 How's it going? Good, good. So Ron already said I'm here to talk about the tie that binds. Why email is the key to maximizing your email marketing ROI. And I'm Justine. So hello there. That was a look on my face when they asked me to come back and present at MozCon again. I was like, ah, right? I had to change my hair and my glasses just to make sure you guys wouldn't recognize me this time. But I'm Meledore on Twitter, and litmus is litmus app. I'm really privileged to be able to be back here and be able to talk to you guys again. So the more you tweet, maybe more I can come back next year. So the slides and a lot of the resources I'm going to talk about are already up on a landing page. I always say that if you take a picture of one slide today, this is the picture or the slide that you want to do it on. So it's litmus.com slash LP slash MozCon. And I'll show it again at the end, just so you know. I have been a huge fan of karma for years. They saw these beautifully designed Wi-Fi hotspots and the data to go along with it. In fact, I first heard about karma from a friend several years ago. They'd reached this ultimate phase of the marketing funnel where they'd turned into an advocate. They exposed me to the brand. I'd converted as a customer. And then I became an advocate too. Amazing. Their value prop from day one was pay as you go. You didn't have to sign a contract or pay a monthly fee. You just got this Wi-Fi hotspot that worked all the time and didn't really have any strings attached. It solved a really unique consumer problem. And their branded marketing communications backed it up. The sub-defines on their emails were amazing, magical even. They notified me when I'd earned extra data whenever I shared my Wi-Fi hotspot with other people in public. And they also encouraged me to get outside when the weather was nice. You know, I've actually worked on a park bench with Wi-Fi hotspot before. It's kind of an amazing experience. It seemed like their emails were always about you and never about them. My inbox was just full of all this love and good karma. So that love didn't stop at the inbox. It continued with great copywriting and customer-centric value in the emails themselves. They talk about their commitment to you, the customer, and all the value that they're bringing you, by bringing you online whenever and wherever you want. It never felt like they were selling you something. So when they did finally go to sell you something, it didn't really feel like it. It just felt like, you know, good karma. One of my favorite emails of all time, like seriously of all time, not just from karma, but any email I've ever received is this one. It looks really simple. It just says, hey, your karma battery is dying. But the brilliance of it is that they wanted me to recharge it. Because the more I kept using the karma hotspot, the more I was getting value from it as a customer, but the more data I had to buy from them. It was a win-win proposition. It was benefiting them and it was benefiting me. They were creating a ton of goodwill with customers by doing their branding and marketing communications this way. And they were fulfilling the promise of their brand name. They were creating good karma. It was like this amazing feedback loop of just pure goodness. You know, we toil away at email because we feel like it's something that we just have to do. Like it's another box in our marketing arsenal that we have to check. And we don't really think anybody notices it or pays attention, or it might not have that much impact. Like who cares about opens and clicks anyway, right? But the more great emails that karma put out into the universe, the more good karma they got in return. This is what we want, right? This is doing our jobs as marketers. This is brilliant. This is good work. The kind of marketing that really no one kind of sees but occasionally people tweet about positively. I know I like that kind of marketing when it happens to me at Litmus. So our jobs as marketers is to sit at the intersection between what our customers need and what our business needs and act as a translator between the two. Whenever we can overlap the needs of our audience with the needs of our business, that's when that magic and marketing becomes really, really powerful. That's good karma. But then, dun, dun, dun. You know the story couldn't have a totally happy ending, right? In August of last year, I just kind of stopped getting those brilliant, well-branded marketing emails from karma. They just completely felt silent. I kept getting the transactional emails that told me when people shared my wifi or my battery died. But aside from that, I didn't really get anything anymore for like four months. But then on Christmas day, what a great present. They started again. Well, sort of. Gone was the brilliant copywriting and customer-focused message. In its place was these shouty, all-cap subject lines that demanded that I buy more data at a discount. And it was a limited-time discount, but the discount happened like every other day. So Gone was the customer-focused copywriting. Gone was the value proposition that I'd come to expect. And in its place was nothing but buzzwords and vague marketing speak shouting at me about a grandfather refuel program that they kept using RGP as an acronym. And I'm like, what is this? If I weren't a marketer, I might not have any idea what they're talking about. It seemed more like an internal marketing brief that accidentally got sent from their ESP than something that you'd actually want to send your customers on purpose. And their customers noticed. It started