Holiday Email Marketing Campaigns

Hello everyone. If you can hear me. Okay, could you type something into the chat or the questions just to make sure the audio is working? Okay, great. Okay, you guys should be able to see my screen now. Let me know if you can see it. Nice to see some familiar names in the webinar. Nathan Singh. Good seeing ya. David Edwards. Good seeing ya. Kristen Hicks. Hey, Joy. Lots of familiar people. All right, it is past 2 o'. Clock. Looks like we have about 20 people on right now. I think Gotowebinar might have screwed up the time. It said it started at 1pm instead of 2pm Central, but there will be recording of this. I did remember to press the record button, so we should be good to go. And feel free to stop me at any time throughout this presentation. And we will. I'm happy to answer questions as we go through this. I'm going to try to move this into presentation mode. So the title of this webinar, this kind of came from a question or really something. On Erodium weekend, I was going to do a talk doing holiday email campaigns and nobody voted for it. It was a little bit too esoteric, but for that event. But I thought I would do it. I had the content anyway, so I thought I would do it kind of as a webinar. So here we are today. So the title I selected was how we generated 80,000 in new recurring annual revenue with our holiday campaign last year. This is referring to, I believe, our New Year's campaign. And we had really good success with it. And you have some opportunities with a new Black Friday campaign or a New Year's campaign that you really don't have with other times of the year. And we'll get into kind of why. So what we're going to do in the next 30 to 40 minutes, hopefully we'll be done by 2:45 or so. I'll tell you a little bit about me if you don't know who I am. We're going to talk about why holiday shopping and just why holiday marketing works so well. We're going to talk about how to craft a holiday email campaign. I'm going to show you some stats. And then if you want the templates that I have used last year, I'm going to sell them to you for 29 bucks. And then the money is going to go to a great charity. So if that is of interest to you, you'll be able to get the exact templates that I'm going to use this year for both Black Friday and Christmas. And if you want those all that money is going to go to a great charity. So we'll talk about that a little bit and of course we'll have time for Q and A. I think a lot of people on the webinar know who I am. It's my family, my wife, my kids. My wife's name is Karine. I have two kids, Micah and Addie. Degrees in computer science and Christian leadership and information systems. And I run a bunch of different businesses. Currently my two main businesses are MarketBeat Financial Media Company for stock investors. And then GoGoPhoto Contest is a company that helps animal shelters make money. So I'm a big believer that you should be talking from experience. And when I do a webinar like this, I really do try to speak from my personal experience. And hopefully you'll see that today as we kind of go through this content. This is brand new content. I've never talked about it before. I've never done a presentation about this before. It's not really in any of my books. So you guys are getting kind of the first crack at this fresh information. So hopefully you'll find it valuable. A little bit about MarketBeat. It serves for stock investors. We do 50 million page views a year. We're on track to do about five and a half million in revenue this year. Very profitable company. We have four employees that run a company. So it's very high margin. We have 725,000 people on our email list, 275,000 on our browser notification list. And we were on the Ink Tribe thousand list for the last three years. This is the experience that this presentation is coming from. So hopefully you will find it credible. I want to talk about some holiday stats. And these are from Shopify in 2017. So last year there were $108 billion in holiday sales. The average order was $84. And 3 billion unique emails were sent during Black Friday last year. You might see that stat and say, you know, a whole lot of people are sending out emails. Maybe I shouldn't do that because everyone else is doing it. And it would be hard for my messages to kind of get through the. Get through the inbox and get people to actually see it. I would challenge that thinking because if every major brand in the world is sending emails on Black Friday and Christmas and New Year's, there's probably a reason for that. It's because they're making lots of money doing that. Black Friday sales, New Year sales, these things work really well and that's why so many people are doing it and why you See so much activity from brands around the holiday seasons. In the brick and mortar days, this was their big selling time. That really hasn't changed. People are shopping for Christmas. It's just the time of year when people like to buy stuff for whatever reason. So you can see kind of the categories that shopify. You can see the categories that Shopify has listed for what people bought last year online. Obviously apparel is very popular. Accessories, you know, stuff that's easy to ship, electronics is definitely up there. Houseware, shoes, types of people, things that people buy online anyway obviously made the top of the list. And then things that were easy to stick into a box with FedEx or UPS and get to people's houses. So there is a really big economic opportunity here for your business during the holiday season and I just don't want to understate that. A lot of people are making a lot of money during holiday season and that can definitely be YouTube. Go to the next slide a couple more stats. 