limited HTML font support. Email also has some design considerations not present in other channels, such as the need for defensive design techniques like bulletproof buttons.

Create brand guidelines for your emails that recognize the limitations of the channel, as well as the special elements only found in email. For example, the need to use HTML text and the limited support for fonts means that you’ll need to have button designs and font selections for your emails that differ slightly from your usual graphic designs. Consider including the following elements in your email brand guidelines:

• Types of emails sent and template and styling used for each
• Content block templates
• SL and preview text guidelines
• Web font and HTML font guidelines
• CTA text guidelines
• Color palette
• Photographic style and image styling, formatting, etc.
• Button styling
• Defensive design elements, including alt text styling
• For both desktop & mobile: header sizing, logo sizing, and logo placement; nav bar content, styling, & sizing; font sizes for headlines, subheads, body text, and other content elements
• Footer elements
• Plain text version design elements, including spacing and dividers
• International or foreign language version considerations, including cultural sensitivities
• Additional elements depending on your industry or brand”

“Create a brief for every message you send and refer to it throughout your workflow. The brief should answer:

• WHO should get this message? All of your subscribers? If only a certain segment, how are you defining that segment? What’s the list name? If subscribers only receive this email in certain circumstances, how are you defining that trigger for the email?
• WHAT action do you want those subscribers to take? Make a purchase? Watch a video? Register for an event? Tweet a hashtag? Do you have the best landing page set up to facilitate that action? Does the page require extra setup time or special expertise? Are there any barriers or distractions you can eliminate to make it easier to take that action?
• WHY will those subscribers be motivated to take that action? What messaging, evidence, incentives, social proof, imagery, experiences, or interactivity will you use to convince them to take the desired action? What SL(s) will you use? If the message includes personalization or dynamic content, have you set it up correctly? Do you have defaults in place? If your email includes new or advanced functionality, do you need extra time or outside expertise to implement it?
• WHEN should those subscribers receive the message?
• How long has it been since you last emailed those subscribers? How does this message fit into that cadence and the context of those previous emails? If there’s an act-by deadline, are you giving those subscribers sufficient time to act? Should this message be segmented by time zone? Should it be segmented by average temperature or other regional characteristics? If it’s a triggered email, how soon after the trigger should it be sent and are there any conditions under which it shouldn’t be sent?
• WHERE are those subscribers likely to read the message? On what devices or in which email clients are they likely to read it? How should your email’s design account for those environments? Will the functionality in your email be supported? Do you have fallbacks in place for when that functionality isn’t supported? In what physical location, circumstances, or context will your email be read? Does your email’s design and copy need to factor that in?
• HOW will you measure this email’s success? Opens? Clicks? Conversions? Revenue? Do you have the correct tracking in place in the email and on the landing pages? What messaging, image, or other element are you AB testing in this email? Are you clear on the conditions for a conclusive and statistically significant test?
• IS this email part of a series or a subscriber or customer journey? Does this email fully reflect the trigger or circumstances under which the subscriber is receiving it? How does this message build upon previous emails, if any, in the series or journey? How does this email set up the next message, if any, in the series or journey to be successful?
• DO you have any supplemental material that’s important to answering the other questions? Were you inspired by an email, case study, article, or presentation that you saw? If so, attach that material to the brief. Is there info that’s important to understanding the goal, design, coding, etc. of this email? If so, include it in the brief.

Use this as a model to create your own list of questions that are suitable for your brand. If you can’t adequately answer these questions, you should consider planning out the email better or perhaps not sending it at all. Once you’ve satisfactorily addressed each of these questions, then:

• Assign tasks and approval responsibilities
• Set deadlines for tasks and approvals, as well as limits on rounds of revisions
• Set a date for the review of the performance of the email and, if it’s a triggered email, set a schedule for the ongoing review, update, and optimization of the email

When those are established, all of the internal or external stakeholders should sign off on the brief. This confirms that everyone’s on the same page about the email’s goals and the responsibilities of everyone involved. If you’re working with an agency, freelancers, or consultants, getting signoff is extra critical.

Make this brief easily accessible to everyone on the team, so they can use it as a single point of reference throughout the email production process.”

“Your email content calendar should include the review and update of triggered and transactional emails. It can take considerable time to optimize these messages for a new season with updated primary messaging and images and secondary content blocks. And that’s on top of making potential changes to email signup forms and signup confirmation pages.”

