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The Digital Marketing Podcast
Effective Email Marketing
00:24:23
An Interview with Philip Story from Enchant Agency
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Transcript38 lines
- [00:00]
A
Welcome to the Digital Marketing Podcast brought to you by targetinternet.com hello, and welcome back to the Digital Marketing Podcast. My name is Kieran Rogers and today, listeners, we are joined with Philip Storey. Say hello, Philip, and tell us a bit about who you are and what you do.
- [00:25]
B
Hi. Hi, Kieran. Thanks for having me. Yep. My name is Philip Storey and I run a lifecycle marketing agency called Enchantment in London. And I spend most of my time helping companies to build relationships with prospects and customers across the entire customer life cycle.
- [00:41]
A
And I can't share with you how excited I am to have you on the show.
- [00:46]
B
It's just.
- [00:47]
A
I'm utterly excited. Philip is, in my mind, one of the masters of this and one of the things I love about your methodology, Philip, is in terms of email marketing, you go the extra nine yards, I think, and that's that for me, listening to you speak at various conferences, Differences when we've come across is the thing that really excites me. You've always got interesting angles on what we can do that just does that little bit extra, that little bit more for our customers when it comes to email marketing.
- [01:17]
B
Yeah, it's amazing just how many missed opportunities there are that are out there in terms of how marketers look at email as a channel. And it still fascinates me that how people can get bored of the channel or look at the newer channels, like some of the social platforms that we have to play with today, the money is still there with email marketing. And the truth is, 99% of companies are really just scratching the surface. And actually the reason why they don't delve even further is because actually it's still the most. It's still the highest performing channel in terms of return on investments. If you look at any stats from the dma, for example, every year it's the highest performing marketing channel of them all. You can get away with doing it badly and still make a good return on investment.
- [02:02]
A
So what I've invited Philip along to do with us today is a bit of an email marketing masterclass and we're going to look at sort of email across, across the board. I'm particularly interested in email marketing sequences because I think kind of automating some of the stuff that you do from a day to day on an email perspective. So my first question to you, Philip, is what do I need to consider in order to create effective email sequences for people on my list?
- [02:31]
B
Yeah, the first thing you need to do when you're thinking about, I guess when we're Talking about sequences, we're really just talking about automation. And the first thing you need to do, Kieran, is really think about actually what that conversation would look like if it was real, if it was a dialogue between two people. Okay, so what are the questions that people ask in a store, for example, you know, what are the questions that. Where do people get stuck in the buying process? Online, on your website? And you need to just simulate that dialogue through a series of messages. And really this is again, sort of one of the most common mistakes. We go with our own needs first as a marketer, because we have, you know, we've got to get results every day. But what we miss by doing that is actually solving the problem. The customer that has, you know, the questions the customer has or the prospect has. We try, we almost skip that stage and go for the, you know, go for the revenue. And actually that's, that's, that's, that's not the right way to do it. So it's about really looking at how you can integrate your strategy with what a real dialogue would look like between two humans and also giving a little to get. So we use the give get methodology, which means in order to get what you want, you have to give something of value and that can just be really valuable. Content doesn't have to be a discount or, you know, anything else really, you know, and so, you know, just making sure that you're actually giving something if you want something back, just keeping it simple actually, as well. So the reason why we find most commonly, you know, even really big retailers don't do this stuff is usually because they just look at the big massive list of things they could do and it's quite a scary long list. And then nothing happens.
- [04:02]
A
And so.
- [04:04]
B
It'S about starting small and doing something and prioritizing everything and making sure that you take things one step at a time.
- [04:12]
A
And so in terms of automation and sequences, where would you recommend people? People start with that.
- [04:17]
B
So we'll talk about the customer life cycle in a little while, but it's really looking at the kind of the. If you. It really depends on what your goals are. If you're looking to increase revenue and attract new customers, then look at how you can use automation to effectively nurture prospects through the buying cycle. Rather than just sending static email campaigns. Make a list of all the different types of interactions that someone might have with your brand, such as downloading an app or just browsing categories or specific products. Or even the most obvious one to go for straight away is basket abandonment for A retailer. But actually you'd still be surprised, Kieran. There's a lot of retailers even have that in place. So that's a big revenue driver.
- [05:04]
A
Let's get on to these customer life cycle stages. Can you talk me through how you approach the customer lifestyle course within an email program?
