Bethany Stachenfeld: Creating effective email marketing workflows, the best email tools and more.

Hey everyone, how's it going? Hello from Dubai, UAE. My name is Eihan Isaacs. I'm the head of global growth for the Founder Institute. I'm also the regional chapter director here for the UAE. Thank you so much for tuning in. We have a really, really exciting webinar for you folks, a live one. We have Bethany, who's the founder and CEO of SendSpark, who's going to be joining us, telling us all of everything we need to know about email workflows. I've been following Beth for quite some time, so really excited to kind of have her join us. We're just about to get started. You know, we've had about 350 people sign up. I think we'll get maybe about— we're already at 130. Oh wow, okay, we're at 132. So we'll see some more folks trickling in. You know, so Akshay, my producer in the back, can you bring up Bethany? But in the meantime, while he's doing that, folks, let us know where in the chat you're from. It'll be great to kind of get everyone's different locations. I see Dubai, Croatia, NYC, Kenya, What's KCK? I've never heard of that. Oh wow, Korea, Berlin, awesome. Ukraine, Costa Rica, Houston. Okay, it's all coming in, it's all coming. What's up, Bethany? You're on mute, just whenever you're ready to unmute yourself. We have SV, Chicago, BC, Canada, yes. Hey, Beth.

Hey, how's it going?

Good, good. You have a packed audience. I've done a few of these and I don't think we've had 145 people join in the first 3 minutes or so. Everyone's come to hear you speak. Folks, let me give a very, very brief intro to Bethany, and then we'll kind of go in and let her take it away. Just before that, some housekeeping. I'll do the intro, she'll give a 20-minute presentation, we'll jump into Q&A. Please use the Q&A tab on your my right. So I think it should be in the same area. Submit your questions there because we'll do about 5, 6 questions. You know, you can upvote it, we'll bring it up on stage and we'll discuss it. After the presentation and after the Q&A is done, we'll open up for networking. You'll see these virtual tables called Network, talk to each other, have fun, and talk about today's topic. And yes, we will email you a recording. In the recording, we'll have all the necessary information as well. So I know that comes up a lot. But let me do a very formal introduction to Beth and also an informal introduction to Beth because I've known her and been following her journey for the last few years. So Beth is the co-founder and CEO of SendSpark. It's a platform for sales teams to create personalized videos at scale. Under her leadership, SendSpark has grown to over 10,000 users from the organizations such as Salesforce, Outreach, LinkedIn, Snowflake, ZipRecruiter, and Microsoft. The company was ranked number 1 by G2 Crowd, sorry, yeah, G2, which is the application review platform in 2022 for video email implementation, ease of use, and results. And she's also led marketing at two very large scale-ups, I think out in Houston, right? Houston or Dallas, somewhere in there.

San Antonio, Texas.

San Antonio, so close. Apart from that, she's completed Venture for America, 500 Startups, On Deck, Stage 2 Accelerator, and you know, she's everything, she's full, like what an entrepreneur needs to be and a great founder. So I'm really, really excited to have her here. And my story, the way I know Beth is I spent some time at Reply.io. I got connected to her when she was doing her integration and we've kind of kept in touch. I think once a year we catch up and it's been very interesting to see how she's grown the platform very organically. Email has been a very core component to it. Also a lot of stuff around content, but I actually use the product quite a bit for sales purposes, for communicating to the team internally. Not to advocate, actually, you know what, to advocate for it heavily, I use the product because it's such a great, it is actually a great product to use. So folks, I hope you tune in and try to get rid of all the distractions, listen to what she has to say because this is raw knowledge on how to help you grow your startup with email. Bethany, I'll kick it over to you and we can get the presentation started. If that's good with you.

Awesome. Yeah, we have a ton to cover, so I'm just going to dive right in. Let me share my screen and give me a thumbs up in the chat when you see it. Okay.

Awesome.