“Keep an inventory of your triggered email programs and regularly schedule time to update and fine-tune them. Keep an inventory of them that includes:

• The name of the triggered email
• Where and in which ESP the email can be found
• The goal
• The CTA and landing page
• The intended audience
• The trigger logic
• Link to supplemental documentation, technical info, etc.
• Date the email was last updated

Triggered emails aren’t ‘set it and forget it’ programs but ‘review and improve’ programs. These emails need regular maintenance and optimization for the following reasons:

• First, because inbox provider support for coding changes over time, checkups are necessary to ensure that triggered emails haven’t developed rendering or functionality problems
• Second, your brand assets, messaging, and landing pages can become outdated. Promotions change, links become outdated, logos get redesigned, and staff turns over, requiring names and headshots in emails to change.
• Third, your brand strategy and messaging are consistently evolving. This provides opportunities to hone your copywriting, polish your design, and improve your targeting.
• And fourth, the changing of the seasons, the approach of holidays, and the arrival of various deadlines provide opportunities to add seasonal content to triggered emails to make them more relevant. For instance, adding a content module about Xmas gifts to a cart abandon email can increase the effectiveness of those emails during the holiday season.

Because of all these concerns, review your triggered emails quarterly. Reviews are also wise any time you change email templates or your site is significantly updated.”

“Smart targeting naturally send more email to only those subscribers who’ll be the most receptive to it. These one-to-some email tactics send more messages and more personalized messages to subscribers who:

• Have indicated their preferences
• Are clicking in your emails, on your site, and in your app
• Are responding to progressive profiling done via email, your site, your app, or some other channel”

Corrections & Apology Emails

“Don’t draw undue attention to email errors by overreacting. Very few email errors are serious enough to need correcting. Most are trivial and merely embarrassing, such as:

• Typos in SLs or body copy
• Blank SLs or ones composed of placeholder text
• Image formatting and rendering issues
• One minor broken link among many
• Temporary issues such as an image server going down for a short period
• Broken personalization
• Minor deployment mistakes such as sending email earlier than intended or sending it twice (if you send an apology email this may be perceived by some as yet another unnecessary email)

Small errors are unlikely to go unnoticed or understood as errors if they’re noticed. It’s often better to move on.”

“Action is needed when an error significantly impairs subscribers’ ability to act on the email or causes significant brand damage by annoying, angering, or offending subscribers.”

“Take steps to reduce the impact of email mistakes when they’re discovered quickly.

• First, stop the send if it hasn’t completed. If your list is really large, a send could take hours, so if you have time to pause it, fix the error, and then resume the send.
• Second, you can fix some content errors post-send. For instance, if the mistake is in an image, correct it and then replace the hosted source file with the corrected image. If the mistake’s with a link, see if you can get the link redirected to the correct page. See if you can change external CSS style sheets. Update live content. Or clarify messaging on the landing page.
• Third, if the email contains incorrect, incomplete, or confusing info, use the landing page for the email to clarify the offer, timing of the event, or other details
• And finally, consider using social media and other channels to address any confusion caused by an email by emphasizing the correct info.

Along the way, check your email analytics to try to determine how large an impact the error made. Sometimes things aren’t as bad as you think, which might influence how you proceed with damage control.”

“Gmail’s move to cache images has made the image replace tactic less effective, but updating image files is still an effective way to alter email content. The hero image can be replaced. Any graphical text can be changed. And in certain situations, you may be able to overwrite most of the content of an email.”

“Many ESPs replace all the links in your emails with ESP-hosted links that include tracking. Some ESPs now allow you to change the destination of those tracking links.”