off friendly here with Erin saying, here's some friendly feedback. Your emails look spammy and use a bunch of foreign terminology. Thanks, Erin. Then Stanford chimes in. He says, it looks like you got hacked or maybe you fired your brand and marketing team. Finally, Annika asked, seriously, what happened? Hey Karma, blink two times if you're in danger. It's my favorite one too. So I'm with Annika like, seriously, what happened? Their emails went from brilliant to spammy in just four months. They went from near daily customer value to almost these promotional shouty emails that didn't really even say anything of meaning. I've never seen a brand crash so quickly and so far. Clearly the marketing team was given new goals or maybe a new marketing team was brought in altogether. And they no longer had a brand and a trust component to their goal setting for their email program. It became painfully obvious that the goals of their emails were to get clicks, opens, conversions, and to get sales. It got so bad that a customer even penned an article that said how my favorite company failed me. They started off by saying, I work Karma's shirts religiously and I believed in the product, the brand and the people behind it. Then they said, everything changed and I have nothing but hatred. That's strong. The CEO left, a new board took over and changed everything I knew about the product. That's crazy. All those people on Twitter were right. Something drastic had shifted internally at Karma and it was completely evident through their email program. And that's not because email is just another box that we have to do. It's not another just channel that we feel compelled to do in the long list of things that we feel obligated to run. Email is a personal medium and it gets delivered to one of the most personal digital spaces that we have, which is the inbox. And as email, more than any other channel, it exposes our work as marketers. It exposes the goals behind our business and our marketing efforts. Our KPIs become really, really obvious when we send emails like this, for better or for worse. So good Karma was sending subscriber-centric emails that really talked about the value of the product and were valuable to the customers as well. Bad Karma was sending buzzword-laden emails that had shouty caps and acronyms that no one understands. These emails were the tie that bound the entire customer experience at Karma together. Their business strategy pivot became painfully obvious through their email program alone. So what happened? The user needs part of that Venn diagram just completely fell out of the equation. So as marketers, we can't focus just on our goals or the goals of our business. The goals of our business should be to drive lifetime value. But as marketers, sometimes we get caught in the day-to-day goals, things like opens, clicks, sometimes even sales. But our subscribers care about things like value and fun and relevance. So email at Karma became a box that was checked, a means to an end. Let's be honest, just a way to sell shit rather than a method of communication. And their email communications just made it really obvious what was going on. In some respects, we've all become Karma in some ways. We've lost our way as marketers. We have all these channels and priorities and goals and processes and tools and KPIs, and that's what we're focused on. We're not always focused on the long tail or have our eyes on the prize. And we track our progress and we show our work as marketers based upon getting the open, getting the click, making the sale. Your email tool probably doesn't have a report that shows lifetime value or brand sentiment online and how people are reacting to your emails. But you might think it's nothing, but it's really the tie that binds. The email channel is gonna show the nature and the quality of our work as marketers. So most marketing is really selfish, right? With very few exceptions, we're not solving world peace or creating, solving world hunger with our emails. But when we take subscriber trust and magic completely out of the equation, all we're left with is bad karma. So I bet those Karma emails had a lot of opens and a lot of clicks, right? You can even tell by on Twitter, like all those people definitely opened the email because they had to read it in order to tweet all these nasty things about it. But how many people unsubscribed? How many people left Karma altogether? What was the revenue impact? What was the lifetime value impact? Email has this opportunity to make or break our customer relationships. It shows our work and our intent behind our brand. So my question to you is, how are you showing your work? How are you showing your intent through your marketing program? And how do we make sure that our email program reflects the quality of everything that we wanna do? So Vicky Ghee is a product manager at Amazon. And she actually has a really great story to tell about how they shifted their mindset about how customer goals and business goals align at Amazon. In 2010, a customer contacted Jeff Bezos. FYI, all of you guys can email Jeff Bezos anytime you want, jeffatamazon.com. Maybe you can tell him that I'm not here so he doesn't get mad at it. And this customer was really, really upset. He was browsing the intimacy section of Amazon.com. We saw everything, including intimacy products. And after he had looked at a couple of different products and made a purchase, we thought it would be really helpful and probably earn some money if we sent him some recommendations for gels and other intimacy products. And surprise, this customer didn't feel