Oh, cool. I see the thumbs up on screen. Okay, so we're going to cover email marketing 101, how to create high-converting workflows. And my goal for today— oh, sorry, I don't even know how I did that. Okay, so my goal for today is to help everyone here create email workflows that are going to dramatically increase revenue. I know that this is all founders, so we have to be very focused on how we're spending our time and what we're doing is actually moving the needle. Quick background on me. Thank you, Ian, for giving me that background. Just, you know, I'm calling in from New York. I started SendSpark because I am so passionate about email marketing and helping people connect. So, you know, we're taking a video approach to that, but I'm going to cover everything today. And I've also built a lot of email marketing workflows at other companies. I think email is one of the easiest ways to influence revenue. So that's what we're going to focus on. Here. Okay, so what we'll do is first we'll kind of go through the framework of how to think about email workflows and what they mean for your business. Then we'll dive, um, relatively deeply into crafting email content that you can start sending out, and I'll go through a few tools you can use to set things live. And then at the end, we have plenty of time for questions, so You can feel free to throw things in the chat, but if I don't catch them, we'll have ample time at the end. Also, I do have it open, so if there's any technical issues or you can't hear me or anything like that, just send a note and I'll see it. Okay, so before we officially dive in, do you mind launching the poll? Yeah, of just tell me what your business model is because I'm going to frame everything to kind of just to make sure it's making sense with your business model. So if you're freemium, free trial, sales-assisted, e-commerce, or something else, just fill out that poll and then we'll see those results. Awesome. So can everyone see the results now?

Cool.

