Email Optimization Tips
[0:21] Intro
[0:45] What are email marketers not doing?
[5:53] Example of pre-header and subject line interplay
[8:23] Big issue with current email marketing: All image emails
[10:38] Email Optimization resources
[15:08] Am I going into the spam filter? How do I know?
[22:19] How to improve deliverability.
[27:16] Email “Reputation”
[28:02] The Wrap Up
CHRIS: Welcome to Matchcast everyone.
Today we are very excited to be joined by Jessica Best. And we are going to talk in some detail about email marketing. Jessica is the director of data driven marketing at Barkley and Kansas City and we are so, so excited to have her with us today. So thank you Jessica for joining us.
JESSICA: Thanks so much for having me, I’m looking forward to it.
CHRIS: Yeah. Absolutely.
We met Jessica at Content Jam in Chicago a few weeks back. Content Jam is a content marketing conference put on by our mutual friends here in Chicago at orbit media studios. Orbit is wonderful people; they do great website design work. Through them we met Jessica. Jessica gave a really, really packed with useful info master class on email marketing and in sitting and learning from Jessica, we thought we just had to have you on to get really deep on a few points about email marketing.
JESSICA: Yeah, I love it, I love that it was so useful for you and that’s my goal man, let’s share some more goodies.
CHRIS: For sure. So you showed in your Content Jam presentation the first slide was defining email marketing and you had a three pointed triangle, which I guess is the only kind of triangle. At one point you had content, another point was list, and the third point you had optimization.
Email marketing can be such a deep and nuanced topic so just want to provide that context. We’ll put this graphic if you don’t mind in the show notes. And going wherever this conversation takes us, but it seems like this will be mostly about optimization.
So just an FYI to have a little context for the listeners, we’ll talk mostly about email marketing optimization in these few minutes we have together to learn from Jessica.
So Jessica, at Matchnode we do email marketing, yet sitting in your presentation, we learned so much and there’s always so much to learn. And certainly you seem like an extreme expert on this particular subject.
Our listeners are small to medium sized business owners or other marketers and I would guess the vast majority of them are probably doing their own email marketing, so I certainly had the experience of having our eyes open to a few things you were mentioning.
What, for our listeners, is the one thing that you still see that most email marketers are not doing?
JESSICA: You know it’s a good point you’re bringing up that email marketers come in all shapes and sizes, just like anything. And I think whether you’ve got a team of 10 and you’ve haired an agency or whether you’ve got, you and a part time person proofing your emails for you. I really see some of those groups of people making the same mistakes. And the biggest one that comes to mind is the pre-header.
And I know you remember this from the presentation because it sort of blows people’s minds when they realize they have control over it. But the pre-header is that piece of text that sits above the first image in your email that you can actually see from the inbox in most inboxes.
It’s a snippet or a text or whatever in the inbox, and Outlook has it, Android has it. iOS devices have 2 lines, so it’s actually getting more real estate in the inbox than the subject line.
So a lot of people don’t optimize that. They kind of throw it away with, “If you can’t if you can’t see this email click here”, well you don’t realize that’s something you can customize and improve on. And what I’ve seen really great email marketers do is find that dance, between the subject line and the pre-header that drives up open rates.
That’s one of the small simple things, that right now people are sort of wasting that opportunity. So if you can find out what plays on that subject line, but isn’t necessary once you open the email. Because remember that some of that small text up there gets skimmed right over once you’re in the actual email. Focus on how you can supplement or maybe give a boost to the subject line to really garner that open.
CHRIS: That’s great, well, we’ll definitely include a screenshot of that in the show notes so people can see exactly what we’re talking about. And you mentioned, “if you can’t see this email click here”. Is that sort of the default that automatically goes into your pre-header if you don’t do anything to optimize it?
JESSICA: Bingo! And regardless of the email platform that you’re using, most of them will make that editable and all of them could make that editable for you. So even if you’re using a template, you might be using Constant Contact, or Mailchimp or Aweber. All of those as part of the template make that something that you can edit.