20 to 40% of sales for small and mid sized retailers take place within the last two months of the year. That's pretty impressive. Most people that sell stuff, any physical item, they make their money in November, December. This is why malls are just packed to the brim. This is why Walmart just loads their aisles up with stuff during the holiday season. It's because that is when people are buying in Mass. 55% of people visit stores on Black Friday and Cyber Monday. And really, I mean the reality is people are going to buy something during holiday season, they're going to buy something on Black Friday, they're going to buy something on leading up to Christmas. So if they are going to buy something, you know, why not have them buy something from you? This is a big sales and marketing opportunity for your business and hopefully you will take advantage of that. Because the reality is that if you are not marketing to your audience in the holiday season, somebody else will be marketing to your audience and then they will get that sale and you will not. Any questions at this point, feel free to type them in the chat. Happy to answer these kind of basic information. We all know that people make lots of, you know, there's lots of sales and marketing happening on holiday season, but this is kind of what the opportunity looks like. So let's talk about what it takes to craft one of these holiday campaigns. So your campaign should take over a period of about five days. Typically one email announcing a sale is not enough. Typically email open rates are 10 to 20%. So if you only send one email 10 to 20% of the people on your email list will ever see your campaign. So, so you really need to send one message a day for five days. And then on the last day of the campaign, you typically send three to four different emails to really kind of ramp up the urgency and kind of create a sense that hey, this is your last chance. If you want the discount, you want whatever, you want this special bonus, it's like, this is your chance, take it or leave it. And you can generate a lot of sales by you're sending several emails on your last day. And I can show that to you guys. In an example, I'm going to try to go to a different tab on my web browser. This is the internal platform we use for MarketBeat. And I'm going to just dial back to December 2017 here. Might take a minute. A lot of stuff's going on here. So we kind of ran two different New Year's campaigns. I'm going to try to pull up one of them. So here's our first email. We sent it at 7am last year and we sold 29 subscriptions in that first email that was sent out at 7am the second email was sent out at 12pm so five hours later that was another 20 sales. And these emails are really not anything all that special. The New Year's Eve special we are offering on our product is going to end in just a few hours. Sign up tonight to get the discount and remember that we have a 30 day money back guarantee. If you're not happy, you can cancel. This is kind of a risk reversal thing. So people don't really feel like they think if I buy this, they don't like it, I'll get my money back. So it reduces the risk for them. So we were at 29. And had 92 conversions. So if I had stopped after the first two emails, I would have missed out on 92 sales. You know, you think a lot of people at New Year's Eve parties, the people on my list tend to be people that don't go to New Year's Eve parties. So they know they probably won't be working on Saturday, but they might be at home on New Year's Eve watching Dick Clark or whoever it is now. So the fact that we sent out another 6pm email was more than double the sales of the two previous emails. And then we sent out one final email. It looks like it went out at like 9:21pm for whatever reason. And we had another 62 sales from that email. Jared says, what have your unsubscribe rates been after. When you email three, three to four emails on the last day of the campaign, it's really hasn't been a big deal. You see 140 unsubscribes there. 