On last week’s episode of Optily Radio, we discussed the ways brands can make sure their email stand out and make the most impact. Jacob Anson of agencyJR and Brendan Hughes of Optily talked in detail about email deliverability, open rates, and email formats.
If you’re short on time, check out the teaser below and the summary write-up. But if you’re looking to improve your email marketing and have 30 minutes to spare, make sure you listen to the entire episode.
The main points we covered off were:
- The importance of keeping email lists clean
- Steps for improving your deliverability
- Crafting a powerful campaign series
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Cleaning your email lists
One of the first points Jacob stressed was the value of audience segmentation. First and foremost, that means targeting people who actually want to read your emails. If someone hasn’t opened a single email three months, they’re not likely to open your next one.
What’s the harm in keeping them in even if they don’t open? Well, your open rates impact deliverability in the long run. By keeping lists clean and targeting people who tend to open your emails, you’ll keep your emails relevant in the eye of Google. Your domain and server reputation will go down and your emails will start to land in the promotions tab or spam if open rates are low.
White-labeling your domain for deliverability
This part gets a tiny bit technical when it comes to ensuring that your emails come from your domain instead of through MailChimp, Klaviyo or another email platform. Before it was fine to send through their servers, however, in recent years Gmail has downgraded the email placements sent through these servers.
In order to get around that, you need to white-label your sending domain. After you go through the white-labeling, you wait a few weeks to become verified. Then you’re good to go with your email campaigns from your own domain.
Step-by-step Black Friday email campaign
Jacob took us through the steps that went into a really successful email campaign for last year’s Black Friday season for a fitness app. This campaign resulted in 142k downloads attributed to email marketing alone.
- Reengagement: take your existing email lists and reengage the audience and widen the net to include those who may have opened emails in the past 6 months, rather than just that past 90 days
- Run this for 1-2 weeks
- Engagement: now you want to segment based on people who have opened an email within 60 or 90 days and engage them with less salesy and more informative content
- Lead generation (optional): with sales you want to advertise the different tiers here, for example, the early bird sales (ie an opt-in VIP list) so you can target this list before your main sales emails go out
- Pre-sale: announcing the upcoming sale to get people excited and give them a heads up
- Sale: here you finally launch the sale and send 2-3 reminder emails during the sale period, finishing with a “sale ending” email
- Sale extended: one final push is to extend the sale for 24 hours
Jacob uses this blueprint for any product launches or big sales with great results.
