Video Transcript: Email Marketing - Part 3

So welcome back to our third lecture on the fascinating topic of email marketing. We've been talking about several different types of campaigns, the role that they play in your overall scheme of marketing, in promoting your ministry or your  nonprofit or your business. And what we're going to talk about this time now is  the role of the segmentation campaign, and that is to pique the interest of  subscribers who sort of got stuck at some point on the value journey that we had that diagram, and they're just either not going anywhere, or they, you know, they you spelled out a logical next step for them, and they chose bucket number two  or door number three instead of the one that you wanted them take. Whatever  reason they're just kind of stuck there, and what we're going to do with it. The  purpose of a segmentation campaign is to say, All right, you know you've been  here. What sort of things are you interested in? Can we send you some  information about playing baseball or improving your basketball skills or  swimming stroke or tennis playing or whatever the case is, and get them to do  things or make choices that they segment themselves based on whatever it is  they're interested in right now. So segmentation campaign, storyboarding a  segmentation campaign, three things. Number one, use content. So you're  creating a lot of blog posts, you're creating videos gated content. And again,  gated content is content that's reserved for people who maybe have subscribed, or they've paid a membership fee, or whatever the case is. Number two is using  special offers. You can send out a series of sales offers, sales announcements,  or coupons for specific products, intentionally chosen products. And then the  third technique is to use events. Are they interested in getting more information  by signing up for a webinar on a specific topic or even an in person meet up, re engagement campaigns. This is probably something that actually is also very  important in the overall scheme of things. On a longer term basis, if you're in like a nonprofit or some sort of a ministry situation, people kind of come and go, and  you never know what happened to those people. Re-engagement campaigns  are meant to, if they're done right, they'll help you answer some of those  questions, calling out the inactive subscribers. Where did they go? And you get  them to either tell you why they're not engaging with you anymore. They move  from the area they're no longer interested. You know, whatever the case is, and  you get you either get them to re-engage with you and start interacting with you  and your emails again, or they select door number two, and you just kind of take them off the list and they're gone, and get them kind of. Do things, say things  provide them with information or offers or opportunities that get them re excited  about you and whatever your ministry or your business is doing. So what is a  storyboard for a re-engagement campaign look like without laying it out slide or,  you know, step by step, really, you're focusing this campaign, this email  campaign, on the inactive subscribers and most mail pro email program,  software has the automatic capability of identifying people who have not opened any of Your emails in a certain period of time, or interacted or responded or 

whatever. So you can target those people via these email programs in calling  these people out and encourage them to re-engage with you. You remind you  want to remind them of the benefits of being a subscriber, telling them what  they're missing, what they've missed recently, since they, you know, last opened  an email. And a couple of reasons for doing this is that you'll get a lot lower  complaints. You'll get the very if you're into E-commerce, you'll very often lower  the the returns that you get refund requests, and it will increase the overall  deliverability of your emails as well. In other words, there are penalties when  you start sending out a lot of emails that are not getting opened or are marked  spam or whatever. So even if somebody subscribes to your email list, it's almost  kind of good practice to remind them the next time they get an email from you  that hey, you know you're getting this email because you subscribe to my list  about my ministry or about my business. Because a lot of times it's just amazing how many times people will come back and and two weeks later, they'll  unsubscribe from your list with a spam complaint, which is not a good thing.  These internet providers do track that stuff. And if you start getting a lot of  complaints by getting names that have not email, addresses that have not  subscribed to you, and you start sending them email, they can mark that email  as spam. And if you get a certain percentage of people responding back saying  this is spam, these email list providers cut you off and you have no email  capabilities. So what if some of these campaigns don't work? What if the  campaign like this re-engagement campaign doesn't work? What? What kind of  next steps are you going to do? Well, kind of self obvious? Just take their name  off the list. If you sent them, say, a series one or two or three emails, time to re engage with them, and you're just you're seeing that they are not opening your  emails anymore, or they're not responding to you, to you anymore. The obvious  issue is you just stop emailing. You take their name right off the list. You mark  them as being inactive subscribers. In other words, it's referred to as cleaning  your list. And one thing you want to do is be working with a clean list of email  addresses. So in a lot of activities throughout marketing and sales and  management of a business or a nonprofit agency, there are certain metrics that  you pay attention to and you measure your success based on these metrics.  And email marketing has its own unique set of metrics that you'll want to  measure your measure your success against email performance metrics. The  first one is actually a little hard to read. I can't even read that anyway. The  second one is the deliverability rate. How many of these emails get delivered?  Typically, that delivery rate is not all that bad. In other words, this is referring to  the fact that the email provider, software provider, couldn't deliver an email for  some reason, there's some sort of a technical issue email open rate. This is a  big one. How many of the if you sent an email out there, did five people open it?  Or did 50 people open it? Generally, you'll find, depending on who you are and  what you're doing, you'll find that most of your open rates will fall somewhere 

