Just getting a little bit emotional , like preparing to have a conversation with one of my heroes . They say , don't meet your heroes , but Michael Dunderlis is my hero . Welcome to the Marketers of the Universe podcast .
I'm Hayden Woods-Williams , digital Marketing Team Lead here at Boo Digital , and we are here to talk about all things marketing here at Brew Digital , and we are here to talk about all things marketing . We're kicking today's episode off with another section from our how to Make Impactful Changes series of topics .
You may have seen some of our content from the last few episodes on social media or from previous episodes . This time , however , we are jumping into email marketing . We are picking the brains of our email mastermind , mark , asking a few questions on how you can make a few small changes to start immediately improving results in your email marketing .
No pressure , mark . We've also entered spooky season , which means the return of marketing horror stories . We did do a blog last year At this time it's all audio , probably going to be turning into a blog , who knows ? We're feeling creative . Our team have taken the time to talk through their marketing nightmares .
Uh , for me , that was uh when I didn't check the quality of data and ended up eating 25 to 50 cadbury boost bars over a three-week period . For now , though , let's get on with the podcast . Our first topic in today's podcast is a continuation of our how to Make Impactful Quick Changes series . This episode , we're speaking about email .
In these sessions , we've just been discussing , channel by channel , how you can take a look at your own marketing and pick out one or two things that are going to help you make small improvements that aren't going to mean months worth of work . With me today to talk about email is our senior email marketing manager , mark Bundle . Welcome , mark .
Hey , yeah , email is one of these channels that everyone does Most people do , I guess but I think it's potentially underappreciated , and I think , when it comes to actually having the skills to really make email sing , not many people have those skills .
So if you were to give a non-email expert one single tip for improving their email performance , what would it be ? And do you agree that not everyone has those skills ?
I'll start with the second part . Absolutely not everyone has those skills , but I think that's the same with any part of any job really . There's quite a lot of specialized stuff and you can't expect everyone to know everything , otherwise we would all be out of jobs .
But if I had to give one tip , if someone was trying to get into email marketing , can't expect everyone to know everything , um , otherwise we would all be out of jobs . But if I give one tip , if someone was trying to get into email marketing , trying to learn that practice , uh , don't be afraid of the boring stuff . Um , email is not the glamorous child .
It is not paid advertising where you're going to see instant results coming in . It's not social media , where you're gonna have this kind of massive range of people commenting on what you're doing . Um , and it's not necessarily as tangible as seo , where you can see real improvements by doing the work and seeing your page rankings go up .
Email is the slow , boring cousin , um , and I make no , no qualms about that and it is still in my little baby and I will always love it , but it's very much a case of you do have to do a lot of building up . You have to potentially warm up ips so that you can send properly .
You have to check spam reports and like collect yourself to feedback loops and you have to catch your domain authority , your ip reputation . You have to make sure you've got consistent scores on your friendly froms . You have to render check things you have to your friendly froms you have to render check things you have to .
I don't audit everything is there is so much admin work in in good email marketing which is what I think puts a lot of people off and kind of relegates it to that less glamorous slot that's when you said the , the like the weird cousin there .
It did make me think of charles boyle from brooklyn 99 you will , would be a great email marketer , because he's all about the detail .
Yeah .
He would do so well at it .
There you go . Email is Charles Boyle . We'll just finish it there , right ?
Done .
I'm actually going to flip this . So we've already mentioned at the beginning that a lot of people do do email , who don't necessarily have the specialism in email . If you were to talk to most marketing generalists , they will have spent a lot of time in an email . Um , I forgot what they're called , what the platform's called .
I'll just call it an email platform . Yeah , esp's . Esp , that's that word email service platform . What is the one thing that you see like non-specialists doing regularly that just by taking a second to stop and think could be improved ?
It sounds so cliche because it gets tried out so often in like email marketing , blogs and podcasts and stuff . The segmentation really is the most important thing for this and it's so easy to do on most providers as well . Yes , you can just collect your list and send everything out to everyone and you know what .
When you're small , when you're just starting out and you've only got half of people , yeah , fair enough maybe , but certainly as you start growing through your journey , that segmentation , so you know who's engaging well with your content . Who are those people that have just signed up for that one discount and are never going to click anything again .
Who is coming in from different sources and maybe only resonates with certain types of copy and certain types of emails .
That sounds so complicated already because I'm talking about loads of different segments , but you can build it up slowly over time , you find out what works for you and even just breaking it down into these people responded to an email in the last 30 days , so they are more engaged and we can send them a little bit more .