that was helpful. This customer felt really embarrassed and offended. I mean, people are looking over his shoulder. He opened it up and there's all this stuff in the email. Like that wasn't at all something that the customer was expecting. That was a huge trust buster. And Jeff Bezos got really mad at my vice president. He held a meeting with Steve Scher, who is my org's VP, and he said, I want you to shut down the channel. We can be a $100 billion company without sending a single email so who in this room is gonna get up and go turn off email? That's really scary for my job prospects, right? Like we don't have to send anything if it's going to break customer trust. I think this is very illuminating because it tells us that email is a privilege, not a right. We don't have to send email. Customers don't have to get recommendations from us. It's just all marketing. So if we're going to do it, we need to do it right by the customer. We need to pay attention and listen to how the customer reacts to our marketing. And we need to adjust. So what does the Amazon threaten to do? They threaten to uncheck the email box because if it didn't meet their subscriber needs, they didn't want to send it. So let's talk about what unchecking the email box looks like in what you can do to meet your subscriber's needs. My colleague Chad White has this framework he calls the hierarchy of subscriber needs. It starts off at the foundation with emails that are simply respectful. Do you have permission to send them and are they meeting the subscriber's expectations? The next level of the pyramid are emails that are functional. Do they break when they hit your inbox or do the links in the images work? Pretty basic stuff, right? Then come valuable emails. The emails targeted. Are they relevant? Are they personalized? The very top of the pyramid are remarkable emails. And these emails are understandably rare. They're hard to strategize. They're hard to execute and you shouldn't send them all the time. But these are the kinds of emails that get forwarded. They get printed. They get screen shot and shared on social media. Those are really remarkable experiences. And one of the things that we can look at when we consider how or if we're meeting our subscriber's needs is something like spam rates. So we asked 1500 US consumers why they mark emails as spam. A lot of them said that they received too many or irrelevant emails. They just weren't interested anymore. They didn't subscribe at the first place. Come on guys. Or they couldn't easily unsubscribe. And what's really interesting is a lot of them said that they'd unsubscribe or they'd mark as spam when they had a bad customer service experience. This goes back to that idea that our brands are omnichannel and I hate buzzwords, but that notion that a customer doesn't think about your brand in marketing channels like we do. Your customer thinks of your brand as your brand. They don't differentiate from the email channel, from the social channel, from maybe the in-store experience. So there was even some evidence in our survey that people that had a bad customer service experience by something like a cashier at a point of sale in a brick and mortar store, they go back and mark those emails as spam and retribution like a revenge spam later on. That stuff happens. It's kind of crazy. Cause frankly we make as marketers unsubscribing way too hard. 40% of the people in that survey said that it was difficult to unsubscribe from promotional emails. So there's a blog called Dark Patterns that showcases examples of strategies that are business focused rather than customer focused. Found this example there. It was an unsubscribe link that was white taxed in a white background. If I can't find that link, guess what? Spam. And 50% of consumers say it's actually easier to mark you as spam than it is to unsubscribe. That's crazy, right? So which is kind of funny, considering that marketers complain about the very tools that help consumers manage their inbox in the first place. I remember when this unsubscribe box was first released for iOS 10 sometime last year, like every marketer I knew was like freaking out and asking me for advice. Did you freak out? Be honest. Where you're like, oh my God, this is gonna kill my email program. Even this guy on Facebook says, this is not good for marketers. This is why email list marketing is dying a slow death. Here's my argument. Inbox providers wouldn't have to create those tools if we didn't make it easy to unsubscribe. If we didn't send people stuff that they wanted to receive in the first place, this is a reaction to the consumer's need to better manage their inbox, not to the marketers' need to send them junk. Because really what matters is unsubscribes, right? Because unsubscribing doesn't hurt your center reputation, but spam complaints do. You wanna avoid that at all costs. You don't wanna hide your unsubscribe button when marketing is spam as the alternative. Another way that we can make sure that we're meeting our subscribers' needs is to look at what I call the subscriber experience. I break this out into two phases, into the inbox and then into the email body. So a lot of us really focus on the email body. We write great headlines, we decide what images we're gonna use, what kind of copy we wanna write, we A-B test like CTAs on buttons to maximize conversions, all that's really good work. But then we do all that work, we chuck it in our email tool and then you turn to your team and say, hey, what should the shoved-a-thine be? You've done that, right? I know I have. But it's crazy to think that it's actually