Summer Camp(aigns) Part 2: Email and Nurture Tips and Techniques
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In this Digital Marketing Bootcamp session, you’ll learn email tips and techniques that will help you build engaging, long-lasting relationships with your prospects and customers.
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Summer Camp(aigns) Part 2: Email and Nurture Tips and Techniques
- 1. Summer Camp(aigns) Part 2 Email and Nurture: Tips and Techniques Mike Madden Demand Generation Program Manager Marketo
- 2. • This webinar is being recorded! Slides and recording will be sent to you after the webinar concludes. • Have a question? Chat in the bottom left and I’ll get to your questions after the webinar. • Posting to social? Use our hashtag - #mktgnation • There is a brief survey after this webinar. Housekeeping
- 3. Page 3Marketo Proprietary and Confidential | © Marketo, Inc. 7/8/2016
- 4. Page 4Marketo Proprietary and Confidential | © Marketo, Inc. 7/8/2016 Four Focus Areas Design Content DeliverabilityNurture
- 5. Page 5Marketo Proprietary and Confidential | © Marketo, Inc. 7/8/2016 Design Design Content DeliverabilityNurture 1. Font 2. Text Size 3. Color 4. HTML Buttons 5. Branding 6. Images
- 6. Page 6Marketo Proprietary and Confidential | © Marketo, Inc. 7/8/2016 H1 – Bold, Legible and Decisive H2 – Additional Details CTA
- 7. Page 7Marketo Proprietary and Confidential | © Marketo, Inc. 7/8/2016 Desktop MobileTablet
- 8. Page 8Marketo Proprietary and Confidential | © Marketo, Inc. 7/8/2016 Alt Tags The following elements have alt tags: • Logo (top left) • Social buttons (top right) • Banner Example Code: <img src="http://pages2.marketo.com/rs/561-HYG- 937/images/11319-YourMarketingAutomationChecklist- Email_564x355.jpg" alt="Your Marketing Automation Checklist" width="564px" height="355" border="0" />
- 9. Page 9Marketo Proprietary and Confidential | © Marketo, Inc. 7/8/2016 What’s Better? HTML Buttons or Images Buttons? Control: Image CTA Test: HTML Button
- 10. Page 10Marketo Proprietary and Confidential | © Marketo, Inc. 7/8/2016 The Inbox Looks a Little Different… Control: Test:
- 11. Page 11Marketo Proprietary and Confidential | © Marketo, Inc. 7/8/2016 The Results: 5% Higher Open Rate 15% Higher click/open rate 20% Higher CTR
- 12. Page 12Marketo Proprietary and Confidential | © Marketo, Inc. 7/8/2016 Resources for HTML Buttons Here are a few simple, free websites for building HTML buttons: • bestcssbuttongenerator.com • dabuttonfactory.com • css3buttongenerator.com
- 13. Page 13Marketo Proprietary and Confidential | © Marketo, Inc. 7/8/2016 Design Principles Recap Design Content DeliverabilityNurture 1. Less is more 2. Weight the message more than the image 3. Design for how people consume
- 14. Page 14Marketo Proprietary and Confidential | © Marketo, Inc. 7/8/2016 Content Design Content DeliverabilityNurture
- 15. Page 15Marketo Proprietary and Confidential | © Marketo, Inc. 7/8/2016 The Power of Personalization
- 16. Page 16Marketo Proprietary and Confidential | © Marketo, Inc. 7/8/2016 Leverage Data
- 17. 0 50 100 150 200 250 300 350 400 100 1000 10000 100000 EngagementScore Email Send Size Source: 100s of Marketo campaigns
- 18. Page 18Marketo Proprietary and Confidential | © Marketo, Inc. 7/8/2016 Behavioral Triggers
- 19. Page 19Marketo Proprietary and Confidential | © Marketo, Inc. 7/8/2016 Behavioral Trigger Example
- 20. Page 20Marketo Proprietary and Confidential | © Marketo, Inc. 7/8/2016 Behavior Trigger Marketo Example
