Everybody's looking for the do's and don'ts on emails, if you want to get massive success welcome to this week in marketing today we talk about the top five do's and the top five don'ts when it comes to email marketing, because you know what you're not sending enough Email email marketing is a massively underutilized marketing channel and today's the day, all that changes welcome to this week in marketing. My name is jason pantana, i'm a business, coach and national speaker with tom ferry, and i am pleased ever so pleased to be having this conversation with you today about email marketing. Now, if you're new to the channel, make sure to head on over to the home page, see that big red subscribe button tap it to subscribe and then turn on the bell, so that you get notifications for whenever we publish new content to make sure that you're, The first to know about all the strategies, all the tactics that you can implement in your business to generate results all right back to our conversation about email marketing get this. There were surveys done recently that asked top marketers of all different industries.

Would they rather live without social media or email and get this four out of five marketers, like professional marketers, say they would sooner give up social media than they would give up email? Hence, i believe, there's something that we're missing in our space, about the importance and efficacy of email. And it's because you know what a lot of us have used canned services and we have spam issues and junk folder issues. But today's the day, all that changes, because today we talk about the top five do's in the top five don'ts, so that you can truly leverage email marketing, because the roi, the return on investment for email marketing is arguably bar. None when it comes to marketing channels.

Look, i talk a lot about video on the show, because i love video as a marketing format, but when it comes to marketing channels, i would argue that there's probably nothing better than email. So if email has not been put to work in your business, listen up. Take notes because today you're going all in on email now before we dive head first into the top five dues top five don'ts of email marketing; first, let's kind of clear up some lingo some language about email marketing, so we're all on the same page here today. I'm talking about one-to-many mass emails, sometimes called bulk emails.

In other words, i am not talking about like your regular everyday email through gmail or outlook or yahoo, or something like that. I'm not talking about basically saying hey, let's open up an email on gmail and put a whole bunch of people in the cc section, so we can just send a bunch of people an email, that's not the appropriate way to send mass email. I'm talking today about bulk email, mass email and we'll talk about tools and platforms in a second, but i want to tell you that i'm also not talking about like listing alerts or automation, campaigns or drip campaigns or things like that again, not one-to-one emails, but one-to-many Emails is what we're exploring today now in terms of who sends this, or how do we send this? I already said it's not gmail, it's not yahoo. It's not some tool like it's, not your regular email right.

This will be done through an email service provider in esp, for example, constant contact, mailchimp bombbomb, send grid, send in blue, like there's tons of them out there, and they all share some basic components that sort of make them under the umbrella of email service providers. For starters, they have the ability to manage your list of recipients, you can create lists and segment lists and have first names and last names and email addresses and some basic crm tools to manage your list of email recipients. That's the first component of an esp. The second one this is a biggie is the ability to design and template your email campaigns.

They let you put in buttons and headers and footers and images and links to videos and columns and pretty little placeholders and pretty little email designs that you could never really do in gmail, for instance, or could never really do in outlook, for instance, so the ability To build the campaign is another major component of an esp, and the last component of the esp worth talking about today is its ability to actually send the emails on your behalf. Now, let's get technical for a quick second, when you and i send email through gmail or outlook or whatever we send email through every day. Technically speaking, your email is being stored and sent through one of their servers like google servers or microsoft servers or whatever. Those are the servers that are sending and receiving emails, but when you send a mass email through, like mailchimp or constant contact or whatever you're technically using one of their servers to host and send your email now, you designate a reply to address which might reply to Your regular email, so if anybody comes back to your email, it goes to that server.

But the outgoing message, your one-to-many mass email campaign, is technically coming from one of their servers, and this is where we start to see discrepancies in the different providers, because some of them have well-managed servers that have not been marked as spam and don't get like. You know slaps on the wrist so to speak in terms of being labeled, as you know, notorious for sending spam and others work incredibly hard to protect the efficacy and integrity of their servers. So again, like three major components of an esp. It's the ability to manage your lists, the ability to make the campaigns and the servers from which you send your emails.