Even just that first step of segmentation is gonna have knock-on effects to your reputation , your deliverability , your and just yeah , how , how well further engagement's going to go .
You mentioned people who've kind of opened in the last 30 days , which means , you know , a lot of the people who are listening to this are going to have email databases where they've got the people who have engaged recently , they've got the people who've engaged 30 to 180 days and then they're probably still sending emails to people who haven't done anything for ,
you know , almost half a year . What do you think they should be doing when it comes to that data ?
with regards to segmentation , uh , don't feel like you're alone for a start . As you say , there's plenty of people doing it , um , whether it's right , wrong , hey , for your audience , you know , it might , it might still work .
Some of those older people , um , but generally , there's a former client I worked with who did this really well and they had five pots of data . They split their people down into highly engaged , engaged , no , sorry , super engaged , highly engaged , engaged , not engaged , and super not engaged Not particularly creatively named , but it said what it did on the tin .
And the engaged , the kind of middle band . They would get two emails a week , one on a monday , one on a friday . The super engaged to get an extra one on a wednesday . Uh , the highly would get an extra one every other week on a wednesday .
Uh , the unengaged would only get , I think , one a month and the super unengaged would only get , I think , one a month and the super unengaged would only get the big quarterly promotion . And that was it . And if nothing else , that's a really good thing for your health .
If you're consistently sending and I say health I mean email health If you're consistently sending to people that are not engaging , the providers , your outlooks , your emails will look at that and go oh , people are regularly not responding to this person's emails , let's just put it in spam instead . It's clearly not a very good sender .
At that point your email is still showing as delivered , but actually it's providing no value because it's gone to the spam box and chances are it's never going to be seen again . And that's a really hidden metric and that's the best that can happen .
If you're sending to your unengaged data , at worst , actually someone's abandoned that address and the provider has turned it into a spam trap and you're mailing a spam trap and if you do that , you can end up on some blacklists and it is impossible to get off of those without so much time and effort , and it means essentially , things like gmail will just block
you , and if you blocked your gmail , that is a very big problem . It is 65 or so don't source me of global email addresses now , it's certainly six , I think 65 percent of most b2b audiences .
Um and yeah , so if you can't send anything to that , I mean immediately you're cutting your audience and into a third thank god it's the Halloween episode , because my God , that's scary . Yeah , email unglamorous , huge consequence .
Yeah , yeah . I'm literally like sitting here going damn , this stuff is really serious .
To do an anecdote on that as well . It is possible as well . I talk about email marketing an awful lot , but the related kind of field of sales marketing has the same thing , especially if you share a crm system .
If you've got a salesperson that goes rogue and sends out loads of emails to unengaged people , that can just lock their google account and that's it . They never mind , just not be able to send an email . They cannot access google , they cannot access docs , sheets , slides , anything .
So , yeah , your email efforts can have this actual , quite real world ish reaching consequences it's amazing , actually , because you don't necessarily consider the sales marketing effort .
It's tying in with your email marketing efforts and there's always this like I'll refer to as project zeus because of peep show , but like sales and marketing can't align .
Um , I remember in a company I used to work for , there was a salesperson who , about three months after GDPR came in , was taking data out of the CRM and mail merging through Microsoft Word , which is a complete no-no , and they got slapped with a big fine . But it also had such a big impact on the business as well .
So , yeah , I guess keeping an eye on your sales team was an important one as well yeah , especially if you're all tied in .
if you , if you're using like a mailchimp or something and your efforts are completely separate , it's the sales team aren't quite so scary in that respect , um .
But as soon as you start doing things uh , properly , like through um , a crm , and they are more connected , then yeah , you have to find some kind of synergy there , because one can really hurt the other , and GDPR is no joke terms on today's podcast episode .
I want to focus a little bit more on the technical aspects of email for a second and how our listeners can get that right . Let's start with optimising for mobile . Why is it so important to optimise for mobile and what are some kind of quick steps that the listeners can do to improve mobile readability , mobile open rates , that kind of thing ?
The general rule in email marketing has been for a good while now design mobile first . It was just design with mobile in mind and then considering any kind of smooth , slowly more from desktop to mobile . Again , always check your audience .
If your audience is opening more on desktop than mobile , it's less important , but you should probably also make it mobile friendly anyway in case . In case , people are getting it on the go , people need things to read on trains , um . And there's most reputable email providers . Now if you're using , like a , like I said , a mailchimp or a hubspot salesforce etc .
