← The Marketing Millennials
The Marketing Millennials
What Actually Makes a Good Email with Naomi West, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Customer.io | Ep. 395
00:44:38
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- [00:01]
A
There's a big gap between having data and turning that data into real customer personalization. Customer IO closes that gap. Fun personalized experiences for Every channel with AI to handle the boring stuff. Learn more at Customer IO TMM welcome to the Marketing Millennials, the NoBS Marketing Podcast. I'm Daniel Murray and join me for unfiltered convers with the brains behind marketing's coolest companies. The one request I tell our guests stories or it didn't happen. Get ready to turn the up. We are back with another episode of the Market Millennials podcast. Today I am with Naomi west, senior product marketing manager at Customer IO. We're gonna talk all things email, which is a topic that everybody talks about, but I feel like there's, it goes back and forth, what's good email, what's bad email, what you do in email. And I think Naomi has some, some myths to bust in this podcast. But Naomi, how did you get into marketing and where did your love from for email come from?
- [01:20]
B
Yeah, well, actually I got rejected from my university's marketing school probably three times before I decided to just do my degree in political science graduate, went into working in recruiting. And then I was so bored at my recruiting job that I took on a side hustle through Angellist doing email marketing. And I at the time had no idea really what I was doing. I was emailing individuals directly, trying to get them to sign up to an app that we were building. And then I realized that you could automate it and I thought I discovered the next best piece of technology before shortly learning that that was email marketing and email automation. And that was in 2015. I ended up quitting the recruiting job where I was working kind of as a receptionist or onboarding coordinator, joining the tech startup full time. And I fell into this weird world where I just loved email marketing, consent based email marketing. So when I'm talking about emailing today, I'm not referring to like cold emails or salespeople emailing people out of the blue, which is cold email or spam or whatever we want to call it. I'm kind of talking examples where you sign up to an app or a website to get a 10% off discount code, or you get kind of an email checklist of things you need to do before being able to use the tool. And that's really my, my bread and butter and I haven't fallen out of it.
- [02:48]
A
So yeah, the angel story is pretty cool, I think. And I love, I love a good rejection to like climbs. Those are the best. That's what motivates me sometimes. All the people who said I couldn't do something and yeah, I love that movie.
- [03:05]
B
And it was all because my calculus grades weren't good enough. And here I am like doing marketing because I wanted to do marketing. And I'm not using calculus, I'm using AI. So take that.
- [03:17]
A
I wanted to ask you. So when someone is judging an email and they say this is a great email, what are they usually getting wrong? When they say this is a great
- [03:28]
B
email, they're looking at it without the context of how someone's receiving that email. So for example, what's the trigger behind that email? Is someone receiving it? Is it a newsletter that goes out on Tuesdays at 9am or is it something that's event triggered? So has someone done something in an application or a platform? Or have they purchased something and then immediately received that email? I think another thing that people often forget to realize is, hey, this email is beautifully designed, but it's actually all images just sliced together. And if that email goes to a spam folder or if that email goes to someone on a certain version of Outlook, none of those images are actually going to load in the email. So you've just sent them a blank email. They have no idea what you're saying. They have no visibility into the context of what you're trying to communicate because you've only used images. You've tried to mimic web design, which is email's kind of like cousin of sorts. But email is so limited in design capabilities that you look at something thinking it kind of seems like web design, but email, you can't have that kind of one to one parity. It's not apples to apples. So context and kind of the actual design and application of the email is something that people often overlook.
- [04:48]
A
I want to go deeper into. You talked a little bit about web design and people try to mimic an email with web design. So what are some of the web design trends that fall apart inside of an email?