92. If I go back to say the first one. These might sound like big numbers but when we sent out this campaign, I'll show you how many people got these messages. Yeah, like this one we sent to 361,000 people and there were 177 unsubscribed. So it's just not a huge deal. People think you can send too many emails. I just don't think that's the case. I think, I mean obviously you send them off topic emails or if you're wasting people's time, that can cause unsubscribes. But I'm not worried at all about the unsubscribe rates on these. So what are the types of emails that you can send during a campaign? A lot of the information you're going to send is just info about your products and services. So who is the product for, what does it do, how much does it cost, what are the benefits? Why do I need this product? A lot of that kind of stuff. Testimonials, messages from people that have used your product and like your product though that's always helpful. You want to get very specific about the person giving the testimonial. So try to use their full name, try to use a picture, the name of their company. Testimonials get faked a lot. It's illegal to do that, but people still do it. So if you can kind of prove that your testimonial is from a real person with a picture like the name of the company and their full name, that adds credibility to that testimonial BigLog FAQ emails. Typically you'll have an FAQ page if I can find one here. Yeah. So the more people that time that people spend, I try to zoom in on this a little bit. The more time that people spend with your email, I think the more likely they are to buy. So every now and then we just send a really long email with all the information they would ever want to know kind of about our products and services. So this is probably a two or three page email and just by giving people, kind of giving people the opportunity to spend some time with it, they become interested and are more likely to buy. So you can have features and benefits. You know, here's everything that the product does for you. You can tell a story. We have examples of all of these, all these different types of emails and the templates that I'm going to show you. We're going to walk through one of the campaigns in more detail. In a few minutes you can do a video tour. So if you go to go to YouTube and type in MarketBeat, you know, we have these video tours that we do our products. That way people can get a feel what it's like to be on the inside. I'm not going to play this because I don't think it's going to play well over GoToWebinar. We can type in Mark B. On YouTube and see the kind of videos we do. They're not well produced. It's just me doing a video like this. But people really gives them a feel for the product and I think they work pretty well. Go back to my slides and then use a hard close. You really want to make sure that people know that like this is the last day of the sale, this is the last day of the bonus. You know, that kind of stuff. You have to really make it a decision time. Give them a point of decision where it's either you're going to buy it or you're not. You know, this deal is ending today. We're not going to extend it past that and you either need to buy it or not buy it. So Troy says as a question, he says, do your segment your. Do you segment your list at all? It seems like you sent to 360,000, which is correct. With a total list of 725,000, what were the qualifiers for sending? It's a good question. There's a couple reasons why we only sent to 360,000 people. Our list was closer to 500,000 at the beginning of the year. And for these sales emails, we only send to people that have opened messages from us within the last 90 days. This is a deliverability thing. When you email to people that are inactive and aren't opening messages from you, that will increase the spam rate and the likelihood is that they weren't going to open the email anyway. So we kind of limit these types of emails to our most engaged people. So yeah, if you're going to run a campaign, it should be over several days. So like for Thanksgiving, it could be Thanksgiving Day, through Cyber Monday or over New Year's it could be like the 26th through the 31st. And send multiple emails is the biggest thing you can do. I want to kind of stress the importance of leveraging the power of scarcity. People really have to feel like, you have to give them a reason that they need to buy like today or by the end of your campaign. So typically, if there is no sense of scarcity, they're probably not going to buy because then they think, well, I can just get the same deal later if I decide I want it. Then you really need to, like, give your customers incentive to take action today, otherwise you probably won't get that sale. So typically what we do is we have our best sale of the year over Black Friday and then we have the same discount over New Year. So normally our product is $200 a year. So then they can buy it for $100 a year over the Black Friday weekend and then the same discount over New Year. So you it's pretty much $100 off the first year, and then if they renew, it's full price after that. So if people know that that discount is going to end at the end of the sale, they're going to sign up. If they're thinking about signing up, they're going to sign up to get that discount because they know that discount will go away after the sale is over. You can offer a time limited bonus or a gift or something that you wouldn't normally get. So for us, one thing that we do sometimes is that we'll give away a copy of one of my books. I have a dividend investing book called Automatic Income. We'll