 So my name is Nikki, I am from Phoenix, I was born and raised there, I did make this trip out to Philly just to be here, this is my first word camp talk, thank you! It is my fourth word camp, my first word camp was in Phoenix in 2012, we're in the shirt, rethan, it's my first trip away from home since I had my daughter, oh looks like I lost internet connection, cool, bear with me, there we go, there's my daughter, her name's Winnie, she's 16 months and yeah so this is my first trip away from her so you're gonna see a couple pictures of her. I've got over a decade of experience in marketing, spanning from graphic design, converging copywriting, website optimization, event planning but I love email and marketing automation the most because of all the data that you can collect on the back end. You have a relationship with your users engagement that you don't have in a lot of other places and you had it before in email marketing, you had it before social. I already said that's my fourth word camp, I am, oh after my first word camp this is my first word press website was for my swim lesson business and the other thing, the other reason I chose to come to Philly is because my little brother lives here, he works for OSISO as we were talking about earlier, this is something that I made for him on his 19th birthday so don't show him or tell him that I used that. So let's get into the agenda here we're gonna talk about why is email awesome, why is email insecure, how we can be better, how you can prevent spoofing and then we're gonna talk a little bit about segmentation and automation and I'll show you a couple cool tools that I like I'm not gonna get deep into the tools just gonna tell you which ones that I like and recommend if you're new to this. So why is email awesome? I'm gonna throw out some stats here. There are 3.7 billion global email users as of 2017. There are 269 billion business and consumer emails sent daily and we've got some average stats here you've got an open rate right under 25% CTR right over 4% and if you've not ever seen CTOR that is a click to open rate it's better statistic to give you an idea of what your actual engagement is on your copy within your email and what it does is it removes all of the people who didn't open your email so you have an idea of what's working so how you get that is you just take your clicks over your actual opens so it's right under 12% for an average. These are results across all email campaigns in all industries so this isn't just straight marketing emails and different industries are going to have different averages. So there's some industries that you know the average open rate is 15% there's some that are gonna shoot up and be 40%. So email has a median ROI of 122%. There's another stat out there that says for every dollar you spend an email you're going to get $38 back but what they're really talking about is marketing emails ones that are encouraging direct sales that you can tie to that email so when you can when you combine it with all other types of email you get an ROI of 122% which is still four times higher than any digital marketing channel. It's also 40 times more effective for new customer acquisition than Facebook or Twitter which makes a lot of sense you're probably not your new customers are probably not finding you on Facebook or Twitter but if you can get their email you have a higher chance of converting them and acquiring them. So why is email insecure? Because of people. People make everything insecure we are bad at passwords we click on links we open attachments we send personal info through email we don't delete things and we access our email on public Wi-Fi. In short we use email. So the thing with email is to keep it accessible there have been no significant security changes ever. The first email was sent in 1968 they finally found out where that email went in 1971 and it was widely adopted in the early 90s. Nothing has ever changed about it security wise. So email clients like Gmail and Yahoo actually do some encrypting of their traffic but there's no encryption of the emails themselves because the basic protocols remain plain text which means it's very easy to hack. And we have no ability to recall messages. Isn't that a bummer? Like if we could add that just that piece to email marketing would be so nice. There's so many times especially when you're new to email marketing that you hit the send button before you really meant to and there's typos. So how can we be better? So I'm going to go through some different steps. First of all passwords. Everybody knows that you're supposed to use a strong password. Mix of uppercase lowercase no birthdays hometowns anything that could be social engineered. There are several clients that offer two-tier authentication including Gmail or you can adopt like a last pass or something like that but you also need to change your email passwords often and we're talking like every three months. Set a reminder in your phone to do it. I have a real hard time with this and you really shouldn't use the same emails or the same passwords over and over again across different platforms. So when it's social engineered one place they're going to take that password and your login information and run it through bots and try it all over the place again. So especially if it's in your bank definitely different email and bank passwords. So when it comes to attachments use a multivirus scanner and scan every attachment before you open. I would recommend I believe it's called bit. I have it in my notes here which have decided. Bit defender. Bit defender is a multi-antivirus scanner that you can put. So what that's going to do is scan every attachment before you open it. You want to convert your email attachments to PDF. PDFs compress really nicely and they have their own encryption and a lot of different readers can easily tell if they've been manipulated and corrupted. And you want to block emails with many recipients and large attachments. Most clients are going to automatically do this or you can go into the settings and make that adjustment. And if you don't know the sender don't open the attachment. You can't open the email don't open the attachment and don't attach if you can link instead. So if you can put a document somewhere on the internet and provide them a link like a Google doc is better than attaching the Google doc. When it comes to content