the first thing that subscribers see. And so why do marketers, why is the first thing that subscribers see the actual last thing that we as marketers think about? Something to think about. So the inbox has your from name, your subject line, and this thing called preview text. And you wanna think about those things and actually maybe consider them first. An optimized inbox, especially on a mobile device is gonna look something like this. It's gonna have that from name, that subject line, and that preview text right there front and center. And that's gonna determine whether or not all the email body stuff gets seen. I talk about mobile because there's actually some truncation potential here. A lot of mobile inboxes cut off the second half of your subject line or that preview text. So you have to front load the first part with all the good stuff in case the back half gets cut off. And speaking of subject lines and from names, it's actually really interesting that we spend so much time A-B testing and optimizing and really, let's be honest, obsessing over subject lines as marketers because it's actually the from name is the thing that subscribers look at first when they're deciding whether or not to open your email. Just who the email's from. So you can use your brand name, you can use a company name, or I like what Core does. Rather than actually putting just their brand name or even a person's name, they start to set examples or expectations of what's actually in the email saying things like Quora Digest or People You Follow or Session Recap. That's great, it actually tells me what's in the email. And behind each of those from names is what we call the from address. If the subscriber replies to the email, this is where the email goes. So I don't know if it's out of just lack of awareness or maybe laziness or what it is, but a lot of brands use a no reply. So think about again, what that says about your brand's willingness to meet your subscriber's needs. It says, I don't really care about you or where your email reply goes if you have a question or a problem. And speaking of trust, 54% of subscribers said they felt tricked or deceived by a subject line in an email they've received. That's crazy, that's more than half. What comes to mind is those emails that are those gimmicky techniques that they use RE or forward. We call that in the email industry a fake forward. Don't do that, right? It feels deceitful, it's not actually a forward. It might get a lot of opens and clicks, but are you letting down your subscriber at the end of the day because you're basically lying to them in your subject line? So be straightforward and direct, don't do that stuff. And then if your email looks bad on mobile, forget about it. 43% of people said they'd mark emails that look bad on mobile with spam and 51% said that they'd unsubscribe. We've been tracking this data point for probably three or four years now and it keeps going up. That tells me that subscribers increasingly have really high expectations for the kinds of emails that we're sending them. I think the other channels, again coming back to the idea of OmniChannel, other channels are raising their expectations. All the people that are doing this well are training people to expect it in their inbox. And keep in mind that if people unsubscribe or mark your emails as spam, you can never email them again just because it looks bad on mobile. So rather than just doing what you do normally do, especially when it comes to email receipts, I don't know how many of you run a point of sale or send anybody any kind of receipt. But make it easily readable. These are two emails that I've recently received that one I could actually read on my mobile device, especially when I was at the store and requested an email receipt versus the irony's the cure. I went to the car, I'm obviously not near a desktop computer and the receipt is basically unreadable on my phone. So how do you make your emails mobile friendly? These are my favorite tips. Another popular slide to take a picture of. I say body copy should be at least 16 pixels. If you're like, whoa, justine, that's really big. Then think about 13 pixels as your absolute minimum. And the reason why it's 13 is because if you do anything less than 13, iOS like iPhone and iPad is gonna automatically resize it to 13 on your behalf. So you'll be stuck with 13 no matter what. I say headlines of 22 and then buttons of 44 by 44. Why? If there's any UX people in the room, you probably know that that's the guideline that Apple recommends. Apparently 44 by 44 is the size of your thumb. And if you're like, justine, I don't know what the heck a pixel is because I'm not a designer. You still have no excuse. All of you have and can follow what I call the rule of thumb. If the thumb tip is about 44 by 44 pixels, you have a pixel detection device attached to your body that you can use whenever you want. So don't tell me you don't know what a pixel is. And speaking of great, tapable touch targets, we have to stop measuring just opens and clicks. Don't stop measuring them all together because they're important, but stop focusing on them obsessively. Email software has a big emphasis on opens and clicks. It's really easy to track without some third-party integrations or other data sources coming into it. And you wanna look beyond just opens and clicks though. You wanna see the whole picture. You wanna start measuring the negative performance metrics in addition to the positive ones because that can give you a really good indication if you're meeting your subscribers' needs and studying the right impression