Email Marketing Mastery: 2023 Trendigital Presentation

My name is Matt Paulson. We are going to talk about 10 different ways to improve your email marketing in the next 10 minutes. All right, founder and CEO of MarketBeat. We are a financial media business that empowers individual investors to make better trading decisions. I wrote a book about email marketing called Email Marketing Demystified. Sold 25,000 copies of that book. MarketBeat's email list is 3.2 million people and we have sent out more than 5 billion emails in the lifetime of MarketBeat. So we know email. 10 tips Tip number 1 replace your Opt in forms with calls to action. So in the 90s and 2000s we talked about this concept of banner blindness. People just started scrolling past the ads, click through rates went down. People just skip them to get to the content. This is now happening with email opt in forms. People are scrolling past your opt in forms. They are clicking the X. They are not looking at them in the way they used to. So the way to engage people for your opt in forums in 2023 is is to have buttons and text links and calls to actions that pop open an opt in form. This is the Motley Fool. They are a financial website similar to ours. They have no opt in forms on their news articles but they have six or seven calls to action above the fold on their website. Go to Emotley fool, check it out, see how they do it. It works really well. I'm not saying get rid of you know your opt in stuff altogether and only do these, but a mix of these types of links and buttons with exit intent is kind of a great combination to get email signups in 2023. Second thing you know we all think about getting opt in for opt ins to our email list on our website but if we are only doing that and we are only getting email opt ins on our website, we're doing ourselves a disservice. There are many other ways to get signups. So if you have a customer list, take those people, put them on your email list. They've already given you the money. They probably want your content. Perfectly legal, ethical, moral to do. Put those people on your email list. If you go to an event or you have an event, collect email signups at the door or at your booth or wherever, collect business cards, have a signup form you want to get. Capture as much contact information as you can. There are companies that you can pay called co registration companies and lead generation companies. Sparkloop.com is a great example where you can pay 2 or $3 to get signed up for your email list. Great services and you can spend kind of direct advertising money to get signups. Give that a shot. Email swaps. If you have a competitor who's friendly, send an email to their list. Have them send your email to their list. Those work really well. Have a contest. Say sign up for email list by this date and we're going to give away whatever on your social media. Have opt ins and calls to action saying hey, sign up our email list so you can get this. If you have print materials put on QR codes and then there are advanced strategies like retention.com, which will actually give you the email addresses of people that visit your website that don't type them in in your opt in form. They just you through the magic of big data, know who the people are on your website and they can give you their email signups. Number three, cross pollinate your marketing channels. So your email list should funnel into your social media and should funnel into your website. Your social media should funnel into your email and your website. Your website should funnel to email and social media. You want to get people to follow you on as many different platforms as possible to maximize the number of touch points that you have because the more touch points you have with your audience, they'll be more engaged and they'll be more likely to purchase. We've done this at MarketBeat. We had a giant email list and we wanted to build an SMS list. So we told people on our email list that hey, we would love for you to sign up for our SMS alerts and if you sign up we're going to send you a stock tip every Monday and we've got 100,000 SMS opt ins through that strategy. They're not new people, but we're communicating to the same people in a different way and we're making a boatload of money because of it. Number four, email. More often, most people just don't email enough. I think everybody should be emailing their list at least once a week. I'm definitely guilty of this on my personal mattpulson.com email list. You know, those people are lucky to get an email from me once a month and I'm not doing it right. You know, once a week is great baseline. If you're kind of in news and stuff that changes all the time, you could even consider emailing daily. Kind of what happens when you don't email your list often enough is that people forget they're on your list. They kind of forget who you are. They get disengaged and they say why am I on this list. Spam report. Who are you? How did you get here? How did you get in my inbox? And you just don't want that to happen. So try to email at least once a week. But also don't think that you need to come up with some magical new content to email your list. Sometimes it's hard to write new content to your list. Look on your website, look on your social media, look on your landing pages, look on your YouTube videos, make transcripts. You look at the content you already have in other places and repurpose that for your email list. Number five, send plain text emails. So Mack Weldon. Anybody wear Mack Weldon clothing? No? Okay, just me. They have cool pullovers, they're really nice. But anyway, big DTC e commerce clothing brand and they send plain text emails like this. Why would they do that? It's because they work when an email looks like this and it's just plain text and it says Dear Matt, I wanted to let you know about our new Aeronit X T shirt or whatever. It's awesome, we'd love for you to give it a try. Here's the link to check it out. Sincerely, whoever the founder of Mac Weldon is. And kind of the email signature, those emails work. So when we test kind of an email that's heavily templated versus something that's plain text at Markaby, the plain text version gets 20 to 30% more engagement. So every E commerce brand in the world is sending heavily templated emails with lots of pictures of products. Try something like this. It works. Number six, send triggered campaigns. So what is a triggered campaign? It is an email that will get a 70% open rate if you send it. Right. So a triggered campaign is when you send an email to your list, probably a contact email. And then when somebody opens