- [05:12]
B
Yeah, I've been talking about this a lot over the last sort of year or so at conferences like where we first met actually, Kieran. And actually looking at the customer lifecycle instead of looking at this purely from an email marketing channel perspective gives you the opportunity to sort of zoom out a little bit and have a different world view, which is actually really quite refreshing because when you work in an organization every single day, you can get a little bit blinkered to the real situation. And the way to look at this is really if you think about your customer life cycle as being a wheel and across that wheel you've got a number of spokes, if you like, that sort of point out towards the edge. And if you start at the top, which is really thinking about the attraction acquisition phase. So how do we find people? How do we get them to subscribe to our email list? How do we start to build a relationship with those individuals? Think about what you need to do is basically map everything you've already got in place there. You basically make a list and you could do this on a big whiteboard and draw this as a big circle with all the spokes coming out for each stage. You could put post it, note for one color, post it for everything that's there right now. So it's a really good session to get everyone involved in. And that means also if you've got other people involved afterwards, all of your ideas are much more likely to launch because actually you've taken everybody on that journey. So you start with acquisition and building that interest and trying to identify those prospects. The second phase, and by the way, all these phases, it's actually really up to you how you map this. But I would start with this approach and then you can add other phases or maybe remove phases. The next phase is consideration. So, you know, this is where all of your regular campaigns might go. Some of the automations I mentioned earlier on might go in here, such as, you know, product browse, category of, browse, all that kind of stuff, simple stuff, but anything where you think someone's starting to show signs of intent to purchase. And again, map everything that you've already got in place here with one post it note color. And then when you start to think of all of your ideas Just put those on a different colored post it note so you can really start to see this whole thing build up. The other phase is getting excited. Yeah, the pre delivery phase and the experience of that. So we call that kind of the experience phase. It's such a massively missed out opportunity for marketers. The reason I say that is because I think the reason this happens is because most of us in marketing often are mostly focused with trying to just get that conversion. But actually if you look at what companies like Sony are doing here where they're really thinking about that handoff from marketing and the transaction to customer service and actually uptake and usage of that product. What Sony do is once you've placed your order for a TV or a camera or something, they'll actually send you an email saying, you know, we hope you're looking forward to getting your new camera. And they'll give you the instructions as a PDF download in an email. And you know, that's a very simple thing to do. Very, you know, you've got all of the assets there to do it, very easy to put in place and actually just really helps, helps people to get the most out of the product. Because I don't know if you're like me, Kieran, but if I order something like that online, I am not reading the instructions when the product turns up. I just want to play with it.
- [08:47]
A
Absolutely. Do you know what, for me, I mean, when I first heard you talk about this, I got very, very excited about it because actually, you know, online digital marketing is all about relationship building. Certainly content marketing is definitely about establishing relationships and building that relationships. And I think as marketers we so often just walk away from, from the relationship as long, you know, since we've got that, that conversion and, and actually that's, that's no good. You can't, can't walk away from a relationship on the first kiss. You need to develop that and actually, you know, you need to nurture that, that relationship. And why not do exciting stuff with what are otherwise fairly bland transactional emails. There's all sorts of creative ways, whatever your product is, where you can actually, you know, really help things along. Because actually these people are purchasing or they've converted or done the thing that you've been aiming to get them to do. You know, that they're, they're on that first stage really and we need to kind of really, really nurture that relationship. And I think the creative possibilities that are very exciting.
- [09:49]
B
I completely agree. And this is the first step, the experience phase or the getting excited phase where marketers start to effectively throw the baton at somebody else. And sometimes that's just based on the way that an organization may be structured. If this feels familiar by the way, it probably means that in your organization there's a problem around communication or there's a problem around structure and responsibilities. And the trend that we really going to see this year is marketers helping other departments because we've got all the tools. And just because we're not targeted with maybe retention or customer satisfaction post purchase for example, it doesn't mean we stop. We need to help these other departments with the tools and technologies that we have invested in. And so it's about communication, working with those other teams to make sure that the customer is actually looked after every stage. And the next stages are really simple as well. So retention and advocacy and loyalty there. So anything in that phase where you're trying to get somebody to maybe go from a first purchase you might call a trial list to a second purchase to a loyal customer maybe you would call that the third or fourth purchase. And then obviously those loyal customers, you want them to become advocates and tell other people about you. And then the last phase is really simple again. So what happens when people disappear? If they perhaps were really engaged with your marketing comms and have maybe disappeared, then you need to re engage them and you need to be proactive about that. You need to do that before you know, they become lapsed, if you like. And also if customers come and go, you know, if they, if they do, if they were, you know, a trialist and you know, brands that are good at this but a little bit heavy. If you look at someone like Ocado again, you know, they're good at this because they're using the right tools. They've got a good, a good strategy in place I feel around wind back and re engagement. But what they perhaps could do better is just again going back to that first thing we talked about around real world conversations really would that be the kind of conversation that takes place in a marketing communication? Would that be the same actually if it was a customer services rep on the phone with that customer?
