Here's a list of 10 ways to upgrade your email Marketing: 4.37 billion users on email worldwide every single day. As a platform, email is larger than anywhere else it is larger than YouTube It's larger than Facebook It's the largest. And I'm not suggesting or trying to dissuade you from leveraging social media marketing far from it. I'm looking today at email as another extension of Distributing your content.

your content that you publish across social. Why not also get it in the inboxes of your audience? Because more folks in your audience use email than any other platform and so why not look at it as another opportunity to build and position your brand For consideration whether they're looking to buy, sell, invest, Refer: I Want to see you leverage Email to get top of Mind What's more 99 of email users check their email every single day now I Know they're on social every day too. But I'm again, my point to you is not to say don't do social is to say look at email not just as a sales Channel but as a marketing channel. How can you leverage mass email to your entire database to position your brand further using the content intent that you're also leveraging on social media? Why not leverage email too? 99 of users check their inboxes daily and get this.

Most of them do it before they even scroll Social. That's how critical email is as a platform. So if you have not stepped into leveraging email marketing because maybe it's intimidating, maybe it's a little too techy for you? Well, this video is going to be very techy, but by the end of today's video, we're going to walk through 10 tips and tricks to ensure better deliverability, better success with your email marketing efforts So that the people who are on your list receive your emails and it works to position your brand. Because reality is, you can't let it stop you from leveraging The Goat Marketing Channel greatest of all time that is email marketing.

It's right at your fingertips. It's yours to be utilized. And so today we're going to talk about 10 techniques, 10 tactics to leverage and upgrade your email marketing. Welcome to this week of marketing! My name is Jason Pantana.

I'm your instructor and I am so glad you're tuned in if you're listening if you're watching I'm glad you're here and I want to hear from you in the comments today. If you're new to the channel, by the way, please make sure to tap that big red subscribe button And when you do, there's a little bell right next to it on YouTube and if you tap that, it turns on notifications. So whenever we publish new videos just like this one, you are the first to know about them and therefore the first to take action on all the ideas that come out of this show and all the other shows just like it on our channel. So I'm glad you're here without further.

Ado Let's dive into our topic which is to discuss one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten genius hacks to upgrade your email marketing. The first recommendation when it comes to email marketing is to absolutely pay critical and close attention to the subject line. choosing the wrong subject line could cause your email to maybe not get delivered. It could maybe trigger a spam filter or it could just be enough to say ah, I don't need this one I See a lot of mistakes pretty often coming from real estate agents.

Typically when they're sending out newsletters where the subject line might say something like newsletter number 143 which is an instant trigger to say you should delete this because this is just number 140. Whatever it is of other content, you don't need this, and especially considering that users inboxes do get busy, they do get clogged up. You want to make sure your subject line is clear and it cuts to the chase, so make sure the words count. My advice would be that when you build out, let's say it's a newsletter.

For instance, write the subject line last. A lot of folks say I'm going to make my subject line because if you look at the steps of actually building out an email campaign, whether you use MailChimp or cost of Contact or some other mass email service provider to distribute your email to your entire list, no matter which one you use. Generally speaking, they ask you what the subject line is before you get into the actual design and contents of the email. This is a mistake, especially with the newsletter.

My advice is go build the newsletter first so that you know what is the most juicy topic, what is really going to grab the attention of folks and that becomes then the heading in the subject line. So again, if you're making a newsletter, it's whatever you're you're leading content is. you're not going to say newsletter number, week, of whatever. Don't do that.

That's going to be a cue to get your email deleted. Lead with whatever is the bit of content that is the most compelling to make somebody who receives your email want to click it to read it. In fact, you may want to consider using some type of a tool. There are lots of free tools to determine the efficacy of your email subject line.

I Like the one that Omniscend uses, they have a free subject line tester where you can write your subject line in it and you can say test and it will give you a score between 0 and 100 and it will tell you how to improve your subject line. and in fact they're currently testing an AI that will write the subject line for you. I Have found that some of the existing AI tools write subject lines that score really low when it comes to these testers. so I would make sure you're running it through the test because the test has all kinds of data that can give some direction in terms of what does and doesn't work based upon your audience.