Um , even the free versions , most of them will have an email builder which will allow you to build things in a fairly mobile-friendly way , and they will kind of make the design what we call responsive . So it's responsive to the screen size , so it's normally fairly easy . The main things to be aware of obviously , things will appear different sizes on mobile .
So that really beautifully designed banner image you've got the top of your email or mobile , bear in mind that is going to be like a couple of centimeters high . It's going to be all squashed down . People aren't going to necessarily be able to read that . So make sure that you design with the smaller size in mind as well .
It's not just making everything claim size to fit , it's being aware of what that new size is going to look like as well . And then with everything else , the smaller buttons tend to be bigger . Where you might click like download an e-book or an email , you'll probably find that button actually on mobile .
You've made it bigger because it's easy to click with the thumb . Thumbs are much less precise than mice or trackpads , so make the button more accessible that way . So , yeah , there are most of the actual kind of tools that you'll have access to can kind of do this for you .
Those are things to bear in mind that the tool can only take you so far there's a tool that I remember using , and I'm sure you've spoken to me about it at some point as well . I can't remember what it's called email on email and acid potentially is a blog .
I used to read an awful lot of do they still have the tool that um allows you to to kind of look at all your emails and how it appears on different browsers and stuff that's actually litmus , um , it's a litmus or , um , the company that is , I'm gonna say , an industry standard , but that's actually litmus , um .
So litmus are , um , the company that is , I'm gonna say , an industry standard , but that's just because I've never used anything else .
It's possible there are others out there , so I'll put that with a big caveat um , but yeah , litmus is um , what used for , uh , render testing , seeing how the different emails will render in the different environments , how they will appear in the different environments . Quite , a lot of the big CRMs have a native integration with Litmus .
Hubspot certainly does , so . You can check your email and say you know what You've built ? This beautiful design . It all looks wonderful , but actually Outlook 2016 is a bit weird and still quite widely in use . Is it going to display properly there , that beautiful background image you've put in ?
Oh wait , actually Gmail there , that beautiful background image you've put in ? Oh wait , actually gmail on chrome doesn't like it and it will display in a different way . That doesn't work correctly .
So it's really important to use a tool like litmus or some kind of render checker , some kind of visual checker , to make sure that your email is displaying as intended on different devices , because there is no uniform standard in enhanced email . Every single Chrome , even within Google Gmail , will work differently on different devices .
And if you're doing it through the app or through the website , if you're doing it on different versions of the app , and how you're getting Gmail through another app instead of directly to the , it gets really complicated . There are so many variations . I think the checkers the little checker that I've got usually something like that there's over 100 you can check .
I'm not saying check every single one every single time . Generally , pick the ones that your audience are using the most and stick to those . Most software providers will say these are the most commonly used ones . It's also worth checking stuff that you can do through these integrations for dark mode compatibility as well .
Although a relatively new thing , gmail particularly really likes to play around with things in dark mode . It will switch colors , it will switch background colors , text font colors , but not consistently and not necessarily to what you think it would change it to . So if you have a logo with black text , that's going to disappear .
If it's not , if it's not a plain png background , that is going to disappear in dark mode .
So make sure you've got colored backgrounds behind any kind of black text as well , is there kind of a good one , but yeah , uh , yeah , render checking for litmus or elsewhere absolutely vital , because we still don't have a unified email standard you , just you dark mode there .
Do you think it is a reasonably new thing ? Do you think it's worthwhile doing ?
Absolutely , it's worthwhile . I haven't got the stat to hand , but there's a significant portion of people who use dark mode on their computers , generally on their phones , and in fact I think iOS 18 is actually defaulting to dark mode Certainly all my iPhones's changing colors now . So , yeah , it's increasingly popular because it does help your eyes .
The way it's implemented for email does it make sense ? Not really , but , to be fair , not a lot of email . Building and foundations make a lot of sense . But , yeah , absolutely it's vital to keep it in mind . People will view your email . In that respect .
If your logo , logo , your social icons , your main text is disappearing , well , I mean , what's the point of sending the email ?
you know , we've kind of touched on images a little bit there with the dark mode . But with regards to email engagement , obviously if they're not appearing that's totally useless . But how can adding or removing images change the like , the response from the recipient ?
Well , this is the thing People will say to you . Put images in your emails and I will say not necessarily . There is still value in a good text email . But again , my favorite thing is test , test , test . Generally , obviously , the cliche is a picture is worth a thousand words . That doesn't stop being true just because it's on a computer .
So images do convey meaning and convey emotion much more clearly and much more quickly than text does . So , saying it's rare to make your entire email an image . A image blockers , that would deny everything . And B , it can cause some interesting vendor issues as well .