Even when you get up into Exact Target, or an Emfluence, or and IBM or whatever is out there. All of that is valuable. So you know, just taking the time to find that default line of text and add your additional pre-header or that second subject line boost to the front of that. That can be that two second ad that really drives that, hopefully, engagement.
CHRIS: That’s so great, because we all have the experience in todays’ world on our mobile devices of living in email and a lot of ways mobile devices are so well suited for email communication and seeing it in your inbox, and everyone is used to the subject line and the from name. And then there’s this other text and everybody reads it, and it really gives you the sense if you want to open that email, what does it say? What does that email hold beyond what we can see?
And just like a macro version of our inbox, you mentioned that the pre-header and the subject line should interplay. Can you give a hypothetical or real world example of how to do that correctly or what you’ve seen work?
JESSICA: Yeah, so one of my favorite examples, and full disclosure this is a client of mine, but they do such fun brand tone anyway. One of my favorite examples is Dairy Queen, they have a real sense, and this is another screenshot we can add, I think I added that to the presentation and we can maybe add that to the podcast.
They do a really nice job of interplay with those. Where the subject line sort of stands on its own, but that pre-header works. And my favorite example actually just came out today. And that is an “oops” email. And a sort of unknown fact in the world, is that your oops email will almost always outperform your other emails, because we’re human and we all want to know what you messed up on.
CHRIS: Yeah, so briefly what’s the oops email? I know what you mean but…
JESSICA: The oops email, meaning you sent something that shouldn’t have gone. In this case we sent a United States email that should have gone out to the entire United States list, and there were about 6000 people in there that were actually in Canada. It’s usually a part of the list that we take out and we forgot to take it out.
So now we owe those 6000 people an oops, we got some egg on our face.
CHRIS: This is like the ultimate oops for US – Canada relations. Because almost every Canadian I’ve met is such a nice person, but the only way they would not be your friend is if you assume they’re an American.
JESSICA: Right, and in this case, one of the products isn’t even available in Canada. So we’ve got two Blizzards, by the way, pumpkin pie Blizzard is maybe the best thing you’ll ever have in your life, but they have a pumpkin pie Blizzard and an apple pie Blizzard in the United States.
So the subject line was a nice play on apple vs pumpkin, which one is your favorite. And in Canada they only have the pumpkin pie. So we recently wrote a subject line that said, “oops”. It has to start with oops, oops subject lines have to start with oops.
“Oops, Canada is pumpkin pie Blizzard all the way”. Then the pre-header says, “apple pie Blizzard available in US locations only.”
So very clear play there between what you need to know, and if you don’t even open the email, you already know what the oops was. So a really nice play there. It’s obviously a continuation of the sentence, but the subject line stands on its own. It keeps the brand tone between the subject line and the pre-header. So really nicely done there.
CHRIS: Great, well, we are not advocating for purposely sending mistaken emails so you can send the oops email given that the oops emails are always opened at higher rate than normal emails. But that’s a good example, thank you for that.
So the pre-header is really important and that was really eye-opening in your presentation to us. What’s another example of something that sometimes, you maybe have a client or would-be client, or a prospect and you start to look into what they’re doing and you look at their emails and it just jumps off the screen at you that maybe some more, less experienced email marketers might not know or notice?
JESSICA: Actually when you asked the question there were two things that came to mind, and the second one is, I am floored, I still get so enraged in my inbox when people send me an email that is all image.
This is a tactic from 2004 maybe? And really designers that aren’t used to email design, it’s so easy to just design something up, save it as a jpeg and shove it into the email. And I understand the draw to do that. But unfortunately, up to 33% of our list can have images turned off. And that includes Outlook and Android.
So across desktop and mobile, we’re sending a blank email to subscribers who asked to receive promotions from us. Unless they take two or sometimes more clicks to download or load those images.
So the sort of whoa, we have a really great looking email, but even black text against white background, is still an image, instead of making it what we call “true text”. Meaning just put text in the email, the same way you would type text on a webpage or something like that.