- [05:04]
B
Custom fonts. If you think about it, there's only like 6 to 8. Someone can correct me on the exact number, but there's really only like six to eight stable email fonts that are applicable across all email clients. Email clients being Hotmail, Yahoo, Outlook, Gmail, Apple mail on iPhone, mail.ru there's so many email clients out there and they all support different things. So for example, if I'm building a beautiful website and I'm using a lovely Google font, I would think, oh, you know Gmail is owned by Google, surely that same font would work if I send this email to Gmail. Wrong. Gmail won't even load its own fonts. It'll fall back to something like Arial or Helvetica. And so fonts is a big one and it's super disappointing because a lot of individuals brand identities are tied to the fonts that they use as their typeface. And when they don't end up loading in the email world you're like what? This is so weird. Like hate this Helvetica or Georgia or whatever these like safe fonts are. So that's a big one. Certain things like GIFs don't even work on certain versions of Outlook. They will only load the very first frame of your gif. So you try and make very simple things like a GIF work in an email and the reality is it's not universally supported when it reaches an inbox. Another thing that doesn't work great is things like rounded corners in some versions of Outlook that's not supported. Unless you use something called vml. You can't play video in a majority of email clients. So people will often say how do I insert this video into an email? And I have to say, well, use a gif, put a faux play button on it and then link out to wherever you've supported that email, whether it's YouTube or Wistia or Vimeo or one of these millions of platforms that exist these days. So there's a million things that are like super limited when it comes to email marketing and it's really sad at the end of the day and there's a lot of education that needs to take place because I think you go into email marketing kind of with these rose colored glasses on thinking that you can create this beautiful design piece and you spend a lot of time attempting to create something that looks great in an email builder or in your marketing automation platform only at send time to realize that a lot of those things aren't supported.
- [07:37]
A
I also think that there's also a overly emphasis on a well designed email and an under emphasis of what actually is in that email and it does what matters in it. Because like what really matters in emails is relevancy and like to the audience and if they are they getting something useful out of it, they don't really care how good designed your email is. I mean I don't go terribly designed but they, you're not gonna, they don't care if you trying to make it super pretty, they trying to get really fast out of this that is useless for them. And then they're going to their next email. They're not trying to. Yeah, no, I, I think the nicely designed email is so like 10, 15 years ago when you got into marketing, just like I need to do that now. It's just like, yeah, let's get the content quickly. I want that whatever you're trying to say in that email.
- [08:31]
B
Yeah, I had, I had like a eureka moment I guess 4ish years ago where I came into this small startup called Parcel, which was an HTML coding platform for email specifically. And I am not a graphic designer by any means, I'm an email marketer. I can talk strategy all day, I can talk a little bit of code, but I am not a visionary. I've got no visions happening up in my head and I cannot execute graphic design. So I always default to either an existing email template that someone has designed for me or I default to a text based email. Something simple that I can get out the door same day. And so for the first year of me doing marketing with Parcel, we would send text based emails and I had always this large dream of hey, we're an HTML coding platform, we should be able to walk the walk and talk the talk, talk the talk, walk the walk and have really cool emails. And finally someone joined our team. His name is Mark Robbins and he's just a really talented email developer that I knew could bring some ideas to life and help me execute on these design ideas. So we ran an a B test where we had variant A which was the text based automations going out kind of like the control. And then variant B which was these like really cool emails that had dynamic content and gradient backgrounds and marquee text that would move in the clients that supported it. And the results came back and the text based variant won for both click through rate as well as conversion rate. And my hypothesis of wow, we should invest in these really nice emails was completely squashed. And that was the moment where I was like, okay, maybe keeping things simple is the way to go. And like thanks Mark. Sorry Mark that your, your designs couldn't actually be super beneficial to us. But text based emails I can get out same day and people love them more. Apparently for this specific business case it's
- [10:40]
A
probably also email dependent based too because I feel like if you're sending out a newsletter and you have like a warmed up audience that loves your email, you could start adding a little bit of flair in that email and they or like it still will be receivable because people are fans of the content you're saying. But if you're sending like those transactional emails or you're sending those automated emails. It's always better to lean on under designed and easy to read than hard.