- 21. Page 21Marketo Proprietary and Confidential | © Marketo, Inc. 7/8/2016 Great Processes for Great Content • Peer reviews • Sign Offs • Check lists • Branding guidelines Audience When you upload a list for the audience you want to send an email to make sure all names are properly capitalized Make sure you exclude bad email values from your list Make sure you reference the most up to date field created by marketing operations Content Remove B2B heavy language in favor of business type neutral language Engagement engine spelt with a little e Speak to the broader Marketing Automation Platforms and not just to software Be careful of dynamic content Creative Make sure images are border = 0 Change the description for the images in image description Campaign Make sure time is in correct region Schedule campaigns minimum an hour out so you have enough time to make any changes if necessary
- 22. Page 22Marketo Proprietary and Confidential | © Marketo, Inc. 7/8/2016 Content Recap Design Content DeliverabilityNurture 1. Power of Personalization 2. Leverage Data 3. Utilize behaviors 4. Create processes
- 23. Page 23Marketo Proprietary and Confidential | © Marketo, Inc. 7/8/2016 Nurture Design Content DeliverabilityNurture
- 25. Page 25Marketo Proprietary and Confidential | © Marketo, Inc. 7/8/2016 ABCDE of Building Your Own Nurturing 1. Audience – Target market, sub segment, behavior 2. Build a Team – Who is accountable? 3. Channels – Multi-channel experience 4. Define the Experience – Story arcs 5. Evaluate – Criteria for implementing nurtures
- 26. A - Audience
- 27. B – Build a Team
- 28. C - Channels
- 29. Page 29Marketo Proprietary and Confidential | © Marketo, Inc. 7/8/2016 D – Define the Experience
- 30. What does success look like at different time points? E - Evaluate Nurture Program One Set –Up Complete Jan Feb Apr May Jun Engagement Score = 70 4x the # of fast leads (<1 month) compared to pre-nurture 2x the # of opportunities With Optimizations, Engagement Score = 80 May 2x the # of MQLs compared to pre-nurture Example:
- 31. Marketing & Sales alignment achieved Touch lead nurture ZERO Increase in conversion 15% Sales & Marketing Alignment Drives Lead Conversion “The greatest benefit from Marketo is the ability to sync sales and marketing.” -Mark Lerner, Director of Marketing
- 32. Page 32Marketo Proprietary and Confidential | © Marketo, Inc. 7/8/2016 Deliverability Design Content DeliverabilityNurture
- 33. Page 33Marketo Proprietary and Confidential | © Marketo, Inc. 7/8/2016 6 Best Practices for Email Deliverability 1. Build trust 2. Use responsible list building methods 3. Choose a solid email marketing platform 4. Manage your complaint rate 5. Monitor your reputation metrics 6. Be transparent
- 34. Page 34Marketo Proprietary and Confidential | © Marketo, Inc. 7/8/2016 For a more in depth look at deliverability, check out our other webinar 7 Plays to Make Your Email Deliverability Unstoppable! https://www.marketo.com/webinars/7-plays-to-make-your-email-deliverability- unstoppable/
- 35. Page 35Marketo Proprietary and Confidential | © Marketo, Inc. 7/8/2016 Email Marketing Summer Camp Design Content DeliverabilityNurture • Less is more • Weight the message more than the image • Design for how people consume • Power of Personalization • Leverage Data • Utilize behaviors • Create processes • A - Audience • B – Build a Team • C - Channels • D – Define Experience • E – Evaluate Critiera • Build Trust • Build good lists • Good vendor • Complaint Rate • Reputation Metric • Transparency
- 36. Questions? Or send me an email: mmadden@marketo.com https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelmadden824
Editor's Notes
- Hi Everyone, My name is Mike Madden and I am a Demand Generation Program Manager at Marketo where I run email programs as well as manage Marketo’s lead nurturing for SMB. Today my goal is to provide you with some helpful tips, tools and examples of how you can not only improve your email campaigns, but also effectively use them in nurture to engage your prospects.
- And with that let’s get going!