Based upon what we know about email users in terms of what they do and don't respond to I Would definitely check out Omnisense Free Tester. We can link that up in the description for you to check out. And one final thought about subject lines is you might consider an A B test most of your email service providers today, the modern ones again. MailChimp Constant contact Omni Said platforms like that They allow you to conduct a B tests where you can say I'm going to try this subject line for this group and this subject line for this group and we're going to see which one does better and see we can learn from it.

And in fact, most of these softwares have the ability to conduct a test for a period of time and then automatically roll with the one that works best based upon what level of bracket you're paying into. So a lot of these emails service providers again MailChimp Cost of contact. They have varying levels of pricing and the more you pay, the more features you get. So depending upon the size of your email list and how big of a part of your strategy, marketing wise, email is to be should give some governance as to how much do you want to spend on email Marketing platforms.

I Will give you my word of caution. you tend to get what you pay for. So if you're going to use a free email service provider like a mass email that maybe comes with your CRM be warned. Those servers from which emails are sent are often associated with other companies that have a partnership or affiliation agreement with a CRM and so they're typically giving the CRM access to kind of a freebie, shared server which may have a poor reputation in terms of email deliverability.

And if it's got a bad reputation, it rubs off on you and it can cause your emails to not make it to inboxes. And if your emails don't get into the inboxes of your users, they are effectively useless. Deliverability is everything in email marketing. Hey I wonder are you thinking right now Man, Email marketing I should be doing more email marketing, but you're questioning how to get started.

That's you. Make sure to check out our course Inbox Hero Inbox Hero is all about the A to Z of email marketing step by step on screen instruction. Everything you need to feel confident in terms of what emails do I send, when do I send them? What do I need to understand about email marketing In terms of the Nitty Gritty details. From start to finish, it's a roughly three hour video based course with me, your instructor walking you through step by step.

the framework of email marketing at the highest level. It's part of our Marketing Pro series of three online courses, this one here inbox, Hero plus two others, one that talks about your Google business profile and another that talks about social media and video. If. You're looking to level up your marketing game online, then make sure to check out Marketing Pro Click the link in the description for more details.

Second recommendation follows right on the heels of the subject line. so you write the subject line last once you know what the juiciest part of the email is, so you can really sculpt and craft a subject line that's compelling and gets a user to want to click. Following on the heels of that is preview text, also called pre-header text. A lot of email marketers forget about it, they leave it out.

Pre-header text or preview text is the one or two lines you often see in the inbox, where what you'll typically see in order of display is. You'll see who it came from and then it will typically show you the subject line and then you might see one or two lines from within the email. This is called the pre-header text or the preview text. Generally speaking, what most email service providers will do is they may grab the first one or two sentences of your email.

They might do that by default, and if they do, that's okay, But what they might do is they might use generic, boilerplate language, something to the effect of to update your subscription preferences blah dot dot, and then you typically can't see more. But if you're the recipient of that email, that's a dead giveaway that this is mass email. It's marketing. and if it looks like marketing, it's safe to ignore.

So be cognizant of the pre-header text and use it to double down on the subject line. Give the recipient that much more conviction that this is the right choice to click and open and read this email. Every little bit counts, especially the pre-header and subject line, because that's going to have a huge impact on whether or not they open your email at all. Now, once again, I'm assuming you're paying or utilizing some type of a mass email service provider.

MailChimp Cost of contact Bomb. Bomb. Omniscend. Uh, send in Blue, Send to Fox There's so many of them out there, and I'm not here today to make recommendations on any stretch.

However, these tools generally offer the ability to customize the pre-header that is the preview text. So do it and consider using tools like chat. GPT for instance that can help you write and craft and succinctly say, whatever it is, that's the most convincing to get someone to click and go read your email. Tip number three has everything to do with who the email came from.

It is your sender name. Now when you send out mass emails again, let's just say it's MailChimp MailChimp will ask you for what's called a reply to address I.E a reply to address. In other words, if somebody replies to your email, who is that email to be sent to now without getting super deep or granular. Here, when you send a mass email, there's really two variables of who the email came from.

It came from both your reply to address. that's the domain it sent it. So if I'm sending emails from Jasonpantena.com or Tom is sending emails from Tomferry.com the domain that sent that email is Tom Ferry or Jason Pantana. That's the domain sending the email, but it's that's only half the equation.