- [11:12]
B
And some images like I look through my inbox every day for one inspiration, but I like to read my emails and I'll open an email and it'll just be a gigantic image. There's no text in sight. I don't know what the main call to action is. The subject line doesn't tell me anything. And that to me I just delete it because I'm like, am I going to have to scroll for days to get what the main message is? Beautiful image, but it loaded like a fax machine because maybe my wifi is slow. But then I also don't understand the content. Sometimes keeping it simple saves graphic designers time, it saves you as a marketer time and it results in way higher engagement.
- [11:51]
A
What's like a fair way to fair way to AB test? Is it just doing one element different? Is it doing the whole email different? Because I'm wondering what is a fair AB test when you're trying to test the text based email or something with a header or something which works better? What's like a fair test that can run the day?
- [12:17]
B
Yeah, it's tough because even the removal of images from an email creates like an apples to oranges test where you're not necessarily comparing the same thing in the same message. The way that I measured it was in, I think it was a three email automation over the course of a seven day period. It was our welcome series where I had variant A, the three emails were text based and then variant B were the design ones. I looked at the overall kind of click through rate across the three emails on both sides as well as the overall conversion rate on both sides to try and understand does the variant A that only contains text based pieces result in overall higher conversion than variant B. I also wait a period of time before I gather those results and see if they're statistically significant. In this specific example I waited a full quarter so three months to see how engagement was over that period. Removing kind of like any fluke timings or like periods, weeks where maybe people were just oddly more engaged with text based emails. I wanted like a really healthy sample size to go in and remove elements of seasonality, make sure I had good volumes of individuals on, on both variants to pull results from. And that's what I would recommend marketers do is kind of automate your tests, put them in an automation and event triggered workflow have those emails go out and then after a longer period of time go and look at how individuals are reacting to them or engaging with them. If you're going to test it over like a one email, like a newsletter, I usually like to repeat the test multiple times. So if I send a weekly newsletter, week one, I would test that out. Week two, test it again. Week three, test it again just to see if the results are consistent towards being statistically significant in one direction or the other.
- [14:15]
A
I think that's a good way to, for marketers listening just to have a fair test. Also I think it's a good way because one thing that a lot of email marketers run into and executed marketers run into is I want to send a text based email because it converts better. But the brand team saying that's off out of brand, like you said, fonts too and, and colors and all this stuff. So how do you combat that? One way to combat it is do that fair test over seven days and see version. But what have you done in the past if someone, if that's ever happened to you?
- [14:54]
B
Yeah, of course, of course. There's always some, someone saying we can't do this. It's against our brand guidelines. And in some scenarios you're unfortunately just stuck in that world. I see it in a lot of more like bureaucratic or larger enterprise organizations where unfortunately, unfortunately the marketer lacks a lot of creative freedom. I am a pusher. I'm a pusher internally. When I like to test things out, I push, push, push until someone finally says absolutely not. But I think it's going in with the value first. So for example, if you wanted to test a text based email saying hey, here's an idea I have, here's how the impact would result in change within our org. It would allow me to decrease my email design time from seven days to one day. The QA time against our brand team or our design team would be shortened by X amount of time. Here's the results I'm hoping for. Higher click through rate, a higher conversion rate and here's what that ends up benefiting our overall organization with. If you can respond with numbers in any fashion, whether it's directly tied to monetary value or just saying, hey, if we see X amount of more conversion, that means X for our business. Ideally a management would see that and be like, okay, it's worth testing. Unfortunately, there's always scenarios where people are like, no, our brand standards are elite and we can't risk someone seeing a text based email from us. That would Ruin our reputation, get a new job, move on time to find a new place where you can be a little bit more creative. But yeah, I think it's just putting the value first and hoping that someone has their head on right where they see that and they're like, okay, let's test it.