give them a free copy of that book if they Sign up for MarketBeat Premium within a specified window. So it's if you sign up today by 11:59pm Pacific, we'll send you a free copy of Matt's dividend investing book, Automatic Income. And people will. They want to get the book. So then they sign up within that period of that time. Limited bonus. The key is to put like an end date on these things. You want to give people something if they take action now that they won't get access to later. That really is the key. People need to know that if I buy today, I get this thing that I want. If I buy tomorrow, I don't get this thing that I want. So you really do have to set that hard deadline and let people be very clear when your sale is going to end. So typically what we do is we'll say something like, if you sign up by Tomorrow night at 11:59pm Pacific, we'll send you a free copy of my dividend investing book, Automatic Income, and you'll also get $100 off in your first year. So something like that. So they know exactly when the sale is ending. And then we also use like a countdown timer that will show you. This is our New Year's countdown timer, already running, but it'll show, you know, literally count down. So if you see, oh, there's only zero days and four hours, you know, it really kind of creates a visual for people. A visual for people that, you know, encourages them to, like, take action. This is a service called motionmail, just motionmailapp.com but you can create, you can create these timer things. It's really easy to do. And then it'll show you how many people view that timer. It's kind of a neat, neat way to do it. So scared. For a campaign like this, you really need to find a way to use the power of scarcity. If people understand that something is going away, they're more likely to take action. Now, Jeremy Brown asked a question. He says, do you ever get feedback from people who purchase your product at full price and they see you are running specials like this? The answer is no. And the reason is because they never get these emails. If somebody is buy. If somebody bought something from me, I'm not going to send them an email trying to sell them something they already bought. So they will just never get that email and they will be totally unaware when getting that sale. Every now and then somebody will sign up with two emails and then they'll say, hey, I got this email for this discount. And we always just give them that discount and we don't make a big deal out of it. So if somebody gets an email, in my book, that's fair game for them to get that discount. But I'm a big believer, once you already sell something to people, once they already sold an idea, that's when you stop selling. We stop selling to people. And that prevents that issue from ever really being a problem. Another thing we like to do is have kind of a one more chance day. So after the sale is closed, people get a message saying, this discount is no longer available, this bonus is no longer available. We like to do what's called a one more chance day. So we'll reopen the discount or the bonus for 24 hours a few days after the sale ends. Now, we don't always do this because we don't want to train people that this is a thing that we do. But every now and then for like New Year's, we do this. So I'm going to try to go back to January in my calendar and I'll show you guys January of 28, I guess 18 is what I'm looking for and I'll show you some of these emails. So we sent four emails on this day again. So it's, you know, it's a message saying, hey, you know, we were spending a holiday, New Year's with our families, so lots of you emailed. And we didn't get back to all of you. So we've decided to open a discount for one more day. Here's details on the discount, here's details on the product, and it's basically the same shtick as the last day of the campaign. You can see here that we got 27 sales in the first email. And the second email was just kind of another, pretty much another reminder email info about the products or 27 sales there, 47 sales. And the second one, kind of the last chance email saying, hey, this is going to go away. And we had another eight sales there. So you can often get as many sales that you did on the last day of your campaign over again on your one more chance kind of day. So just because your sale is over doesn't mean you can't open it again. And opening something that, you know, reopening a campaign, you can often get a lot more sales. So for our New Year's 2017 campaign that we ran in the first couple days of January 2018, that was resulted in one third of all the sales that happened over the campaign. And it was because we opened that cart for one more day. So anybody that was thinking about on the Edge and didn't buy it, that's kind of their opportunity. And they say, hey, the sale was back, I missed out, but now I'm not going to miss out because of this One More Chance day. So what holiday do you do? We do both, but sometimes people will do one or the other. If you have a physical product, obviously Black Friday is your day. You're selling stuff. Any kind of physical object that you