That’s a big one, and unfortunately that one has other repercussions, and this gets back to optimizing and not just content. But actually optimizing your email.
The one big image emails according to spam filters, don’t say anything. So when you send your email to an inbox it has to pass the spam filter first. That spam filter is going to read your email to determine what it’s about and whether they should deliver it. Unfortunately, if all of the words are baked into images, your email is blank for that spam filter and it basically assumes you’re trying to hide something and categorizes you as spam.
So not only is the person you’re hoping to send this to not maybe seeing it, they may not even be receiving it in their inbox because the spam filter can’t read what it’s about.
CHRIS: OK so those are two really big reasons why you do not want single image and no text in your email, let’s unpack them one by one.
The first is that you might have images default “off” on your email, can you give some of the big platforms, whether Android, iOS, Outlook, Gmail, are there any that have images off by default?
JESSICA: Most installs of Outlook have images off by default, and early versions of Android have images off by default. My favorite resource for this because it sort of changes all the time, is Litmus, like the litmus test, litmus.com actually keeps a running total of whether images are enabled or disabled by default on certain browsers. And if you just search litmus.com they update it probably quarterly, which is why I almost don’t want to say anything that is maybe not true.
But they are a great resource for that. And the bottom line is if even one of your major inboxes is turning images off by default, it’s not worth it. Gmail used to and they load images now. iOS actually loads images by default on all devices, so we are always getting images and usually animated images work really well there too. But you don’t want to play with the wrong game there.
CHRIS: So you say, 33% of your list may not see it because images are off, yet a lot of emails maybe the majority of the emails in today’s email marketing have some images in them. So what do you do, do you take a look and create a second version of what it looks like for people who does images off? Because you’re going to have some percentage of people who aren’t going to see your images?
JESSICA: Great question, so the best trick here is to design your emails with a balance and design for those people who are going to have images turned off. You don’t need a second version, and I wouldn’t actually recommend spending a lot of time there. Certainly you can send a text only version, but that’s missing a lot of the really fun stuff you can do in email.
So instead we talk about, make sure you’re doing things like using alternate text, which is the text that goes behind an image when images are turned off. Doesn’t work in all inboxes, again Litmus has a really great chart for that one. But at least it works in some inboxes and you can even play with styling that in some cases which is kind of fun.
But the bigger thing is make sure you have true text, somewhere above the fold, I’m using air quotes on the podcast here, but above the fold on an email meaning before someone has to scroll, they have to see some reason to scroll. And that means for those people with images turned off, make sure you’ve got a really killer headline and some great body copy dragging them into the body of that email.
CHRIS: And on mobile, people are super happy to scroll, but you have to give them a reason to.
JESSICA: That’s right, and if they can’t see anything, there’s no reason to. Think about how fast you go through and triage your mobile inbox. Delete, delete, delete. And that’s what we see commonly, is that mobile, people report that in general, they’re triaging on mobile and maybe revisiting on desktop. But if it doesn’t look on mobile, a large percentage of your audience is going to delete your email, because it didn’t’ look like something they were interested in.
Think about the power of that, when 55% of our audience is maybe opening on a mobile device? And it’s different by every company of course, but the average overall is that over half of email is opened on some sort of mobile device. Make sure your mobile view, make sure your emails sort of squished view, looks like it’s worth opening as well.
CHRIS: And another reason to concentrate on that pre-header is that people just flip through, whether it’s twitter or email, I just have this vision of myself standing on a bus, just flying through messages. And swiping to the right the ones I don’t want, and they’re just gone. Like you said, I’m doing that trimming and triaging on my mobile device and knowing that when I sit down at my desktop to write a response to those that merit it, I’ve already cut out things that just aren’t worth my time. That no pre-header was giving me a hint as to why I should be reading this.
JESSICA: Bingo, and you are representative of the analytics in that.
CHRIS: Yeah, absolutely, not always, I’m a sample size of one in that story but in this case it works.