It looks like we have a pretty good split, so I'll just kind of touch on everything. If you're other, throw that in the chat too and I'll see what that is. So premium, free trial. Perfect. Okay. Okay. So step 1, outlining your email workflows. Basically the way to think about your email workflows, it all starts with what is your customer journey? So you need to think about what are the key milestones that customers take as they're, as they're like becoming acquainted with your product, maybe signing up free, doing a free trial or entering your freemium workflow. Something else, converting to paid, expanding. This is obviously going to be different based on what your business model is and what your user journey is. But that's why you need to think through what are these key milestones. And as you're thinking this through, the hardest part is really cutting out the noise because there's— I just threw this— some things that are important to Sensepark on this page, but there's so many things that people could do as part of your user journey. So it's up to you to really distill the key points. Especially knowing, like, you can't do everything at once. You want to basically give yourself an MVP that you can build for. So really try to map this out. I would spend, like, more time doing this than anything else, just figuring out what is the true lifecycle for your customers. And then, then what you want to do is create a workflow for each of these steps. So So for example, if you were to look at SunSpark, you know, maybe the key things we're optimizing for are signing up, recording a video, share the video, convert to paid, invite team, which would basically be an expansion. Between each of these little steps is an email workflow that's designed to move someone from one step to the next step. And then for each of these workflows, you wanna identify The goal, so this is the milestone you're optimizing for, in this case, record a video. The trigger, which is what causes someone to enter the workflow, like they sign up. And then the filter, which is what would cause someone to exit the workflow. And this could be completing the goal, which is, you know, usually what it is, but it could also be maybe they enter a different workflow, like they're now entering your sales pipeline, or they take a different action that's similar enough that you just wanna call it. Like in this case, if they upload a video, we'll say, okay, you can leave this workflow. Move on to the next one. But really, we're optimizing for this one. Um, so this is what an email workflow is. And then as you're thinking through the content for it, what you basically want to do is have— like, what a workflow is, is have different reminders that are different emails that keep nudging people to complete the milestone. And you can have like infinite of these emails, really. You just space them out for different delays. You wanna think of your emails as bumpers. So if you have your, like your life cycle, that's the happy path that you want people to go through. And then the emails are bumpers to make sure that they're staying on that right path and you can keep nudging them. You just space them out with delays. So, okay, it's been 4 days, they still haven't done it. Send them another email, maybe wait 7 days, send another email. You can kind of do this. For the rest of their lives, you just wanna make sure that at some point, you know, they have the goals or filter, so they'll exit the workflow when it makes sense. Okay, so as you're doing this part, how to write a good email, things to keep in mind, you wanna catch attention right away. You wanna give a clear call to action of like what they should do and make this really concise. You really wanna show what's in it for them. So this is gonna come up, I'm gonna go through a bunch of examples soon, but like the key thing is why should they do this? You want them to do this because you want them to, you know, upgrade their account and pay you money. But like why do they want it? What's the value? The more you can distill this and show it for them, the better. And then always stick to a 3rd grade reading level. It doesn't matter if your customers are really, really smart, they probably are, but you wanna be able to make sure that they're able to ingest your content. Without spending any brainpower. They should be able to glance at your email and immediately intake all of the information. So simplify the language as much as possible. And then things to avoid, long emails. Don't try to be polite. Like sometimes people are so polite, they use so many words and just the value's not there. It's in the trash before people even know what the value is. Never apologize for sending an email. That's something you see a lot is like, oh, I'm sorry for that, for bugging you. I'm sorry for being annoying. Like, no, you're helping them. You're helping them find value. Get that out of your head. And in general, just avoid any kind of words that someone might see at a glance that will tip them off of this is an annoying email. Like you just wanna stick to pure value here. Okay. So I'm gonna show you some examples of good emails. And just so you know, I found a lot of these from reallygoodemails.com, which is an awesome resource. I'll share it at the end that you can go and find. Examples of good email. So you can skim through that as well on your own. So just an example is a welcome email. So let's say someone signs up, you want them to activate. This is one by Framer, build your first interactive prototype. It has a tutorial, nice image, shows a nice 1, 2, 3 of how to get started. I think this is really good because it shows what's in it for them. It doesn't say get started now, it says build your first interactive prototype. It's like, this is what you signed up for, we will help you do this. So this would be great. Um, it also has a clear call to action. It actually could be more clear. Welcome emails are a little tougher. You often see multiple things because there's usually multiple resources you want to include. But it does give a nice tutorial at the top and then this button at the bottom. I would assume they're the same button, I'm not sure. And I like the use of video. It has a tutorial here. Okay. This is another one that I think does a really good job. So an activation email for someone who signed up, but to help them get started. And again, it doesn't say get started. It says a deeper night's sleep. Yes, please. So, you know, like what's in it for you? A deeper night's sleep. You see that value. So that's the what's in it for them. The clear call to action. Start now. It's a nice visual. It's clearly on brand, right? It's about sleep and relaxation. This email, it was, you know, quite long and had some other stats that I think are more or less necessary. But cool. Another one. So this is more of a follow-up because remember, with the emails, it's not just about sending one email of what to do. It's also nudging people consistently. Until they do that action. And sometimes as you're sending more follow-ups, you might need to educate people a little bit more into the why. Like, if they don't take the first step right away, why are they not bought in? Maybe they don't really understand what you do. So this is an email from Zapier, and it kind of goes in the basics. What is a zap? Has a nice video here, you know, shows them really what it is. It has a lot of information in the email, but it's still very beautifully laid out and easy to digest. And the main thing is it's persistent, and you're gonna have to be a little bit creative as you're coming up, you know, with these long campaigns. You don't want to give up on your, on your users. You have to continue nurturing them and educating them until they take the right action. I would also recommend adding like personal follow-ups depending on your business model. But if you do have any type of sales assistants, or even just as founders, If you're trying to connect with people, maybe you have your nice marketing automation laid out, but then it can be nice to nudge people with personalized emails, maybe referencing actions they have or haven't taken and trying to get them on a call. You would just wanna qualify them and make sure that you're not sending this to every single user in your system, only the ones you actually wanna meet with. So this is one that we send out. This is from us at SendSpark. And basically if someone, requests like a video example from the website, we send this personalized follow-up. And by personalized, I mean it's from a person. It's not in like a marketing style. It looks more one-to-one and it has a nice video to, to book a meeting. And I included this because it actually has a pretty good click-through rate, right? Like nearly 14% of people book a demo from this email and it's super simple. So I'd recommend doing something like this. Even as I grab this screenshot, it has good engagement, but I think we could even make it a little bit simpler. So I might change that. I would