There are some industries that do it a lot more fashion and hairdressing , very , very image-heavy industries . Have been worked in both of those , but that's because their product is incredibly visual . The general ratio is 60-40 in terms of text and images to get a good balance . But that's not a hard and fast rule .
You can very much , as I say , as an experiment , test , find what works for you . But a good , engaging image is going to help you convey meaning .
It's going to help bring people in faster , particularly if it's a still of a video and you're clicking through to the actual video , because actually embedding a video in email is still also regrettably archaic and unreliable .
So yeah , images still worth a thousand words , but test in certain scenarios that text only , email might actually be better for you I'm not going to mention the image only email , where companies embed the entire content into an image , because I'm pretty sure it'll make you cry .
But yeah , I mean it does happen , especially in certain industries , and you know what it can work , especially if you're really clever with your alt text , depending . If you've got a fully designed HTML , you're not just using a tool that your provider's given to you .
If you've got a proper email designer writing out the code by hand , you can style alt tags , you can add emojis and stuff , you can color it and give it format and you can actually make it look really nice .
We had a client a former agency Actually if you had image blocking on , our designer had sliced it all up in such a way that each the image was in 40 or 50 different pieces and if you took it away it looked like a car . There was little blocks that came together to look like a car .
If you want to go image heavy , you can but be clever about it , love that Love that We've kind of spoken for quite a while already on this .
We've lots of kind of things that we've discussed . Looking back at what we've spoken about , if you could pick three things that listeners could go and do right now to improve their email marketing , what would they be ?
Segmentation , testing and making sure you can send stuff properly . I know we've not really mentioned that , but it's such an important thing and it kind of ties into the GDPR stuff we spoke about . So those are probably your three most important things , and your provider should be able to help you . If they can't , well , that's what people like us are for .
Absolutely , and it would be , again , totally irresponsible of me to not mention that we do offer an email review uh to clients for free . So head over to brewdigitalcom and navigate to the email and crm page , where our email experts will take a look at your crm and email holds and make sure that they are up to the scratch of foundations .
That is yours to then take away , or you can continue to work with us if you need any support .
Awesome . Thanks , guys . We now journey from the warmth of success to the chilling tales of marketing gone awry . I invite you to join us as we gather around the virtual fire where our team reveal their most unforgettable horror stories from the marketing trenches .
These tales of unexpected twists and spooky setbacks are sure to leave you both entertained and enlightened . So grab your marshmallows and get ready for a hauntingly insightful experience .
So my one minute horror story is pre-GDPR , just before it was being introduced in 2016 . Obviously , it had been briefed for years beforehand . We had one particularly large client at the agency I worked at back then that we kept saying you need to change your consent process .
You need to change your consent process and they kept telling us their legal team had said they don't . Uh , about two weeks before gdpr was due to be implemented , they then realized it had to be in they . Everything had to be changed and we had to do about three months worth of work in two weeks .
Um , moral of the story prepare early so my marketing horror story is a story from back when I used to work in events . We were working on launching a brand new event and the slogan we chose was something super cheesy like boost your revenue by booking a place , or something like this . We were doing a director to home campaign .
We had this list of all the decision makers from all of our kind of key target companies who we wanted at this event . We bought boost bars , made these beautiful little boxes to put the boost bars in along with , like a free ticket to the event . Basically , these all get sent out . Um , we then slowly start to receive boxes of boost bars back .
In the end , we got about 60 boost bars back because we hadn't checked the data and it was all formatted incorrectly and , yeah , nothing went to who it was supposed to and then I ate like 30 boost bars can you make this go viral ?
and our audience is everyone . So I feel like both of those we've kind of all lived through those . It's the big like oh god , these people do not know what we're doing at all . That's that , to me , is a horror story .
I was working the PR agency company and for the tech industry . There's a client who wants to send some gaming product not really gaming , but an e-sport product to a media to do a product review and ask them to do a positive review .
Then we're already trying to say to the clients the journalist will have their own opinion it's not necessarily always positive , but the client just really insists to do a positive review . In the end the journalist was very angry with us . They can't do this . They couldn't do this and I spent a lot of time to apologize for this behavior of my client .
So in the end it was fine , but the process was like horrendous .
This happened in my previous workplace , so there were a few horror stories , but this is like the biggest one . We , I think we back then we just launched like a , a big webinar , a very much anticipated webinar campaign , um with a client and everything was very carefully planned for many months um , from like the creative to the copy to the targeting um .