“Draft an apology email so you’re prepared when the occasion arises. Apology emails are very rare, but you want to be prepared in the event that misfortune befalls you so you can respond quickly — whether that misfortune is a serious email marketing error, a website outage, a PR issue, or a natural disaster. To that end, draft an apology email that you can update with the necessary info. As far as serious email marketing errors go, they come in a few different varieties, each of which deserves a different response:

• First, for significant errors that only affect a small portion of your subscribers, consider sending an apology email — or a resend of the original email with a message of explanation on top — to only the affected subscribers. For instance, if you send subscribers personalized discount codes and your site wasn’t set up properly to accept those codes at the time of the send, then you could send an apology email to just those subscribers who tried to use their codes, telling them that the issue has been fixed and to please try again. Other subscriber groups that might deserve attention include subscribers who enabled the email’s images to display or clicked on a broken link or a link to an incorrect landing page.
• Second, for a serious mistake that only affects your email subscribers, an apology clears things up and mends the relationship. A good example of this kind of mistake would be a company that owns multiple brands accidentally sending a message intended for one brand’s subscribers to another’s. Permission is sacred. Violating it is worth apologizing for and making it clear to subscribers that they won’t receive any more messages from the brand — with the subtext being ‘Please don’t mark that email as spam.’
• And third, for particularly harmful or hurtful email mistakes — especially if a lot of people are talking about it on social media — an apology email should be part of a full-spectrum apology that includes reaching out via social media and making statements in the media.”

“In most cases, you’ll be correcting the details of an offer or event. So rather than a dedicated apology email, you’ll want to send a corrected version of the email with a brief explanation of what was wrong — most often accomplished by prefacing the SL with “oops:” or “Correction:” and then including a one sentence explanation in the preheader at the very top of the body copy. Sometimes brands will alter the hero image to include an apology.”

Unsubscribe Process

“Clearly identify the subscriber on the opt-out page and in the preference center to give the subscriber assurance that they’ve arrived at their correct page. Show their email address prominently, if not other info like their name. Doing this also helps to prevent recipients of a forwarded email from unintentionally unsubscribing the subscriber who sent it to them.”

“Give subscribers options in addition to completely opting out.

• A common reason subscribers opt out is that they feel they receive too many emails. Once a month and once a week are common opt-down email frequency choices.
• Another reason subscribers give for opting out is that the emails were not relevant. Letting subscribers select or change content or product preferences can correct that problem.
• Some subscribers simply want to change their email address and think they need to unsubscribe and then re-subscribe. Providing a Change Your Email Address link in your emails and a similar option in your preference center or on your unsub page simplifies this process and eliminates the risk that they never get around to re-subscribing after opting out. This option also keeps your customer and subscriber records clean by ensuring that you attribute both the subscriber’s old and new email address — and their associated activity — to a single customer file. Otherwise, you’d likely create a second file for the same customer and lose the ability to act on that past behavior.
• Other subscribers might still want to receive messages from you, but would prefer to get them via another channel. You might be losing an email subscriber, but if you give them the ability to opt over to direct mail, a social network, or some other touchpoint, you’ll keep the lines of communication open, which should be a business priority.
• If you have sister brands, giving outgoing subscribers the option to sign up for emails from these other brands might pay off.
• During the holiday season, when email volume spikes, you might also consider giving subscribers the option to pause or ‘snooze’ their subscription until after Christmas or the New Year
• And lastly, when given the option to Stay Subscribed, a surprising number of subscribers do so, which indicates that some are just exploring their options. Use your unsub page or preference center to remind subscribers of the benefits of receiving your emails and give them the chance to re-affirm their subscription.”

“Identify the sources of subscribers that churn the least and focus on increasing acquisition through those sources. Make your messaging more compelling and relevant by sending more segmented emails, triggered emails, and emails with personalized content.”

“With most B2C brand sending 150–200 broad emails a year, even with a good unsub rate of 0.25%, you’re seeing more than a third and as much as half of your list churn — and that’s not including subscribers that go inactive or become undeliverable. Because opt-out rates compound with every campaign you send, reducing them even a little has a big effect annually.”

Experimentation

“Take your AB testing up another level by creating a profit & loss (P&L) statement for all of your testing efforts. This will help communicate the value of your testing efforts to your execs.

Analytics, customer surveys, diary studies, and focus groups can help you identify which elements of your email program to test and can give you ideas for challenger designs and processes. Everything is open to testing, but here’s some common AB tests to get you started:

Email Design (SL, preview text, and preheader text)

• Different lengths
• Number of components (e.g. highlighting one offer vs. two)
• Different offers (e.g. percent vs dollar)
• Statement vs. question
• Value vs. lifestyle appeal
• First-name personalization vs. generic address or none
• Different capitalization, punctuation, special characters, and emojis

Headline

• Different spacing
• Different lengths
• Different sizes
• Different fonts or styling

Images

• Different sizes
• Different position
• Model vs. product
• Positioning of model (e.g. looking straight vs. looking toward key copy or CTA vs. looking away from it)
• Live shot vs. illustration
• Static image vs. animation vs. video
• Manufacturer image vs. your image vs. customer image

Copy

• Different position relative to images
• Different copy lengths
• Different benefits or features highlighted
• Promotional vs. non-promotional copy
• Including social proof (e.g. testimonials, Likes on Pinterest or Insta, etc.)

