99: 5 Best Practices to Supercharge Your Email Marketing With Sue Glenn
Today my special guest is Sue Glenn. Sue is the Marketing Director of Diverse Marketing and Web Design. Her passion is helping entrepreneurs and small businesses up level with email marketing. She teaches proven strategies through workshops, online courses and one-on-one coaching. She also has an online course called Email With Ease.
In this episode, we cover 5 best practices to help you supercharge your email marketing:
Tips on building your email list (the right way)
The 80/20 rule with your email content and how to find stellar content to share with your email list (hint: it doesn't have to be all of your own content!)
The must-have design elements so you don't end up in the trash or spam folder
Tips and tricks to increase open and clickthrough rates
Why it's important to review your email analytics and what to look for
Note: Some of these links are affiliate links, which means I may get a commission if you try them and purchase. However, none of the fees have been increased to compensate me.
Mentioned In This Episode
Transcript:
Speaker 1 (00:03):
And today my special guest is Sue Glenn. Sue is the marketing director of diverse marketing and web design. Her passion is helping entrepreneurs and small businesses up level with email marketing. She teaches proven strategies through workshops, online courses, and one on one coaching. And she also has an online course called email with ease. So thank you so much for joining me. I'm super excited to jump in with this with you today. We're gonna be talking about best practices for email marketing and email marketing is one of my favorite subjects I think is such an important your email list is such an important business asset in your business, and it's often overlooked by small business owners. So super excited to dive in with this with you today. And can you take a second and tell the audience a little bit more about you and your business?
Speaker 2 (01:01):
Yes. First of all, thank you so much for having me. I'm also very excited to be here and talk about my favorite subject as well. So I help small businesses and businesses who are either just getting started or who need sort of like a, a restart for, with their marketing and specifically their email marketing efforts. A lot of companies, small companies put email by the wayside and they focus on social media, but I believe that they go hand in hand. And we're gonna talk about some of the advantages of email as compared to social media.
Speaker 1 (01:40):
Well, why don't we go ahead and jump right in. And can you talk about your first best practices? I know that we kind of talked a little bit about this before we jumped on, but one of the things that you were talking about and you just hit upon it now is building that email list and why it is so very important. Can you talk about some of the best practices related to that? Yeah,
Speaker 2 (02:05):
Absolutely. So, first of all, there's basically five steps to harnessing the power of, of your inbox and building a list would be number one to start with because you really, it's really hard to send emails out when you don't have a list. It's not impossible though, because there are ways to work around it, but you need to be the building, your email list on a regular basis. It's not something that ends, you know, you don't build it and then it's, it's there. You know, there's attrition, people will drop off and, and nobody should take that personally. And you know what, that's a, a lot, a lot of times people who do send emails, they, they get they take it personal and they actually stopped sending emails because they think that people don't wanna hear from them, but it's really not true. I'll get into that a little bit later.
Speaker 2 (02:55):
So best practices, the building email list are number one, do not purchase a list, okay. There there's laws against the way that you get email subscribers and you have to be very careful and make sure that you are not that you're obeying the, those laws. And some of them are included in this spam can laws. I'm not gonna go into details on what that is, but you have to be mindful of that. So some of the ways that you can build a healthy email list that's compliant is by having an opt-in. So creating a freebie or an incentive in exchange for someone's email address. And some of them could be like at an event, right? You have a registration and people show up or on an online zoom. If you're having a webinar on people sign up, those are all legitimate ways to collect email addresses. And those are some of the best practices. If you meet somebody in person, you don't wanna collect their business cards and then just send them to the list. The next step, you really need to have permission. And in some cases the email service provider, before you upload your list, they will ask you that question. It'll be one of the questions. Do you have explicit consent, the subscriber and you have to click yes or no. So hopefully you will click. Yes. And you do right by them.
Speaker 1 (04:29):
So let me ask you this. The folks that are listening, their service providers are freelancers, their online course creators. And this is an area that is difficult, right? It's difficult for many of us to grow email list, especially if we're not investing a lot in paid advertising. You mentioned about having that free lead magnet, and we can have it up on our website. We can have it in our blog post. What are some other ways we can possibly grow that email list?