JESSICA: But that’s what I say, you remember I’m sure from the presentation, I want analytics, not anecdotes. Sometimes anecdotes help display the story in a way that makes it relatable, but the numbers show that you and I, when we triage our mobile inboxes, are the norm.
CHRIS: Absolutely, so we are talking about not over relying on images, and certainly not having one big image having all your text in it. And the first reason is as we said some people could have images turned off and that’s a complete fail. And the second reason is that you may go into the junk folder because the email looks empty to spam filters. It kind of reminds me of the same thing in SEO, you don’t want to put all your text on your website in images, because the search engines can’t index them.
JESSICA: Totally, it’s the same thing, the same concept, yeah.
CHRIS: And you mentioned Litmus is a great tool and we’ll certainly link to that, how do I find out if I’m going into the spam filter, do I do this before I send the email, after I send the email, how do I figure this out?
JESSICA: Great question, and this probably where I spend so much of my time, between breaks at conferences, or when I talk to people about this sort of foreign world of deliverability. Which is a multi-syllabic way of saying, pain in my butt.
Deliverability meaning the art and science of getting through to the inbox. How do you know if you’re getting through is the first step in fixing if you have a problem getting through to the inbox?
There are two different types of text, one is the pre send and one is the post send. And two different companies actually offer both. Litmus, obviously I’m a fan of Litmus, offers pre send testing. They integrate with a lot of email platforms. So if you are using Mailchimp, or Constant Contact or some of these others, they are either integrating Litmus, or they have something of their own, sometimes it’s called inbox doctor or something like that. That is actually meant to be before you send, the reason being if you send on the default settings, if you send your email through a sample spam filter at Gmail or Yahoo!, or business to business inboxes like Outlook.
If you send and it gets blocked, it’s time to make some changes to your email, and you want to do that before you send, because the point of that test is to give you a chance to correct that before you blast it out to your list. And just kind of don’t go anywhere.
CHRIS: Makes sense.
JESSICA: Litmus is the pre-test, and I would recommend that as often as you can if you find that you’ve got a good template going, maybe you don’t have to send every time. But because the content of your email is a big reason of why you would or would not get past a spam filter, Litmus’ filtering system really helps mock that up for you and helps you decide whether you’re on track or not for that type of thing.
CHRIS: Got it.
JESSICA: There’s also the post-send tests. And these are my favorites, because these are most likely to be a little more representative of what actually happened. And this is actually a company called Return Path which I work with most often.
They give you a list of fake addresses they’re real email addresses but they don’t belong to anybody, they belong to Return Path, and you send to them at the same time as you send to your real list. Once you hit send, it monitors where those emails landed for their faux inboxes.
So of 500 inboxes, we’ve got a-z at AOL, a-z at Gmail, a-z at Yahoo!. And they basically report our emails, your emails showed up in our inboxes that start with a, through inboxes that start with t. U and V went to the spam folder, and we never saw the rest of it.
So they’re actually giving you information about where that email landed in their sort of seed address list.
This is incredibly insightful, it’s always meant to be a guide, and not law, because if I sent to you Chris and you open every time and click and you and I have had emails back and forth, the next email I send to you, Gmail is going to put in the inbox because we have a relationship, and because you’ve proven that you’re interested.
So that notwithstanding, sort of on the default level, if nobody opened and nobody clicked, would this email arrive in the inbox, in the junk box, or nowhere?
So it’s a really good gauge, and they actually have something called panel data too. They’ve got a tool or a opt-in system where real subscribers who might be on your list, have sort of opted in to give Return Path information about where brand emails are landing in their real inboxes.
And that’s really good information because they are usually signing up for them, engaging with them or not. That history is sort of there. And that’s called panel data. That panel data only really works with bigger lists because if nobody from the panel is on your subscriber list, we just don’t have the data.
So for bigger senders, that’s something I really rely on, and for smaller senders, that seed list, that Return Path uses is really the biggest success that we can find in correlating that to what we see in our results.
Because the other thing you can look at, even if you don’t pay for either of these services, is you can actually go into a sent email, find your average open rate. Let’s say you’ve got a 20% open rate. In most systems you can break down your results by domain.
