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25 Email Marketing Hacks & Best Practices to Double Your Response Rates

Matt Heinz

President, Heinz Marketing

1 Copies of this deck

2 Free Extras!

– Secrets to Successful Email Marketing– Secrets to Successful Content Marketing– The Modern Marketer’s Field Guide

3 Email me (matt@heinzmarketing.com) or bring

me a business card with what you want

Housekeeping

1 Planning

2 Process

3 Optimization

4 Measurement

5 Integration

Email Hacks & Best Practices

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Planning:“No, that is NOT a campaign!”

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1 Campaigns vs programs vs “sends”

2 Know the objective (email is the drill, what is the hole??)

3 What is the customer point of view?

4 What stage of the buyer’s journey are you addressing?

5 What is the customer context (i.e. how and when will the email be

received?)

6 How will email integrate with other channels or outreach efforts?

7 Is email really the best channel to drive response?

8 List management (!)

Planning Best Practices

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2 Process:“Why can’t you just send it now?”

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1 Have a documented production checklist

2 Have a documented quality assurance process

3 Use Litmus to test multiple delivery formats, clients & channels

4 Optimize for HTML, pain text and image-free viewing

5 Require at least three subject line options in your creative brief

6 Require a creative brief (!)

7 Coordination with sales efforts

8 Sales enablement packages to support follow-up

Process Best Practices

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3 Optimization:“Counterintuitive usually wins…”

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1 Test days of the week

2 The “from” line – people vs. buildings vs. “do-not-reply”

3 Resend to unread prospects

4 What are you doing with transactional emails?– Format, calls to action, etc.

5 Video embeds (one:many and one:one)

6 Mobile optimization

7 Triggered responses (based on lead scoring or predictive analytics)

8 “You” vs “I” messaging

Optimization Best Practices

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1 Test (no subject)

2 The pros & cons of “RE:” and “FW:” subject lines

3 Tease, Personalize, Prioritize, Numbers

4 35-50 characters max to optimize for opens, 70+ characters to optimize

for clicks

Subject Line Best Practices

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1 Does marketing “own” the email?

2 What else does the recipient need to know?

3 WHEN should they get the email?

4 Transaction vs. Experience

5 Out-of-Office Emails

Transactional Email Best Practices

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1 Intro/teaser headers

2 Clarity of call to action

3 Contact information in the salutation

4 PS content

5 PPS content

Other variables to drive response

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4 Measurement:“Did it work?”

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1 Which metrics really matter?

2 Leading vs lagging indicators

3 Integrated systems tracking post-click conversion

4 Long-tail tracking impact (in isolation & across campaigns)

5 Don’t take inactives too seriously

Measurement Best Practices

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5 Integration:“Email does not stand alone…”

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1 Channel coordination: Email, Web, social, offline, events, etc

2 Sales coordination: Scheduling, follow-up materials, email/phone/VM

sequences

3 Post-campaign segmentation: Opens, clicks, unresponsives, etc.

4 Progressive profiling

Integration Best Practices

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• MailCharts – What your competitors are sending…

• TimeTrade – Let prospects schedule meetings with you immediately…

• unroll.me – Unsubscribe from all of your spam at once…

• Signals – See exactly who’s engaging with your email in real-time…

Other apps worth checking out…

1 Copies of this deck

2 Free Extras!

– Secrets to Successful Email Marketing– Secrets to Successful Content Marketing– The Modern Marketer’s Field Guide

3 Email me (matt@heinzmarketing.com) or bring

me a business card with what you want

Reminder!

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Thank You!