 So, thank you for all for sticking around. It is five o'clock. It has been a long day. Hopefully you have all learned and had as much fun as I have. Today we're going to learn about making the most of your mailing list. My name is Corey Loss. I live in a little town called Socrates, New York, so a few hours west of here. As I had just said, it's a very boring drive, but relatively easy. Thank you for having me. I have been building websites since mid to late 90s, so I've been around doing this for quite a while, and I've been messing around with WordPress since 2009, so also pretty long time. I'm still doing contract work to pay the bills, but trying to build a plug-in into a business is my main plug-in is called Kanban Board for WordPress, and if you don't know what a Kanban Board is, Google it or come ask me afterwards. But if you're looking for a project management solution, give it a try. I'll say this again later, but we can start already. If you ever want to ask me a question, I'm happy to talk about entrepreneurship or WordPress or Yo-Yo-ing. I'm good at Yo-Yo-ing, which is sort of weird, but I started in the 8th grade, so there are some things you just don't forget. Send me an email, or you can find me on Twitter at CoreyMiles. So goals for our chat today. I'm going to talk a bit about the benefits of email and email marketing. I'm going to talk about mailing list services that you might use to handle your mailing list. I'm going to talk about how people join your mailing list, how to get people to join your mailing list, and then how to get people to actually read your email assuming they've joined your mailing list, and then you're able to send them some emails. So starting with the benefits of email. I'm going to read some stats to you. If they're not absolutely fascinating to you, they'll be over fairly quickly here. There's simply more email. Three billion users of email worldwide by 2019. And the last that I saw said that I think it's mostly in America. Almost everybody has close to two accounts. Obviously everybody either has two accounts or one account or less. But anyway, per user, per American, there's 1.8 accounts per person. Email is viewed more. 90% of Americans check email at least once daily. Most of us check it every 10 minutes. And 60% of the time email is checked on mobile, which is just an interesting stat, and I'll come back to that a little later. Email is viewed longer. So compared to social media, social media marketing, the average reading time of an email is 11 seconds, which as you can imagine compared to a tweet, which is often scrolled by instantaneously. And email is clicked on more. So this is obviously talking more about email marketing. But the open rates for marketing emails is around 25%, and click-through rates is around 4%, versus anything on social, which is still usually less than 1%. So getting into the specific benefits of email marketing. Some of these are facts. Some of these are a little subjective. I'll try to add my disclaimer when it's subjective. The first one here is one of the reasons why I think email marketing is so successful, if that is specifically as protected. People tend to protect their inboxes. But so the inverse is true in that if they sign up for your mailing list, the likelihood that they will engage with your email marketing is pretty high because they've let you in. So if you're a nerd like me and you know about vampires, there's an old rule that vampires aren't allowed to come into your house until you invite them in, and then all sorts of havoc, they can recall sorts of havoc on you, but you have to let them in. Email is targeted, so most people will not sign up for newsletters, email lists that they aren't interested in. So you have the opportunity of targeting your audience. You're probably sending them content that they are interested in, and that makes it a lot easier to market to them. And targeted segmented campaigns have an open rate that is 14% higher than sort of broad marketing, broad strokes marketing, so they're big advantages. Email marketing is cheap compared to buying go boards or hiring blimps or printing off endless t-shirts and giving them out at word camps and then hoping that people don't just need t-shirts, that they actually like your product. It's a great offense to the folks printing t-shirts. I love them. And then email, here's another subjective thing, but it's something that I've noticed, at least in myself, is that email feels productive, right? So even if you receive a newsletter in your inbox that you know is marketing, it still feels productive somehow to skim through, to feel like you're learning about new products, here's new tools that you might use in your professional life. And then to delete that email feels like you're checking something off. So to me, I think that it's just one of those little subtle psychology tricks that makes email marketing so effective. So now, assuming I've convinced you that email marketing is the way to go, here's mailing list services and things that you might look for in these services, right? So there are a lot of different companies out there, some of the bigger ones are MailChimp, Campaign Monitor, Constant Contact. And then there's also the general functionality, which we'll talk about in a sec, is also now baked into a lot of tools. It used to be, like I said, I started back in the 90s. The early email marketing tools had a few purposes and a few features, whereas now a lot of those features bleed over into other products or other products now contain some of that same functionality. So CRM tools, sales tools, and email automation tools, some of those names are InfusionSoft, Drip is a great one, and then I use a product called Active Campaign that again combines a lot of this functionality. So features that you want to look at, well, obviously, number one, email deliverability. And this is the huge advantage of using a service that sends emails for you instead of you just BCCing 100 people, is