send through UPS or FedEx, Black Friday is your day. You can extend that through Cyber Monday, but that's the time that people are shopping for stuff. So if you're selling stuff, you should probably be doing a sale over the Black Friday period. If you're selling more intangible items like a subscription or just things that people don't give away as presents ever, you know, New Year's might be a better option. A lot of people are off work over New Year's. More time to check their personal email. You know, there are fewer marketers sending emails over New Year's versus Black Friday. And the reality is people are Kind of bored because they're not at work, got a lot of free time, and they're looking for something to do. So if you can sell them something like a subscription, you know, that will give them something to do. So a new Year sale can work pretty well. There's certainly nothing wrong with doing both of them. Some people do both of them, we do both of them. That's worked well for us. Certainly there are reasons to do one or the other as well. Here are our Black Friday stats from last year. We sent out 14 different campaigns. We sent out 2.4 million total messages. Of that, we had 485,000 open. So about 20% open rate, very common, pretty low click through rate, 0.6%. And that's because, you know, people are pretty familiar with their products. But that generated 126 total sales and then 25,000 in recurring annual revenue from that five day campaign. So that's great. That's basically 25 grand in new subscription revenue every year. Our new year sale obviously was much more successful. We sent out 26 campaigns, we sent out a lot more emails. We sent out 4.6 million emails, about 18% open rate. Obviously some people are gone, so they probably weren't looking at their email. Same Click through rate, 628 sales on this one. And then we had 80,000 in new recurring annual revenue. So this stuff really works. That is, we're at about 1.2 million in total recurring annual revenue. So for us to increase by 80,000, it's kind of an 8 to 10% increase over a few days. That's really a big deal. And it could certainly be a big deal for your business. Miranda asks, hi, Miranda says, would you find or think this translates to the nonprofit world where sales are donations? Absolutely, yes. I'm going to try to find an example for that. You know, there's a reason that nonprofits send out lots of messages. Towards December, January. You know, a lot of charitable giving happens. Let me try to find that. A good example. I have a letter that I wrote for a church that I would love to show off if I can find it. Yeah, I'm not gonna be able to find it, but a lot of nonprofits will send out. A lot of nonprofits will send out requests for donations kind of that second week of January. I recommend every nonprofit sends a letter to their donors list in November or kind of that first or second week in December saying, hey, we're doing a lot of great stuff. Here's some stuff we're working on next year. Please consider making this part of your end of the year giving. You know, I'm on, you know, I've helped doing some fundraising for my church. We've done this, I've done this for some other nonprofits. But definitely send a letter to your, your constituents towards the end of the year asking them for a donation. It works very, very well. Yeah. So those are our stats. And now I want to actually pull up. I think it's like I have in Dropbox here somewhere. If I were smart, I would have had this open already. But we're going to go through my actual Black Friday. And pull it up here. There we go. We're going to pull up my December 2017 campaign. We'll just go through some of the emails. So this is kind of what I'm going to be. I guess this is actually what we're going to use for this year. Try to zoom in on this if I can. So very similar to what we did last year. Hope you had a good Christmas. We went to the family farm, had a great time. We're starting to look forward to 2019. We're going to buy a bunch of stuff. It's going to cost lots of money to do this for you guys. Then say, would you step up and help cover some of these costs? Here's what it costs to run MarketBeat and would you consider to buy a premium subscription to help support this stuff? It says if you would like to upgrade, you know, here's the discount that's available. Then it says we're going to cut this off on New Year's Eve at midnight. And then just info about the product. Have a happy New Year. And then that countdown. Same email, different part of the campaign. Then we do that big FAQ email again. Hey, this other, you know, Matt sent this email yesterday offering this great discount. Here's info about the discount and then here's our big FAQ list, which works pretty well. Third email, quick reminder, pretty much the same stuff. So normally subscriptions cost this. If you sign up now, half off and then sign up by New Year's Eve. What is the product? Same kind of thing. Now we're at December 29th and then here is kind of more of a kind of a sale with water type message. The stock market has become a lot flatter stuff that hedge funds used to have. You