also recommend adding follow-ups if you do do the sales assisted to include like why they should show up on a demo. So like if you are doing something to get them to meet a demo, you could use a video here to say, hey, here's what to expect in the demo. You know, there's gonna be a real person there. Don't just not show up, you know, either reschedule or cancel, hopefully come ask some questions. So we send this and this also gets really good engagement and has dramatically reduced no-show rates. So it's something I recommend it to most people we talk to. And again, super short, engaging with video, clear call to action, and easy to automate. Awesome. Okay, so some other tips to make your email stand out. If you couldn't tell, I'm really big on video, so I'd highly recommend using video wherever it's appropriate. It gets a lot more engagement than plain text emails, either video or even like GIFs or images or just other types of visuals. It's going to help you catch attention, show the next step, and deliver the what's in it for them better than text. And if you're doing this, I'd recommend SendSpark to make sure that you're gonna still get that really strong deliverability. The video's gonna render well in email. You can create personalized videos at scale and get all the analytics you need to continue improving your content. I would also say to really make sure that you're thinking of your emails as like an MVP with the lean startup methodology. Set things up for success for yourself. So like do the basics, protect your domain, If you're new to email marketing, just make sure you do all of the DKIM, DMARC, like other stuff to set yourself up well. Use subdomains and warm up your domains. But the reason you're using subdomains when you send out emails is let's say like you make a mistake, you accidentally spam out the entire world. It's okay. You just throw out those domains and start over. But you don't want to do that with your core domain. So just try to dummy-proof the system and know Do your best, you will make mistakes, make sure those mistakes don't hurt you too much. And then you can also consistently clean your context to make sure you're having high engagement and avoiding those mistakes to begin with. And then in general, just make sure to keep your workflows organized. This goes back to the beginning, like you're finding those key milestones in the customer journey that you're trying to optimize for. So don't try to do a workflow for every single thing at first. Just do a few and make sure that it's really easy to add to these and build them. 'Cause one of the dangers of email marketing, if you set up so much at the beginning and then you kind of forget what you've set live, it's really hard to update later and you end up just having to throw everything out and starting over. So just less is more, start simple and run A/B tests so you can, so you can continue to improve your content over time. The— actually, I think that I'm answering— I'm going to answer that question soon, Francisca. So good to you. Okay. Right now. So just in terms of setting the emails live, in terms of the design, what I would look at is really good email. So that's where I copied those screenshots from. And it's a really great platform. I've been using it for, for like years, like well before starting SendSpark. And not only does it give you good email, like content and designs for every, like unique thing, like you can say, oh, I want a welcome video. I want an activation email. I want an e-commerce email. It will give you the code for that email so you can use it and modify it for you. And people contribute their own, right? It's, it's something that people are willing to share. And then just to talk about these other tools, use email marketing software to set your emails live. I just put a few I, I really like HubSpot as a, like, a marketing-driven, like, inbound-driven company. We do, like, free trials, um, and free, and we have a freemium model. HubSpot's really good for anything like product-led B2B SaaS. I've also used Customer.io. It's a bit cheaper and very good as well. Um, Klaviyo, I've heard really great things for e-commerce, so I wanted to include it, but I've personally never used it. And then I would just say, like, there's a ton of others, so just Talk to people, find, find a platform good for you. They're not gonna be that different than each other, but so it's not like you really have to worry that much. But at the same time, once you have it set up, you really don't wanna switch. So do a little bit of research and find the best one. I would also recommend using Segment to connect your triggers, goals, and this should say filters with your email platform. So this will connect in your product if you wanna send emails when people sign up free or take certain actions. Segment can help you connect those dots. And especially if you either, either you're a marketer and not a developer and you're not that technical yourself, this is huge. Or if you're a developer but you wanna hire a marketer to run your emails in the future, you wanna make sure that you're making it really easy for your marketer to be able to set these automated emails at critical lifecycle points without touching the code themselves. So Segment like just bridges that gap perfectly. If you're using video, which highly recommend, then you should use SendSpark. We have a code StartupFan, so you can use, you can use this to get 90% off any of our plans for 6 months. And then we also have a free trial, so you can use that. Really good emails I mentioned. So this is like the design inspiration. Just before you do anything, just scroll through this for like 15 minutes and look at some more examples here. And then ChatGPT, I threw this in. I've been using this a ton lately to help synthesize content. So what I'd recommend you do is just like word vomit of what you really want, what that like, what's in it for them is, and then just say make this more succinct, you know, make this more concise, make this a third grade reading level, and it'll help you like dumb down, not dumb down, but like simplify your email in a way that makes it a lot more readable for your end user. Um, I saw a question about a subdomain. Um, so basically a subdomain is like when you're sending the, the emails out, like, you know, they could come from— where is this— so it could come from like bethany@sendspark.com. But a risk of that is like, let's say that, um, I accidentally, like, I just overdo it. I email way too many people. My emails are really bad and I get marked as spam a lot. That can hurt your actual domain. So then sendspark.com could get like targeted for, like, it would show up that we have spam. It's gonna lower our search rankings. It'll make all of our emails harder to deliver. And it's really hard to recover once you do that. So what you can do is either create a totally different domain, like sendsparkmail.com, or you can use a subdomain like email.sendspark.com. And that way, if you end up having some trouble with your domain, you get marked as spam, you just throw it out and then you start over and you get a new domain. It's annoying because you have to still warm it up again, which basically means instead of starting by emailing 100,000 people, you start by emailing 100 and then 200 and 300 and build it over time. There are tools to do that as well to like get your domains warm. But I would just never start with a real domain, even if you're doing everything right. Like, someone could abuse your system. Like, we had this issue where someone basically was able to use SendSpark and send out like thousands and thousands of invites, and it would be like, you know, this random, you know, spammy email invited you to sendspark.com. They sent this to like thousands of people, and that could hurt our domain if we're using our core domain to send out emails. So you basically never want to use your core domain to send out emails if you can avoid it. So here's the tools. I'm just going to do the quick recap and then I will open it up for questions. Um, as you're designing your email workflows, you want to first map out your customer journey, and specifically this means coming up with the goals, triggers, and filters for each stage in the customer journey that you want to move people to. Think of emails as bumpers to keep people on track. It's more important to send emails when people aren't doing the action you want than when they are, because you're trying to nudge them to do that action. Write really good content by showing what's in it for them, making it engaging, giving a clear call to action. And then set yourself up for success by using subdomains to dummy-proof your domains. Keep everything really simple and know you can add more over time, but it's kind of hard to take things away. Use good tech and always A/B test so you can learn and improve. Please feel free to connect with me. I'll throw my LinkedIn in the chat as well, and then I'll also be around for questions right now. So yeah.