you want to check for confidential content. Now of course this applies to your own confidential content but when you're dealing with customers it's even more important. So you're going to omit any kind of personal information including full shipping addresses phone numbers and payment details is a big one. People will send you their credit card number over an email. That's not a good thing. You probably don't even want to send full invoice information if you can redact that sensitive information out of an invoice to send it over over email. That's the best way to go or have it like how's somewhere else and send them a link to it. And then you can add legal footers. Yes nobody reads them until you have a court case where somebody needs to read them. And then watch out for phishing. We all know what phishing is, right? When it comes to your own behavior you want to archive your email. So I do a monthly practice where I go back in and highlight all of the month's emails and throw them into an archive. I can still search them but they're not as easily available to people who might have malintent and access to my email. Never access emails from public Wi-Fi. I know everybody has to do this once in a while but especially when it comes to company emails or business emails, client emails, use a VPN when available, hop off the Wi-Fi, use your 4G. Never click unsubscribe links in spam. So you might think you're unsubscribing and in a lot of cases you're just opting in for more spam. Use reply all with extreme caution. So when you reply all, you can reveal other people's email addresses to people with malintent. So the rule of thumb is if you don't know everybody on the reply all, don't. Just don't. Don't share passwords and encrypt if you can. Encryptions, a complicated process. There are tools out there to help you and because I don't have all the time in the world, I would say Google how to encrypt my email if that's something important to you. So when we do better, we can be better. But the biggest takeaway I would like you to have from this talk is to stop sending marketing emails from your Gmail. You need to invest in appropriate software. You will thank me for it later. You have templates, you have ability to see open rates and click rates. It's worth it. So to use a reputable email service provider, that's like a mail chimp or an active campaign. And when you do send email from a domain other than your own, you cannot authenticate yourself. So that's the biggest thing. We're going to be talking about email authentication right now. So when I say don't get spoofed, spoofing is the act of somebody taking, trying to look a lot like you when they send an email. So a lot of spammers do this. Probably seen the Amazon spoofed email. There's phishing attached to it. It might be phishing spam and spoofing all at the same time. But there are different email authentication protocols in place to help you. They aren't perfect because email is just generally insecure. But they're one is very easy to accomplish. And then the others take a little bit more time, which is why I recommend using an ESP because they usually have a platform in place that can easily get you set up on this. So SPF is your sender policy framework. And what that is, is a record that holds your domain, your brand, and your email server IP. So if you're with an ESP, if you're not sending a ton of emails, you probably don't have a dedicated server, you're on a shared server, and they can give you that IP address. And what it does is creates that record for the email clients to look up to say, Okay, this email came from this IP, it should be regarding this domain. And I'm going to actually deliver it to the inbox. If it can't authenticate that record, chances are you might not make it to your customers inbox. dechem is domain keys identification mail. So what this allows people to do is take responsibility for transmitting a message in a way that can be verified by mailbox providers. Short story, it is a signature added to your header, your footer or your body that will deny authentication if an edit has been made to the header footer or body. So think about it. When you forward an email, there's usually something tagged at the top that says forwarded from Yahoo, that would make it fail the dechem authentication because something has been changed. So when people are trying to copy and paste your headers, chances are they're going to change something and that signature won't come with it, and it will fail authentication. And the third is DMARC, which is domain based message authentication reporting and conformance. So what DMARC does is marries SPF and dechem together. So they're going to be checking each other's records and working together. Now, like I said before, these aren't perfect, but it's the best we have right now. So now we're going to move on into segmentation and automation. Who here is using any kind of marketing automation? Cool. So segmentation first, marketers have witnessed an increase of 760% in email revenue from segmented campaigns. Segmented email campaigns get 14.31 more opened and 100.95% more clicks than non segmented campaigns. So I've provided 10 data points that you can segment by. So segmenting, in order to segment, you have to have more data about your contacts. So the more data that you can collect from them over time and over your relationship with them, the easier it's going to be for you to segment. And these are a couple of things that you can use to segment by have a list of different demographics and they are in my notes. So demographics could include industry, job functions, seniority, basically who they are, and then your geographics are going to be where they are. And the last eight are about what they've been up to. So engagement, how are they engaging with your brand? Are they liking things on social? Have they clicked on a link in a previous email? What do you know about them from their behavior? Website behavior, are they downloading content off of your website? Are they clicking to a page? Are they completing forms? Usage has to do with like, if you're a software company, you have some information about when their last login might have been onto your software, or if they've gone to the FAQ or help section, or submitted a support ticket. If you do any kind of survey, surveying of your customers survey results, so like think like a net promoter score might be a way to create a segment. 