- If you’ve been following our summer campaigns webinar series, we’ve discussed the three different stages of the funnel, which starts with attracting leads, then engaging with those leads through email and lead nurturing, then passing those on to sales to close. In this webinar, we are going to focus on the middle of the funnel and provide you with practical frameworks and exercises to help you better engage your audience using email and lead nurturing.
- Now, because this is a bootcamp style webinar, I’m going to break down lead engagement into 4 manageable focus areas for us to work through. In regards to design, we will go through the basics of what to consider when it comes to well designed emails, then in the content section we will go through the processes of producing great content and subject lines. Third, we will go through the ABCDE’s of things to consider when building your nurture programs and then we will end with resources to help you improve your deliverability metrics.
- So let’s begin with design, which really come down to the following five. Font, Text Size, Color, Branding and Images and when it comes to email design less is always more.
- Because you have a very limited space to work with when it comes to email design, it’s incredibly important to make sure your visual message, which consists of image and text, is incredibly clear and concise. To do this make sure that your H1 is bold, legible and decisive. Your H2 is where you can add in pertinent details such as date or location. Balance your text with your image in a way that makes your message pop out more than the image itself. The banner of an email is about attracting a person’s attention to have them want to read the body of the email, but at the end of the day its also about getting them to do the required action you want so including a clear CTA can help that desired behavior.
- Something to take into consideration is that people consume your design on different browsers and now on different screens. Making sure that your email is responsive on a mobile phone and tablet is incredibly important in making sure your emails are well-designed. In this case you have even less space to work with so get straight to the point by keeping images to a minimum and make the CTA even more clear. One additional point that I’d like to call out is that the font size is 2pts larger on mobile phone for increased readability. This is a great design element to incorporate!
- A commonly accepted best practice for email marketing is to use “alt” text, which stands for alternative text, on email images. Here’s why you should use “alt” tags: Most email clients block images by default. When images are blocked, your alt tags will display the text over the blocked images. This is a handy way to communicate messages even when images cannot. If you’re in a situation where images can’t load due to a bad or broken connection, alt tags will save the day! You’ll see in the screen shot on the left that our alt tags are displaying text that’s telling the recipient what the images are. And in the example code on the right, I’ve made the alt text bold and red. If you aren’t already using alt text in your emails, please start using it. It will help your deliverability rates and potentially even your open rates too!
- Lastly, I want to cover the topic of CTA buttons and which is better: image CTA or HTML CTAs. A while back, I ran a test to determine which is better. Here, we see two emails: the control, which is using a jpeg CTA Button that reads “RSVP NOW” and a Test, which uses an HTML button with the exact same “RSVP NOW” language. It’s tough to tell which button is which, right? Well that’s because the coded HTML button is made to be the same size, color, look and feel as it’s jpeg counterpart. Where this button really shines is when the email hits the inbox.
- When any email gets to your inbox, you (or your email client) will choose to download images, which counts as an opened email. On the left, you can see that all of the images need to be downloaded and that the “RSVP NOW” CTA Button, the main attraction in your email, is hidden. Only when images are downloaded does your image-based CTA render in all it’s glory. But on the right, the HTML button renders before the email is opened!!! Why? Because this is code, not an image. Nothing needs to be downloaded at all and your main call-to-action is made clear and apparent before the recipient opens the email. What’s most interesting about this test is the numbers. Let’s take a peek!
- Our little HTML button pulled in some impressive results! Now right off the bat, you might be thinking “how is it that the HTML button had a higher open rate?” Well, because the coded button rendered before the email was ever opened and it completely changed the user experience. As a result, we saw 5% higher opens! Additionally, we saw a 15% higher click to open rate and a 20% higher click through rate! These numbers were HUGE and impressed us big time. What’s even cooler is that these numbers are statistically significant, ensuring that we have full confidence that rolling out HTML buttons to all of our emails will produce a positive impact.
- How great would it be if you could produce 20% higher click through rates on all of your emails?? Well now you can!! Here’s a few simple, free websites for generating HTML buttons. They use very easy editors to build the button just how you like it and when you are finished, you just pop the HTML into your email. It’s as easy as that. And don’t worry about writing down these websites right now. I’ll be sending out this presentation later.