Awesome, thanks so much. Yeah, we already shared your LinkedIn credentials. Awesome. Everyone, if you found that insightful, please thumbs up and we'll kind of dive deep into questions right now. First question I will ask, because this is just for folks in the audience, I also run an outbound agency, so, and running that in That's a little bit on the sales outreach side, but I see some questions in there that people are asking the difference between sales outreach and some of the stuff around sales outreach versus email marketing. I think it would be helpful to, for you maybe to answer that and then we'll kind of go into the audience questions. But like, you know, you talked about HubSpot and using those as email marketing portion, so that's email marketing, but there's also like your sales outreach emails, which is the one-to-ones. Like maybe could you explain to the audience the difference between those two? And like maybe because like you wouldn't use a HubSpot for a one-to-one outreach, right? So like just you can give that background, that'd be helpful.

Yeah. I think it's really just like the different stages in the customer journey a little bit. So what I would, How I would think about this is like, if these are our stages, which you can see, so it's like this is the user journey. And I think of like email marketing as you're trying to influence someone to move from step to step in the customer journey versus if you're doing outbound, you're trying to get people to enter the customer journey to begin with. And so the difference is if someone's not in your customer journey, you know, you don't really have any information about actions they have or haven't taken because they haven't done anything. Um, so, you know, the term's top of funnel. It's all very top of funnel. You maybe have a list of leads or some reason to reach out to certain people, and then you can send campaigns and you're trying to either book a meeting or get them to sign up for free or just somehow enter your funnel. But when I think about like using HubSpot, um, or other email workflows, it's really okay, they have entered the funnel. Now we're trying to coax them to success with automation as opposed to handheld assistance, a lot more scalable. But you would do— Yeah. So you would do the sales outreach before they get to these stages. Awesome.

Thanks. Yeah, that's helpful. The only thing I'd add to that is one way of thinking of email marketing is what Bethany just explained, which was when a person joins your workflow, that could be a product workflow, that can be your newsletter, whichever they're joining these versus the sales outreach is typically when that's one-to-one. So you're typically using your Gmail or some sort of sales automation tool. So that's just something to take into consideration. All right, I'm gonna jump into the Q&A portion. I'm gonna read it out for now 'cause we're just having some technical issues to bring it up on screen, but yeah, and I'm going over the most popular. So let's say Luca is asking, could you go over through some of the ways of avoid getting your broadcast emails go to spam? What is your tactics to avoid the spam folder in email marketing?

Yeah, so with email marketing too, just one thing to assume as opposed to if you're doing the outbound is that these are people that have somehow opted in-ish. So they maybe signed up for your product, they did like a lead magnet action, maybe they attended a webinar. Do we get to email ever after? Just kidding. So there's different actions that people took. And so from there, what you want to do is one, like, your email platform should do this, but see how engaged people are. If people aren't opening your emails, don't email them anymore because that can hurt you. But in general, if you're sending good emails that are getting good engagement, then you're pretty good. And this lets you take a little bit more risks. Than if you're doing cold. If you're doing cold, you have to be really cautious about like sending, you gotta look at your link to text ratio, your image to text ratio. There's a ton of things. I have an article about it, I'll post. But when you're emailing the warmer people, so people that have like opted in or signed up or that are engaged, you can actually take a lot more liberties. I'd still recommend using the subdomain in case you push it too far, but you should really strive to drive the most engagement. And prioritize that over anything else because ultimately engagement is the most important for getting good deliverability. Obviously you wouldn't wanna do anything like crazy, crazy in terms of like sending out a block that's just an image, but it's really just about like tracking the engagement, tracking your unsubscribe rate and, and letting like your email marketing system's gonna help you do this a little bit. And it looks like you're about to add something, so I want you to jump into.