between 8% and 40% email click rates. That depends. Again, there's a wide  variance here on click rates. If you have an offer on there that has a link and you say, click here to get this or to get to this next step in my marketing program, or  the next box on my value journey, you're going to have some sort of a link in that email for them to click, which will instantly send you a signal to your email  program that this particular email address gets bumped into a different list  segment. The other thing that you're going to be paying attention to, as far as  metrics are concerned, is email unsubscribes and complaint rates. And I  mentioned a while ago that some of these email software providers like  MailChimp and Constant Contact, and some of these other people like that, they have some pretty defined levels of complaints. If you get more than a couple of  percent complaint rate of spam complaints, you'll start getting warning notices  from these people saying, you know, this either needs to stop or and get  resolved, or we are going to discontinue your subscription to our service. So  with having said all that, those are some of the important metrics that we talked  about. It's always good to kind of keep an eye on those metrics, because it tells  you what's working. So no matter what kind of email campaign that you're  running, whether it's a segmentation campaign or re-engagement or  indoctrination or who knows what it is, if you have data that tracks these metrics, it will very quickly tell you what kinds of things are working, what people are  responding to, and that is a very critical, critical function that we pay attention to  in any email campaign that we do. So let's talk just a few minutes about some of the different roles of the management people who might be involved in email  marketing at your particular organization, and this is kind of assuming a maybe  a business approach to it, but three primary inputs that you'll have is marketing.  They're going to kind of know who you're going to be emailing to, why you're  going to be emailing them, and what sort of things that you want to be saying  and why you're gonna want to say it. Sales people are going to be very  interested in just send me the leads, and I'll set up an appointment go visit them, and I'll go get the order, or I'll call them on the phone, or I'll send them an email,  capture the order and get the cash, and we're done editorial. These are the  people who are going to write the copy for the email, and they may be writing  the copy for the offers that they see on the website, that sort of thing. Believe it  or not, this is a very critical area. And I can tell you this from personal  experience, there's a couple of things here that you need to be paying attention  to. And probably one of the biggest issues is the text that you use on your  subject line. The next most critical part of your email is obviously the text of your  email. And I can tell you from personal experience that I can take a subject line,  I can transpose two words on that subject line, and I will triple the open rate. My  wife thinks I'm crazy when I tell her that, but I can tell you from personal  experience that tweaking a single word, shifting two words around in an email  subject line, adding that recipients first name to that subject line, just have can 

have explosive results in terms of your email marketing metrics, so you have to  be very careful do not just whip some text off. And you know, writing like you talk is a big no no, and if you do that, you'll have dismal results. So editorial is a very 

critical aspect of an entire email marketing campaign. So that kind of brings us  to the end about email obviously, I only have had time in this particular series of  three lectures to really kind of skate across the surface of the pond. There's a  whole lot more about email marketing. And if you go on your computer, you get  on the internet, and you do a search, you'll find just tons of information about  email marketing. But during this series of three lectures here, I've given you a  really good basic foundation of things that you may be looking for relative to  using email for your marketing effort, at your agency, at your organization or at  your business. Thanks for listening.