7 8 and 9 are all about what they're buying. So when was the last time they bought? How much did they spend? How frequently do they buy? And then 10 is their stage in the life cycle. So are they a prospect? Are they a hot lead? Do you think they're about to convert? Did they just convert? Where in the onboarding process are they? Do they look like they are about to churn? You can predict churn by collecting data off of your customers, of course, then you have to let some of them churn. So automation. Segmenting comes before automation because you need a segment to set up a good automation. An automation is usually, an automation is just a triggered campaign that means that the segment has qualified for some event. Maybe they completed a form. Maybe they just made a purchase. Maybe they were going to make a purchase and they bounced off. Automated messages receive on average 70.5% higher open rates and 152% higher CTR. So once they've qualified to get into that automation, you're going to have higher engagement because the message is customized based off of their actions. So here's a couple different trigger ideas for you. Content downloads, welcomes, that could be a subscriber welcome or a welcome after a purchase, a free trial upsell. If you're doing any kind of free trials, usually have some testing to figure out when you should trigger them to upsell or a low barrier product that you can get them in on trying to get them to spend a little bit of money. Cart abandonments, purchases, onboarding birthdays and anniversaries. And that can be their actual birthdays and anniversaries or like an anniversary of when they became a customer. Renewals and reminders, unsubscribes and my favorite is Win Back because you can usually have a lot of fun with it. You can change up your copy a little bit. These are customers that have recently left. So it's a last ditch Hail Mary effort. My last Win Back campaign included one that was about superheroes and another one that was don't go, it's dangerous to go alone here. Take this. Zelda reference. So in addition to email marketing and marketing automation, I really love flow charts. I could spend a day in Lucidcharts doing something like this. But this is a general content download automation. And you can you can take them in different directions based off of whether they opened or clicked something. So this has to do with if they opened or not. And in a lot of cases, you can resend the same email if they don't open with a different subject line. See if they open that one. So these are all going to be available. But person downloads your contents or subscribes to content on your website and you send them an email that delivers that content. Do they open it? Yes or no? Let's just say yes. So they opened it. The next email they get is going to be similar content in another email. Did they open it? Let's say no. They didn't open this one. So then they go into the similar content via email with a new subject line and they open that one. So then they come back up into week three again and you get a free trial invitation email. And they don't activate. So you send that one again with a new subject line. And turns out that got them. They activated bringing them up to the trial onboarding and up sale automation. So then are they going to purchase? Yes. No. Obviously this one's really simple, but it kind of gets you starting to think about the different actions people can take along a drip campaign and how you are going to respond your messaging to their actions. So there's lots of cool tools out there to help you be successful in email marketing and marketing automation and they have security features already built in. So my favorite is actually active campaign because they are continuously developing that and it's got some really nice automation building whizzy wigs within it that lets you create all these dependencies based off of their actions. Campaign monitors also a nice one. They both start at $9 a month. And then if you're really brand new, MailChimp has lovely integrations with WordPress and it starts free. Anybody using MailChimp in here? You like it? Yeah, it's pretty good. And they've even got so if you if you make the step up and you start doing transactional emails and a lot of emails they have can't remember the name it's another monkey that helps you send transactional emails. I just came out of an environment where I was using ActOn and SendGrid and I would have loved to only have one platform but SendGrid was deeply integrated into our admin software at Sitelock and ActOn did all the automation pieces. I'm moving into a situation where I'll be using Marketo. So another thing that we need to do more of with our email marketing is testing to see what it looks like in different email clients on different devices. So there's two big ones out there and obviously they're much different in price but Litmus offers a lot of great tools for testing. You can see it on different devices in their whizzy wig but what they're doing is they have a full seed list and they send that out to test themselves and then email on Asset does the same thing they just have a few fewer features. Anybody else here using a tool in email marketing that they absolutely love and would like to share? ConvertKit? What do you like about ConvertKit? Yeah I always think of MailChimp as like the beginner ESP. When you really want to get into automations you need marketing automation and I know most of us can't afford Marketo or Pardot or even Acton which is a pretty affordable entry level marketing automation. Just why I think Active Campaign is so cool. The one thing Jerry and I were speaking about that earlier is that they don't have the best support. All their support is basically done via email. You can't get on the phone with anybody. Questions? Jerry? Let's get a quick subscriber. Let's give an example. It's a private opt-in. I'll give you an example. I have a huge collection of business cards. I like to get some useful information on them. I like to have them use the cards. Can I write to them and say hey I've added you to my list. Tell me if you don't want to be. Or should I say hey let me know if you want to be. I think that's a great practice. I think sending them an email with an option to opt-in. Maybe a personal email with like a link back to your opt-in form that will