No, I think your spam is also, like I started also before Reply, I was at Mailjet.com, which is a very competitor to Mailchimp. And spam's a topic you can just keep talking about, but the number one thing is it is that engagement and making sure there's relevancy. I think if you're adding things like images and all that, you gotta be sensible. If you're sending like a 100-megabyte email with a lot of images, it's definitely gonna go to spam, right? But if you're sending stuff that's well optimized and it's built for a certain, for your email workflow and they've opened it up and they've engaged with your email, that sender's inbox is gonna start to build a certain reputation with you. Then you can go down the wormhole of IP warmup and all of the type of stuff. So I don't wanna get into that because it's become very, very technical and all that. But yeah, I think in short, the best way is go definitely look at a lot of these guides that are available, but Just logically think, I tell this to my team internally as well, would you open and read this email or are you gonna skim it? If you're skimming it, then what is the key things that we need to communicate to this individual and what's the respective next call to action, right? If you're just doing it to just throw in a bunch of content, right? Again, we don't read, we skim. It's like some user psychology for you. But yeah. All right, I'm gonna go to the next question. Abeif Agrawal is asking, any insights of early-stage startup to build email lists and generate qualified leads? So I think another way of asking this, Beth, is, you know, if I'm a startup today and I wanna start building on my email list, not my cold email outbound list, but my actual like opted-in list, whether it's from newsletter or product, like what are some insights you can give like from what you did when you were starting off? And yeah, I'd love to hear that.

Yeah, for how to build the email list. Yeah, there's definitely a few ways you can go about this and it depends a little bit on your business, but I'll just tell you some things that we did. So keep in mind, SendSpark is a video email platform and the videos that you can create with our platform are always meant to be sent within a HubSpot, a Customer.io reply, How am I in and other channels. So to build our email list, we put out a ton of content around sending video emails and things that people maybe would be searching for on Google. And then we also did a lot of partnerships with other platforms. And this is like a really nice way to grow your list if it makes sense for your business, because if you can identify who are companies that already have the lead list that you want, and then you talk to them and you're like, hey, what would be helpful? Can we do some basically free marketing for you? Like, can we put on this event with you? Can we do something else and then we'll both promote it? It can be a nice way to like co-share lists. And you know, when you're just starting out, you maybe don't have that much to contribute yourself because your list is so tiny, but just focus on the tinier platforms first. And then over time, you know, your list will grow and you'll have more to offer if you do any of this co-marketing. So I'd say co-marketing is great. Any type of content is great. We also put out free tools. Like we just put out a video, like an AI-generated video script builder to drive, to drive some leads. We also have a request video tool and we have some other free tools and a free product. And so like this can, you know, either through SEO or just by word of mouth can help drive some stuff. Just be careful because if it takes you a long time to build, it can be a distraction. And just because you build it doesn't mean people will use it. So that's not always the most efficient way. I've also heard of people doing kind of things that are a little bit more just like wild, like putting out kind of free products on Craigslist that might appeal to people in their target market to drive people in. I mean, you should just get really creative, have a couple of drinks or whatever you want to do and think of some weird ideas and test everything.

Yeah, I think the cold marketing one is really big and it's also doing things like this where it's like events, right? Like just try to get as much learn from people as much as possible. As long as you've identified the right target audience, then you're good to go. But yeah, sound advice. All right, I'm having a really hard time to keep up with all this, but anyway, that sounds— we've answered it. So I hope I say this correct. Wembo is asking like, what is the lead conversion rate in email marketing and how can we improve this numbers? Like I guess like for you when you started out, what were some of your conversion rates and like how do you, as a founder, as a marketer, as an organization, continuously improve it? Right? Like if you're getting an open rate of X% this week, how do you get an X, like a 20% improvement? Or do you have any metrics you're kind of measuring to constantly push the needle?

So everyone talks about conversion rates and they talk about this meaning like a click-through rate on email. And I talk about it too because it's what the industry talks about. But I'll be the first to say that should not be what you're optimizing for. It doesn't matter if people click on your email. It matters that they're moving forward in your sales process. And so you wanna try to figure out is what's the benchmark for conversions at different point in your sales process. And so for our business, we are a product-led B2B SaaS. I obsess over the OpenView benchmarks for like standout product-led growth companies. So I'm looking not at our email conversion rates, but at our, what is our free-to-active conversion rate and our active-to-paid conversion rate and our expansion conversion rate. And then email's a good way to drive that. And so you should be looking at like, how does email help your funnel and your customer journey? Not like what's a good email conversion rate. I mean, that being said, if something like you never want your unsubscribe rate to be higher than your click-through rate or something like that, but really try to figure out, you know, if people aren't unsubscribing, it's fine. It's just how are you influencing the key milestones you're trying to influence?