this thing called whitelisting, which I won't get into, but basically it can't guarantee that your email is going to be delivered, but the likelihood that it doesn't end up in a spam folder is a lot higher. And then past that, things like list management, so when people subscribe to your mailing list, they're also able to unsubscribe, they're able to update their email accounts, that kind of thing. And then you get into some of the extras, which are things like analytics and reporting, you want to know how effective your emails are, you want to know how many people read your email, how many people clicked on your well-worded call to action that you're selling your, you know, your widget, whatever it is. And then end conversions, so kind of combining those two numbers, which is how many people viewed the email versus how many people actually clicked. Things like segmentation, which we'll get to a little bit more later, but starting to break down your users, tag your users so that this person's signed up on my home page or did they sign up after clicking on a tweet, and are they interested in, you know, my blue widgets or my red widgets, because that lets you, you know, target them a little bit differently. Depending on how you're going to use your emails, integrations can be important, and since we are at a WordPress conference, I'll talk a little bit about WordPress now and later, but specifically if you're looking for integrating your email marketing with your WordPress site, then obviously integrations are going to be important. And then the last thing to look for, which a lot of people don't think about in the beginning, but you will definitely run into if you keep going with email marketing, is importing and exporting. Over time, I've signed up for and then abandoned probably at least half a dozen email marketing tools. They come and go, companies close, they get acquired, I outgrow them, that kind of thing. And so you want to know that you can export your email list and then import it into the new tool, whichever one you might choose. Extra features, sort of the icing on the cake, if you will, CRM, so managing relationships with your users or your customers, email addresses, shipping addresses, the names of their lives if you're into that kind of marketing or husband's attack. Sales tracking is another feature set that you might see. So knowing whether your customers or the people who are on your mailing list bought products or didn't buy products again, lets you target them differently. Drip campaigns, which is a newer feature or a newer technique that's caught on in the last few years, which is even if you don't know it by this name, you probably have experienced it. You go to a website and they say, give me your email address and I will send you an email course over the next seven days teaching you how to do X, Y and Z. That's a drip campaign where they drip emails to you over time. Automation, which is the same sort of thing in segmentation and starts to integrate into your website of, okay, they visited this website or this web page and this web page so they must be interested in this type of product rather than this type of product and maybe I'll tag them a certain way and then I can target them. And then support is the other thing that I'm starting to see overlap with some of these web apps or SaaS apps or products where you can basically manage if you've got a software product like I do for example and people are emailing in hey, it broke or whatever. There's ways to integrate that into your newsletter or you can manage them overlapping and with the same tools. So how to get people, excuse me, how people actually will join your mailing list? This is technically speaking. So basically you're talking about a WordPress site assuming that you've got a WordPress site. You can put forms on your various pages and this is where they might sign up and you might have some copy that says if you join my newsletter then I will teach you all sorts of wonderful amazing things. WordPress loves its widgets so you can have widgets where people can sign up and then something that's become very popular in the last few years are modals, pop-ups, pop-overs, whatever you want to call them but basically we've all seen it where you're reading a blog post and after a few seconds a little window opens up and says join my mailing list and I will send you more great content like this. So how do you get all of these things onto your WordPress website? Well a lot of the email marketing tools that you might use have built-in form generators. A lot of them also now have WordPress plugins so if you, for example, sign up with Mailchimp and then you go into the Plugin directory and Google or search for Mailchimp you know there's a dedicated plugin that you can just install and then it'll let you add forms to your content, that kind of thing. Sort of the inverse of that if you've already got a Gravity Forms or a Ninja Forms form built into you or that you're using on your WordPress site they all have add-ons now so they will generate a form for you and so if somebody signs up it will automatically add them to your active campaign or Mailchimp. And then there are third-party services like SumoMe, OptinMonster that I use called Get Site Control where you add a little bit of JavaScript to your website and it'll add forms or popovers for you. So now let's say you've got a form on your website how do you actually get people to join your mail address? What it comes down to is giving them something in exchange for their email address. Again, thinking about the vampire rule basically you want some way to convince people to let you into their house so that you can suck their blood. This is a terrible analogy. But these are often called lead magnets for content upgrades and we'll go into a little bit of each kind here but basically broken down more or less in the three groups where you've got guys who of course cheat sheets, that kind of thing. You've got an actual