automatically put them into your list. I wouldn't say just add them straight to your list. Especially if you're dealing with anybody outside of the United States. So Canada has some stronger laws against spam and the GDPR rolled out earlier in April and that one's big in Europe and if they didn't explicitly opt-in you can be hit with different fines that come out of there. So what I would do is maybe send them a personal email with a link to your opt-in and say hey these are the kind of emails you can expect from me. I'd love to have you blah blah blah blah blah. Email them with a link to opt-in? Yes. Email them with a link to opt-in. A lot of different clients are now doing double opt-in which is a really great like it will shrink your list but you will have a far higher engaged list because they all said yes I want to be in and you ask them again are you sure? And they said oh yeah so the more you ask them the better it is. I'll get you next we had a question over there. Yes so they are triggered by in most ESPs when they hit an unsubscribe they're going to come up with an unsubscribe button now that's unsubscribing from your email say they like unsubscribed from another email or another list you can send them an email or when they hit unsubscribe you can send them sorry to see you go and try to get like a survey response out of them to see maybe why they unsubscribed a lot of ESPs actually have a little survey at the end that says oh I didn't sign up for this or you sent me too many emails or this wasn't the email that I was expecting but use that information and you can segment by that or you can send a personal email outside of the ESP if it was somebody that you like know personally and have her history with and then when back once they've cancelled with you or you've lost them as a customer and they haven't unsubscribed from your ESP you can send them a series of emails like a deal like a swinging deal to get them back to subscribe into your services. Does I answer your question? Okay ten minutes. Okay I did see one over there you still got a question or come here that means you've got spooked so when you get an email from yourself usually what they did is they found your email somewhere and they're trying to send an email that looks a lot like yours and trying to get people to it's usually a phishing scam they're trying to get you to click and submit more information there's ignore it delete it you can look at it I wouldn't I wouldn't interact with it so when you get a spam email you don't want to hit the unsubscribe link because in a lot of cases that's a malicious link it's going to take you somewhere possibly opt you in for more spam or download viruses onto your hardware yes yes you can unsubscribe now if it's a legitimate person sending a personal email from their personal email account you usually can't unsubscribe one of the tricks in email marketing is to make your emails look like they came from a real person but you can usually tell if it was sent from an ESP or from somebody's actual you know personal email box if it's got the unsubscribe so Jerry so a lot of the clients are going to filter certain emails into your promotions based off of some of that information but it's not going to filter because it knows it's coming from an ESP in most cases your ESP is going to have you on a shared server that they're responsible for the deliverability of that comes from that server so say MailChimp has you on a shared server and somebody else on your shared server starts spamming they're going to take the necessary actions to remove them from that server so they don't damage the deliverability of everybody else on that server that makes sense okay anybody else so some of them have more of a visual kind of build out when you do your automations and some don't well create the flow chart no this flow chart was created in lucid chart okay yes yes active campaign is going to be a little bit more sophisticated in my opinion campaign monitors still building their automations up a little bit but yes active campaign has this available and it's a very nice visual whizzy wig last question litmus and email on acid I like email and ask it a lot yes so you don't want to build automations that you don't have a good segmented group for because the time it takes to build out the automation is maybe not the best use of your time if you have a small group something like this would probably take me a couple hours to build the automation itself and that's not considering copywriting or email design time in most cases I'm in a marketing department where that's done for me I build the automation itself and then you're going to want to test your automations you send it to a couple people and you can expedite them through the next steps like if there's a way you can expedite it to make sure that they're getting the right emails based off of their behaviors yes so the testing that I was yes the testing that I was talking about is really about a visual test of it it's not going to test out your automations it's going to tell you what your emails look like on different clients depending on what device they're on mm-hmm yes so they've been they've been spoofed yes so I had a conversation last night at the speaker and sponsored dinner with a gentleman and he was saying he had a client that was sending emails from the same server he was hosting his domain on and didn't believe that that was affecting the speed of his site and it was it was basically taking a bandwidth so he had the move over to send grid and watched it go from night to day with the resources that were available to run his website because he was constantly crashing his website he'd send hundreds of emails in a matter of hours from the same server which is another reason why we highly recommend ESB's email service providers and use their servers they manage them for deliverability it's mostly manual it's mostly manual I think there's some tools that like you can take pictures of business cards but they're not perfect yeah hire like a college student there's people looking for that kind of work go on fiber you know as long as like the information that you're giving them to input like that you trust them with it and that they're not going to do something insecure with we got a wrap up here I want to thank everybody for bearing with me talk when I get down and I hope you guys have a great word camp