that email, you trigger a second email to be sent. So if somebody is currently engaging with your content and you know they're in their email inbox, it is the perfect time to send them another email. So you can use the marketing automation technology inside your existing email platform to trigger a second email when somebody opens your your first email. So this is kind of a great way to send out a sales email but also send out a sales email that's you going to get great engagement. It's going to get, you know, great, great click through rates because you're really only people, you know emailing to people that are already engaged right now. Give that a try. Works really well. Number seven, make sure your email DNS records validate. So along with your domain name, your mattpulsen.com your markerbeat.com, there's this phone book called your DNS records that points different places on the Internet. And three of these records are to help validate who can send email on behalf of your domain. This is spf, dkim and dmarc. And then there's another one called BIMI that we don't need to get into right now. But basically what these records do is basically it says that this server over here is the one that can send email for mattpulsen.com if it's any other server over there or over there over there. Like those are fake, Those are impersonators, those are phishing. It's malware. Don't trust any of those, only trust this. And if you don't have your DNS verification records set up properly, you're going to get bad open rates. You're probably going spam forwarder might not get delivered at all. You really need to make sure these are set up properly. So how do you do this? You open up your ESP, your email service provider, Mailchimp, AWeber, ActiveCampaign, whatever, and you send a test email to your Gmail account. Open that email on your desktop Gmail and in the top right there'll be three dots and it'll open a menu with some options like that's where you go to print and forward it or whatever. And one of those options is show original. And then it will bring up something like this that will tell you if you are passing your the spf, the dkim and the DMARC tests. And if you're not passing them, you want to fix that right away. So if it's broken, email your email service provider, say, this thing says it's broken, how do I fix it? And then they'll tell you what to do. Number eight, run your emails through mailtester, mail-tester.com, mail tester without the dash doesn't work. Make sure to put the-in mail-tester.com so this is a tool that allows you to check your emails for spammy issues before they come out. So maybe you accidentally put the word Viagra or Cialis or something like that in your email and don't realize that that might be a problem. So mail tester would say, you know, it's a really good email you got there, but probably don't put Viagra in your email because that's lots of spam. But also check for like spf, dkim, those things It'll tell you if there are any kind of formatting problems with your email. Maybe there's a broken image, or who knows what the problem could be. But when you send your kind of a test email through esp, they give you an address to test it to, and then you do the test. And then it would tell you it'll run it through common spam filters and tell you if there's a problem with any of it. Every email that we Send out through MarketBeat goes through a mail tester first, and I'd encourage you to do that as well. And it's free, so that's cool. Number nine, stop emailing people who are inactive. So if you have had an. If you had an email list for three, four, five years, you'll notice that your open rates go down over time. Why is this? It's because people change hobbies, they change jobs, they change emails, and they just get less interested over time. And that's okay. At some point, even if people don't unsubscribe and it's been like two years since they've opened your email, you just kind of got to let them go. That's the nature of email marketing. Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail, aol, the big email providers, they want to see, you know, 20, 25% open rates on your email. And if you're not getting that, you kind of need to let the people who have an open email from you in a long time, you got to let them go, just let them move on to the next thing. So the way you kind of do this to push it a little bit is that if somebody's opened an email within the last 30 days, you know, you can email those people every day. You won't have an issue. If people have not opened in 30 days, maybe you've opened in 90 days. Maybe you email those people like once a week. And if somebody hasn't opened an email in 90 days, you email them maybe once a year or once a month or once a quarter just to try to reactivate them. And maybe they'll suddenly become interested in your stuff again. It really works. That will really skew. You want to email your most active people or your most recently active people more often, your least active people less often. And then that will get you the open rates you want. It'll keep the ESPs happy, it'll keep you out of that dreaded promotions folder everybody's afraid of. And keep your emails where you want to be. Number 10, ask for the sale. We have email lists to make money. Don't be afraid to ask for the sale. So many of us are like, I don't want to feel salesy. I don't want to send out a sales letter. I don't want to upset people. I don't want them to unsubscribe. Remember, we're trying to make money here. We're trying to make money for our business with our email list. So sometimes you just got to ask for the sale. Lots of ways to do this. You can do holiday sales. You can give them bonuses. Buy this today and you can have this clicker. You can do a new product launch. Hey, I got a new thing to sell. Do you want to buy it? You do? Bottles say, hey, if you buy this clicker and this thing in my pocket, you can have them both for half price. And then deadlines. You got to have deadlines. Urgency. Give them a reason to buy right now. Buy today. So one thing we'll do at MarketBeat is say, hey, if you want to Sign up for MarketBeat All Access Today, 100 credit in your account waiting for you, but it expires at midnight. You better buy it today. Those things work. I know it's dumb, it's cheesy, it's corny. But deadlines and urgency works. Last thing, I wrote a book about email marketing. Email marketing Demystified. It's on its third edition. It's pretty good if you want to check it out and learn more about email marketing. 99 cents. I could really use that 99 cents. So please go buy the book. Thanks, everybody. See you later.