CTA

• Different sizes
• Button vs. link
• Different button shape
• Different wording
• Different colors
• Different positions
• Different landing pages
• High commitment vs. low commitment (e.g. Buy Now vs. Learn More)

Product grid

• Number of columns in grid (e.g. 2 vs. 3)
• Which product elements to include (e.g. product name, brand, price, etc.)

Secondary messages

• Number of secondary messages, including none
• Order of secondary messages
• Related to primary message vs. not

Processes

Subscription Process

• Different signup language
• Different form elements (e.g. just email address vs. more fields)
• Making fields optional vs. required
• Showing or linking to sample emails vs. not

Unsub Process

• Different language on opt-out page
• Different alternatives made available

Automation

Triggered Messages

• Different trigger logic
• How quickly to send the message after it’s triggered
• Whether to send a series of triggered emails
• The delay between triggered emails in a series
• Under what conditions an email in a series is skipped
• Under what conditions an email series ends

Inactivity

• Different lengths of inactivity
• Different content tactics to reengage (e.g. rich offer, different SLs, etc.)
• Different re-permission messaging”

“When testing email design changes, choose sample groups composed of new subscribers. Existing subscribers will likely resist design changes initially and it can take a while to change their expectations and retrain how they interact with your emails. New subscribers aren’t biased by interactions with your previous designs, so they’re the ideal candidates for these tests.”

The Funnel

(Also see under Deliverability and Unsubscribe)

“It’s tempting to want to optimize each stage in isolation — to focus your lis building on maximizing subscriber growth and to focus your envelope content on maximizing opens. But that’s an overly simplified view of how audience selection works. It assumes that all subscribers are equal and that all opens are equal — and they’re not. You don’t want just anybody on your email list; you want subscribers who are going to engage and convert. And you don’t want just anyone to open that email; you want openers who are the most receptive to your CTA to open that email. Each stage of the funnel has one job, which is to maximize converters at the bottom of the funnel.”

“If you don’t have quality subscribers, it’s difficult to have engaged subscribers. If you don’t have engaged subscribers, it’s difficult to have enough behavior to target well. If you don’t target subscribers well, it’s difficult to get the right openers. If you don’t have the right openers, it’s difficult to get the right clickers. And if you don’t have the right clickers, it’s difficult to get the right converters. Each stage depends on all the ones that preceded it, which is why optimizing any single stage in isolation tends to result in underperformance.”

“Engaged Subscriber Stage: The frequency at which you send emails, the content and CTA of those messages, and how well those all align with subscribers’ expressed and implied preferences will determine which of your subscribers stay engaged. If you send lots of broadcast emails with one-size-fits-all messaging, then your program will have a narrow appeal and engagement will likely suffer. However, if you have a healthy mix of broadcast, seasonal, segmented, and triggered emails, and use personaliztion wisely, then your program’s appeal will be much wider.”

“Email Recipient Stage: Many of the messages you send are best received by only a portion of your subscribers because of their expressed interests or past actions. And other messages are best received only by certain subscribers at a certain time based on past actions or a lack of action.”

“Email Interactions Stage: The audience selection that takes place within an email is accomplished through the messaging. The right messaging at each of the three stages of an email interaction allows recipients to self-quality or self-select themselves to proceed to the next stage.”

“The SL should be straightforward and predispose those who open the email to engage with its content. The goal isn’t to generate opens; it’s to generate openers who are most likely to convert.”

“A strong correlation between the email content and the landing page reassures subscribers that they’ve landed in the right place. For instance, consider repeating headlines and images from the email on the landing page.”