- To recap - the rules of email design come down to the following three: Less is always more Weight the message more than the image Design for how people consume your emails - for example mobile vs desktop, Image vs. HTML buttons, and images on vs images off
- Now that we’ve discussed design, let’s move on to helping you improve your content and subject lines
- The first part of great content is making it personal. I always think LinkedIn and Amazon do a really great job of this. They personalize the subject lines by using your name, but they also personalize the email. Using personalization of name or company tokens can help you increase your open rates. The power of personalization comes from the accuracy of your data, so if you have the data make sure you are leveraging it to help capture people’s attention.
- A great example of a company leveraging data is Lyft. Every month I receive an email from Lyft that lets me know how many rides I’ve taken in a month and how I’ve rated them. They are doing a good job of storing my ridership data and feeding it back to me in my emails. Add in firmagraphic and demographic data to make your messages even more powerful. By segmenting effectively, you can create targeted emails that result in higher engagement. In this case because Lyft knows I am in San Francisco it is showing me events I can attend in my region. Someone from Portland using Lyft will obviously get a different event calendar.
- This idea of effective segmentation as a way to improve your content is further bolstered by this graph. What you see here is that there is a direct correlation between the size of the send and engagement. The engagement score here is the combination of open rates, click through rates, and click to opens. More to the point, smaller sends are typically more engaging than large ones.
- Aside from Personalization - Behavior is an important element to designing successful email campaigns that attract attention. Companies are getting very sophisticated in how they listen for action on a website and then follow up with a relevant email later. This study from MarketingSherpa shows that being relevant and engaging with your audience requires sophisticated targeting that combines online body language (like website traffic and browsing behavior) with lifestyle and demographic data (personas) When behavioral cues are not used, email can be experienced as an interruption.
- This email from west elm is a perfect example of listening for action on a website and responding with a relevant and timely offer. In this case, I had been browsing around on their site but hadn’t put anything in my cart. Clearly West Elm is using an active trigger campaign that probably looks at the length of time someone spends looking at an item, and then sends an email to remind them of it the next day. It’s important for companies to keep their audience engaged even after they display just slight interest.
- In regards to how you can apply this to your own company, when someone downloads one of your assets you can set up a trigger campaign that identifies that behavior and maybe recommends a similar piece of content they may be interested in . In this example, when someone downloads out Power of A/B testing ebook, we send out a triggered email pointing them to our worksheet, What to Test with Your Digital Ads. It ‘s friendly, thoughtful, and shows that we are listening to behaviors to make their experience more relevant.
- Another great way to keep your content at a high standard is to implement peer reviews. At Marketo all of our work is actually reviewed by a peer before being sent to a manager for sign off. This provides a feedback mechanism to your work that can allow you to improve your content and take another reader’s perspective into the mix. Also developing your own email marketing check list is important. In it you can include company best practices that make your emails consistent and on brand. Here are just a few examples of check list items we have at Marketo. As humans we are incredibly prone to errors and the errors we make tend to always be the same ones so in your checklist include biases you have in your writing or mistakes you’ve made in the past so that you can catch them early. It’s also good to have sharing circles with coworkers where you are open about your mistakes so that people are aware of what to do when they are faced with a situation. At Marketo we call this our “Fail of the Week” where someone presents on a pitfall and what can be done in the future to catch these errors.
- To recap: Follow these 4 principles for creating great email content Personalized emails allow for higher engagement Leverage data to be more effective Utilize behaviors for your campaigns And create processes that create great content
- The third area we are going to focus on is nurture. Nurture - is the automation of email communications over a long period of time. It is the process of building effective relationships with potential customers throughout the buying journey, across multiple channels and touch points
- The reason to consider nurture as a part of the way you send emails is because if we look at this compiled data of emails sent at Marketo, what we notice is that when you just send a regular email by itself, indicated by the blue line, the avg click rate and the avg click to open rates are incredibly low. The best performing emails are the ones that are in a nurture and of course the ones that are triggered by a behavior. So what makes an email in nurture so much more effective than a regular batch and blast email? The answer is the nurturing is about having a conversation with your audience, whereas batch emails are just sending emails to an audience regardless of who they are and the behaviors they exhibit.
