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“Just checking in” emails are the worst. If you’re sending an email, it’s obvious that you’re checking in. You don’t need to say it again.
When you’re an email marketer, your to-do list often looks like this: Generate opt-in leads, segment your lists, set up lead nurturing workflows, draft clear and concise email copy, check your emails for deliverability, optimize for plain text and HTML, and so on.
Geez … isn’t there any fun in email marketing anymore?
Last fall, my teammate, Pamela Vaughan, and I made a terrifying and exciting decision. We were on a big mission to reduce our graymail, and we decided to do something drastic.
We created a workflow that initially unsubscribed 250,000 people from our emails — which was roughly half of our list — and would continue to unsubscribe unengaged people over time. Plus, we completely eliminated the option to receive instant notification emails from us.
You don’t need to be an email marketing expert to know that you don’t want people to unsubscribe from your emails.
However, an unsubscribe isn’t the end of the world. In fact, it can actually serve as a helpful signal. For example, if you notice that your unsubscribe rate is starting to climb, it might mean that you’re overloading your audience or failing to target them with sufficiently relevant content.
As more and more people use their mobile phones to surf the internet, marketers have had to rethink how and where we create, share, and optimize content on the web — including email.
In the past year or two, we’ve seen a number of notable changes in the way people check and read their email.
On any given day, the average businessperson receives 91 emails, according to a report by The Radicati Group. This number is expected to rise to 95 emails per person per day by next year, and reach almost 100 by 2018.
That’s a lot of email.
There’s a lot to say when it comes to how to do email marketing well. We could talk for days about the most critical components of an optimized email, common email marketing mistakes you might be making, and examples of brilliant email marketing that will inspire you. But at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter how optimized your emails are if you can’t see the results of your efforts — not to mention measure whether email is helping you hit your goals.
Last year, we saw significant changes in marketing technology. Mobile and social search shifted marketer’s SEO efforts, and messaging apps started to introduce new ways for brands to connect with their audience. But one channel continued to hold the reputation of ‘ol reliable among marketing teams: email.
When you work in marketing, establishing partnerships and building meaningful relationships with influencers comes with the territory.
At CreativeLive, I’m constantly seeking out new business leaders to introduce to our audience. For me, this translates into a high volume of cold emails to people who are extremely busy.
This post originally appeared on HubSpot’s Sales Blog. To read more content like this, subscribe to Sales.
What’s the first step to being more productive?
Depending on what you do, many different answers might come to mind. For some it might be managing time better, setting a schedule, or creating a to-do list every day. But this isn’t exactly the answer I’m looking for.
We all get those emails—the flood of “Save now! 50% off!” and “BOGO sale!” If our inbox was a pool, we could swim in the amount of marketing messages we get. But more often than not, most marketing emails end up in the trash. Unless it’s for something we can actually use, or the subject line piques our interest, most marketing emails don’t get through.
When it comes to delighting people with design, details matter — a lot. The fonts you choose every time you lay out an email, an ebook, or an image for social media end up giving your marketing a polish that makes a big difference.
Trouble is, with so many options to choose from, finding the right one isn’t always as obvious as we’d like it to be. Thankfully, there are a few guiding principles out there to simplify the selection process.
“Am I spending too much time on this?”
For marketers, this isn’t an uncommon question to struggle with. And after questioning myself one too many times, I decided to conduct some research to determine how much time it takes the average marketer to complete a routine task like creating an email, building a list, organizing analytics, etc.
Without fail, I almost always forget to put up an out-of-office email message when I’m headed out for vacation. It’s one of those things I remember just as I’m shutting down, or sometimes even after I’ve already left. (Heh, sorry guys.)
Since I usually throw them up in a hurry, I don’t take a lot of time to get creative. However, I remembered to put up my OOO message early this time around — so I decided to do some Googling for funny, clever, and snarky messages people have used in the past.