The other piece is the server that sent it. The server belongs to the the email service provider, so it's Mailchimp's server. or it's Send Grids server or it's Send In Blues server. It's whoever you use for mass email.

They provide the server from what your email comes. So when when your emails go out to all the various mailboxes on your list Yahoo addresses Gmail addresses Outlook addresses they knock at the door of those respective mailboxes and say, let me in and the mailbox says, well, who's there And when it wants to know who's there, it's looking at pretty much two variables: who the email come from. That's your sender name, that's the domain it came from. More on that in a little bit.

And then the second piece is the server that's sent it. and this is where you get. what you pay for comes into play because if you're sending emails from a server with a low reputation, then ouch. It's going to hurt your deliverability.

Real real bad. and in fact, the dirtiness of that server will rub off on the cleanliness of your domain. It will actually taint your domain's reputation. So quick.

Sidebar: If you're having issues with this, this is Not one of the tips you're going to want to look into feedback loops. You can Google It Feedback loops Every major mailbox like Gmail like Yahoo like Outlook provide feedback loops that will let email marketers like yourself have a feedback loop that will give them instruction about what they can do to rehabilitate maybe a damaged reputation and make roads toward Improvement so you can Google that they're called feedback loops. Anyways, back to the regularly scheduled broadcast where we're talking about the sender name. Here's what I Really want you to hear when it comes to the tip: I.E The tactic around the sender name A lot of you send emails from.

Maybe it's the name of your brokerage or it's your team or it's the company name. But what we know is when people get emails from people, they're far more likely to click and open and engage with those emails. So even if the name of your firm, for instance, is ABC Realty you don't want the email to say that it came from ABC Realty because recognize that when you provide instruction to let's say it's MailChimp It asks you for the reply to address, but it also asks you for the sender name. So I can say the reply to address is blah blah blah Jasonpantena.com the username at Jasonpanta.com but the actual sender name I could say is Jason Pantana.

or you might say the actual Center name is a came from ABC Realty. But if somebody sees that the email came from ABC Realty, they're less likely to click it than if it said it came from John at ABC Realty or if it came from John Smith Just for instance, a name is more likely to trigger someone to want to read and open with it. And what's more, that's the person people know. They know you and so make sure that the sender identity is clear to the recipient that they realize they're getting an email from you.

Next recommended practice is to utilize personalization. What does that mean? Well, that means you can personalize the emails as to who they're going out to. You're sending a mass email. So maybe you have a thousand people on your list or ten thousand or a hundred thousand people on your list of email subscribers and recipients.

By the way, subscribers is better. Permission marketing wins over buying emails and mass cold emailing people. I'm not a fan. This video isn't about that, but you're exposing yourself to massive risk if you're doing that anyways.

I Digress: Let's get back to the topic of you're sending out an email to your list. It's a mass email, but you have the ability in most of these email service providers to customize or that is to personalize who the email is to and the places you can do so are in the salutation at the very beginning of the body of the email. It might say Jason comma line break and then it can be the actual text. and if it wasn't going to Json let's say that the next person on your list was Jane It might say Jane comma and then it's the email contents.

you can personalize with what are called merge tags. Merge tags are for example: F name is a first name or last name. So we're imagining here that inside of your email service provider, there is some kind of a CRM component whereby all your email addresses are listed and perhaps you have other information about each person on the list. You have their email address, but maybe you have their first name, their last name, and other data points.

Utilizing these merge tags, you can personalize the email to say it's to Jane it's to Jerry it's to the individuals and it will automatically put the right name in based upon going through your list and kicking off each respective email to the entire list. Now, the places where these merge tags are typically used to personalize an email or one I Already said it. It's the salutation. So the salutation is in the beginning of the body of the email, but the other place is in the subject line now I'm going to talk in a little bit about one more caveat when it comes to subject lines: I won't spoil that yet, so you may want to think twice about this.

However, there is a lot of data that suggests if you personalize with the merge tag in the subject line. depending upon your email service provider's ability to actually facilitate this task, it can have a profound impact on the performance of your email. So first names are typically the ones we see utilized in terms of merge tags. But what if somebody when they filled out your form and they subscribe to your email list, what if they used like an initial so they said their name was Amy k or something like that and maybe you want to trim it off? well, guess what, you can get real code Savvy when it comes to merge tags.