- [12:09]
A
Okay, so we've kind of covered the full buying cycle there and we sort of moved on to some of the tools that email marketers have in their toolbox? I'd really like to sort of pick your brains on it really. So what, what in your opinion are the must have tools in your email toolbox now?
- [12:27]
B
There's a little bit of a backstory to this. I feel that we've all been a bit messed about with by email service providers actually over the last year.
- [12:38]
A
I agree.
- [12:39]
B
Yeah, really, really. Actually, I think that what happened is, you know, email email marketing service providers, you know, all the big ones, all the small ones and everything in between, I think that they just got stuck sort of thinking it was acceptable just to be a broadcast platform for static campaigns and to do the bare essentials of automation. And I think what's actually happened there is marketers have got really stuck. They've had to go and buy other tools, other technologies to integrate with the email service provider, which is not ideal really. You don't want to have like 10 tools for email marketing. It's become more expensive and actually think that email service providers have missed a massive market opportunity because the companies that have cropped up and filled this gap and become automation platforms of their own have really have really become the winners in this space over the last couple of years. So if you've got like a regular email service, email platform and you're finding it difficult to automate, perhaps some of the more basic elements of the customer lifecycle, tools such as fresh relevance are really nice. So we've got quite a few clients using them and they're great at things like basket abandonment and product browse and doing sort of, you know, live content in email. One of our other favorite tools in this space is Autopilot. So it's really cheap. It's like, I think it's about $100 a month and you can automate loads of different things with that. And it's quite easy to get integrated so it doesn't need tons of development time. And so that's a nice one. If you're in the B2B space, there's absolutely no doubt that HubSpot is the platform. We are a client of HubSpot and it's the most expensive thing that our agency spends on in terms of tools and tech. But we're never going to get rid of it. It's absolutely amazing. Our entire, our entire website and CRM, Sal, marketing campaigns, marketing automation all runs off of the same tool. And when you've got. And that's really what I think email service providers could have done. You know, that's where they could have been. And I think it's a real shame actually that we're in this position where we do have to, as email marketers, go out and buy a ton of different tools and platforms to be able to do things well. There's lots of other tools as well. We really like Our friends over at Email Taxi. So, yeah, have you seen that?
- [14:52]
A
You introduced me to this and I spent some time looking at it and I think, you know, if you haven't got people within the team that have lots of HTML experience, it's fantastic because it really does kind of take that whole, you know, creative HTML designs simplified really, without, without all the technical headaches. I thought it was really good.
- [15:12]
B
Yeah, well, coding emails is a nightmare. It's a nightmare even if you're good at it because there's always, you know, surprises. So templating is absolutely critical. And so being able to use a tool like Taxi to effectively template all of your emails and just go in and drag and drop it means that marketers can just get on with marketing, actually. And that's really important. And I think for too long in email marketing, again, this is probably one of the reasons why the channel is a little bit. People aren't using the channel to its entire capability is because just getting emails out has been historically a bit of a pain in the backside. Removing any need to look at code or to worry about any rendering challenges every time you send a campaign is a massive way off of most of our shoulders. So that's what Taxi does and it's very, very good at it.
- [16:02]
A
And what I liked about Taxi was that it doesn't actually send the email. So it'll work with any email service provider, but it creates good code that you can send out.
- [16:10]
B
Yeah, it's integrated with pretty much all the email service providers. So you just press once you set your integration up, which is very, very simple to do. You just press a button and it exports all of the, all of the code into the campaign that you choose. You don't even need to download anything, you just get on with it. Once you finish working in Taxi, everything is back in your email service provider. So, yeah, it's a really good point, actually. That really does sort of make a big difference, not having to sort of pull stuff down and re upload it and all that kind of stuff. It does speed things up for sure.
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A
What, in your opinion, are the common roadblocks to, to good integration between platforms and email?
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B
I think that the biggest challenge has actually been getting the old players to actually work with the new technologies and tools. So, and this is. That's maybe a little bit, it's true, but maybe a little harsh. And the reason, you know, if you build, if you build a platform five years ago, it's going to be harder to integrate now because everything moves so quickly in this space. So, you know, it's. I'm sympathetic to that. But also getting CRM to work with an email platform can be a bit challenging to the point where actually there's a real problem in Internet marketing as a whole, where if we look at how some really decent sized brands are actually just completely winging it and don't even have a CRM still, I mean, it's amazing. I don't know how these companies are able so that it must be costing them a lot of money because to run a company without a single customer view is, is not a place I would like to be in my organization. And so we're seeing a lot of email marketers using their email platform. It's like a mini CRM and it's just not cut out to do it in most cases. So this is a real problem. And normally the lack of CRM comes down to the fact that it costs quite a lot of money to build a good CRM and to have it integrated with things like call centers and so on. It becomes a very big project. Look, budgets are lean these days. Everything wants to do something yesterday. And so this often falls to the bottom of the list in terms of priorities.