can now have and you can have a two marketbeats. We're kind of talking about a feature here, Mark. We offers email alerts and you know, when we get information about one of your stocks we can send an SMS or text message to you. So this is kind of a features and benefits email and more. You know, it's kind of the same sign up now to get the discount. And then here is, we're on December 29th. I think this is one of our other campaigns. We do two campaigns simultaneously over, over New Year's, one for our premium subscribers and then one for premium subscribers that haven't bought the highest level subscription yet. So here is another email focusing on a feature that we have called the Idea Engine. Then we should be on December 30th. Again, reminder, reminder, reminder. These emails are all very similar and that's because you really have to drill stuff through people's heads. And here's kind of a more kind of a benefits email. It's like, here's why you would subscribe. But in every email we have the discount and the deadline, then the last day. Bad news. This is my favorite subject line of all time. People will open a subject line of bad news. And you know, some people say it's deceptive, but it really works. And you can kind of write your email away where it is bad news. The bad news is that if you don't buy today, you lose out on a discount. That's the bad news. It works really well. And the last thing we tend to do, shorter emails, kind of the scarcity mentality. Don't miss out. Here's your chance. And now we're at 5pm on New Year's Eve. This discount's ending in a few hours. And here we're actually improving the deal. So now what we're doing is normally the discount was $100 for the first year instead of 200. Now we're really giving people an opportunity to sign up with absolutely no risk because we're making it that you can get your first month for a dollar. So for people that are kind of on the edge, haven't made a decision yet, at the last minute, we're saying, all right, you haven't signed up yet. How about a dollar? Well, how about you sign up for a dollar for the first month? If you don't like it, cancel it. You're not going to get charged anymore. If you do like it, you're still going to get that same discount. So we're improving the deal towards kind of the end. And then I think this is our final email at 9pm on New Year's Eve. We've got a few hours left. $1 for your first month. Sign up now. It's by the end of it. You know, we're done talking about features and benefits. It's, you know, this is your last hands. Please take action. So that's kind of, that's kind of what our campaigns look like. Very, very straightforward features and benefits sales copy. I had a few questions come in. We're trying to answer those. Nathan Singh asks why is your from email domain different from your MarketBeat domain? Good question. So MarketBeat's brand name used to be Analyst Ratings Network. About 2015 we had that name and our old domain name was analystratings.net and we never changed the from email address that we use. And the reason we did that was because as we had just a very good domain and IP reputation set up for that domain and if it wasn't broken, I didn't see any reason to change it. And we're still using that from domain. Aaron says Aaron, Aaron is the reason we did this webinar. Aaron James, he really wanted to hear this content so I made the webinar mostly for him. So the rest of you get a benefit from it. But he says can you talk about your approach for a B subject or content during a sale? So how do you do split testing? I try to pull up campaign. I'll show you how we do split testing now. Typically we do subject line testing. Let's find one that's already done. So what we do is we, you know, we use three or four different subject lines. So this is for a recent campaign that we did and it was sign up for Market B Daily Premium and I'll send you my book. So we use three different subject lines. Your blueprint for successful dividend investing. And then can I send you my free book and then just automatic income book. Those are the three that I tested. So what we'll do is we'll send out we'll take the first 20% of the list and we'll send the three different subject lines broken down evenly. So 6% or so will or 6.667% will get that first email. Another 6.6 will get the second. Another 6.6% will get a third. Then after about 90 minutes or so we'll kind of pick a winner. So our system will pick pick this stock as or this subject line is the winner because it got the better open rate and it got more clicks. And then we sent out the remaining 80% of our list. Got the subject line. We don't do a whole lot of body testing. We just don't do that. And I probably could but there is some point where, you know, it just becomes over optimization. We have a pretty good idea of what works and what doesn't work. And I just don't see the need to send test two different email copies as well. So that's kind of what we do. So it's three different subject lines. The first 20% and then remaining 80%. Get the winning subject line is how we do things. Hold on. Few questions coming in. Alex Puja.