about your brand. Things like bounce rate and spam complaints can really tell you, can paint a better picture. You wanna aim for less than a 2% bounce rate and less than a 0.02% spam complaint rate. And remember that unsubscribes are okay or even good. You wanna encourage those instead of leaving people with the option to mark you as spam. You can also look at your web analytics, right? We all like SEO in here, we're at MozCon. Or you can look at third-party tools, actually, Litmus does this, to look at things like read rate or engagement. And even if you have really high engagement or people are spending a long time reading your emails, that doesn't necessarily mean a good thing. It could mean your emails are really engaging and people are spending a long time reading them. It could mean your emails are confusing as heck and they're searching around for a CTA or how to unsubscribe. So let's also talk about the analytics part for a second in Google Analytics because I know there's a lot of SEOs in the room. So instead of looking at open click rates, what I've been doing lately at Litmus when I've been looking at the success of our email programs is looking at email traffic into our funnel. So we break, we have different goals in Google Analytics and we break our funnel into several different steps. We say you saw our signup flow, you looked at the pricing page, you ended up recording your card details and then you convert. We break that up and we track each of those as goals. And time after time, email shows up in the number one channel for all those stages in the funnel. So in particular, when it looks to our signup flow, email has the highest volume of sessions. Then when we go to the pricing page and we look at number of sessions there, we can actually see that people that originate from email actually spend twice as long on our pricing page than they did if they came from social. So all that stuff about how social media is gonna kill email, I'm not so sure about that. Then the trend continues when I look at the credit card signup page. Email sees twice as many pages per session than social does. Pretty cool. And lastly, if we look at conversions, email is once again the number one channel. Not quite double, but what, like a hundred more than even our own blog. So don't stop there. You also wanna recognize that a lot of the positive metrics that email can do for your business aren't easily trackable or easily measurable. Say for instance, you write a really compelling subject line and you have killer pre-header text and it tells the subscriber everything they need to know. They might waltz right into your store and buy something because you said there was a sale going on. Maybe they type in the URL of your site after seeing your email in their inbox rather than actually clicking on it. Or maybe they just do a search instead. So look at those ambient performance metrics and if you see blips happening in your business that you can't really explain, look at your email program. It might make a lot of sense. You also wanna ask the five W's the next time before you start your next campaign. This is gonna help you make sure that you're addressing your subscribers' needs in addition to your business needs. So who, what, when, where, why? And of course there's the bonus of how. Any journalism people in here should know this like the back of their hand. So who are you sending to? What do you want them to do? When is it appropriate to send the message? And don't get caught up on the when that we always think of when it comes to email. People are obsessed with wanting to know like what day of the week or what time of day is the best time to send email. And I'll tell you a secret. Every time the email industry puts out a report that's like Tuesday is the best day to send email, everyone starts sending email on Tuesday and guess what day of the week is no longer the best day to send email? Tuesday. So think more about the when in terms of the customer life cycle. Do I trigger a behavioral based image or email based upon something you did or a lack of something that you did? So think about life cycle rather than time of day and day of week. Where were the recipient rated? All those mobile stats, right? We gotta think about that. Why should they care? That's the kicker guys. That's the one that's gonna tell you whether or not you're meeting your subscribers' needs or even thinking about them in the first place. And then finally, how are you gonna measure success? Let's go beyond opens and clicks. Lots and lots of different reasons and answers to those questions. But again, these are gonna help you force you to find the intersection between your business needs and your subscriber needs. So before you do your next campaign, sit down with your team or your boss or just you and your loans himself if that's what you're up to, which is totally cool. I love solo email pernures, they're my favorite. And you wanna identify and agree on this stuff. So the five W's, the hierarchy of subscriber needs, are we meeting them? And then all the subscriber experience stuff. So tell you what, if you can't fill that out, if you don't have a plan, if you can't figure out the purpose, then you shouldn't send the email. And if you can't remember all of that, I actually put together a workbook on the plane here. No joke. That tells you how to uncheck and recheck those boxes. It's like four pages of goodness that leads you through that entire thing and can help you plan your next campaign. And so you can get it at limits.com slash lp slash mozcom. And that's all I have for you. Thank you. Thank you.