 Hello. Thank you for having me back for year three in my dimension. Also, my third hair color at MozCon. It's a real honor to talk email with you for the third year in a row. And I also hope that you're not in that post-lunch slump and not too excited to talk about email with me. So that's me, Justine, two hair colors ago. I've been in email for more than 10 years, but hey, who's counting? As I said, I'm BPO marketing at a SaaS company called Litmus. So we see lots and lots of emails, lots and lots of best practices, and lots and lots of research that I'm going to talk to you about today. I lead brand content research. I also really love cats, by the way. If you've seen my presentations before, I'm sorry I don't have as many cat gifts for you today. But if you look up some of the old ones, you might, if you're a fellow cat lover, you might enjoy them as well. So I am Meladory on Twitter. Bonus points to anyone that can tweet at me and tell me what my Twitter name is in reference to. Or my company is Litmus, and try to keep it nice, you know, so I can come back next year. It's always a good thing. So I'm here to talk to you today about the golden rules of email marketing. But first, I want to tell you a little bit of a story. If you were at MozCon last year, you might remember that I told you the story about one of my very favorite brands. So here's a quick recap, and it's kind of a sad story. Karma is this a Wi-Fi hotspot company, and they sent these wonderful customer-centric emails for the longest time. Their brand voice was so human-centric, talking about all the value that their product brought to me and to my pocket and to my Wi-Fi connection all the time. Their emails were just really human-centric. They were really all about the value, right? But then they went to sending nothing but buzzword-laden emails full of marketing terminology like grandfather program, 20% off, refuel, literally were incomprehensible almost. And to make matters more worse, there was really an abrupt transition. It happened over just a few months or so. They went from sending these really customer-centric messages to sending nothing but transactional and triggered emails about who was joining my network and my billing to sending garbage, honestly, all caps, marketing buzzwords about grandfather terminology and promotions on an almost daily basis. It was heartbreaking. And the difference was totally stark. You could tell that something drastic had shifted internally at Karma. They went from emails to tell me my battery was dying so I could get more use out of my device to basically shouting at me with marketing buzzwords. It didn't make any sense at all. And so it was a really great reminder that this is how marketers see email as, well, a marketing channel as they possibly should. It's all about reports, open rates, delivery rates, click-through rates. By the way, this is like a screenshot from MailChimp from more than a decade ago, but really nothing's changed, right? Email is that old-style work. It's all about the opens and the clicks, baby. Worse yet, sometimes we see email is a cash machine where we press this button that says send this blast and it just prints money and all the metrics come through the front door. And it's a balancing act. Anyone that sends email on top of their regular job doing SEO or any other kind of marketing knows how difficult it is to manage email on top of every other channel and all the expectations that come along with it. Which leads to how consumers see email a little bit differently as humans do, a little bit differently than marketers do. So they see email as, well, just another promotion in their inbox. Or let's be honest, a giant can of spam right in the face. That's because there's a disconnect. Marketers see email as a marketing channel and there's pressure to show this short-term gain which can often destroy long-term loyalty in the process. On one side of the spectrum, we know that sending consumer-centric, subscriber-centric email that builds trust with our audience and adds value, fun, and relevance is exactly what the humans on the other side of the inbox want. But as marketers, we're pressured to show the reports, the opens, the clicks, the sales, which if we do too much of that, it ends up spending trust. When we should be meeting there in the magic, in the middle where all the magic happens, when you can find that blend between when you're meeting your consumer's needs but you're also meeting your business's needs. And so when marketers don't find that magic in the middle, this is what happened, spam. Humans report spam when emails arrive in their inbox that don't meet their expectations. And it's important here to remember that it's not you that defines spam. It's the human with the inbox. They think that anything irrelevant, unpersonalized, just not interesting, is spam. If they can't unsubscribe from you easily, it's spam. If they never signed up to receive it in the first place, it's definitely spam. And this is what's actually really interesting. We talk about wearing a lot of hats as marketers and riding that unicycle and balancing the email on top of your head. When we talk about omni-channel experiences, for instance, if you are a brick and mortar, if you're a local SEO, you have a brick and mortar location, someone walks into your store, they have a bad customer service experience, they might punish you as retribution the next time they receive an email from you by marking you as spam. And of course, not working well on a smartphone. That's spam too. I can't read it, I can't understand it, can't make sense of it on a small screen. It must be spam. So my colleague Chad White said in one of our reports, irrelevant and unwanted email is the new spam in both the eyes of consumers and internet service providers. Let's again, just a reminder that we're not the ones who decide what spam is. It's the humans that do. And if they think it's spam, then, well, it's spam. And I also think that Erin Walter, who is over at InVision and also wrote the book Designing for Emotion, really hit the nail on the head when he said that humans want to connect with real people. And when we press send as marketers, it's sometimes hard to forget that, when on the other side of that button, isn't