Let’s say at gmail.com, your gmail.com subscribers the open rate was 20%, Hotmail.com subscribers or outlook.com subscribers the open rate was 18%. And then yahoo.com subscribers, the open rate was 2% or 5%. Something is obviously out of whack there.
Yahoo! likely sent us to another folder, or maybe didn’t deliver us at all. And that’s sort of the dirty secret here.
CHRIS: Yeah, what is that, you sort of mentioned that earlier. You said go to the inbox, go to spam, or somewhere else. What is somewhere else? What do you mean, if it’s not in the inbox, not in spam, where did it go?
JESSICA: It can evaporate in space. This is my least favorite, I feel like I tell people Santa Claus doesn’t exist when I say this. In email, because the inboxes primary goal is to make their inbox user happy, they do not owe email marketers like us, anything at all. So when we send to them, they decide either where to place you, or unfortunately, if to place you.
So you could go to the inbox, or go to the junk folder, or Yahoo! in particular, and I kind of pick on them, but they pick on us so it’s mutual. Yahoo! can just decide, you know, we’re sending you to spam and people are marking you as spam, we’re just not going to deliver the rest of your lists. And that goes what we call missing.
And Return Path’s numbers on this, in the united states as a whole, all email marketers. About 73% of valid email marketing goes to the inbox, another 6 or 7% go to the spam folder, 20+% goes missing.
CHRIS: So a larger percentage is just not being delivered and is just disappearing than what goes to spam?
JESSICA: And you don’t know it’s happening unless you’re doing testing like this. And like I said, at the very basic level, start looking at your domain level report and see if you’ve got some things that look really out of whack. Sometimes you’ll see actual zeros.
So in the case of AOL, when AOL blocks you as spam, they 100% across the board block you. So you’ll see 0% open rate, 0% click through rate, and 100% bounce rate.
That is being blocked as spam at AOL. So take that as a first step, and if you see some red flags it’s time to start talking to either me, or Return Path directly. They do have a fee associated with it, so if you’re just not sure, you can always tweet me and see if you’re on the right track.
CHRIS: Such is life.
JESSICA: There is a business behind the deliverability quotient.
CHRIS: Tools that provide value cost money.
JESSICA: That’s right.
CHRIS: OK, so that is super interesting, so your email could just go missing, you mentioned 73% usually gets through, or that’s the standard or the normal, the average number. 6-7% to spam, 20% missing.
So these numbers you want to try to do a little bit better than those numbers, use them as a baseline, what do you do if you run one of these tests and you realize you’re at these numbers or below, and you need to do better. What are some ways to improve deliverability apart from not having one big image for example?
What are some other things you could do to improve, increase your deliverability? Because that’s just money left on the table if you’re not getting through.
JESSICA: Bingo, and that’s what I was going to sort of preface this with. 73% is the average, I think that most marketers that are paying attention to this, can expect 95-97, even 99% inbox placement.
One quick aside, do not confuse delivered or delivery in your email service provider, like Constant Contact or Mailchimp will give you 99% delivered. All that means is that that did not hard bounce back to you. A hard bounce is when somebodies email address is bad. So out of 100, I had 99 of them delivered and 1 of them bounced back to me as a bad address. That is not the same thing here.
CHRIS: No and it’s a measurement from the email platform, they’re like, we sent it, and we didn’t hear that it bounced back as dead, so we sent it. It’s not saying that it landed in the inbox, just that it was sent.
JESSICA: That’s exactly right, and that’s why these other tools have made a living. They’re actually finding that just because you sent it doesn’t mean it actually landed anywhere. And to your point again as a preface, the cost of deliverability monitoring or of the investment to fix your deliverability issues if you have them, is by far justified if you understand that potentially, really that 6% that’s going to spam, and that 20% that’s going missing, so a quarter of your audience doesn’t even have a chance to engage, doesn’t have a chance to buy something from you.