So for example, let's say that you have first names for some of your people, but not for all your people. You can create conditions in the merge tag where it would say hey, if I don't have a first name, make it say friend so it might say Hi friend or whatever filler word you might want to use in place of having a first name. or maybe it could say I want if it's Amy K I just want Amy Well you can actually use what are called trim tags where you can trim off extra characters or hyphens or letters so that it is a clean sweep of everybody in your list and they all get a good personalized email. Now how am I supposed to write that code? You might wonder.

The answer is go to Chatgpt You can go into Chat GPT or Google Bard and you can say hey, write, write a merge tag to use the first name that trims off any characters after a space or a hyphen or whatever you want. And also if they don't have a first name, it will automatically supplement with this word and it will poof. Kick out the exact code that you should use and you copy and paste it and put it in MailChimp Put it in constant contact or whatever platform you're using and you are off to the races. Make sure you're using AI to help you write some of this more complicated code if you're not a coder.

Next, Genius email marketing hack if I do say so myself is to make your emails mobile. Optimized reality is most people who receive your emails are going to look at them on their phones. whether it's an iPhone or haven't forbid an Android, That's where they're going to consume the contents of your emails. So make them mobile optimized.

Well, how do you make an email mobile optimized? Well, here's the good news. Most of the heavy lifting and work is being done by the email service provider. MailChimp Cost of Contact Whoever you're using. They're doing most of the work to mobile optimize your email.

But here's how you can help one make your subject lines short. Now, when you use a tool like omniscend That I Referenced earlier on in terms of a free subject line tester, it's already considering the brevity, the shortness of your subject lines as a factor. This is simply here to remind you that hey, when you send out an email to a mobile device, you have a really, really limited amount of characters in the subject line before it gets cut off before the viewer who receives that email would only see a dot dot dot. So whatever critical words that would have convinced me to look at your email might have been there.

I'm not going to see them. So make your subject lines short to make your emails more mobile optimized. Additionally, make sure your emails are super scrollable for a mobile device. Now again, heavy lifting.

Falls Onto the email service providers they use and deploy what's called responsive Design, which detects the browser in which the viewer is seeing your email whether it's on a mobile device or on a tablet or on a browser desktop kind of application Wherever they're seeing it, it can detect their screen dimensions and then format automatically, but you can still do some work to help. If your email has lots of columns and whatnot, you're going to want to ensure that on a mobile application it's a single feed because people are trained to scroll through a feed on their phones and email is no different. So make sure that it looks good as a continuous scrolling feed one line from the top to the bottom when it comes to your email on mobile devices. If you want to have columns and whatnot, that as long as this response to design columns on a desktop browser, that's fine.

But when it comes to email for mobile devices, make sure it's a single column they can scroll through and also be cognizant of the size of your font. Is it easily legible? Is it easy to read? If at any point the viewer of your email has to pinch and zoom to click on a link or to read something, your email is broken. Number six on the list is what we've dubbed nested Ctas. Now, a CTA is a call to action, and nested means it's tucked in.

It's fit in between. What we're imagining here for you is a newsletter. A lot of you send out newsletters, and a newsletter is typically a digest of content you've been publishing across the internet. It could be blogs.

it could be videos on YouTube social media posts and it's a collection, a cornucopia of all the content you're producing. And you can come pile it into a newsletter of some type and email it out to your list once a week, which is a great practice. newsletters are traditionally a gift, they're a contribution piece, their value add, and so for a lot of you, there might be the sense of well I can't do a big old sales pitch. It's not a sales email.

Well, sales and marketing work really well together. So my advice is in between the sections of content, you should include nested calls to action. They're just tucked in between. Now a couple of points to think about that are sidebar points.

First, don't include so much content your email that nobody would ever make it to the bottom. That's a waste of your content. You'd be better off dividing it up and sending out more emails that people can actually manage their way through. Second, don't include so many Ctas that you water down the results of the one.

CTA you're actually trying to drive results to. In terms of ctas, it may be a link that drives somebody to your calendly where they can book a meeting with you looking to buy or sell, invest, refer that can schedule a consultation with you. It may be a link to a home valuation software or tool that you utilize, or it could be a link to go. search for homes on your website.