- [16:44]
A
One thing too I wanted to ask you is I know you've worked with a lot of different ESPs in the past, so how much does platform matter versus strategy when it comes to ESP? Is it like do you need the perfect platform or. I mean for some things probably you need some automations that some can do. But what is the most important when you're weighing out those two things? We all know marketing has to feel human to work, but when each message has to be built, tested and managed across every channel, feeling human is easier said than done. Customer IO makes it possible with AI automation and integrated marketing tools. So you could speed up repetitive work and skip the boring one size fits all marketing. Give customer experiences that feel like they were created just for them wherever they are. Learn more@customer IO TMM.
- [17:48]
B
Yeah, there are a million ways to get the same thing done in all of these platforms. A lot of teams will lean on external kind of like vitamin tools that help them create great emails because they're in product solution sucks. A lot of email editors inside of marketing automation platforms are the bare minimum I think because the product teams are focusing on building out better data orchestration and segmentation and people can get what they need, they need done. As is that being said, basic text based email can be accomplished in every single platform, no issue there. And then kind of a well designed email in my opinion can also be accomplished in like 80% of platforms where people start to get a little bit itchy is when they want to customize an email design based on the email clients that will be receiving it. So once you get past this generic designed email and start leaning into okay, what does Apple Mail support? They support interactivity, maybe they support marquees, maybe they support gradient backgrounds. Email designers will potentially lean into that and want to customize it and so there's external tools for that. Some marketing automation platforms like Customer IO and Alternatives Support those things in the product themselves. So I think if you're wanting to test out the text based email piece, you should be able to do it on any single platform. It's when you want to kind of lean into the nitty gritty kind of targeting based on client, that's where you can kind of start to do that in either external tools or poke your marketing automation platform to see if they offer those capabilities. But I've been in a lot of platforms and the platforms that I like, there's certainly a list of platforms that I avoid. The platforms that I like to use and the ones that I work with support the basic email design functionality. It's really the event triggering and the dynamic conditions, the segmentation, the reporting that differs on a platform to platform basis.
- [20:05]
A
Let's go into some of the things that lead up to an email that are important that people think about. So when you're designing an email campaign or a life cycle campaign where an abandoned card flow, abandoned form flow, whatever you do, what is your like 1, 2, 3 step and how are you planning out from I'm going to do this to I'm going to execute it internally because there's a lot of like moving parts sometimes too if you, if you're changing fields, if you're marketing things. So what is like your end to end look like for a campaign?
- [20:42]
B
Yeah, there are a lot of moving pieces. So one of my favorite like campaign to One of my favorite campaigns to work on or automations to build is like very specific education event triggered emails. So for example, Customer IO recently launched our MCP server which allows individuals to basically connect Claude ChatGPT cursor directly to their Customer IO workspace. So I can go into Claude and I can be like tell me about Daniel at MarketingMillennials and it will pull your user profile data. I will ask it what are some things Daniel's done inside of Customer IO recently? And I can fetch all of that data and Claude can summarize it for me, which is great. In that specific scenario, my job as a product marketer at Customer IO is to explore how people are using the MCP server. I want to know their feedback on it and I also want to educate them on how to use the server better. With that, I start with defining what I want the trigger to be. In this scenario, it's enabling the MCP server inside of their customer IO account. When someone does that, they trigger an automation and the first touch point is kind of congratulating them on enabling the server and reaching out, letting them know that I'm here for feedback, I'm here for questions. My stance on email marketing is it has to be a two way street. I have gathered so much valuable feedback from users over the years when they reply to my emails. So that first touch point want to welcome them, congratulate them, give them a couple best practice resources for where they can learn how to use the server effectively and then offer them a way to contact me with feedback. So I kind of strategize around that. I'm all around the copy. My main goal is attempting to get them to use the server for the very first time. So that's going to be my primary call to action, driving them to connect Claude or Cursor or chatgpt the follow ups. I want to know how their experience was. And so let's say after a certain period of time, three days, five days, seven days, you can play around with kind of the day delay to see if one results in more feedback. The touch point after that certain delay is going to be trying to gather that feedback. And so my copy in that email is how'd the experience go? Was there anything you wished you could do? Do I need imagery in those emails? Potentially I might throw in a GIF showing how to connect the tools. Just a really simple visualization of how to use the product. I might throw in a couple example prompts giving individuals a starting place and then from there see what kind of results I get back. It's a first pass. And that's kind of how I approach email building. I put out a general feeler of what I want to accomplish as a marketer, what I want in return. And from there either it could be like me working as an IC to develop and build those emails myself, or I could be working with my product manager, the rest of the marketing team, to kind of shape the brand voice and tone if it needs to be more brandy. And then I make sure those feedback loops are in place to translate that feedback back to Slack channels so others can have visibility. There is a QA process with the email. So once I've built the emails, I submit them to our brand team for review. They do same day review because we have a pretty well oiled email design system and then I launch it.