Today, we're talking about mass emails again like bombbomb mailchimp things like that one-to-many communications that are really kind of in the vein of newsletters or those types of blast, not listing alerts, not that other stuff we talked about. So are we clear, i hope, we're clear. Let's keep rolling all right drum roll, please, let's dive into our top 10, really top five dues top five don'ts and here's how i'm going to play this i'm going to go one. Do one! Don't one do one don't and you'll kind of pick up with me as we get going so first up is a do number one do.

Is you should personalize your email campaigns, personalize them? What does that mean? That means that most email service providers, the ones i just named a second ago, bombbomb mailchimp, constant contact. They had the ability to personalize an email campaign whereby you can use what's called a merge tag and what it will do is you can put it in the subject line and or in the body of your campaign, and it will go through your list of all The recipients and if you have log like their first name, their last name, their email address. If that data is in your list of recipients, it can actually port in the first name and personalize it to every single recipient. So it could say like json, comma rest of subject line or the opening like body could say: json, comma and then the rest of the campaign.

But what research has found is when you personalize email campaigns they just perform better. I mean like look when somebody says my name jason. My ears are programmed to perk up, i'm programmed to say what's in it for me, because they've called me by my name and if you call your recipients by their first name, it's going to improve every metric in your campaign. Next, up on the list is a don't our first don't of the day, which is don't use, deletable, subject lines if the subject line says something like newsletter number 143 or something like that.

That's like, as a recipient permission, to delete and ignore, because it's not telling me what's in it for me, if i open it so make sure when you're using subject lines, keep in mind that less is more, most people are viewing on mobile devices and so the Length of your subject line will get cut off if it's too long, so really just a few words personalize it. If you feel like that's appropriate for you and then just a few words that tell me what's in it for me to open it, don't say things like newsletter number, 123 and don't say like week of blank or something like that. Anything that looks like it's. Oh just another one, just another email coming in it creates a permission.

Slip for people to just delete it do not pass go. Do not collect 200. Do incorporate strategic calls to action. Now, on a recent episode of this week in marketing, i went in depth about calls to action.

We talked about really there's two buckets of ctas calls to action, there's research phase offers or calls to action and there's ready phase calls to action. Research phase calls to action, we said were things like get a free home valuation search for homes, things that are more representative of buyers and sellers who are kind of in the beginning, stages of thinking about or exploring the possibilities of, buying or selling real estate and Having ctas that align with that intent versus ready phase offers is like book a consultation, much more direct kind of transactional types of offers either way. What i'm telling you right now without going into too much depth of ctas is as you're making your newsletter like. Imagine.

It's a newsletter and you're scanning through it you've got some content sections, but in between those sections you should put some ctas so that people can actually invite themselves into doing business with you. So, for example, they might click a link that says schedule a consultation or something to that effect, because, ideally, your past clients, your sphere of influence contacts. Your database are the ones receiving your email here, and so i want to make sure that i am consistently inviting them into the idea of working with me should that be relevant to what they're thinking about doing whether it's buying selling investing referring whatever it is. So here's the pro here's the thing to do do include strategic ctas if you're sending out a newsletter or a recap or a roundup or other lingo we've tossed around in past episodes just make sure if it's content rich, which it should be don't forget to include Some calls to action in there, because, if somebody's in the market to take action and work with you, don't miss the window of opportunity back in the don'ts column, don't forget to optimize your emails for mobile devices fact is most of your recipients, no matter who you Are or where you are most of your recipients are going to view your emails on their iphones on androids on their mobile device.

In fact, we know, statistically, the greatest likelihood is they're using apple mail, the native app on iphones. It has the lion's share of most viewership of emails. More than google does with gmail it's going to happen on a mobile device, though that's my point. So what can you do to optimize for mobile? Well, one thing we already shared, which is the subject line.

Don't use too many words or characters where the subject lines get shaved off or cut off from being able to view. What's more, a lot of these email templates that agents can build inside of mailchimp or cost of contact are a little overly ornate. They have like right-hand, sidebars and left-hand sidebars and there's all this stuff, but the reality is on a mobile device. I'm going to scroll in my emails from top to bottom, so a single feed as the template of my email campaign is going to be optimal for consuming it on a mobile device which i'm prone to do additionally think about the font size.