At this time I was still new to marketing so I was just handling reporting back then , so I didn't really know exactly what was happening at that time . But during that time someone in the team forgot to set the daily budget caps on LinkedIn ads .
Instead of selecting lifetime budget , it was actually daily budget and we went live on like a Friday , friday evening and by Monday morning the client's budget for the entire two months or so had already been spent . That was really bad .
So they had received hundreds of clicks and impressions , but with minimal conversion maybe less than 10 , since the campaign was just ramping up . Thankfully , no one lost their job . So , yeah , hard lesson learned Always triple check your budget settings . Before I worked in marketing .
I worked in PR for quite a popular sporting company and the event had already started off badly , because one of the journalists asked me how I got into sports PR and I had to explain to him that I did a fashion degree .
And then the person that I was in charge of managing that day did his bit on stage and then decided that he didn't want to do any interviews and he wanted to send his 15 year old brother out to do his interviews in his place .
And I , for lack of a better way of explaining it , had to stand and argue with him for half an hour about why he couldn't send his underage brother out in his place . And yeah , he went out and did one interview and then went back and went home , but at least he did an interview . So that's my PR horror story .
Man , I'd probably use this podcast , to be honest . No , so I edit a podcast . We won't name what it is , but it can be a real challenge sometimes . So Zoom links have been wrong when we've set up the recording . People turn up late or don't turn up at all . Sometimes they have to leave early , throwing the whole schedule up in the air .
We've even had somebody have their lunch delivered midway through the recording session . Um , it needs heavy editing because everybody flubs their lines . Uh , we even recorded a whole podcast once where the url had been read out wrong the whole way through and nobody noticed until afterwards .
Uh , best of all , I'm pretty sure the platform we host this nameless podcast on is cursed , because multiple times now I've scheduled a podcast to go live , only for it to revert to draft afterwards . So there's definitely a poltergeist in the system and it's not an overworked copywriter making a mistake .
There's one time one of our clients back then I was working for this kind of one agency in Malaysia One of our clients back then I was working for this kind of one agency in Malaysia .
They had a budget of like 50,000 Malaysia Ringgit and then they were asking one of the influencers for the campaign to be somebody really really famous , which is like to kind of example it it's like a Beyonce , of like a Malaysia , basically to be a part of the campaign . And we told them no , your budget of 50 000 is not gonna cut it .
And they didn't take it very , very well . They just kind of start reporting us to our team lead and then they were still not satisfied that up to the point , even my country manager have to kind of jump in to really kind of save the day at the end of the day .
So I would say this is the worst experience , the scariest one , because it's not just affecting a campaign but up to the point I have a country manager involved . But hey , it's soft and that was in the past , thank you .
In one of my previous roles I used to work on an account for a recognizable vitamin company in the uk . Now the trouble was the ceo of that business had a partner who also had a business that they were quite keen for us as an agency to work on , which was all very exciting at the time . But the trouble was the product .
Um , it was a rather expensive makeup box , uh , costing around 300 pounds . Um , for a makeup box that had some lights in it and that was the kind of the usp and try as we might to to market this product and to drive business for the company , uh , no one wanted to buy a 300 pound makeup box .
Part of the problem we had was that all of the kind of promo images , um , and assets we received from them showed the box with the makeup in it , which convinced people that because the price was so high , it must come with the makeup included , which again was a point of controversy and a constant source of frustration for both parties frustration for for both
parties and , um , unfortunately , we couldn't convince the client that the price was an issue , because she was laboring under the illusion that that this was the greatest product on earth . This client was also particularly frosty and difficult to work with , which made made the fact that we had to push back on several elements all the more challenging .
So we ended up kind of separating from this business . The moral of the story is the client is not always right .
So there was a massive negative review from my previous company . I went in and reached out to the person who posted a negative review .
I was able to calm down the situation and , surprisingly , somebody else from the organization Also reached out to her and their response and communication with her Was definitely not aligned to Our brand's strategy and how we approached her , which basically made her even mad and because of that she decided to refuse to speak to us again and went ahead and created more
negative things about the company . Fun times .
That is all we have time for today . Uh , thank you everyone for listening . We hope we haven't scared you too much with those horror stories and all of the big scary words from our email uh section . There's definitely some useful snippets in there that I think you should go and implement right now . We do love that you've made it this far for your listen .
We love making this content . I'd love it if you could recommend the show to at least a friend , maybe a colleague , and thank you also to the Brew Digital team for their research and input into today's session .
Make sure to check out our past episodes , subscribe on whatever platform you use to listen to our podcasts , and we will see you on the next one no-transcript .