- So how you do think about building your own nurture or improving the nurtures you have? Here are the ABCDE’s to help you think through your nurturing campaigns. Everything begins with the audience you want to communicate with. Then you need to make sure you have the resources to build the nurtures that you want. Nurture is not just email, but it’s the integration of all your channels. Once you have all these things it’s time to define what experience you want your target market to have and then evaluate what are your success criteria.
- The first question you should always ask yourself is WHO you should nurture. It is important to get buy- in from stakeholders and understand where there are opportunities. Bring together your key stakeholders and define exactly who it is you should be marketing to. What data fields do you need, what minimum requirements do they need to meet in order to be a part of the target market. An email best practice tip is to have your marketing operations team build an approved set of mutually and non mutually exclusive segmentations that are easily referenceable. This will greatly help in minimizing issues you have when sending emails.
- On some marketing teams, all lead nurturing is managed by one person. In other organizations, it is divided amongst several people. The key thing to remember is lead nurturing is really a co-existence of two opposing variables: creativity and logic. It’s both an art and a science. Your nurture team needs to produce compelling content, but it also needs to perform complex marketing operations. So consider hiring for the following roles Nurture content manager Nurture operations manager
- C is for Channels and in particular the multi-channel experience For nurture to be effective, you have to think outside of just email. It is most effective when it is aligned to buyer behavior and their communication preferences.
- Alright now you’ve got your team together, you’ve defined your target market, you’re able to properly identify and qualify them, its time to think of the story you want to tell them. The best way to do this is to determine how many emails you want to nurture a particular audience with. Let’s go with 10. The first 2-4 emails tend to be the most important because they either capture the attention of your audience, or they are the ones that people unsubscribe from. This is where you should place your best performing emails. Once a person has unsubscribed from your emails, there goes your ability to tell someone a holistic story about your company. At Marketo our philosophy is to always start with light and engaging content like infographics or videos, and then move on to meatier pieces of content like eBooks or definitive guides. Finally you can include some product promotions, but do them carefully, sparsely and intermittently. You don’t want people to feel sold to and unsubscribe from your content. Nurture is all about engaging with people over a long period of time. At Marketo we have a rule of thumb called the 4-11 rule. For every four entertainment pieces, we send 1 soft promotion like a research report and 1 hard promotion like attend a demo or visit a pricing page Also be conscious that even though you create a story arc of emails 1 through 10, doesn’t mean that a person will read and receive all of them
- It is very important before you even start on any nurturing project to make sure that the team is aligned on objectives and outcomes. Evaluate what does success actually look like. 14 Minutes
- Oktopost is a great example of a company that previously had no automated lead nurturing, but after they went through the process of creating a lead nurture, they were able to increase their lead conversion rates by 15% and 80% of their converted leads came through the zero touch nurture campaign Video link http://www.marketo.com/customers/oktopost/ Company B2B social media management platform 1st solution to establish the ROI of social media Situation Lack of alignment between Sales and Marketing Marketing had to manually process and run all lead gen activity No automated lead nurturing or prioritization for sales follow up Solution Zero-touch lead nurture Intelligent lead scoring A/B testing Program level analytics Integration with Salesforce.com and Oktopost social media platform Results 80% of converted leads coming through ‘zero touch’ nurture program 15% increase in lead conversion rate Acquisition costs decreased significantly Overall Sales & Marketing alignment
- Now last but not least is Email Deliverability
- Your reputation as a sender is crucial. Email deliverability is more and more about your reputation as a sender and less about the actual content of your emails. Be sure to follow this proactive checklist to give your emails the best chance of hitting the inbox: 1) Give your subscribers a good reason to opt in and set clear expectations about what’s to come. 2) Verify all new email addresses before sending your messages, and regularly scrub your contact lists to remove inactive addresses. 3) Make sure the vendor you choose is sophisticated enough to handle bounce codes, feedback loops, and connection optimization. 4) If your email marketing service warns you that complaints made against you are high, take the warning seriously. 5) Get your email reputation score to learn what you need to change about your program in order to improve your reputation and your inbox placement rates. 6) Let your subscribers and potential subscribers know how you’re doing when it comes to complaint rates, bounces rates, and your Sender Score rank.