Speaker 2 (04:59):
So on your website, there's actually two ways that work very well. And, and you can use, use this idea both in your word PR I'm sorry, in your websites platform, but also there are third party companies that you can have that will integrate with your websites. And the first way is to have a popup form. Now, a lot of people don't love popups, but they work. So it's important that you just try it, like, try it on your website and see how it works for you, because it it's a very valuable asset and you don't have to have a popup come up every five seconds. You can have it on a timer, you can have it so that it only pops up when somebody's about to exit your website. So there's ways to work with that popup. And the other one is to have an what's called an inline form, which is a static signup form on your website.
Speaker 2 (06:01):
And it could be placed anywhere. Most people put it at the bottom. So it's sort of discreet. So you could have both, you can have the pop up, that's sort of more in your face, and then you can have the inline form that's sort of in the background. You can have them both be the same optin or they can be different optin, but once you, you know, have that opt-in, then you have to start with the nurture sequence to get people through whatever the topic of your freebie is, and then work them through that so that they, you build then no, like,
Speaker 1 (06:37):
And the other thing I just wanted to mention here, because I know this is an area that a lot of people struggle with. One of the ways that I have found, or one of the best ways I have found for growing my email list is collaborating with other business owners, whether that's maybe speaking at a virtual summit, right. Maybe that's participating in an industry bundle kind of like what we're doing with one of our hobby school brands where everybody gets together, puts together a digital bundle, and then they promote it. So if people are looking for ways to grow their list organically and ethically as what Sue mentioned here that, that is, you know, give you some ideas on how to do that.
Speaker 2 (07:22):
Yeah. Collaborations, for sure. Even like podcasting, you know, using other people's audiences, getting in front of other people's audiences, that way, you know, you can collab add an event. You can do a, a takeover on Instagram and, and now that there are links available to everybody, not just people who have 10,000 followers or more you can really take advantage of that. And, and I just wanted to mention that with, with Facebook, you can create a campaign to get email leads. So it's not that you're purchasing the leads outright. You're actually targeting people who are based in either your area or, or whatever parameters you want. And that is okay to do, it's not considered a purchase in, in that way, but you can actually like create a campaign of, of lead that generate new email addresses for you.
Speaker 1 (08:20):
All right. So let's move on to our next one. Can you talk a little bit about the next best email marketing practice?
Speaker 2 (08:28):
Yeah. So now we get into content and how, how do you create content? So one of the, the best practices is not to sell every single email, know that you send out. Some people only send out promotional emails, a lot of retail, you know, companies do this, but for course creators and people who are smaller businesses and entrepreneurs, it, it works if you use the 80 20 rule. So the 80 20 rule is that you send emails that are, you know, educational, informational, entertaining, or personal stories. And then the other 20% could be promotional, whether that's your core course launch or, or a sale of a digital product, or you know, the, the virtual summit, something that you're gonna sell in there. So you wanna have also include your specific content pillar so that it keeps you on track.
Speaker 2 (09:31):
You need to have a plan, you know, obviously strategy is, is very important. So I like to say like, most people will be, it'll be beneficial for them if they send one email a week and it's not feasible for, for many people, I send out a monthly email. And it's more of like a digest, you know, I give content ideas and marketing ideas, so people can use that and call it account. So there's a lot that they can pick from throughout the month. But some people, like I said, they'll choose to send out weekly emails. So you wanna basically choose four things you'll be talking about regularly. And like the first, the first week of the month could be just personal, sort about about you. And this is to build that no, like, and trust factor. And then the second week can talk about like, just to say, you'll have a health and wellness business.
Speaker 2 (10:26):
So the first week could be your story. You know, why you got started or things that happened to you that made you wanna start the business. Right? And then the second week could be something about not selling a product, but talking about a product or a way that was helpful to you to overcome something. And then the third week could be something educational, like you can put in part of your blog post, and then have people go from, from to read more on your website. So you do want to have it, have your material also go somewhere else. It could be to an article, anything that's informational for them to get closer to you. And then say the fourth week of every month could be your promotion, your, your sign up for this event, or purchase product or sign up for my course, something like that. So that would be considered the best practice for, for, including your content and how to create your content.