“Email Sharing Stage: Subscribers do the audience selection at this stage and in a highly targeted way, with forwards acting like triggered 1-to-1 emails and social sharing acting like segmented emails. To spur forwards and social sharing, marketers should:

• Periodically create exceptional content or use a deviation in design to make it clear the message is special
• Keep the email design simple and clean and focus your email on a single message, as this allows subscribers to forward the message without needing to explain it
• Personalize and target the message, as pointed messages encourage subscribers to share it with people who are just like them, whereas broad generic messaging tends not to inspire much sharing.”

The Subscriber Lifecycle & Journeys

“Re-engagement Stage: Supplementing or replacing the engagement stage, the reengagement stage consists of messaging tactics designed to address inactive subscribers and those in danger of soon becoming inactive. These tactics include:

• Sending winback, reengagement, and other inaction-triggered emails
• Sending different messages and using different envelope or body content than what engaged subscribers receive
• Withholding emails for a number of weeks
• Drastically reducing email frequency to minimize the risk to your sender reputation posed by inactive subscribers

The purpose of the reengagement stage is to return disengaged subscribers to the engagement stage rather than having them progress to the transition stage.”

“Super-Engagement Stage: Supplementing or replacing the engagement stage, the super-engagement stage consists of tactics that further engage your most engaged subscribers. These tactics, all of which result in these subscribers receiving additional emails, include:

• Setting up an array of action-triggered messages, including browse and cart abandon, back-in-stock notification, replenishment, and other post-purchase emails
• Sending segmented messages based on browse and purchase behavior, expressed preferences, and progressive profiling
• Giving subscribers opportunities to give you more info through your preference center and progressive profiling and then using that info to power segmentation and personalization
• Offering a loyalty program with a supplemental mailstream or a higher-volume mailstream that replaces the ones that non-loyalty members receive
• Getting subscribers to opt up into additional mailstreams, whether those offered by your brand or sister brands

Creating a subscriber journey requires you to take these steps:

1. Define problem or objective: ID an area of the business that could be improved through an email intervention, expressed in terms of sales, satisfaction, retention, evangelism, or another aspect
2. Find moments that matter: Next, ID those moments when reaching out to a subscriber with the right message can have a sizable, positive impact. As previously discussed, some common moments that matter involve signups, registrations, purchases, and inactivity. But to turn that moment into a journey, think about the moment just as the starting point. Many journeys involve interactions over time, so it may be helpful to think about 90-day customer retention, time to first purchase, email engagement during the first 30 days as a subscriber, and similar time-delimited metrics. For example, if you’re trying to create greater satisfaction and engagement among your conference attendees, the journey would start with someone registering for the event, which would trigger an initial transactional email and also add that person to a list of attendees that would receive emails before, during, and after the conference.
3. Create the journey: With the goal defined and the starting point of the intervention identified, now you can start to craft a journey, by answering these questions:

The journey trigger

• What triggers the journey? Is the first email action, inaction, date, or machine triggered?
• Is the first email in the journey sent immediately? If not, how long is the send delayed?

The first email

• Are there multiple versions of this email based on personas, subscriber geolocation, or other factors?
• What’s the content of each version of the email? Do they include any personalization or dynamic content?
• What’s the primary CTA? What are the secondary CTAs, if any?

Subsequent emails

• Is the next email in the journey conditional on anything? Continued action? Further inaction? The value of past actions in the journey, such as the value of a shopping cart or purchase?
• How long should the delay be between this emial and the previous email in the journey?
• Are there multiple versions of this email?
• What’s the content of each version?
• What are the CTAs?

As you determine the logic, timing, and messaging of subsequent emails in the journey, also ask yourself:

• What’s the journey-ending action, the action that stops subsequent emails in this journey from being sent?
• How long will the journey last? Days? Months?
• Does this journey scale to the opportunity? Do subscribers receive more or fewer emails based on the value of their actions, profile, etc.?
• If all conditions are met, what’s the maximum number of messages in this journey?
• While a subscriber is on this journey, should other emails be completely or partially suppressed?

As you build out a journey, think about the customer lifecycle. Some journeys will be focused on one component of the lifecycle. For instance, a cart abandon journey might include emails reminding the subscriber what’s in their cart and suggesting alternative products, both of which are forms of consideration.

However, other journeys involve multiple components. That’s why I prefer a nested model of the customer lifecycle rather than a linear one.