There are different Ctas you may have in your business. Join team, make a referral, whatever it is Nest those ctas in between the different content segments. Number seven on the list is to integrate videos in your email, but not literally don't actually put the video file in your email. No.

MP4s No Movs Gifs are fine. What? I'm really imagining here is a thumbnail image that if clicked, links to open up the video somewhere else where I can watch it. In fact, including an actual video in your email the it's considered rich media could cause your email to have massive deliverability issues and end up in junk folders or Spam folders and so forth. However, including videos by way of a thumbnail image that looks like a video.

A word that says video, click here. Just mentioning videos or making reference to videos whereby the viewer can click to go watch the video increases click-through performance by 65 percent. So like with every other kind of media on the planet, more video number eight on the list is to make it all clickable. make everything clickable.

In terms of metrics to determine how effective your email campaigns are, a lot of folks fall back on open rates. Well, open rates aren't very reliable these days. And here's why: a couple years ago Apple released what they dubbed the Male Privacy Protection Program And what it basically means in a nutshell is that Apple has the ability to pre-open emails on its own servers before delivering said emails into the inboxes of the actual users. which when Apple pre-opens to make sure there's nothing suspect going on with that email, it can trigger a false report open and so the email can get marked as having been opened before Apple ever even put it in your inbox.

Now why is that a big deal? Well, it's because more people access email on Apple Mail than anywhere else. It could be a Gmail or a Yahoo or Outlook, but it's on Apple Mail because it's on their iPhones And so that means your open rate is not reliable. So Apple is over reporting, opens Android under report opens and so what do you do about it? Well, you can't rely upon open rates unless you're looking at the Delta. So for example, if you're sending out emails and let's say you got a thousand subscribers and let's say that last month your open rate was I'll call it 30 and this month it dropped to 11.

Something happened because the Delta the change is over of if you recall math signify something big happened as long as the size of your list wasn't dramatically impacted. So you can measure the change in open rates as long as the change in number of subscribers isn't drastically changing month over month. But the number that really matters in terms of how is your email doing, Metric wise is its click-through rate. Our viewers are recipients of the emails, opening emails, and clicking something to engage with it.

Are they clicking on a video? Are they clicking on a call to action? Are they clicking on a banner of some type that takes them to a destination of your choosing? The destination could be on your website, which is my preference. I Would always encourage you to drive traffic to your website because chances are they can surf and check out other calls to action. What's more, they can also get pixeled and tagged for retargeting purposes. If you're Marketing in that capacity versus driving to a social media.

they can go see somebody else's stuff and you could potentially lose them a little bit more quickly than if they go to your website. But the main point here that I'm trying to make right now. The point I'm stressing now is make everything clickable so have lots of links, have lots of images, buttons, and whatnot that drive two different destinations to get more on a specific topic, especially if it's a newsletter. Now you might be thinking like, well, Jason What if I'm not sending out like a newsletter with lots of videos or different pieces of content that they might want to click to go learn more on I Get it.

If you have a very singular point to an email where there's only one call to action, that's okay too I would encourage you to make sure that you really set it up so that when they read down to the point of the call to action, they're like yeah, I'm going to click that because again, your click-through rate is your best. Optics In terms of how is this email performing with the metric, best practice: number nine is authentication. Now, before I dive into the exact authentications and protocols to put in place, let's talk about how these work. you're authenticating your domain.

So MailChimp just as an example, already has a good reputation as a provider when it comes to Gmail and Yahoo and the different mailboxes. There are email service providers and there are mailboxes. and so MailChimp works hard to protect its servers, their integrity. and so users who are for instance, leveraging MailChimp to send emails, they get to inherit the squeaky clean reputation that MailChimp has worked so hard to create for them.

But Gmail and Yahoo and Outlook they don't really know your domain unless it's authenticated. Now let's take a step back and talk about at a high level: what is authentication and fair warning: you might need someone to help you with this. In terms of actually going about doing it, it's a lot like installing a pixel or a tag. If you recall having a metapixel used to be your Facebook pixel, it was a string of code they gave you and Facebook asked you hey, install this code on the back end of your website.

So we know that it's your website because only you could have put it there. If it was your website, you can log into the back end of it. It's kind of like that whereby these authentications or strings of code that are installed on the back end of where your website is hosted. It's not.

