 The first questions to all of you in the audience please raise your hands if you own at least one email address okay that's good to see so many answers by the way is there anyone who doesn't have any email address in this auditorium okay that's great to hear okay let's begin I want to share an interesting story with you this year I attended what can be Asia which happened in February in Bank of Thailand few days prior to the event I received an email from one of the popular WordPress theme company the content of the email says something like this we are sponsoring what can be Asia we are going to have our stall please visit our stall meet our team members and grab the swag I have been using their product for a very long time so I was excited to meet the team members so what I did next I responded to that email something like this hey thank you for letting me know I'm excited to meet your team members now there are two things that might have happened one I might have received an email from them or I might not have received an email from them I want you all to guess how many of you believe that I receive an email from them please raise your hands yes I did receive an email from them but sadly it was an automated response which was something that I had not expected so through this incident I want to share a valuable relation with you all if you are running any kind of email campaign your customers are going to respond to your emails and you need to make sure that you respond to your customers appropriately if you don't your customers are going to feel that they are being ignored and who knows they might even give bad ratings or stop using your product which is something that you don't want let's move ahead the topic of my presentation today is email marketing essential effective strategies for better open rate and conversion in this session I will cover some of the strategies that I use in my company to improve the open rate I'll also share some of the techniques that I use to improve the conversion apart from this I'll also share some of the things that you should avoid if you're running any kind of email campaigns before we dive into the topic here are a few things about me currently I am working as a chief product officer at Gordwing Solutions in my career over five years I have interacted with more than 15,000 of customers and probably more than 50,000 of emails I have successfully run more than 250 plus email campaigns and my every campaign statistics include more than 32% of open rate and more than 2% of click rate so we all know about email marketing since we all have email and you might be receiving so many of emails on a regular basis so what is email marketing actually and why people or businesses use email marketing email marketing is considered one of the effective medium to communicate with your customers because everyone owns an email you can easily reach out to your customers promote your product get your feedback and it is also considered one of the cheap and effective medium here are few stats that highlights how important the email marketing is there are four billion daily email users and this number is expected to increase to 4.6 billion by 2025 so as you can see in the beginning no one raised their hand when I asked if there is anyone who doesn't have an email address so everyone in fact everyone present in this event has an email address moving ahead 99% of email users check their inbox on a regular basis and some even check more than 20 times 84.3 consumers say that they share their emails at least once a day and this is something that I believe you can relate to yourself with yourself as well how many of you checked your email today okay so this is something very common here's another stats that is more convincing for businesses 64% of small businesses use email marketing to reach to their customers why because running ads are expensive and email marketing you can easily collect leads and easily send lengthy messages or any kind of promotional content at your own pace so it's very effective to communicate with your audience still not convinced here an interesting fact by cell cycle 2022 50% of people buy from email marketing emails at least once a month just imagine if this stats becomes true for you how many conversion you'll bring for your business so all these stats that I share with you highlight how important the email marketing is and I hope that if you are not doing any kind of email marketing then you should definitely start looking into and seriously focus on doing email marketing for a business so let's move ahead for what you have been waiting for so how do you improve the open rate for your email campaigns so before I do that let me ask you one question you want to run an email campaign what is the first and foremost things you need anyone in the audience yes if you want to run an email campaign you should at least have your own email address from where you want to send an email interesting on some people also say that you need to have a contact list or something like that okay let's move ahead so one of the most important thing that most businesses or company ignore is prioritizing the security of their domain you should verify your domain SPF DKIM and demarc record and you need to make sure that those record pass for all of these three you can use any kind of DNS editor to verify the record and why are these record very important so let's understand SPF helps to protect sender and recipients from spam spoofing and phishing emails on the other hand DKIM verify that no third party has tampered with the email content on the other hand demarc is something very critical it helps the administrator to protect their domain authority from attackers or exploiters if you have the demarc configured properly no hackers or attackers can reunite your domain reputation by sending spammy emails but let's suppose I don't configure these things what happens you will be compromising the quality of your email and it is going to affect your email campaign drastically if you are running any kind of email campaign you want to make sure that they land in their inbox not in the spam and if you have this record missing you can be very sure that they will not land in their inbox and it is more likely to land in their spam now to run your email campaign very effective you need to segment your audience why segment your audience because you want your campaign very specific to your audience let's suppose you have two types of products one is a travel agency plug-in another is maybe a multi-purpose theme now one of your campaign is about how to go your travel business website then this content or email marketing campaign is only effective for the audience who are your travel product or the users of your travel product not the one that are you that are the audience of your multi-purpose theme so if you have segmented your audience you can target this campaign only to these