just a list of 10,000 or maybe even 10 million people, they're real humans with real inboxes that have real desires about the kind of messages they receive and real opinions about what makes them spam or not. So let's get to the insights, huh? So to understand all of the emotions and drivers that go into both sides of the equation, both how humans see marketing and how marketers see marketing, Litmus does this massive survey every year. We get 3,000 marketers telling us everything about how they create email to how they send it to how people interact with it to the benchmarks that they report and everything in between. And so all that gets published in a bunch of research that leads to the golden rules of human centric email marketing. So some of that research lends us insight into the priorities and goals and top challenges of email marketers. And so when we asked marketers this year, well, what are your top trends and priorities that you're looking to get? They said, I want to send more personalized email. I want to improve accessibility. I want to get better analytics and insights. We want to build better narratives and tell more stories. We want to be more human. And we want to focus on lifetime value, which all sound like really, really great goals. But if you remember that slide earlier about why humans report marketing as spam, and we compare them to one another, and we say, okay, if one of our top priorities is personalization, but one of the main reasons why humans mark emails as spam is because they're irrelevant, how are we doing there? Or if we say we want to improve accessibility, but I'm marking as spam because my emails look bad on a smartphone. So we can keep going on and on down this list, but you'll see that every point of trends and priorities has a counterpoint to why humans are reporting that maybe those really aren't priorities after all. As marketers, are we really putting our money where our mouth is and we talk about wanting to do human-centric email marketing? Are we really benefiting our consumers? Or are we just saying that because it's benefiting our business? And at least to this question, are marketers and humans really aligned? So there's a disconnect between those challenges and our priorities. So what are the marketing rules about humans? Number one, always collect consent. Cannot emphasize this enough. Email marketing is an opt-in channel, not an opt-out channel. You might be saying, wait, Justine, I'm pretty sure that can spam in the US is an opt-out law, not an opt-in law. And I'm here to say, well, that's really changing. That is the case today. And in fact, the US is the only country on planet Earth for the most part that is an opt-out country that doesn't require consent to send email. Basically, every other country does. And you might have even heard from a little thing called GDPR that rolled out on May 25th this year. And believe it or not, GDPR is more than just a strategy to cram your inbox full of privacy policy and re-opt in emails, ha ha, believe it or not. It's actually a little bit more than that. So GDPR is the General Data Protection Regulation, kind of a mouthful, which is the EU's privacy law. And it basically affects any company that uses personal data from EU citizens. So I've heard a lot of myths about GDPR in the last year or so. And one of them is that if you're not based in the EU or if you don't market to people in the EU, that it doesn't affect you. And that's incorrect. If you collect data from any EU citizen, you need to comply with GDPR because non-compliance can lead to some really hefty fines. And so what does GDPR actually say, at least when it comes to email? GDPR says a lot, but the email specific parts that apply are the fact that, well, you have to have a positive opt-in. And so a positive opt-in is really specific. It means that you cannot pre-check boxes. So if you have ever signed up for or checked out of an e-commerce platform or retailer and bought something from that retailer, and as you're checking out, the box at the bottom says, yeah, I want to receive promotions and ongoing things. Or there's no checkbox at all, and you just automatically start receiving promotions after you buy something. That can't happen anymore under GDPR. Someone has to positively and willingly check that box and say, yes, I agree to receive marketing emails from you. You also can't bury the consent. So if you say, I agree to the terms and conditions, and then somewhere in your terms and conditions is buried something about all the marketing email you send, you can also not do that anymore. You have to explicitly have a checkbox that says, I'm going to market to you. It can't be just a checkbox that says, I agree to the T's and C's. You also have to make it easy to withdraw consent. So it has to be really easy for someone to opt out and say, I don't want to receive communications from you anymore. You have to keep a record. Record keeping is a big part of this. And then you also have to refresh the consents if they don't meet the standard. So that explains all of the re-opten emails that you were getting and those couple weeks leading up to May 25th. It was every company, it's kind of a hidden secret, the dirty secret behind GDPR. All those companies didn't have a proper record of your consent, so they needed to re-record your consent. Just shines a light on the bad data-keeping practices of so many of us in the industry. So lots of stuff about GDPR. If you want to talk about that later, come chat with me. Rule number two is create accessible email, something else that I could spend a whole separate half an hour talking about. So one of the few things that you could really do is just make sure that you have enough color contrast in your email. There's some really great tools. This one is at webaim.org where you can plug in hex codes of colors and just make sure that there's enough contrast. So if someone that has problems with their vision or maybe they have a color deficiency, they're colorblind, this is gonna make sure that there's enough color contrast in your emails so that it's actually readable. You also wanted to make sure that you're sending a plain text version. So emails are sent in little bundles. There's the pretty part that has the HTML with all