I think that's great advice, especially for someone who came like me from email. I think a lot of stuff with open and clicks and obviously if you're in responses, response rate is the most important, but very, very important. I see those as being directionally accurate. It's like, oh, okay, I have an open rate of 5%, something's wrong. Let me go fix it. Unsubscribe is 10%. Okay, let me go fix it. But it's not gonna, I'm not gonna meddle about it every single time. Which is interesting. I like how you said focus on what's the next respective conversion journey and look at that data point, right? So I hope that answers your question. All right, let's—

And look at how your emails compare to each other too, maybe. So it's like if one of your emails is doing great and you're A/B testing it and one is better, beat your own metrics. Okay, moving on.

Yeah. All right, so let's, because Sorry, dude, this thing is getting refreshed as they come in. So we talked about lead conversion, we talked about broadcast, we talked about this. Can I use email? So this is, Adrian's asking this, can you use email marketing for startups without customers or is it only for companies that have a customer base? If it can be used for startups with no customers, can you explain how?

Do you mean no customers?

Yeah. So Adrian, I think I understand what you're trying to say, but you need to elaborate. I don't know if you can add a comment in the— you could, yeah, you should be able to add comment of are you talking about adding more users or are you talking about sales prospecting? Because if, yeah, you should be able to use email marketing with even one individual. So yeah, that depends. We'll just wait for you to respond back to that. So at my company we use Amazon SES technology to automate emails. Do you know any workaround to track the performance of those emails because Gmail doesn't see them? Luca is asking, I guess. What is your stack, Beth? Just so the audience knows, maybe directly, right?

So I mean, I personally use HubSpot, which does a lot of things, so that's gonna track the email opens, but I can't even think what they're called. Just look in like search email, what would it be, like an email tracker, and you should be able to get a Chrome extension or just basically the ability to put a tracking pixel in any email that you're sending with a different platform and that should be able to do it for you. There's— can you think of any off the top of your head? I know there's a ton, but I don't even know if they're—

no, I typically use— so we use internally I've used so many different products between HubSpot, MailChimp, Mandrill, Mailjet, Customer.io. I really like Customer.io. I think it's a great product, but because when you set up everything, it asks you, hey, put this in, put this DNS record. You do the technical setup and everything else is good. ActiveCampaign I haven't used in a while, but that was the OG back in the day, which was really, really good. So I think to answer your question, it really depends on It's how you set up all the respective technical items, right? All right, let's—

yeah, well, they're saying they can just get an email tracker and add it, I think, too.

Yeah, you can get third-party trackers, right? So like some, some people would use them, some people don't. It really depends on the infrastructure setup. All right, we are— we're at 45. We can probably do a couple more and then we'll break out into networking. Um, all right, Ali, I like this question by Ali. He says, should I be thinking differently about the content, language, or style for emails at the end of the funnel compared to the beginning of the funnel, or keep things same?

Oh, that's a good question. The way I would think about it. Well, so there's two ways to think about language. Like, one is your voice, like your brand voice, and that I'd say is more or less consistent. That's who you are. Communication, what matters more than your voice is who are you talking to and what did they like? Like how did they like to understand information? You know, do they and what kind of tone do they like? Would they prefer more professional or more casual or something else? So I would say this probably isn't something to optimize for as you're just getting started, but as you're thinking about building out your process like longer term, the more information you can learn about your prospect and your customer, the more you can adapt to them. So if there's anything that you can do, whether it's like their job title, their country, other actions they've taken, if there's anything that you can try to track to learn what their ideal voice is, then you should modify it to them. But that being said, I've never actually done that and I don't know if it's going to make a huge difference, but it could. It's a cool idea.

Yeah. I think another way of thinking of this is if Think of top funnel, middle funnel, bottom funnel. And if you're, this is if, like, you know, if your emails are going on that sequence, then you have to think about language and content that way. It's like, what does awareness look like for an email and push them further down the funnel to take them a little bit more on. And I think Beth, you mentioned this on your thing about activation and engagement and then go from there to conversion, right? Like getting them to do the next step. So I think that's one thing you need to think about Adrian, of how you, when you're designing email, like I think Bethany did a really good job of explaining the framework and the strategy. I've spoken to so many individuals where they'll just start to set up an email workflow where it's like one email, then it's like a random follow-up, random follow-up, random follow-up, and there's no story to tell between those two. So just as you're thinking about it, a really good hack is just go and sign up for something you really, really like and see how they communicate on their email workflow. I do that a lot. I'm like, okay, okay, what is this person saying and how long? Like, oh, what does that delay look like? It's a 3-day delay, it's a 4-day delay. And then it's a really helpful way to do it. I think Really Good Emails also has a full sequence, but I know they have individual for sure. That's right.

Yeah.