travel agency customers so something like this so what kind of customization can you create you can create segmentation based on the products you can also create segmentation based on the interest you can also say create segmentation based on the activities you can also create segmentation based on demographics and if you do so you can send customized email only to those specific audience on their festival occasions so these are some of the benefits now one of the first thing that your customers are going to see when they receive an email from you is the subject line now you need to make your subject line very interesting very intriguing so that they are enticed to open your email and how you do that here are few solutions try to keep it short and precise as much as possible you can also create a sense of urgency or scarcity you can also begin with asking a question if possible use some kind of actionable language and try to use personalization as much as possible within your subject line let's see some examples that uses these five concepts okay so here is one example last chance Clark are you in for our exclusive gift so as you can see here Clark is the personalizations and email marketing tool have this kind of tool that automatically can grab the first name of your subscribers last chance we are also creating a sense of urgency and we are asking a questions with an actionable language and curiosity so the person who is reading the subject line will be excited to open this email to see what is what they have within the content because we are not disclosing what exclusive gift we have for them here's another example ready to grow your website traffic Bruce only five spots left so here also we have used the same concept we have used personalizations we are creating a sense of urgency by using only five spots left and we are also asking a questions are ready to grow your website traffic somebody who is serious about growing the traffic are more interested to open this email address and somebody who owns a website who don't want to miss this email for sure let's move ahead okay the next and most important thing that you also need to consider is maintaining a healthy email list healthy email list basically means the list of contacts or subscribers who engage with your content by engagement basically means who have opened your email have clicked on your link at least once by maintaining a healthy email list what you do is you ensure that you are not your campaigns are not going to be affected when you do mass email because once they engage with your campaign it sends a positive signal to the receiving domain and it basically means that whenever you send another email it passes through that filter and it gets delivered in their inbox so I highly encourage to make your email list healthy try to avoid sending emails to your own engaged contacts and the benefits of this is that you'll have an improved deliverability you will have a better engagement rate and since you will be sending the campaign to a very segmented list it will be also very cost effective because email marketing campaign sometimes can be very costly and as a result since you will be sending the campaign only to the specific audience who have engaged with the content the chances of bounce rate will do that will be very minimal or almost zero now people don't want to check their emails during the weekend or festival seasons because they want to spend a quality time with their friends and family so if you're running any kind of email campaign you need to make sure that you don't send them at a wrong time wrong time basically means don't send on the festival's time or during the weekends if you have any kind of a deals let's suppose in cut in Nepal we celebrate a major festival called the same so what we can do is when the festival is coming we make sure we announce the festival offer two to three days prior to the event so that people have their working days and you still can check the mail and grab the offer now if you're really serious about email marketing this is something you should definitely consider is costly but this is something very game changer for the email marketers get a dedicated IP and why is a dedicated IP very important here's an example of if you run your campaign on a seared IP so let's suppose here are two bloggers WordPress company and affiliate bloggers and they are running their email campaign for Black Friday from the same email service provider and they are on a seared IP basically means if these two people send an email campaign they are going to be from the same email address the WordPress company has a very healthy email this has a good sending reputations has optimized the sending time and also verified the DNS record the one that we talk initially on the other hand we also have an affiliate blogger who is running the campaign from the same IP but it has unorganized list bad sending reputations it has a record of spamming emails in the in the past and unfortunately it has on verified DNS record now what happens when these two company launch their campaign at the same time how many of you think that what was company campaign is going to perform better than the affiliate blogger please raise your hands okay yes okay so yes it is going to slightly perform better than the affiliate bloggers because it has some good things but the maximum potentials that it could have achieved won't be able to achieve why because the receiving domain will get a good quality emails as well as the bad quality of emails but they are coming from the same IP so you need to put some kind of filtered there so as a result that IP gets flagged and the WordPress can company campaigns are going to be affected so by getting a dedicated IP what what you get is only you can send an email from that IP and buying by doing so you can ensure that you have a very good domain reputations and it also isolate you from the bad neighbors because no one is going to send an emails from that IP as a result you'll have a very improved deliverability and it is also considered very good for if you are running any kind of automations or sending an email to the high volume of contacts now one of the main goal that you run an email campaign is to obviously convert your customers all the effort is whistless if your campaigns it doesn't convert so let's look into some of the techniques that I use for the conversion one is whenever somebody signs up for your email campaign make sure that you build your brand trust first don't start sending promotional email I have whenever I download some of the free company products I receive so many promotional email right away we sometimes is good but it's better to avoid what you can do is try to introduce your product your company so they get to know more about you provide some kind of back story of your products provide them with the resources that can actually help them to get it started using your