Speaker 1 (11:29):
And I, and I know this is an area that a lot of people struggle with is trying to figure out what to say right. In their emails that they're sending out to their audience. And, you know, like you said, we don't always want to be selling and promoting our products and services. I know that there, like you mentioned, there's some retailers out there that that's all I get from them every single day. I feel like I'm getting 20, 20% off coupon for a day, day, every day. So where can folks go if they're really struggling with trying to come up with an ideas to email their list, where would you point them to? Well,
Speaker 2 (12:04):
First I would say point to themselves and brainstorm some ideas, you know, you know, what, what are you known for? What do people come to you for? Think about the frequently asked questions, get, get content from your own website. You know, the frequently asked questions when you meet somebody, what's the first thing they ask you, things that come up over and over and over again. That's one way content is it's, there's so much content out there that you can pull from. You can curate content from other sources. And a lot of people actually abandon emails because they don't think they have enough content. And it's sad because think about with things that you could teach somebody you only need to you consider not, not an expert, but to know more than someone. I think, I think the statistics, all you need is 10% edge on somebody else to consider yourself an expert on something. So if you just think about all the things that people ask you, or even do some research on competitors and see what they're talking about or what people are asking them or other people's blog posts, you will have never ended content. And that's, that would be like the main, main point for them.
Speaker 1 (13:36):
And I like that. And I like the point that you made about curating content from other people. I was reading an email. I got on this email list here recently, just because I was, I was curious about something and got some of their emails that were coming through on the welcome sequence. And they were doing a lot of content, was curated from other places. And I was like, you know what? This is ingenious because a lot of this content I'm interested in and it's that content that they actually produced, you know, it's content that was coming from someone else. And I'm like, oh, that's really cool. I really love the way they did that. So that's a great tip. So moving on, what is your next best practice that you wanna talk about
Speaker 2 (14:19):
About how to create a campaign? So I'm a, I'm a local certified local expert for constant contact. It's an email service provider and they send out, you know, millions of emails. So based on their search they found that there are seven elements to good design or things that you should have in an email. And I'm gonna go down that list quickly. I probably to get one, but so one of the first one is obviously who the email is coming from. Right. I still get emails from people who just show their first name and some of them I know, and I've talked to them about it. Oh yeah, I gotta change that this right. I mean, how would they know that it's me and all the people, right? If you want to have people know exactly who it's coming from, and there's no doubt about it, make sure that you have your first name, your last name and, or your company name.
Speaker 2 (15:24):
If it's a product that you sell and people know you mostly for the product, you know, use the product name, but figure out how people know you the best or the majority of people, how they know you best. So that's where the two, and from comes in your, when you're sending out an email the second one is your subject subject line. There are best practices for best subject lines that get open the most. And we, that a shorter subject line is better and it needs to be optimized for mobile because you're not gonna get as many words on your phone as you will on desktop. Now, most people for me in my reporting says that I get about 75% opening on desktop and only 25% on mobile. So I sort of optimize it more for people who are reading on the desktop. There's a little more real estate in there on the subject line, but basically, yeah, you do wanna have make it short, like six to 10 words and get the most important part of your subject line be, you know, at the front.
Speaker 2 (16:31):
You wanna definitely make sure that you're not using words or phrases that are in your own spam box. So if you wanna know what not to do, look in your own spam email inbox and avoid those words, like things like money, urgent act now you've won prize, you know, things like that. They, they don't go over so well. And, and there is a possibility that it won't even it'll get rejected and won't even land in someone's inbox. Another thing is don't use too many exclamation points punctuation, you know, anything like too many question marks and things like that. So avoid that as well. And the last quick tip I have is not to add so many emojis, but feel free to add at least one, they, they seem to stand out in somebody's inbox. So it could be seasonal.
Speaker 2 (17:27):
You know, if you're sending out something for Valentine's, obviously you put a heart, so that would stand out as opposed to someone not having so every month or every, maybe once a month like that, like I said, I'd do a monthly. And I started adding emojis for the month that she said the weekly people might get tired of them. But if you decide to send it, you know, every fourth week to have your emoji, or if it relates to your story, you know, use one in your subject line. So that's subject line, then there is the actual campaign design. So at the top of the email, you should always have either your, a logo or if your logo's not a picture, your name, if it's your logo at the top and the middle, so that it doesn't get caught off by your phone, you know, your smart phone and keep it on the top and then make sure it's clickable, have it clickable to wherever you want somebody to take action.
Speaker 2 (18:26):
It's usually going to be your website. Don't wanna wait for somebody to get all the way to the bottom, where your contact information is to click on your website. Sometimes people wanna do that right away. And then after that, you're gonna put in your headline and then content, and you don't wanna have too much content, like 20 lines of texts is sufficient. You can do, if you wanna add, like say you have three things you wanna talk about, you know, you can have three small, small, short, you know, headlines and then have just a little bit of text and then have a link to read more. Maybe, maybe it's through your blog or to an article or to an event. So you can do it that way. And then you wanna have very strong calls to, and to highlight them we create, I create buttons.