- Your reputation as a sender is crucial. Email deliverability is more and more about your reputation as a sender and less about the actual content of your emails. Be sure to follow this proactive checklist to give your emails the best chance of hitting the inbox: 1) Give your subscribers a good reason to opt in and set clear expectations about what’s to come. 2) Verify all new email addresses before sending your messages, and regularly scrub your contact lists to remove inactive addresses. 3) Make sure the vendor you choose is sophisticated enough to handle bounce codes, feedback loops, and connection optimization. 4) If your email marketing service warns you that complaints made against you are high, take the warning seriously. 5) Get your email reputation score to learn what you need to change about your program in order to improve your reputation and your inbox placement rates. 6) Let your subscribers and potential subscribers know how you’re doing when it comes to complaint rates, bounces rates, and your Sender Score rank.
- And that wraps up our email marketing and lead nurturing summer camp. This is an overview slide of everything we discuss nicely put into one slide
- Alright, that’s all I have for you. Before I answer a few questions, I’d like to remind you that there is a brief survey after this webinar. Please take 30 seconds to complete it to let me know how we can make these better for you in the future. Now on to the questions! What are some best practices for a/b testing? Single vs. multi-variate tests Look for statistical significance (use significance calculator) Look at whole email performance, not just single metric performance What do you think of welcome emails? I am a big proponent of welcome emails! When it comes to database cleanliness, most of the issues occur at the email acquisition stage. Welcome emails or a welcome series is a great way to accomplish a few different things. You can: Set expectations for email frequency and offer types Ask new subscribers to whitelist your email domain, which increases email inboxing over the long-term. Even better, for Gmail specific addresses, ask them to drag your email from the promotions tab to the primary tab. This ensures inbox placement in the primary tab. Build trust and branding with a warm, personalized message (I’ve heard than using a welcome email or welcome series can increase long-term email engagement by over 30%) Monitor soft bounces and hard bounces because you can clean out your lists if there are obvious junk values. Some people may sign up with a junk email address just to get an offer or deal. Other may have undesirable bounce types. You can catch these in a welcome email campaign and scrub them out before they make it into your long-term email strategy. My concern with HTML buttons is that they look very basic. How can I make them prettier and is the rendering different across browsers and clients? HTML buttons can be styled to look a little fancier as well. You can add gradients, rounded edges, and other elements that you’d normally mock up in photoshop. However, not all of these stylistic elements will be displayed the same across browsers and clients. For example, if you opened an email in Chrome, it will render the button nearly exactly as you had it mocked up and styled. But if you were to open the button in Outlook, much of the styling would be stripped out because Outlook uses Word to process HTML. The most important note here though is that using an HTML button changes the open experience for the recipient and will provide a positive lift in click-to-open rates and potentially even your open rates. My advice is to choose a button that is on brand and experiences minimal stylistic changes across all browsers. You can test these differences in a product like Litmus. This past year, a huge focus for us has been deliverability and our email inboxing rates. Does Marketo offer a feature that helps track deliverability and inboxing? Yes we do! Marketo offers an email deliverability package powered by 250ok. With it, you can track inboxing rates across all ISPs using a weighted seedlist that integrates very easily with Marketo. Additionally, there is a Litmus-like feature called Design Informant where you can check how your email renders across all devices, browsers, and email clients. Lastly and possibly most importantly, you can even track how your emails get placed within the Gmail tabs, which are Primary, Social, and Promotions. If you are committed to improving your email deliverability, the email deliverability package is a must-have. Alrighty, that’s about all the time we have for questions. I want to thank all of you for joining us today for the webinar. I hope you have actionable takeaways that you can implement in the next few days. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me directly and I’d be happy to help. Thank you everyone and have a great rest of your day!