asset that you give them so a download of free trial and for more high touch, generally for higher price point services you've got training or assets or assessments, excuse me so we'll get into that. So what are some guides and of course cheat sheets. Again, talking about drip campaigns content that you might give them over a week delivered in a chapter a day that kind of thing. A downloadable PDF restricted content or infographics so maybe it's just a beautiful graphic that tells them the ten best tips and tricks for whatever. These are all things that basically you can say hey, sign up now and I will send you my awesome infographic that will teach you how to increase your SEO whatever it might be. A couple of ways to generate these things is to think about you and your business and your day to day what are assets that you might be generating already so like if you've got a friend who maybe is not as tech savvy as you are because all of us are of course WordPress experts and they say hey, how do I increase the SEO on my website you might shoot them an email that says well you can try this, you can try this, try this well that right there might be a great block of content that you can convert into a PDF that you could then offer as a free download in exchange for somebody joining your newsletter. As far as restricted content a really neat trick is you can create a page on your website but if you don't link to it anywhere nobody really knows that it's there so it's sort of a secret hidden page and you can tell people hey if you sign up for my newsletter then I will give you this great content and you can just redirect them to that page that has that content on it so it's really easy, it's functionality it's built into WordPress and it's a great way to deliver that. And then a trick that I like using for generating things like infographics if you are not a graphic designer and you want obviously you want your infographic to look attractive a level website called Fiverr spelled a 2Rs that you can get people to design things for you, you can basically get anybody to do anything from 5 bucks on Fiverr that's kind of the idea but it's great for services like this where you will hire somebody for 5 or 20 bucks and say here's the content and they'll do it for you you can also hire people to do research if you want to generate something a little more in depth that kind of thing so the next group of assets you might give away something downloadable, a free trial so if you are a musician and you're trying to promote yourself maybe give away a free song or a single in exchange for your email address that you can market them and sell them the rest of the album maybe if you're an author give away the first chapter and for me if you're like me and you're selling a software product then you can give away a trial license hey try our software for free for 14 days in exchange for your email address and the trick here is again WordPress being one of the wonderful platforms that we know it is lets you host these files for free easily upload it to your media folder and then you can just link to it there and then the last category of giveaways again like I said is generally better for it's a little more high touch and so time being money it's a little better for high price point services and products but it has other extra benefits like it's great for customer research so things like phone calls, Skype calls you can obviously do this remotely so you do videos you do live tutorials live webinars and online courses so basically what you're doing here is saying I will do a website assessment for you in exchange for email address I will teach you my 10 best tips and tricks for selling spices to rock stars whatever it is but again usually because time is money it's something that you want to know that you're likely to get $10,000 out of marketing to them rather than 12 bucks a month or whatever it might be a good way here that I've seen for people who again you want to limit access to you to avoid people who are just trying to keep the tires is to add actually more fields to your sign up form so it's not just give me your email address but how many rock stars do you know or whatever it might be so you can use the form basically to pre-qualify people before letting them join your newsletter so you kind of know that they're worth marketing so now you've got them on your mailing list how do you get them to actually read your email so again I'm going to list off some stats here but I promise they're worth buying obviously start with great content but what that means is generally not just high sales buy buy buy my stuff but you want to teach people things you want to add value that can also be entertainment it doesn't have to just be education and then also statistically being personable tends to do better than just we are a company and we are trying to sell something to you so saying hey there how's it going and talking in the first person this is what first person for we whatever that is she's not yes I know grammar stuff so saying we and I rather than just we as a company and you as the lowly customer all will lead to more conversions kiss keep it simple plain text or emails that look like plain text actually perform 25% better so the days of the newsletters where you have two sidebars and many articles and that kind of thing are fading now obviously the disclaimer there is it depends on your industry there are certain industries where those newsletters files will have HTML heavy newsletters will still convert way better so it's up to you to figure that out broadly speaking plain text looking emails single column not with sidebars and and I think the best way this is illustrated is the fact that two thirds of email remember the staff that I mentioned earlier two thirds of email are now viewed on mobile so on your phone or on your tablet and naturally if you've got an HTML heavy email it probably is not going to show up very well on a screen this big so plain text keeping