So it's It's like the DNS. It's rather technical. It's kind of like that only with authentication of your email domain, your domain that sends email for you, which is like your website Jasonpantena.com Um, when you look at emails, if my email was so and so at Jasonpantana.com that's just the username at the Domain Jsonpantena.com So you're authenticating the entire domain and to do that, you're a service provider. Like MailChimp will give you the string of code, but they want it installed, not on the back end of your website like your Pixel is.

Typically, it's installed in the footer of your website. Again, this is probably technical for you if you're listening and watching right now, but with authenticating an email, you're actually installing that little bit of code or the record if you will. Inside the actual hosting of your website is the DNS servers. So as we get into authentication, I'm not telling you that you have to do this, I'm suggesting it's a best practice and so it may require reaching out to somebody who works in this space and can handle the technical details of this job.

There are three authentications that matter. I'm not going to go into all the nitty-gritty details of what each one does and here they are. The first one is SPF sender policy framework. Second one is Dkim that's domain Keys identified mail and the last one is called Dmarc domain-based message authentication.

Those are the three that really matter. So do some Googling do some research and get your domain authenticated so you get better deliverability because what it does is it increases Google and Yahoo and outlook's Trust of you because they know MailChimp servers. they're like, we know, mailchimp's good and we're going to take them for a good value. But boy, if you are also authenticated and MailChimp and you had really gone through that extra motion, that extra step, we're gonna have that much more certainty that you belong in the inboxes of our users.

And finally, and this one's a big one is to set up an automated welcome message whenever somebody joins your email list. Whether they're leads you generated from open houses or perhaps from a third-party portal, or perhaps through PPC efforts on your website or they just navigated to the contact form to actually subscribe on your website. However, you get people on your email list remember it's all about permission based marketing, so however, they opted in. It's critical that you send them a welcome email right away.

Welcome emails have almost a 100 read rate. Why? Because they just subscribed, What's more welcome emails will help remind somebody down the road why they're getting your emails. There's a lot of folks who have an email list that is largely based on they've gotten leads over the history of their careers and then they add those leads perhaps too and they have the right to if they have the right consent given. When they opted in, They add them to an email list and oftentimes the consumer is like, how did you get my email Why I'm on this list I Didn't sign up for it and they report it or they opt out.

And it hurts your deliverability because it starts to lessen your reputation with the different mailboxes. Well, if you took the time to set up an automated welcome email which all the major mailboxes like MailChimp and so forth have the ability to create this where somebody new opts in, it triggers the automatic email to go out. That's going to help massively in terms of reminding them down the road. This is why you're getting emails from us.

because this serves as the don't forget you're going to get emails from us. Your welcome campaign can be automated and it should include details such as hey, thanks for signing up It's really great to have you here. It's an opportunity to set an expectation for we send emails on this frequency. Be on the lookout for them.

Save us to your contacts or emails, go to your address book, and it's also a chance to say hey, here's what you missed out on. Here's some of the best resources that have been in past editions to sort of wet the palette and create anticipation for emails that are to come. A welcome campaign gets a super super high read rate and it primes subscribers to engage more effectively with your emails. And the more your subscribers engage with emails, the better your deliverability to all your subscribers and the more people who want to subscribe and the more nested Ctas they can click on to go, take action, and put themselves in line to do business with you.

There's no doubt about it, email marketing comes with the learning curve, but so does social media. So does video. So does any marketing channel worth investing in? It comes with the learning curve. Here's my recommendation: Invest in email.

It is the goat the greatest of all time. If you were overlooking email because perhaps you're technically intimidated, this video I Sincerely Hope gave you a lot more confidence in terms of okay I understand some of the mechanics and moving parts of email and I can leverage it. But I'm also willing to bet for many of you watching it opened up more questions than answers it gave because you started realizing wow, there is a lot when it comes to email marketing and if that's you, make sure to check out Inbox Hero. It's the course that's part of marketing.

Pro It's about three hours of video content that you can watch on your pace. To be sure you're confident with email marketing because email marketing is a huge opportunity to work the list to nurture your audience and to attract business where people come to you to buy, sell, invest, or refer. I'm so glad you watched and or listened to this podcast and I'm curious and I want to hear from you in the comments, what are you planning to do next with email marketing? Until next week? This is this week in Marketing Foreign.