- [18:23]
A
What kind of top tips do you have? I think you're right. I think in order to take your email onto the next level and to start leveraging on almost one to one level communication with customers, which is very much what I think today's modern customer expects from, from a good customer experience, what sort of tips do you have for enabling our audience to really leverage on the data that they've got that they might not be using?
- [18:49]
B
Yeah, that's a great question. And I think the first place I always go to when I'm asked a question like this is listening. And what I mean by that is actually I truly believe that the greatest power of email marketing and the greatest strength that we have as email marketers is the ability to listen to. So when I talk about listening, what I really mean is paying attention to what people are doing. So what we typically see is you'll send a campaign maybe twice, three times a week or once a week, or whatever that looks like for your business. And if somebody starts to show high propensity to purchase, maybe they're looking at specific products, maybe they're looking at the blog or they're going over to social assets like your Facebook page or your Instagram and doing things. What we tend to do is just wait until the next campaign goes out and send it to a very big segment again. And that's not listening. And again, going back, right back to that first point, Kieran, when you asked me one of the most important things about creating email sequences. Well, the most important thing about email marketing as a whole is just having this, trying to humanize and actually have a real dialogue with somebody. So by just sending another campaign, it's like someone walking in. If you're a shoe, you know, a shoe retailer and someone comes in one week and tries on like three pairs of shoes and you know they're a size 5 and you know, you build this rapport, next time that same person comes in, you're going to remember hopefully that you've had that conversation. And whilst you might not remember their shoe size, you need to pick up that conversation where it finished. And by just carrying on sending campaigns, you're not doing that. So listening and doing something, something like the basics of automation, to be proactive at following up on that engagement that you've listened out for is really, really important. And so that's definitely the sort of the first place that I would go. The second is now so important about to integrate email into other channels. And so one of the things that we've been doing and we've kind of been pulled into this world quite a lot in chance is really looking at paid social and how paid social can work with email. And the results are actually really quite amazing. Customers, prospects, they don't really care where they engage with you, where they meet you, it's all on their terms now, but they expect the same experience in each of those spaces. So it's really important to build that consistency. So one of the tips I would give you as an email marketer is talk to whoever it is that's responsible for paid social media and try to mirror the stuff that you've got going on with email marketing automation into paid social. Because all of that targeting and all of that segmentation that you're doing from listening is all actionable and available in paid social.
- [21:44]
A
Yeah, I love that. I love the whole idea of layering the consistent messages across different channels because as a customer, I'm not an email customer or, or a social media customer, I'm just a customer and I kind of want that consistency of experience and that kind of level's quite simple to achieve.
- [22:01]
B
Right.
- [22:01]
A
You just need a bit of a joined up content plan in terms of what you're talking about when you're talking about it and it can go on and become much more sophisticated than that. But I think that's a great starting point. If you're not doing that already. Definitely some quick wins there.
- [22:12]
B
Absolutely. And I think that's the key point. Make sure you start somewhere manageable and achievable. Don't promise your organization that you're going to do something really, really complex. Be kind of, I'd like to describe it. When you're starting out on a strategy like this, be ruthlessly subtractive. Take stuff away. Because the reason that the 99% don't do all of the things that we're talking about today is because it gets too difficult. It gets too difficult to get all the tools to talk to each other. It becomes too difficult to understand if it's a good strategy or not because it's so complex. And it can just become too difficult to get other people to understand and buy into. And so if you're asking for budget to do some of this stuff, you need to start small. And so I think you're absolutely right. Start with something that's manageable, where you can measure, measure it nicely and correctly, improve the ROI and build on it as you go. And that's true of any of the things that we've discussed today, for sure.
- [23:12]
A
Fantastic. Well, Philip, thank you so much for the time and going through this with us. If you want to know any more about Enchant and what you guys do, perhaps get involved with a bit of consultancy with you. Where do we go? Who do we speak to?
- [23:25]
B
Just go to enchantagency.com or you can send me an email. Just send an email to hellochantagency.com and I'll be really happy to have a chat with you.
- [23:34]
A
Fantastic. Well, thank you so much and we wished you the best of luck with your email marketing campaigns and talks throughout the rest of this year.
- [23:41]
B
Thank you, Kieran. Thanks for having me. And thanks everyone for listening.
- [23:52]
A
Thanks for listening to the digital marketing podcast brought to you by Target Internet. If you're investing in your digital marketing skills, take a look at our free benchmark skills test and look at the wealth of online learning we provide. To help marketers get up to speed and stay up to date, just visit targetinternet.combenchmark.
- [24:16]
B
SAM.