the graphics and the colors and then there's the really boring part that's just plain text that developers with pine insist on using because they just hate the internet. But when you bundle those two things together, not only is it gonna help make you look not like a spammer, it's gonna help your deliverability, it's also gonna improve accessibility for anyone that can't or doesn't want to read HTML emails. It's something else for them to read. You also wanna use semantic elements. So email gets a really bad rap for having poor support for HTML and CSS. If you've ever heard the phrase code like it's 1999 for email, that's where that comes from. And luckily those days are largely behind us. For the large part, you can use semantic elements in email today. And the reason why semantic elements got a really bad rap with emails is because there'd be all this default styling associated with like H1s and P tags that would just make your email look terrible. So there's resets and different kinds of rules that you can apply to those semantic elements to make sure that your email still looks and reads correctly. You can also use a little trick that's called adding role equals presentation to all of the tables in your email if you're still using table-based layouts. What that basically does is it tells screen readers this is not a data table. So a little walk down memory lane or if you'd not an HTML guru. Tables were initially created to format, well, tabular data, things in columns and rows, things like charts and graphs. And when email came along and especially outlook rendering with Word, marketers started using email, HTML tables to display content in email because there wasn't good support for regular HTML and CSS. And so when screen readers see a table, they suspect it's full of, well, tabular data and they start reading out all of the columns and the rows in the table. So what happens when you don't use this is the screen reader starts to read out all of the empty cells and columns that you're using for spacing in your email. So this can really help improve that experience for people that are using a screen reader. Rule number three is that mobile still matters. So every year we publish this data from email analytics data at Litmus and mobile has been consistently at or above 50%. It's not going away. You guys know this. And responsive design is pretty much the status quo but we still have a little bit of ways to go. So if you haven't yet updated your emails to be responsive or at least fluid or mobile friendly, definitely put that on your to-do list. Our research shows that broadcast and segmented emails are largely mobile optimized but that triggered and transactional emails lag behind. And this goes back to why humans report emails as spam. 43% said they've marked a brand as spam for not looking good on mobile but 51% said that they've unsubscribed. So that's nuts. If you send someone an email that looks bad on a mobile device and they unsubscribe or mark you as spam, you can never email them again. Worse yet, if you get marked as spam, it could affect your ability to send an email at all. So rule four is make it easy to unsubscribe. This is one of those really maddening rules that I hate to even have to say on stage but here we are. Because too many email marketers make unsubscribing really hard. 61% of the people in the survey said that unsubscribing from emails was actually not, was easy. So that means that 40% said that it was hard. And I see this more often than I care to admit where emails have unsubscribed links with white text and a white background making it impossible to unsubscribe. And 50% of consumers said it's actually easier to mark a brand as spam than to unsubscribe at all. So not only is it illegal but it's just annoying as heck. So another white text and a white background mistake here. We don't wanna put these dark patterns in our emails. So somewhat related is inbox controls in rule number five. You want to embrace them and stop freaking out about the promotions tab. Every time I give a talk I have someone ask me, hey Justine, how can I avoid being delivered to the promotions tab in Gmail or how can I trick Gmail to deliver my email directly to the primary tab? And my answer is don't, just don't do it. Just like Gmail likes to punish SEO with different algorithms, Gmail will punish you as an email marketer if you try to circumvent their inbox algorithm to get into the promotions or to get out of the promotions tab. And so the Gmail Promotions tab has lots of different other ways of helping people manage their inbox. There's list unsubscribe in the header in Gmail. There's the bulk in the the focused area in Outlook. Apple Mail on iOS has this wonderful header that asks you to unsubscribe at the very top of your emails. And then Yahoo and Gmail recently roll out new inbox management controls where they look at your behavior over time and they actually proactively ask you if you wanna unsubscribe from emails that you haven't read in a while. So issue a little cautionary tale. These functions exist because of us. They're our fault or we have no one but ourselves to thank because consumers went back and told inbox providers, I'm having a hard time managing my inbox. I'm getting too much email. And so this was their response. If we send better personalized, a better targeted email, these controls might go away. And just remember, the Promotions tab is not the spam folder. People expect to see your emails there. So I also want you to look beyond vanity metrics like opens and clicks because those are just the beginning. I wanna do a little presentation's favorite thing, a little show of hands. This email, the subject line was thanks for your order. I want you to spend a second and read it. And tell me how you would feel if you got this email in your inbox or if you sent it as an email marketer. So by show of hands, who says this is a creative campaign, brilliantly executed. Know what? One person, maybe. This email was lauded on tech blogs for being like clever and brilliant and everyone should do April Fool's Day emails that look like this email. How many of you are like, what the F? Yeah, okay. So the internet agreed with you. After this email was sent out, Twitter was full of people mentioning this brand online, saying things like, it isn't funny. I thought someone made a fraudulent purchase. It's not a good marketing subject line. It looks like a phishing scam. Nice job jerks. Yikes. So these people obviously opened the email, right? They obviously opened it. They read it. They clicked through. They were trying to figure out what the heck happened. So if you're looking just at opens and clicks and you're saying, yeah, this email was a success, you might need to look a little bit deeper. 