Speaker 2 (19:14):
So it would be like a contrasting button. So your email should basically be a light colored background and then dark colored text, definitely wanna use your branding. So let's just say you have branding that's green, white, and black, right? So if your text is going to be black and the background's going to be white, then use your green as your button. And that will stand out from the rest of the email and then make sure the wording in your button is, is stands out as well. Like you might say get this now or sign up here, or, you know, even read more. So people can click on that. And then at the end, at the bottom, you wanna put in your contact information. So it's a way for somebody to get in touch with you, phone number and email address.
Speaker 2 (20:10):
Again, even though it's at the top, I mean, you can have your reply to be different than an email that you want people to connect with you on. And so it could be different because you might have a team and might have somebody else who replies to your emails. And then you wanna have obviously your website again at the bottom, it could be just, you know, have the link there and then add in your so social media sites. So you wanna have the icons, you know, to Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram YouTube, you know, whatever you have, you can put that at the bottom. So that's the sequence basically, so that you have all the bases covered for people to be able to reach out to you again, to contact you, to get all information that you want them to receive. And also the call to action. Cause that's the main part of email is what you want people to do with the information. You know, you're not just sending information, it's something that you always want them to do once they open up your email.
Speaker 1 (21:03):
And I like your tip about making sure that number one, you have your name and who's actually sending the email and then you make sure you have your contact information. I can't even tell you how many emails I have received over the years. And I had no idea who was sending the email. I'm like, yeah, didn't
Speaker 2 (21:21):
Even right. You wanna have your name? You should have a signature at the bottom, like a, you know, like a, a signature it's a little bit different then the type base in email and, and even like the credential, like, you know, like what you're known for like online, I always have at the bottom, I have, you know, certified the Blacksburg and, and also, you know, digital marketing strategist. So you wanna have that, you know, as well.
Speaker 1 (21:43):
All right. So moving on, what is your next email best practice.
Speaker 2 (21:49):
Okay. So the next subject would be getting your emails open. So there are a few good things that you can do here. And that would be back to the subject lines, working with different ways to get the, get your emails open is to have an urgent subject line. Just don't wanna use that too often. So keep away from making an urgent every time do not use the, the, I think it's called quick switching bait. I, you know, like they do that with cars where they, you know, you make an offer, people come down or, or pull you up and then they don't have that car available and Travis, you know, sell you something else. So make sure that your subject line is in relation to the content that's in the email. You know, you don't wanna create a subject line. That's very enticing just to get them to open it and then not have the information that you really want them to read.
Speaker 2 (22:47):
So that's a, that's a no-no. Also you wanna test, you know, test your subject lines. You may or may not have the feature in your email service provider, but there is AB testing in certain, certain emails that you should be doing. So we, and a way to do that is to create two different subject lines. And we only it's send, send one subject line to a group of people in your on your subscriber list and then create another email subject line that you think might be better or work in your favor and then choose a different amount of people on that list and send them both out and then see which one, like, wait, you have to wait like a couple days for, or a day. So make sure I do this in advance, especially if you're just starting to test.
Speaker 2 (23:41):
It could be even like a few hours later, just see which one gets the most opens and then send that subject line to the rest of the list. And you can do that over and over just so you can figure out like you can get into a groove of like what's working as far as the subject lines you're using. Cause a lot of times you'll get a similar subject line that's always gonna work for you. And you only have to tweak a couple of words, you know, in that. So the, the AV testing, you can also do, like there are, there are headline analyzers and things that you can also get outside of your email service provider if they don't offer that. So you can do something with a, with a third party and then make sure you are sending it in, during the time or day that your target market will be looking at it.
Speaker 2 (24:31):
So let's just say your target market might be, you know, moms and they of young kids, right. They will probably put their little ones to bed around I seven o'clock or eight o'clock. So then a, a good time for them to get an email might be if you send it at eight o'clock and they're looking at their emails, you know, later at night when they have some time to themselves, that's one option. So we have to be cognizant of your audience and when they might be opening emails. Okay. So that's, that's one way. And then the day of the week, there are actually certain days of the week that are better for certain industries, but overall a Thursday between like 10 and two has the most, most openly. And a lot of people don't know that. And then Tuesday is the second best. And then Wednesday Saturday is really not the best, but for certain industries, actually, Sunday mornings are good too. So again, this is all about testing. You have to try, you know, send out your first few, meet few emails or remember to see what's gonna work best for you. And just keep following that, you know, don't keep mixing it up, find out like something that's working and then just be doing that.
