Really you’re still doing email marketing in 2021?👩🏻‍💻

Ready, Set, Hell yes — and it’s time for journey-based emails 📧

COVID-19 has forced people indoors and companies online. Marketing is Omni -ON, 24/7. Real-time is here with the new entry to market like Clubhouse and dancing on tick-tock, you need to redirect the engaged user to somewhere right? The end goal is ALWAYS to get them off socials into your owned database and email is the primary pillar. But let’s get real, once you created the initial interest and hook a user to give them your email — It’s time to nurture this owned channel, this is your opportunity to increase customer connection and trust in your 2021 email strategy.

But first, to have an effective marketing approach, we need to lead with empathy and CONSENT. Asking permission regularly to send emails is respecting the relationship. For instance, you’re on a sales drive or course launch, give the user the option to find out more only if they want to and self-segment. THIS is more important than ever. Subscribers are expecting a relationship that they are interested in. If you spoke to your glorious human about small business tips on a public forum and they wanted to have a direct connection on this style of information don’t just charge ahead and 100% try and upsell a course and YELLING buy me, buy me.

Be cool, it now the time to build relationships and provide a value-driven, inclusive personalized experience to allow the opportunity to like you and date you for a bit. Right now companies are leaning more heavily on email to hit the right note and now more than ever empower you and your team (no matter the skill level) to deliver personalized, on-brand experiences at scale and this starts with the right tech stack and strategy.

This month at www.yarnly.ai we have had a number of our clients that needed support with their email strategy. It’s common when we look under the hood of a communication strategy for chatbots (Yarnly.ai builds chatbots at their core) we see the duck tape many detached ill-equipped tech stacks and it’s the nature of digital maturity in the tools available, increased traffic sources and strategies that need to be supported by the customer CRM and email automation platform. It evolves constantly — This week's email specifically has been top of mind and I spent my think time this week with the legends at CXL which brings you advanced level marketing training: get deep skills in growth, customer acquisition, analytics, and conversion optimization.

So here’s is a short and sharp list of the main areas of focus with tips we all need to implement from basics to best-in-class from the CXL crew.

How to make things work in today inbox in 2021

1. Journey based emails drive real connections and real return on investment, by using progressive capture to advise ongoing love letters (yes email is not just a transactional 1 to many approaches) ask your customers questions, get to know your humans and the superpower in providing real results is personalization, segmentation, automation, optimization.
2. B2C design for mobile-first
3. B2B gets desktop opens when you're communicating with a business email address. All brands are not equal, check your analytics for devise stats
4. Personalization in your subject line — 25 characters (mobile)
5. Sender reputation is critical. Ensure you are getting opt-in and permissions regularly, set expectations with the receiver — inbox placement is a statistic you need to monitor
6. Register to win campaigns does not give you permission to place the person on an email list — long term
7. Don’t buy, rent, trade emails lists / don’t scrape from social media
8. Keep it skimmable
9. Clarity trumps clever — simple CTA’s
10. Regularly send once a month to protect your deliverability. This is the basic strategy and required as a standard.
11. List growth: clean your house before you invite people over. clean unsubscribed, your complainers, bounces, and trim your inactive with a re-engagement sequence.

CLIENT EXAMPLE: Sends emails once a week to their unengaged audience, but sends three times a week to their engaged audience to trim their list back. Not having to pay for the part of the list that’s unengaged, only paying for volume in their case, so they don’t have to pay for sending to those unengaged connections. This will also make the open rate on the engaged portion of it be just a little bit truer and get better delivery and inbox placement for their future emails.

12. Find your own voice — get weird, talk like you

13. Optimising your email marketing using data, data, data can and should inform the content, the timing, and certainly the outcome of any email marketing campaigns and programs.

14.Use dynamic images but stay under 400 kilobytes for slow internet

15. Accessibility. The most important consideration that we need to focus on in 2020 to make a bigger impact on inclusion is accessibility WHO estimates 1.3 billion people worldwide live with some form of visual impairment, with 217 million living with moderate to severe vision impairment. Approximately 36 million people worldwide are blind. This means accessibility for your readers, for example, if somebody is visually impaired, they use a screen reader to read the content of your emails. In that case, we need to make sure text in images, better structure, and colors need to be considered. But this is also about devices, right? If you think about a website needing to work on five different browsers, an email has to work 50 different types of inboxes. From Outlook on a PC versus a Mac to an Android phone, but like the Gmail app on an Android phone, all of those devices render your code differently.

A great article by Campaign Monitor captures a how-to on employ email accessibility —

• Maintain a logical reading order
• Use heading elements in code
• Include sufficient contrast between text and background colors
• Provide text alternatives for images
• Feature meaningful link text
• Keep your code concise
• Use a descriptive subject line

Check out these awesome tools to add to your tool kit

Return Path see whether your emails are making it to the inbox

FreshAddress can cleanse your list

Email on Acid Previews to ensure your email looks the way you intended

Live Clicker Nifty images dynamic content supporting personalization in images

A/B TestingSignificance Calculator Neil Patel A/B statistical significance calculator that you can use on Neil Patel’s website

Readable This online tool lets you run your content through multiple readability tests

Overview

Don’t overcook the sale, lead with real valuable customer information, be there for your customers, and be human. It’s a noisy world and we want to create better more enjoyable experiences for anyone that engages with our emails.

Who am I

Ohhh 👋 I’m Aoife — pronounced (Efa-aaa), a digital marketing strategist and the founder of Yarnly.AI, living and working on the Eora Nation Australia. My mission is to amplify and support purposeful brands that are wild cards, have brave voices, and are championing change.

Yarnly’s mission is to work with humans on their dance floor providing equity to elevate voices through redesigned automation strategies with a focus on purposeful, ethical, and consensual marketing for socially responsible brand experiences.

We love meeting new people and creating magic to elevate underrepresented voices. Feel free to reach me at www.yarnly.ai aoife@yarnly.ai — maybe we can help you with your email journey.

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🍃 I acknowledge the traditional custodians throughout Australia, recognising their continuing connection to land, water, and culture, and pay my respect to elders, past, present, and emerging.🍃