- [24:28]
A
I think some people forget when they think of the grand scheme of emails. I think you forget about the ones that you could do for individual product managers or individual reps that could help them save a lot of time. They think about the card flow they think about. Also I was going to add too tools sometimes matters if you're trying to do like product triggers because it's sometimes hard, yes, sometimes hard. When you don't have a tool that's easy to connect to your custom product, then you're having to have engineering built, something to go into.
- [25:03]
B
And engineers ignore, they ignore marketers. They're like, I'll Be like, hey, can I. Do you guys have an event for this I could use? And they're like, la, la, la, la, la.
- [25:13]
A
Or six months later, it's, it's live.
- [25:16]
B
Six months later. Do you need this? Yeah, no. That's why I'm a pusher. If I don't get same day replies from an engineer, I'm in there calling them, pinging them, pulling them into like a slack little video they don't like. Video engineers don't want to be bugged. So if you're a marketer out there and engineering isn't helping you, you just have to push all day, every day.
- [25:35]
A
Even with it. I remember we had, there was like certain guardrails when I was in marketing ops that they weren't allowed certain fields inside and we needed just one more field and it was the end of the world to add a field that I needed on the record so I could do an automation.
- [25:55]
B
It's weird.
- [25:55]
A
I'm fighting because they have their eternal rule and I'm just, this is not going to affect anything and it's going to help us increase revenue. Please let.
- [26:05]
B
It's so odd and it's such like a universal, like if you're a marketer and you haven't encountered a tricky engineer or like tricky it, it's coming soon for you. It's like a rite of passage. Everyone has to encounter this certain type of personality that like has to abide by the rules. No, you can't have that data. You can have it in one year from now. I don't know what, what's up with that?
- [26:29]
A
I also want to ask you, I mean, let's say, I mean you probably are since you're an email marketing. You're judging a lot of emails that come in your inbox. Other people are sending you. But I want to ask you. Yeah, like someone came in you and one of those emails fell in your inbox and you said, and they said like, tell me, they said, tell me if this email is good. What are like the three things that you looking for to check if this is a good email? If someone is sending you because you're judging them. I do the same thing with marketing.
- [27:01]
B
Yeah. If I had someone email me being like, is this a good email? And I'm the recipient, let's say it's sent to me and then the brand is like, was that a good email? The relevancy is top of mind. How familiar am I with the brand as is. Did I just sign up to them? And it's part of their welcome flow. Is this a brand that I've been acquainted with for a year from now or a year? At least a year. Relevancy, top of mind. I feel like there's a lot of brands out there that forget to create these predictable touch points and just ghost subscribers for six months and then they're like, oh, I need to send a newsletter. They send the newsletter, I receive an email and I'm like, what is this brand? I've never signed up to? You spam. I'm huge on the spam. Spam, spam, spam. I don't even unsubscribe. I'm like, I don't know.