Do i have to pinch and zoom to actually and then move around all clumsily in order to actually see the email campaign to read the email campaign, or is it really easy for me to read because the font size is mobile, appropriate? What about the buttons or the things i can click? Are they big enough that my fat thumb doesn't miss it, and i can actually easily open up and click on images and click on links and do the things that you want me to do in terms of the actions i'm supposed to take? When i get your email campaign, are you optimized for mobile recommendation? Number three is to set up an auto responder welcome campaign. Now, statistically speaking, this is probably going to be not probably, statistically speaking, this will be the best email campaign of all your email campaigns. It's been proven when somebody signs up for like a newsletter, for instance, and then the sender of that newsletter kicks off an automatic, hey, welcome to the list, thanks for joining here's, what you've missed up until now, click here do this. Here's about us and all that stuff that email is proven to be like killing every metric out there of all email, metrics, open rate, click-through rate, all the metrics, it's performing optimally.

So i know this one's kind of off our path a little bit of what we're talking about, but still, if you want to set up your email marketing campaigns for long-term success with every new subscriber that welcome, autoresponder campaign is going to crush it. For you continuing onward and upward, don't forget to include pre-header or preview text. Sometimes they call it preview text basically think about viewing email on your iphone. Typically in the inbox, you'll see the following three lines: the top line of the email is who it's from and then beneath that is its subject line and then beneath that is its pre-header text or preview text, which is basically one or two sentences that tells the Viewer more about the contents of that email to entice them, or you know, dissuade them from opening it up and looking at the email.

Now here's the deal. If you do not customize that pre-header text, the preview text, these email service providers will fill it with their own text and typically it's not what you want. It's usually going to say something like to update your subscription preferences click here and it's almost always a dead giveaway that this is a mass email, marketing communication and it gives viewers the permission mentally to say, i can ignore this delete and they swipe it off and Delete it, you should customize this text and it should really double down on the subject line. Give viewers even more of a reason to open your campaign.

Read it click it and engage with it. Recommendation number four is to make everything your email campaigns clickable. Now it used to be that the major metric that we measured everything by was open rate, but that's changed, and let me tell you why. Last summer, 2021 apple rolled out, this program called the mail privacy protection program and it's very official sounding and it's quite a tongue twister to say, but it's called the mail privacy protection program.

Basically, here's how it works. When you hook up your email to your apple mail, which we already said by the way that apple mail is the number one space where most people view their email bigger than google right. So this is a big deal when you hook up your email to apple mail, specifically ios apple mail, on your iphone again, the number one space where people look at email apple, actually preloads every single message before it puts it in your inbox. In other words, it preloads it on its own, separate server to kind of scan through and make sure there's nothing fishy going on with the email that could infringe upon your privacy, except for the fact that they're digging through your email to protect your privacy, which i'm Not going to try to reconcile but anyways when they dig through your email, it actually can report back a false open to the email service provider.

That's measuring this, so it might like bombbomb or mailchimp might think that the email got opened and it did but not by you. It got opened by apple on some off-site server before it was delivered into the inbox of the recipient, and then they may or may not have opened it. We have, no, they might have deleted it straight away and we don't know so. Open rate is no longer the gold standard in terms of measuring the performance of emails, and it falls to click through rate, so make everything.

Clickable include links in your campaigns, make the header click to your website, make the images click to your blog post, and this is a real kicker. You should, if you're, making video content, you should put the thumbnail images or an animated gif. If your email service provider can do that inside the campaign to entice people to go, click that and go watch it off site because we know statistically, the stat is that if you include videos in your email, videos get a 65 percent higher rate of click-through performance Than other types of things that somebody could click in an email campaign, but here's what i'm getting at it's all about making things clickable. If you want to be able to measure whether or not your email campaigns are working, make everything clickable next up and this one is highly controversial.

You may or may not agree with me. Don't spam people i'm just kidding. Of course, you agree with me: don't spam people, you don't want to get spammed and they don't want to get spammed either and i'm not accusing anybody, but if you are potentially buying lists of data and emailing them. I know there's a difference between cold email and warm email, but just make sure you know the rules in fact go read through the can spam act of 2003 know the rules and regulations in your local marketplace around email make sure that when you're sending email it's A value add and you're following all the rules, because guess what? If you get flagged for spamming people, it's going to blacklist you in terms of your sender score and the deliverability of your emails is going to tank.