So if all of the things being equal you could get the same amount of money as you are from the 75% add another 25% on to that. Let’s say I sent to my list of 100 people and I’m only getting through to 75 of them, but 75 of those people purchased $75 worth of revenue, think of adding $25 more of revenue, if only I got through to the other 25 people.
I think I’m sending to 100 people and then 100 people are spending $75 but really 75 people are spending $75 and if I invest in getting through to the other 25 I can see a 33% uptick to my revenue or response rate, purely by getting through to people I already thought I was sending to.
So the case is there, right? Like the case to invest in this is definitely there and it starts with content. So how do we fix it? We found that we are 70% in the inbox, what’s next?
There are two sides to this, one is your content and that’s the easy side to be honest. And the other side is your reputation.
And I’ll start with content. Content like one big image – that’s out. Also misspellings or errors in your code if your coding your own emails, or something is wrong with the way you’ve been copy and pasting your emails, that can actually trigger your spam filter. Because it looks like it’s a careless act that a marketer wouldn’t do but a spammer would.
Unfortunately, if you are in the pharmaceutical industry or you sell Rolex watches, the content in your email can actually look spammy because it’s a common item with spammers.
And common things are, “marketing”, “percent off”, dollar signs, free, free, free, CIALIS in all caps.
CHRIS: Don’t put the worked Cialis in your email, don’t put the word Cialis or Viagra in your email.
JESSICA: Well and what’s funny is, I actually had a client who worked in pharmaceuticals and we had to be very careful in how we crafted our emails, because they did product testing for Cialis providers. They had to say the word Cialis in their emails.
So we had to figure out that balance of how do we talk about the product and feature the product in the images maybe, but maybe not have to say CIALIS in all caps with the registration mark in the body of the email.
CHRIS: Yeah so is that a case where you can actually use the image to hide the word and improve your chance to get through?
JESSICA: Yeah you like that? If the spammers are going to bring us down, we’re going to use the tricks where we can.
You just want to make sure you have the balance of text in that email that does talk about the benefits or has some sort of non-marketing, non-sales, non-pharma copy in it. And just test it, test it through Litmus and see what it takes to balance that out and get it through.
Quick tip there, if you can add at least 500 characters of text to your email, that balance of text to image becomes a little more moot. So if you have at least 500 characters of text in your email you’ve probably checked the box for how much you absolutely have to have before spam filters are just going to think you’re trying to scam them.
CHRIS: OK, so that’s a rule to keep in mind generally, is 500 characters of text, you’re generally going to be OK on the systems being able to read your emails and determine that it is not spam.
JESSICA: Yeah, bingo.
CHRIS: Great, well Jessica this has been so informative, fun, helpful, useful, I’m sure the listeners will agree. Thank you so much for joining us, do you have anything else you’d like to mention?
Oh first, follow Jessica on twitter @bestofjess awesome name, Jessica Best. That’s got to be fun.
JESSICA: It is.
CHRIS: Anything else Jessica you’d like to mention or include here for our listeners?
JESSICA: You know the last thing I’ll say, and this is a soap box of mine. All of your best intentions are great, but in email marketing it starts with getting permission to send email to that list. And that goes back to almost everything we’ve talked about here. Getting through to the inbox, getting high engagement rates and really having an optimized list. Make sure you’re sending what you’ve promised and only sending to those people that you’ve asked.
And that’s the biggest overarching rule that I can give you in email marketing. And if you want to talk to me about it, you can hit me up on twitter like Chris said @bestofjess on twitter, I’d love to connect with people and learn more about what they’re doing.
CHRIS: And that gets to what you said, content and reputation, and that gets to reputation which is a subject of another podcast.
Well, Thanks again for joining us Jess, we really appreciate all the time, information, awesome energy.
Thanks to our listeners and we will talk to you all very soon.
Resources:
–Email pre-send testing: Litmus
–Email post-send testing: ReturnPath
–Jessica’s post on the difference between missing and bounced emails
–intro and outro music from our friends at Sabers: https://sabersmusic.bandcamp.com/releases