it short keeping it simple keeping it personable generally is known to convert better segment if you can sending different emails to different groups of customers again as I mentioned earlier based on tags based on preferences tend to convert better 14% more opens than if it's not segmented so if I like red shirts and you send me an email about red shirts 14% more likely to click through and check out the red shirts which kind of makes sense but not only is it 14% more opens but 100% more click through again because you're showing me exactly the products that I want makes a big difference personalizing them it's such a silly little trick but that Dear Corey instead of Dear Sir or Dear Ma'am or Dear Ma'am leads to 5% more email opens shouldn't work we all know that it's automated we all know that they don't actually know me by name but it works here's another subjective tip and trick but I've seen it work a lot and a lot more lately it is asking for engagement and I don't mean sales I don't mean asking them to buy but asking customers to weigh in including things like polls or just asking your customers hey we're thinking about carrying more red shirts what do you think and it's amazing how much you'll get people writing in and going what I hate red stop carrying red shirts or people going yes more red shirts only red shirts people like to share their opinions on the internet I don't know if you guys have discovered that yet and then of course the caveat all of this is it depends on your market it depends on what you're trying to get out of of your email marketing efforts so measure and experiment everything I tell you today is absolutely 100% true except for when it's not so it's up to you to figure out where I'm lying so the last thing I want to talk about is intent because this was the biggest mistake that I made for a long time as I have been learning email marketing since the late 90s is early on everybody said you need a mailing list so I got a mailing list and they said you got to send out a newsletter once a month and I've done this for a number of businesses a number of businesses over the last goodness 20 years and what it comes down to is intent what is it that you want to get out of your email marketing and what is it you want customers to get out of you marketing to them and obviously the easy answer is sales if you sell widgets you want to sell them widgets but a lot of the time high pressure sales don't work so that it's do you want more engagement do you want your customers to weigh in for me it's been promoting a sense of ownership and so like I said the trick it's not really a trick the technique that I like using the most now is engagement most of the newsletters that I send out now I will very intentionally include a couple of screenshots and say we're thinking about building feature A or feature B which one do you want and it's amazing how much engagement I'll get and for me I know that that way I'm building a product that my customers want and two they have a sense of ownership in my product and so again they're more likely to buy which is what I ultimately want them to do but since I can't just say buy my thing or at least I can but they won't do what I tell them how do I want to get there so I want to leave you with the underlying maybe it's over the meta concept of what is your intent I've given you the hopefully sort of the technical overview of how you can do email marketing what is it you want to get out of them that's the basics of making the most of your mail questions concerns accusations denials I wonder if you would say a little bit about the difference or the way that they might be complementary writing a blog and an e-news other which might in some ways have the same kind of fun do you comment on that? so the question was what are the advantages and disadvantages perhaps of writing blog posts versus including content in an e-mail newsletter and then where do they overlap is that right? one the obvious easy caveat or disclaimer is it's going to depend on your audience are they more likely to come to your website or do they want you to come to them but I would ur ur I would skew towards trying to get into people's inboxes because again if it lands in their inbox you're way more likely to get eyeballs on it or at least to have them see a subject line and maybe choose not to read it different from if it's on your blog and it's on your website you've got to somehow get them to you get them back to you and so you coming to them I think is probably going to be work better but again it kind of depends question in the back it's being filmed and recorded so yes so the question was will the presentation be online? in addition because I feel that they are in contact with these people and Facebook knows who they are but they don't know who they are do you have any magic words that I could say to try to sell them on the concept of email versus Facebook? so let me see if I can summarize with a client who is spending a lot of time doing Facebook marketing where they don't necessarily know who their customers are how can we sell them the benefits of email marketing and I would say not but in addition to I would imagine so there are a couple of things one of the things that occurs to me now that I probably should have included in my presentation and forgot so the next time I give this talk I will include it but you are the lucky individuals who will benefit from a great question and be remembering right now is that a lot of us hesitate to include content in duplicate content and this actually goes back to your question of if I write it in a blog post should I also put it in your newsletter absolutely don't assume it's kind of like sending the same tweet a few times like you can't send it every 30 seconds but there is no harm in sending the same tweet a few times over a period of time don't assume that people will have seen the content and then also most of us assume that people will even realize that they've seen the