Okay.

I think so. Yeah.

All right, let's kind of do a couple more. So subdomain we talked about. Yeah, a lot of questions here on spam. Oh, okay. Ali also, his follow-up question is around how are you titling your emails? So I guess not the internal titles obviously in HubSpot, but like when, let's talk a little bit about subject line preview text and the H1 of the email. Like what is, do you have like a framework you usually operate by or like how are you kind of like going about that?

So what I'm doing is I try to keep it— so what I've heard is you can read 5 words at once without actively reading. Like if you see 5 words written down, you don't have to read it as a sentence. Your mind just sees it all. So I try to stick to like 5 words. I think it's officially like 5 plus or minus 2. So you can go up to 7 if you want or keep it shorter. But so I'd say like keep it there and then try to again just show what's in it for them. There's some, like, again, if you Google search, like, good email subject lines, you'll see a few that consistently do well, like quick question or things like that. But for things that are more educational for the product experience, then I would try to show, like, what they're gonna get out of this email. Like, you know, learn how to make a prototype, like, learn how to do X, Y, Z. Maybe not learn, 'cause that seems spammy, but that would be the framework. Like, what's in it for them? How do you show value and hook them right away?

Yeah, another one, it's you can't really do it on the subject line or the preview text. It's in the, as you're skimming an email, if you know it's an important, like Beth said, 5 words, if you had to bold 5 words in your email so they can just read the 4 or 5 words and make that story, they'll be like, like, you know, for, for like something like Beth would be like personalization scale videos, sign up now. I can read everything, be like, okay, this is what this is about because as I'm skimming it, I'm like, okay, cool. That's kind of another helpful tactic. Email formatting is super underrated. I don't see enough people paying attention to it. Look at bolding text because it will help people focus on it. That doesn't mean you bold the whole email, but bold certain parts of it. That's how I find like not enough people are doing that. Let's do one last question. Questions. So people are asking, right? So I answered most of it around spam and stuff. So I guess the last question is by Trang or David Fu is like, how often can you send emails without being annoying? So maybe another way of answering, I think of this question is like, What is an ideal email workflow? And this is truth be told with FI, we've kind of gotten that feedback as well because when somebody jumps into the FI system, they're getting emails for events, they're getting emails for applications, they're getting emails for their assignments, they're getting emails from their peers. So they're kind of getting all these, some of them are automated, some of them are manual emails. So we've tried to figure out how to reduce some of that, but it's still a growing concern and stuff and we're still addressing it. But be curious to know what is your thoughts on how do you make sure you don't over-email a user?

Maybe there's another way. Yeah, especially when you have multiple workflows and get really complicated. So what you can do with most email systems is set something up so if someone enters one workflow, it exits them from another. So they're not getting like multiple emails a day that are all about different things. But that's something like you really have to spend a lot of time mapping out before you start to make sure that people aren't getting too many and like spacing out the delays. One thing I would also keep in mind is like, when are people like really hot? Like, when are they trying to learn about your software? So like right after they sign up, I would say like it's totally fine to email them like every single day and like get them because you kind of have that prime time. They signed up, they're interested, they're currently evaluating competitors. Like you need to make sure that you're the one that's in their inbox at the front of their brain. But if it's more of a nurture email, like, all right, it's been 3 months, they haven't done anything and you're just trying to like lure them back in, I'd say space it out. Cause you're more concerned at that point about the unsubscribe. And, and so you're just kind of balancing that a little bit and, and kind of playing with it. But there isn't, I wouldn't say there's any max. Obviously not more than once a day. It would be ideal unless you really, really have to. But then otherwise it's really just how interested in they would they be in getting a lot of content versus you might be annoying.

Yeah, definitely. You don't want to over-email. It will be reflected in your unsubscribe rates going forward. All right, awesome, everyone. If you've enjoyed this session, thumbs up. There's no thumbs down, so thumbs up or heart, please show the reaction, share the love. Awesome too, Beth. Been getting a thing. Beth, thanks so much for taking the time and educating the audience. We hit about 205 people at one point, we're about 160. So, and then we have the rest of the individuals, 150 people or so will get the recording. Yes, you will get a recording. I saw that, I just wanna bring that up again because I saw a lot of questions on that. What we're gonna do now, folks, is we're gonna wrap up. Obviously, Beth, thanks for your time. Where you'll see these small virtual tables, you know, go and network with each other. Beth, if you have some time, you know, jump onto tables, speak to other folks. I'll hop around for a bit as well. But yeah, thanks everyone for joining in. I hope you found this valuable, and we'll wrap things up here. Thanks everyone.