- [27:53]
A
There are some email providers that auto subscribe you too, which is. That's a horrible practice where you get auto subscribed to newsletter you never subscribe to. I hate.
- [28:02]
B
Yes, unfortunately, I think that's like legal in the States maybe. So I apologize for that. Down there in Canada, you can't do it. There has to be like either implied consent where I've like purchased from the brand previously or like signed up for like white paper downloadable. You can't just email me like that. It's illegal. I'll fight them. I don't like that. And I think that's also illegal like in Europe and stuff. So I don't get it. Relevancy. Just collect consent from your subscribers and you'll have a good time. Make sure you're communicating with them like fairly frequently. Monthly is fine, weekly could be too much. Depends on what you're saying and what you're trying to sell and what you're offering is so relevancy and then the content itself. So what is it that you're trying to get me to accomplish? Is it a newsletter that I've opted into? In that case, is this content relevant to what you said you were going to deliver to me? And am I opening the email and reading through it and not unsubscribing? Is it a newsletter that is trying to get me to click on blog posts and read further? In that case, are people clicking through and then the design? I think back to the design once again. Is the content legible? Like people who send out emails with size 12 font size? I can't read that. If I need to make my face wrinkle to read an email on my mobile device, it's a bad email. So basic design and accessibility, best practices. That's the trifecta really. A good email is one that's relevant, has good content and is legible and accessible.
- [29:43]
A
I want to also go into, I know you in some of your workflows, you talked about that you have cloud and all, all the AI tools that are connected to your platform. But what do you think? Because, I mean email is not going away for a long time. But what do you, what do you think is going to separate a good email market from a great market in the next three years? What are some skills that they should double down on to make sure that they are going to be competing? I mean obviously one of them is like knowing how to do stuff with AI, but like maybe go deeper into what are you thinking about that?
- [30:19]
B
Yeah, the best types of email marketers that I see today and maybe just like marketers in general are ones that are open to testing new ideas, not people that just stay, you know, working the same wheel over and over again. It's people that say, hey, it's been, you know, six months since we've tested this last. Should we test it again? What do we want to find out, you know, from our audience this time? So openness to testing and openness to being wrong I think is like a quality that I look for in junior marketers or marketers that are just looking to stand out with that openness to learning and openness to testing is definitely like an openness to exploring the new AI tools. I know there's a lot of organizations still that are in this weird anti AI state and unfortunately I feel like the people that work there are just going to fall behind in the talent pool as years progress. There are a lot of tools, Claude, obviously being one. I use a great tool now that is like a, it's moved from a vitamin tool, like a nice to have to a need to have like pill everyday tool called Whisper Flow. It's a voice, voice transcription. Oh, it's so good. It's so good. I now just talk everywhere. I'm down in my living room watching tv, like holding the hotkey, like, okay, create a strategy document or rewrite this slack message. Just commanding it to do all of these things. For me, it's fantastic tool. So yeah, exploring AI tools, going deep on their use cases, not just like downloading them once and then never touching them again. I think another thing which ties in with the new world of AI is just you need to have good communication skills, both written and verbal. I'm worried that with all these AI tools, written summaries will get really concise and really locked in. But then when it comes to live interactions, these people will stumble on how to communicate something effectively. Without an AI solution. So whether that means talking to yourself in a mirror, talking to yourself on something in like Riverside to see how you come across, to see how you can better shorten some of the fluff words or like words that don't equate to good sentences or good grammar, that probably was a horrible sentence in itself. But practicing communicating verbally I think is another standout quality that individuals should work on as we lean into this like weird AI world that will help us offline communicate well.
- [33:04]
A
Yeah, I think those, what you said, those personal skills, learning how to do that is also I think one of the things that I've been feeling. If you know how to, if you know how to manage people, you probably couldn't manage AI very well too in a way that like you understand how to give direction to junior and, and that all comes from like interpersonal skills. But also if you're running, if you have AI agents like working for you and you don't know how to give clear, direct feedback, it's going to be
- [33:41]
B
you're not going to get what you need.