54% of subscribers said they've been tricked or deceived by a subject line. So that's not very good. So I also want you to build a better list. And so how do we do that? Here are some great ways that you can actually get blocked and blacklisted as you're building your list and your email marketing list. You can use email list rental. That's a big no-no. You can use co-registration. You can buy an email list or kind of a surprising one, lead generation forms like e-books and reports. And you might be wondering, what the heck, Justine? All this content that you're talking about is actually gated behind e-books and reports. And you're right. So humans might want to read your research and get all that stuff from you, but they might not want to receive emails from you. So recall insight number one, which is always collect consent. And the right way to do this is again to create an unchecked box that asks people if they want to receive emails from you and let them have the content for free, even if you can't market to them afterwards. So in these last few minutes, I want to talk to you about human rules about marketing. So we talk a lot about how we can make email better for our subscribers, but how do we make email better for ourselves or for our teams back home in the office? Our research tells us a lot about how the pain points and the challenges that we have internally at our companies, too. And so one of the rules is that we actually kind of suck at measuring ROI. Just like how we overly rely on opens and clicks, we have a really hard time looking beyond deeper into the funnel and seeing how things like AB testing or open rates and click rates actually translate to our bottom line metrics. And I actually don't have a lot of good advice for you here, because every organization is different, but it's something that you really need to go back home and be aware of. Paying attention to those surface metrics can lead you short-term gains, but kind of destroy your progress in the long term. So 70% of these brands that we surveyed said, we don't actually know how our emails are performing for our business because we can't measure ROI. It's kind of a bummer. We also spend way too much time on reviews and approval processes. So when we asked marketers what their review and approval processes looked like, they said that they work on average with 2.4 other departments and spend almost four hours getting an email reviewed and approved. And then 64% of them said that last minute changes are really, really common. So what takeaway here is that reviews and approvals actually take longer than every other part of your email marketing process. Longer than copywriting, longer than testing, longer than putting together your strategy in the first place. So is this really the best use of our time? I'd say figure out how to streamline our review and approvals process and invest that time elsewhere. And surprise, surprise, organizations that said that people with VP or C in their title usually bog down the process the most. So successful teams also use email briefs and checklists consistently. Our research shows that 81% of the companies that rated their email programs as successful use an email brief most of the time. And so what should your email brief include? Well, it should talk about the five Ws. Who should receive it? What action should they take? Why should they take the action? When should they receive the message? And where are they likely to read it? And when I say when, keep in mind that we're not talking about time of day or day of week. We're talking about when in the life cycle, what is an appropriate place in that subscriber's experience with your brand to send that email. So heighten the conversation above time and day and think broader than that. And so the last rule on the marketer's side is kudos to the heroes among us. So give yourself a pat on the back or go home and tell your team thank you because our research shows that email marketers are basically undervalued, understaffed, and underappreciated. It might have something to do with that ROI metric. The average email professional performs almost five job functions. They're responsible for things like copywriting, email building, development, design, testing, managing your email platform. And 44% actually do all of those activities overseeing their entire email marketing program being the ultimate jacks and jills of all trades. So what are our marketing insights from humans? We wanna collect consent always, create accessible emails. Mobile still matters. Look at that mobile optimization strategy. Don't forget to make it easy to unsubscribe. Embrace the promotions tab. Those inbox controls are really here to stay. And then see beyond subject line success. Look deeper in the funnel. I'm probably doing something weird in Seattle by putting a slide from Amazon on the stage. But I really like this quote from Jeff when he said that when things get complicated we simplify by asking what's best for the customer. And one of my favorite tools to do that is to go back to the subscriber hierarchy of needs that I shared last year and ask myself, am I making emails that are respectful, functional, valuable, and remarkable? And if not, maybe I need to go back to the drawing board and start back over with the bottom of the pyramid. So on the human side of the spectrum, we need to advocate for deeper reporting, streamline the approval process, use briefs and checklists, and ultimately give ourselves a pat on the back because we're doing a lot of hard work and building big impact for our brands and maybe not always getting credit for it. So high fives to all of you and thank you for coming. You can get all of the research that I shared today on our website at litmus.com slash data email.