For instance, a new subscriber welcome journey might include emails asking subscribers to refer their friends in exchange for an incentive (evangelism), tell you their favorite brands (consideration), and follow your brand on social media (awareness).

A consumable product purchase journey might include emails that confirm the order (purchase) and provide a subscription offer to deliver more of the product every month (retention).

A durable goods purchase journey might include emails that confirm the purchase (purchase), provide setup or install instructions (usage), offer supplemental warranty coverage (consideration), and ask the subscriber to review the product (evangelism).

A software trial journey might include emails providing instructions and tips (usage) and end-of-trial notifications that try to get them to become a customer (consideration).

An event journey might include emails confirming registration (purchase), trying to upsell the attendee on a workshop (consideration), detailing keynote speakers and breakout sessions (usage), listing recommendations of things to bring to the conference (usage), and soliciting feedback after it’s over (evangelism).

And a reengagement journey might include emails asking the subscriber to update their preferences (consideration), offering them a big discount on their next purchase (consideration), and telling them about other channels through which they can hear from your brand (awareness).

This nested model also helps you focus on personas, recognizing that people can advocate for your brand without purchasing it or even using it, and that people can be users of your product without being purchasers. The latter is often the case with B2B products and services, for examples, where execs and other stakeholders sign off on products that others throughout the org can use.”

Mapping Out Multiple Journeys

“Once you’ve had one journey set up, look for opportunities to set up additional ones. Start by exploring the possibility of expanding existing single-email triggered campaigns. Then try to leverage other moments that matter to create more journeys.

As you do this, continually try to scale the journey to the opportunity. Bigger opportunities deserve longer journeys, while small opportunities deserve short ones — or perhaps just a single triggered email. Use conditional triggers and dynamic content to ensure that every email in a journey is relevant to all of the personas that go on that journey.

Keep track of all your journeys using a subscriber journey map (see diagram). Consider listing out each of your journeys, noting the number of emails and the goal of each one in terms of building awareness, consideration, purchase, usage, retention, or evangelism. For shorthand, consider using “1A” to denote that the first email in the journey aims to build awareness, for example.

To illustrate what this would look like, Figure 37 includes mappings of all of the journeys discussed here.

After you’ve done the big picture view of all your journeys, then create an email brief for each email in a journey, being sure to note the delay between triggers, any conditions on whether a particular email in the journey should be sent, and what the journey-ending action is.

Nurturing Existing Journeys

To maximize performance, you should:

• Routinely review their performance
• AB test the logic, timing, messaging, and other aspects of the various emails in the journey
• Update the content to make it seasonally relevant

Don’t be afraid to start with minimum viable emails in your journey and then improve them over time. Also, because we live in an omnichannel world, look for opportunities to coordinate your subscriber journeys with actions in other channels.”

Improving Your Program

“Break your email project into small and manageable steps.”

Minimum Viable Emails

“For new emails, embrace the minimum viable email — the absolute simplest version of an on-brand email that fulfills the intended goal. For example, if you’re creating a cart abandon for the first time, build a one-time triggered email with simple logic. And have that email contain simple messaging that tells the subscriber that they left something in their cart and that they can return to their cart to complete their purchase by clicking the link. Is that going to be a great execution of a cart abandon? No, but it’ll likely start generating positive returns and, more importantly, it’ll give you a foundation on which to build.”

Incremental Improvements

“Once you’ve created an email, strive for small changes or additions in terms of content, design, and other aspects that make the experience better. One of email marketing’s strengths is that frequencies and volume are high enough that marketers have plenty of opportunities to make improvements and tests quickly reach statistical significance. Consider these potential improvements:

• AB testing of messaging, images, CTAs, layout, number of content blocks, etc.
• Including personalization or dynamic content based on stated preferences, behavior, demographics, location, acquisition source, etc.
• Including live content
• Including AI-driven content suggestions and other predictive intelligence
• Including seasonal messaging

Design of Email

• AB testing of fonts, styling, colors, layout, etc.
• Improving legibility
• Clarifying content hierarchy
• Emphasizing CTAs
• Removing distractions and adding white space

Rendering of Email

• Improving mobile rendering
• Improving images-off rendering
• Improving plain text version
• Improving other fallbacks

Interactivity of Email

• Including gifs, HTML5 video, and other rich media content
• Including email carousels, hamburger menus, and other interactive features