- [33:43]
A
And that's come from personal skills you learn in everyday job too. So I think those skills.
- [33:49]
B
Yeah, yeah. And those skills are all, I guess like aside from the AI specific tools, they're tool agnostic, good communication skills, written and verbal as well as an openness to learning and an openness to testing. It's not like a course you should take online. That's something like you can practice continuously and one online certification isn't going to tick a box making you a good marketer. I have a lot of people ask like what courses should I take? Or like what tools should I learn? I'm like, I don't think that's the right, the right answer or like that's not going to solve problems. If you know one specific tool, it won't set you up for the most success.
- [34:31]
A
Yeah, it's sad to say that most, and I wouldn't say all summer, great. Most courses are become best practices and when they best practices they're already old. Especially in a way in a marketing role where something, if you're talking about copywriting, okay, that is something that doesn't change the basics of that or basic psychology. But I'm talking about email specific tooling or how to design an email that could be changing in a week. A new tool comes out and you're ready behind because you're thinking about old school tools that you're using. So yeah, yeah, I always ask people this on my podcast, but what is a marketing hill you would die on?
- [35:23]
B
Well, there's so many. I have very strong opinions. It's open rates are a vanity metric. That is a hill I will die on. Have a lot of senior execs that I've worked with over the years be like, what's the open rate? And is that a good or a bad open rate? And I just want to like reach through. I've really only worked remotely, so I want to reach through the screen and be like, no, don't look at that metric. Because a lot of open rates are automated these days. IPhones, for example, if you're running it's iOS 15 or above. Once an email lands in your Apple mail inbox, it's marked as opened because content is pre fetched on Apple mail now. And so that means you're not even reading the email and the open rate is whatever.
- [36:09]
A
Yeah, I mean if you have a good platform, you could probably say like, okay, okay, let's weed out those and upgrade too.
- [36:16]
B
Yeah, the good platforms will tell you if it's like a bot open and give you like a human metric. But still, even like the human metric one, sometimes I get an email in my inbox and the subject line will say 50% off until end of day. I might delete that email, but at dinner time before I'm about to take my first bite, I'll be like, oh, I got an email from that swimwear brand. They told me that there's 50% off until end of day. I'm going to go buy a swimsuit right now from this online brand. So it's not telling you the full picture. Even though I didn't open that email, there's still correlation to potentially me going and converting. And so I just want marketers out there to push themselves to think beyond open rates. Because there's so much more to measuring email engagement and overall marketing engagement than just how many people opened your email.
- [37:10]
A
And open doesn't mean red. I think people forget that too. It's just like ads where you see impressions doesn't mean you got attention. Open just could mean someone's clearing out the inbox. It could be the bot. Every morning could mean the bot. And some of those emails you said like the swimwear brands and stuff, some show discount code, preview text, so you don't even have to click email to get the discount code.
- [37:39]
B
They're making it super easy for me to make that purchase and I kind of like it. As an email marketer, I'm like, oh, you're making it so easy. But yeah, there's a million reasons why open rates aren't the best measure of success. And there's a lot more like meat behind that whole concept. But yeah, that's one of the many hills I will die on.
- [38:02]
A
So I'll just go what are you consistently our metrics that email marketers should really be paying attention to?