content before and even more so will get annoyed that they've seen the content before and I my recollection is a study show that that was not true so in this case I think that then your client sending content putting content on Facebook marketing to people on Facebook is not bad but I think to me it would be a fairly easy sell to say look yes you're reaching people I'm sure you're reaching people but because of segmentation because of getting into their inbox and marketing directly to them and just how strong segmentation and the targeted email marketing can be it's not bad that you're casting this wide net on Facebook but the intent would be pushing them further down the funnel and getting them to sign on to the newsletter because there are huge advantages of marketing of getting into their inbox of knowing what their name is of being able to tag them based on the pages on the websites that they visited that kind of thing and you're if you're trying to whisper in their ear let's say another terrible analogy you're getting closer and closer to their ear basically right so the question is what is a good or a decent rate of engagement I guess for across an entire list a couple of thoughts there one is it'll add flow over time to the only staff that I know of is based on specific like the engagement of emails and then it really comes down to content too and how engaged your customer is so it's kind of hard to answer my gut tells me that it's 8 to 25 percent where it's getting thumbs up am I right woohoo lucky guess for me in my own mailing list I look for 8 to 10 percent because that's what I've seen and the spikes that I've seen with the best performing content that I've been able to figure out that's generally my peak so I'm looking for that or better so you're doing trial and error yes I'm doing my own trial and error I've been focusing more on content less so than a delivery time because there have been historically there have been reports that have come out that said Tuesday at 8 a.m. but then everybody senses it's Tuesday at 8 a.m. and the whole thing's blown out of the water so and I know a lot of well so let me let me say two things one from my experience and my reading the best thing is consistency it doesn't necessarily matter the time of day or whatever the best thing you can do is be consistent so that your readers it's just like logging you want your readers to anticipate something from you so whether that's every Tuesday or once a month or whatever it is but be consistent and the other thing about engagement is all of the better email tools and I think I'm realizing that this should be on the slide so there will be another provision of this another tool that you want to make sure feature that you want to make sure that your email tool has is list column I think would be the way to put it so every once in a while going in and there's a button you can click that will basically say this group of users have never ever opened an email maybe it's time to sunset them let them you know unsubscribe them automatically or ideally here's an opportunity to email all of those people and say hey I noticed you haven't engaged with my mailing list for a while is your email address active is there something else I can talk about do you hate me personally are you a competitor and you're just spying on you know whatever it might be but that's another segment to look at anti-segment yes sir so what is the most sophisticated way a non-intrusive creepy big brother stalkery spammy sort of way to get email addresses specifically from Facebook from Facebook pages we'll go through you for having a big following on Facebook first of all second of all I there's no harm in asking if you're putting out good content there's no harm in asking end every Facebook post with a call to action hey if you want more great content like this join my mailing list there's also widgets and apps and all sorts of little ways to actually get that form right built into the Facebook page but again in the name of being personable I don't think there's any harm in asking consistently encouraging people often to join your mailing list and then obviously you have to deliver on that promise actually give them good content but I would just be straightforward about that I don't know that there's any tip or trick quick comments on moving people again the better tools all have export functions features but again most of them at this point there's a surprising amount going on behind the scenes in a lot of these email providers where they've got their own whitelists IP you know whitelisting and spam checks and all that stuff also your list that you online have reputations whether you know about it or not there's a number assigned to you and you can make that concept or not hopefully most of it's kept private or internal but it's true and so the truth is I wouldn't be surprised I don't know this factually but I wouldn't be surprised if I was moving from MailChimp to Active Campaign if Active Campaign didn't have some way to look at my reputation on MailChimp and say you know yes this person's legit or at least he's not totally evil and so let him import the email address and that kind of thing. One last question anybody? So you're seeing you're saying in the emails that you're receiving you're starting to see more animation, more animated gifs, more videos that kind of thing I think that's absolutely true that doesn't surprise me at all I'm seeing some of it as well again in the context of it might be the only content or it might be laid out in a fairly simple way we're not talking about a page of videos but yeah anything that's going to engage your users and so if they're drawn to cute little animations or if you can get your point across better with essentially a short video in the form of a gif I think that that's it's compelling it's all comes down to compelling content whatever format that's in I'm Corey Moss if you want to get in touch, email me find me on Twitter, thanks very much