It's not worth it so just make sure to get educated. Your esp mailchimp bombbomb, whoever should have language to explain what is spam and how to avoid it, and they should even have spam detection to make sure that you don't get thought of as spam, because there's so many spam filters out there. But one of the best ways to avoid spam filters is not the spam. Now, let's go technical for a quick.

Second, remember: i talked about your esp has servers from which it sends your emails, specifically their shared servers, meaning that there might be other users who have their own email list who are emailing from the same servers as you and if they're getting marked as spam, or If they're spamming people and then thus getting marked as spam by extension, it can reflect on your sender, reputation as well, so again, the email service provider that you use the servers from which they send matters. Sometimes a lot of these esps have free accounts and then paid accounts, but the paid accounts get better servers. I would do some research and figure out. Okay, am i using a shared server with a bunch of frankly novices who are sending email and potentially violating rules and spamming people, therefore making me far more susceptible to getting their bad send reputation? Because, if i am, i should pay the money and get the better account.

You should work with an esp who takes spam really seriously and protects the integrity of their servers and finally do number five there's one more don't, but the last do is to prune your email list once or twice a year, specifically we're looking to remove inactive subscribers And i know i know that it's such a hard bitter pill to swallow because reality is, you worked so hard building your email list and the idea of getting rid of people on the email list is like that's like removing followers from instagram but think about it. Followers who are inactive on instagram are also hurting you, if they're not engaging with your content, they're, actually hurting your reach and future reach and being getting suggested in all the metrics that matter on instagram and the same kind of truth applies with your email. If you have inactive subscribers on your email list, they're not clicking through they're, not really doing anything with your emails, then they're potentially harming your sender score they're, damaging your deliverability of your email campaigns. They are frankly dead weight.

Now i understand that you may not just like cold turkey cut them off. I would highly recommend some type of a win back sequence. Maybe one or two email campaigns, that's kind of like hey. Are you still there? Are you still interested in getting these emails because you may win some back, which is great, but if they don't reply to that, then it's a dead giveaway.

They need to be taken off your email list. Now you may decide to get a secondary email service provider where you put your b level and c level less active subscribers, because you don't want to get rid of them, but you should most certainly protect it from your main email service provider, because the integrity of The list and your deliverability scores your sender scores matters, because if your emails go to junk, if they go to spam, it's as if they never were sent at all because nobody ever saw them so prune the list every now and again, i know it's hard to Do but when you prune something you're actually setting it up for new growth, my last piece of advice don't send at random. Now we know through research that tuesdays and thursdays tend to be the best days, and we know that in terms of time of day, we know that, like lunch, breaks or periods of time, where people are kind of like taking a break theoretically are usually the best Times to get in someone's inbox, we also know that, like saturday is typically the worst time to get into somebody's inbox, but reality is it's going to be different for everybody. So what you should do is test pay attention to performance and then make an informed choice about.

When are you going to send your email campaigns, but here's what you're not going to do? You're not going to just send it random, because you're always running a gunning and just trying to get the email campaign out, don't send it random, send consistently and train your subscriber list for when they can expect your value at email campaigns. Again. The email campaigns like we can do all the things we just talked about, but if the content isn't there, it's not going to work, you got to have quality content, but the purpose of today's video is to understand some of the do's and don'ts so that you Can navigate the email marketing space deftly and have success in your marketing campaigns? We made it. That was a lot admittedly, but the reality is the greatness is in the details.

Email marketing is an underutilized channel and it needs to be put to work, but it needs to be put to work in the right most efficacious way possible, which is why we talked today about do's and don'ts. Now, if this content was useful for you, it would mean a ton if you would smash that like button, because that sends algorithmic overtones to youtube to say like hey. This is good content, show it to more people, so smash that, like button and also if you have a question or a comment or an idea, i want to hear from you in the comments. I am actually personally looking through the comments replying to comments and trying to make sure that you are gleaning as much value out of these videos as humanly possible, so leave a comment until next week.

This is this week in marketing.