product in this way the customer will feel that hey this email campaign really provides me a value and they will engage with your content they will excitedly excited will be excited to wait for your next email and when you start providing value to your customers through your emails they're going to be a long-term customers for you and when you send any kind of emails we should only keep two things in mind one your email campaign should provide at least any kind of value to them and make sure you also include the targeted call to actions wherever possible because when they see the value then it is easier for you to motivate the people to take an action next we all have very short attention spam due to different social medias we easily get distracted even your customers will be receiving more than 100 emails on a regular basis they don't have time to read all the content that is available in their email and they cannot go through all the emails they receive but if you keep your email sought and precise to the point which will take them less than couple of seconds just to read then they will be able to get what you're trying to offer and there are more likely to take the actions that you want them to take so try to be sought and precise and take them direct to the call to action we human always seek for validations if you want to really convert to the customers what you can do is include some kind of good reviews about your product most of the companies offer like hey sign up for the pro version here are 30% and that's it but what if you can also include some of the testimonials within that email content what it doesn't is it will establish the credibility of your product hey when the people read other comment they will feel more confident to grab this deal so make sure you include some kind of social proof it can be screen shot or the text itself and this will highly help to convert and another technique just like I mentioned try to use a scar city or create a sense of urgency through an email you can use some kind of timer within your content or like have some kind of number within your subject line people have the fear of pissing out so if your email content highlight that they might take the necessary actions and who knows the conversion might be even better another thing that you should also do is your customers are going to receive an email at a different time and they might not take the desired action that you intend them to so what you can also do is you can send them a general follow-up email so that they will be reminded that hey you miss this offer grab the offer for a limited time and this actually helps and this has this is something we always do for all our email campaigns and it has really worked well I talked about different techniques for the open-rate and conversion but do the technique really work how many of you have doubts is there anyone okay glad to hear so I've been using this technique in the company and it has really walked and here are some of the top results that I want to share with you so this is one of the email campaign that I run for the company for one of our services and it has a massive 64 percent of open rate and a 11 percent of a clicker rate which is way more than this industry standards here's is another email campaign that runs on automations which is sent to almost a small segment of audience like 8,000 contacts which has a massive open rate of 26 percent and a 3 percent click rate here's another example which has been sent to almost 8 thousand of customers which has a good open rate of 46 percent and 6 percent click rate so if you use this technique effectively for your business I'm sure you're going to see a massive improvement in your current campaigns if you are doing that if you are already doing this great if you are not doing that try implementing some of the techniques that you can implement and feel free to share some of the results in the future whenever we are connected now we talked about what are the things we should do but we should never forget what are the things we should avoid so let's look at things you should avoid if you're running any kind of email campaign first and for most things never use any kind of poor or misleading subject line your subject lines should be related to the content sometimes I receive a clickbait email campaigns and what I do next I immediately on subscribe because I don't feel it good when I'm being tricked so people don't like to be treated like that one so avoid using poor or misleading subject line you don't want to irritate your customers by sending too many of emails control the number of emails you send to them on a monthly basis on a regular on a monthly basis you can send up to two to five emails which is considered a healthy volume of emails avoid sending long and complex email try to be precise as much as possible and to the point and never send an email to your customers without any without their consent never buy an email list and always get their consent if you don't you're more likely to get in a legal troubles next never ignore a sum of the email regulations for example you should always have an unsubscribe link and the address in the footer of all the emails that you sent if you don't have one make sure you do that immediately and check that you have this one if you are caught then most likely your email are going to be in the spam or even your email service provider may suspend your account last but not the least never never send an email using no reply sender address you want your customers to interact with you by no reply you are sending them the bad signal that hey you shouldn't reply to my email so never use that one and it is not considered professional for sending no reply emails through the no reply email address these are some of the things that you should avoid and based on how you are running the campaign there might be many other things that you should avoid for sure now there are different tools that you can use and here are some of the tools that I use I use bravo formerly known as send in blue for managing or sending my email campaigns I find it very easy to use and cost effective and I have been using this for more than three years I write all my email content first in Google Docs and fix the grammatical mistake using grammarly and you chat if it was just fine tune the email content in some of the email templates we also send a video to link or just explain the feature that we are sending them in the update so for that purpose we use loom for recording the tutorial itself and for creating different kinds of creative banners for the email campaign we use figma and these are the tools and feel free to use any kind of tools that will help you to run your email campaign effectively that's it so that's a wrap if you like to connect with me here's my LinkedIn address you can search me just by giving my name and now if you have any questions please feel free to ask