- [38:12]
B
Honestly, like click through rate if you have a call to action in your email. I see a lot of I worked with a brand last week as one of my freelance projects that said that they had little to no email engagement and when I went and looked at their emails it was a long form newsletter with nowhere to click. And so I was like what do you want people to click on here? There's no CTA buttons. You're providing all the information to them directly in this email. So click through rates are great. If you're trying to get the user or subscriber to take an action and then push, your team internally mops IT engineers to give you the events you need to measure the success of that email. Whether it's assigning a conversion goal or a conversion event to that specific specific automation or one off email in your marketing automation platform, or using a supplemental tool like Mixpanel or Amplitude to then create funnel reports. Seeing how many individuals go and click on the email and then convert to your specific goal. You're wanting them to paint that story internally. Share it widely. One thing I don't see email marketers doing enough is sharing how their emails are actually performing from a brand perspective. What are you encouraging people to do? People don't know those things unless you tell them internally. So share it on Slack, share it on teams, yell out your successes. Yeah, click through rates and conversion rates. Really good one. And then another one that I like to keep an eye on is unsubscribe rates from an automated perspective. So in a welcome series, ideally you don't have a ton of unsubscribes because you've set expectations right at the start of what someone is going to receive from you. And then for future event triggered campaigns, are you keeping those unsubscribe rates down and not annoying people with the amount of automated emails that are going out.
- [40:06]
A
I mean also if you're getting unsubscribes in a welcome email, the offer on top is usually also wrong. Whatever is feeding into that welcome email something you're probably getting the wrong lead or ICP in that list.
- [40:22]
B
Yeah, whenever I see unsubscribes happening in a welcome series, I'M like, what did you tell these people? What, what did they sign up for?
- [40:29]
A
Why when you say communicate that these things are happening and I'll say this is that there's so many events that happen where this spikes and things happening in sales and stuff. And if you're not communicating a big email went out and people are just. Yeah, sometimes it doesn't track that. It could come as a Google branded search or this like you said, you didn't open the email and you went and buy some. So if you should be communicating with. Because there's so many things, if an event happened and then this conversion on in the reports, you should be telling people and screaming totally instead of saying being quiet that you're sending out big campaigns.
- [41:14]
B
Yeah, yeah. Don't let your work like exist in a silo. I think is a big one. Because email marketers, you live and breathe email all day. Or if you're a marketer that wears like 17 hats and emails one of your hats. We live in our marketing automation platform. We probably send test sends to our boss and then we forget to communicate externally or internally within our organization that something is happening and it's such a missed opportunity because when you can communicate that a big send is going out or an event invite or a new product launch, your customer success team can amplify that and your sales team can amplify that and they can kind of be in the loop with all of that stuff and help kind of make your email success what it is.
- [41:57]
A
Lastly, where could people find you and what you're doing and what are you doing in customer IO?
- [42:04]
B
I do have a website, NaomiWest, ca and a newsletter that I run called Slow Emails. It's called Slow Emails because I don't have a great predictable cadence with how often I send it. I send it very slowly throughout the year.
- [42:16]
A
Well, you set the standards up front.
- [42:19]
B
Yeah.
- [42:20]
A
I'm telling people if you said that you send a newsletter every six months it's fine.
- [42:26]
B
Yeah.
- [42:26]
A
If you do, if you say you have a newsletter and stop sending and then saying what's up?
- [42:31]
B
It's a. Yeah, I still like, I get an unsubscribe every once in a while probably because I've spooked someone but. And I mourn them. I mourn every unsubscribe individually. I take it very personally. But yeah, I think I do a good job setting the expectations. It's a newsletter where I talk about email unsurprisingly and then I talk a lot on LinkedIn to myself about events that I'm hosting and running and whether they're both virtual or in person and resources that I write on email, it's really a full time job and a hobby.
- [43:02]
A
I love it. Okay so go subscribe to the slowest email newsletter in the world. Yes yeah that'd be great and go follow Naomi on LinkedIn and yeah check out Customer IO. It's a great platform. So thank you so much for coming on and appreciate your time.
- [43:23]
B
Yeah thanks for having me. It was great to chat email with you.
- [43:29]
A
Thanks so much for listening. Keep keep tuning in to hear more great insights from the coolest marketers from around the world. If you haven't already make sure to subscribe and follow the Marketing Millennials podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you get your podcast. And if you like what you hear I would greatly appreciate you giving us a five star rating. It helps bring more marketers into our community. Sam.