Speaker 1 (25:50):
I think that's some good tips. And going back to the a and B testing, there are some email service providers out there where you can just put in the, a, B lines for your subject lines and they'll do all that testing for you, which that is that's really cool. You know, and I've been test team kind of when to send out emails and, you know, it's very strange. Like I've sent out an email on a Sunday night that got crazy open rates and then, you know, testing one out in the middle of the week, when you think everybody's working, maybe they're just too busy working and they're not out the email. So
Speaker 2 (26:25):
That's why you never know. Right? Like sometimes you thinking, oh yeah, definitely. They, they will be best. That's what they say. And then we put it on Thursday, but you find out your Sunday's better. Then that's what works for you. Don't do what everybody else is doing. If it's not gonna work for you. And then like, like you did, you tested it, you figured it out. And you know, you see what's gonna work. And, and also it depends on the types of emails you're sending too, you know, if you have an event and it's coming up quickly and you have a certain day that has to go out, you know, you have no choice to send it. So you can't do every email, but again, that's, that's why you have testing.
Speaker 1 (26:56):
All right. So let's move on to the next best practice.
Speaker 2 (27:01):
Okay. So the next best for practice is paying attention to your analytics. A lot of people that I speak to never even look at the reports, but after every email that you send, you, you get a report. It's usually like a day or two later, and it will give you all this great information that you don't have to yourself. Right? the percentage of people that opened your email, how many people clicked on the email, what were they looking at? There's heat maps on for some companies where you can see where they're hovering, you know, their, their mouse. Again you can compare your, a few emails. If you want, you can compare like a similar story email, like let's just say, you know, remember I talked earlier about on the first week of the month, you can send up maybe a personal story, right?
Speaker 2 (27:56):
So you can check like the stories that worked and the ones that didn't, and then the, the whole point of we've for getting your analytics and, and, and studying them is seeing what works, what didn't and making better decisions going forward. But the most important actually the most important analytic is, is your clickthrough’s because that's where most of the action takes place. I mean, people obviously have to open in order to click, but the clickthrough’s are, are very important. And if you can segment your list and see what people are clicking on then you can focus on the people who click, but maybe don't purchase and send them like a follow up email based on their behavior. So don't yeah. So don't, don't ignore those, those reports, you know, look at them every, every month at minimum.
Speaker 1 (28:55):
And it, and I'm assuming I know in convert kit, I don't know anything about constant content, but I know in convert kit is very easy. I can just go in, look at my reports for a particular campaign I've been at 'em all week as we just finished the scale, your business summit. So I've been looking at all that and all the, all the email yeah. Analytics there. So
Speaker 2 (29:15):
Yeah, there's graphs, there's all sorts of things. There's, there's percentages then there's comparisons with, with graphs graphs, and also, you know, a number of people, but also not just the number of people, but you can figure out like exactly who who's, the person who clicked on, who opened my email, who clicked on it, who's been opening up my last five emails, and then there's, there could be a chart also of who's your, you know, how many people are the most engaged, how many are the least engaged? And then you can send out emails to those two separate lists. You know, the most engaged gives them a, a special offer, you know, being the most engaged, you know, list, the least engaged, give them sort of like a RET re of yourself and your services to get them engaged again, there's all sorts of ways to use your, your analytics, but they definitely, definitely need to use all those insights to help you be a better marketer.
Speaker 1 (30:14):
So Sue, thank you so much for sharing these email best practices with us. Can you tell the audience we're or they can find you if they wanna learn a little bit more about email marketing? Yes.
Speaker 2 (30:26):
So I have website diverse marketing.net, and on social media, I am, can be reached at Sue V like victory, Glen Sue V Glen with two NS. And yep. That's it. Those are the, the two main places that can find me in the,
Speaker 1 (30:48):
And we'll make sure Sue that those links are in the show notes for everybody. And thank you so much for joining me. I loved all of your email marketing tips and best practices, and I know that this is gonna help a tremendous amount of people.
Speaker 2 (31:02):
Excellent. Very happy. I'd love to, to, to talk about my passion, helping small business kids and entrepreneurs. So I appreciate you having
Speaker 1 (31:09):
Me. Thank you, Sue. You're
Speaker 2 (31:11):
Welcome.