Audience of Email

• Improving segmentation by behavior, demographic, psychographic, or other data
• Improving email’s trigger logic

Timing of Email

• Improving time zone optimization
• Improving seasonal, regional, or temperature-based optimization

Series Messaging of Email

• Optimizing number of messages in series
• Optimizing timing of each message in series
• Setting the optimal conditions under which the next message in the series is sent

Cross-Channel Coordination of Email

Improving coordination with:

• Direct mail
• Social media
• Push messaging
• In-store messaging
• Advertising
• Other channels

Landing Page(s) of Email

• Improving messaging, design, or functionality of existing landing page(s)
• Creating custom landing pages

Returning to the example of the minimum viable cart abandon email: Over time, you could make that email dynamic so it shows the items that were abandoned, add suggestions of alternative products, expand it into a series of emails, and then make those additional emails conditional based on the value of the cart. Don’t be afraid to start small and then gradually make improvements.”

Cross-Channel Synergies

“Customers are significantly more valuable and more engaged when they engage with your brand through multiple channels. So use email to expose your customers to other channels. And conversely use other channels to grow your email list.

Since emails are powerful unique identifiers, data from your customers’ email marketing interactions can be extremely helpful in building out customer profiles. That data can then be used to power targeted ads and messaging in other channels using the customer’s email.

Here’s examples of how you can apply these strategies:

Email + Site

• Include a prominent email signup form on homepage, one in the footer of every page of your site, and one integrated into your checkout process
• Choose the best landing pages on your site for the CTAs in your emails
• Use browse, carting, and purchase behavior to trigger browse abandon, cart abandon, and transactional emails, respectively — as well as to build the subscriber’s profile for future segmentation, personalization, dynamic content, and predictive intelligence
• Use elements of the titles of successful blog spots as SLs and preview text

Email + Site Search

• Use trending searches to inform what to promote in your emails and highlight in your SLs
• Use trending searches to inform when to send or start including seasonal messaging
• Include ‘Top Searches’ in emails

Email + Paid Search

• Use high-performing paid search terms in your SLs and body copy
• Use paid search to AB test and optimize potential email landing pages, as vice versa
• Use paid search to drive visitors to email signup and lead generation pages

Email + Mobile

• Use responsive design to target mobile users with mobile-specific CTAs such as a CTA to download your app or sign up to receive texts
• Provide click-to-call phone numbers in your mobile-friendly emails
• Use email to reengage subscribers who haven’t used your app in a while
• Promote SMS signup to your email subscribers
• Allow people to sign up for email by texting you their email address

Email + Social Media

• Link to your social media pages in your emails
• Include ‘share with your network’ CTAs to spur social sharing of your email content
• Use activity, especially trending activity, on your social media pages to inform or determine email content (i.e. highlight most-pinned products)
• Use a Facebook tab, Twitter cards, and other social media mechanisms to collect email signups
• Use your email list to target subscribers and lookalikes with social media ads

Email + Direct Mail

• AB test images or messaging in emails and use the winners in your direct mail or catalog
• Coordinate arrival of email with arrival of direct mail or catalog to attract more attention
• Ask subscribers to sign up to receive catalog for more targeted and efficient distribution
• Use email and web behavior to power personalized direct mail promotions
• Use direct mail to try to reengage inactive subscribers

Email + Stores

• Offer e-receipts
• Allow store customers to opt in to promotional emails, preferably through kiosk, POS tablet, or pin pad
• Set up a geofence around stores during special events that trigger a push notification offering an incentive to users who sign up for email
• Use email messaging to recruit seasonal workers, since your subscribers are likely quite familiar with your brand and offerings
• Have stores, sales associates, and call center reps report negative customer interactions so promotional emails to those customers might be paused to prevent unsubs and spam complaints in response to the bad experience

Email + TV

• Tell subscribers about news coverage or other TV attention your products and services get
• Tell subscribers about upcoming TV specials or appearances on shows and encourage them to watch it
• Give subscribers sneak peeks of major TV commercials such as Super Bowl ad or Super Bowl teaser ads

Customers don’t separate your brand into different channels. They see one brand, and expect orgs to treat them as one person, no matter how many channels they’re using to interact with your brand. Make sure that each of your channel teams coordinates their activities and shares insights with the others.”

Looking Toward The Future

“Email rendering will become even more complex as the market for wearables and the Internet of Things take off. Some devices will be able to display full emails, whereas others will show only SLs, making clarity within envelope copy even more important.

Because of shrinking device sizes, the voice-and-gesture-based navigation of inbxoes and the audio transcription of emails will become issues at some point. Email design concerns will then include determining which content is read out and picking the appropriate voice ‘fonts’ and intonation ‘styles.’ Voice interfaces may empower brands to create voice-optimized emails by introducing a voice-html part of multipart MME emails.”

“Image blocking will cease to be an issue. Inbox providers won’t see it as a security issue and their ability to block spam will make it unnecessary.”

The trend toward inboxes within inboxes will continue, primarily through the further rollout of tabbed inboxes that partition inboxes into sub-inboxes. Customers can manage their email more easily when similar messages are grouped. This allows users to get in a shopping or social frame of mind, for instance, and then deal with all the emails of that sort. Better organized and more logical inboxes are good for everyone.”

“Relatedly, email inboxes will slowly continue to take on more communication functionality, creeping toward becoming a unified inbox, where emails, texts, social updates, voicemails, and other messages will comingle just one click away from each other. Mobile devices have provided a template for how to do this, with alerts and notifications all appearing on lock screens.”

“Along with mixing of media types, the inbox will gain more rich content and interactivity. People will be able to play videos, browse product assortments, and eventually even make purchases — all without leaving their inboxes. Moreover, all content will be up to date at the time it’s opened. The emails of the future will be much more like sending subscribers a microsite than a static message.”

“Personalization, segmentation, and triggered emails will all be used at much higher levels than they are today thanks to marketers’ ability to tap Big Data, harness cross-channel integration, and leverage sophisticated digital marketing platforms. As a result, email marketing will become even more profitable — even after taking into account rising production and platform costs.

“AI and automation will make acting on Big Data much easier and make data-driven marketing even more pervasive. AI will take over some email marketing tasks completely, particularly those that require instant action. Automation will become more fluid and adaptive, shifting from being prescriptive to principle-based sense and respond. However, in most cases, machine learning will simply provide email marketers with suggestions for triggers, segmentation, offers, copy, SLs, and more.”

“Going hand in hand with Big Data, the collection of personal data will likely become much more transparent and permission-based. Email preference centers will morph into communication preference and profile centers, where consumers can modify their cross-channel messaging preferences and edit personal info collected about themselves. This will largely come about because of changes in consumer attitudes about privacy. More companies will incorporate privacy protections into their products. In fact, device and software companies will eventually compete on their default privacy features. Along the way, it seems inevitable that new privacy and data security regulations will come into effect, first in Eruope, with the U.S. quietly resisting.”

“The single most disruptive force affecting email marketing is the rising expectations of subscribers because there’s always a small number of leading brands that are delivering exceptional email and omnichannel experiences. These brands gradually raise expectations, making it more challenging for all other brands.”

“Given the change constant in our industry, especially on the tech front, it pays to be proactive. If you wait until there are five case studies in hand before implementing or even testing a particular change or tactic, you’ll have guaranteed that you’re a year or more behind some of your competitors. As an email marketer, if you’re not living six months in the future, you’re in trouble.”

“Content schedules, testing schedules, and tech upgrade and rollout schedules are all critical to competing effectively in the email industry. The future of email is always in motion, so you always have to be chasing it. Thankfully, the velocity of email marketing is so fast you have nearly unparalleled opportunities to fail small and then quickly recover and improve.”

“Despite all of these possible changes, the one thing that won’t happen anytime soon is email being disrupted and overtaken by another channel. Social and mobile only made email more relevant and more entrenched in the end. Email hasn’t been dethroned because no other channel can match its size, richness of message, one-to-one capabilities, or open platform. That last point is why Facebook, a closed platform, will never become large enough to meaningfully threaten email.”

“The only thing that could threaten email would be another open platform — possibly an open platform social network with email at its core. Email’s core tech is more than a decade old, so this new platform might come from a major refresh of the underlying tech driven by Google or Microsoft. Similar to the way open standards forced AOL (the marketing leading inbox provider in the 90s) to eventually allow its users to email non-AOL users, the same thing might happen with social media.”