Hello and welcome! I’m Justyna, content writer at LiveChat and this is the one and only Business Sidekick!

In the last episodes, I was talking with my guests about the best applications every business should have and when you should start to think about opening your social media channels. Now it’s time for email marketing!

My today’s guest is Michał Leszczyński, Content Manager at GetResponse, an email marketing platform.

Enjoy!

Hello Michał, thanks for accepting my invitation!

Hello thank you for having me.

Can you tell me in short what are you doing on a daily basis?

My name is Michael Leszczynski and I’m the Content Marketing Manager at the company called GetResponse, so I manage all the content marketing projects, I plan them, implement them, and co-authored some of the kind of pieces that we produce.

Awesome, okay, so, the topic of today’s podcast is email marketing. Can you tell me something about it? Why email marketing is so important and what are the benefits of it?

So, Email Marketing, it’s just another foremost promotion of marketing, well this one uses email to send valuable information and valuable assets, resources, to your audience. So there a few reasons why, it’s important and why it’s useful really is because it’s worthily inexpensive. All you have to do is collect email address of your audience and send them the messages, craft them and you can actually use ready-made templates just to make your life easier as also reliable.

So, unlike social media channels where you have to fight with the algorithms to get your message showed your audience. With email, if you have deliverability straight, then your message will always land in your audiences mailboxes, so it doesn’t have to be the inbox, it doesn’t have to be at the top, it all depends on the hour but it’s going to go there. And the last thing is it’s measureable, so, it’s quite easy to see the results of email marketing can things that you sent.

Fun, fun, fun! So, how can it be implemented? If I do not know anything about marketing? How can I start my journey with it?

Sure, if you never had any chance when you go at email marketing, there are few ways to do it, the easiest one is probably pay an agency to do it for you, so they have the email database or you provide them with your own and sent the emails for you, but that sometimes expensive way to do it, you can also just have your own mailing server your own admin to do it for you, but that usually just takes too much of the resources based on, when it comes to people, and probably the easiest way to do it is using an ESP which is an Email Service Provider.

So, it’s just like any other software’s service, you plugged it in, so you pay monthly, and if you ever are bored with it, you can get rid of it and stop paying, so that’s probably the easiest way to go about email marketing and this is probably one of the best solutions for, especially starting companies because ESP’s have some experience with delivering your emails, they have the solutions ready-made, so you don’t really need to take care thinking about getting your email is delivered, all you have to do is provide valuable to your audience

So basically, when you have software, you have to have email list of your customers and you write template of an email and you can send a bulk of emails to your audience right?

Yeah, exactly, you have to have your own email database, that’s what we called Premising Based Marketing. So you don’t do it, rent or purchase list that’s something they we’re against, and yeah, you can send the messages in bulk or you can actually automate them, so for example, want to be someone’s line up to your list will get an automated welcome message or cycled messages, so you don’t have to send all in at once, but they’re be sending themselves as people sign up.

Probably the best thing to do is to put a pop-up or a sign up for one of your website. Pop-ups are something that people either feel that they’re against them or for them, it depends on how you go about it but they’re really effective, so software such as GetResponse offers solutions that help put those signup forms on your website and you have to tell your audience that there’s this possibility to sign up your email once and why they should do it, for example, if you put a form on Facebook page or on your own page, you should provide the benefits for signing up, so it is to keep up to date with the updates with all the promotional calls or promotional information or be the first person to get the latest information from your band, has to be something does really valuable to your audience.

Sounds like a piece of cake! What are the best practices for emails?

Sure! These days, you need to realize that most people will be opening the messages on their mobile devices, while on the go. So, probably the number one thing that’s to say is responsive design, so it’s the same message that you send to all your audience but it shows differently on different email devices, different email clients, so if they open it up on the desktop it’s going to expand, it’s going to be larger, and if it’s on mobile devices, it’s going to be divided into blocks and it’s going to be well adjusted into the size of your device.

And on top of that, probably one of things that’s recommend is to do something that most company’s done to is write in those emails coz most companies just put a large image and the contract shouldn’t does about it, but you have to have a proper ratio of text and images because email clients will be filtering your messages based on how good the content is and in their opinion, text is always a better message.

So, definitely put large images to show the emotions and, you know, say words cannot say in such a short time, but do write a copy that resonates with your audience and then put of course a call to action button if you want your audience to go somewhere. So direct them to the landing page where you will be showing all the information.

So probably another thing is to say is that emails are not supposed to sell. So you don’t need to provide all of the information, you don’t need to show everything about your product or your service done, all you have to do inspire some interest and then just direct them to a landing page where everything else will be covered.

It cannot be completely different, and it cannot be salesly, pushy, “buy now” and “do it now” and such, you have to work on the copy and make it interesting, make it fun to read. So even with call to action buttons instead of using words like “submit” because no one wants to submit or “download”, you can use fun copy that like get this ebook or read about it, learn more or reading comments the file like that so you have to just align it with the tone of voice that you’re using throughout the whole marking spectrum.

So, you sound like a human right?

Yeah exactly! Since some of this messages will be sent in bulks, some of them will be automated, so someone might be thinking that these are machines sending messages to us but you have to sound like the marketer, like a person, so you know, you need to connect with your audience and build a relationship and that’s how you’re going to build loyalty with them.

Okay and, what are the greatest email mistakes people do?

Greatest email mistakes, so the one that I’ve said, the large images, and using only images in your emails, because it might look good in the you know graphic designers mind, but messages should be delivered as well, so you have to look at the technical side of it and make sure that your messages will be actually sent to your audience and they will be able to see them so you use a text, use a text and copy them as well.

Another one is putting attachments in emails...

Yeah, yeah, that’s true!

Yeah! That’s so old school and putting videos in emails as well, most email clients will not support it, so you need to test the messages, how they look them, whether they read them well in different email clients.

So if you can test them before, then do so and probably the last major mistake I’ve said is just sending the messages to a purchase list. I know it’s relatively cheap to do, just buy a large email database of people in your sector, but to be honest, if I get message from the same brand or in one campaign, since I opted in another one because just because someone purchase my email. I can see that I cannot really relate to that company, I cannot really form a bond with them because they don’t really care about me, they send the same messages to everyone and they want you so as much as possible.

And then, probably you’d mark such an email such as spam, and that’s another problem with emails.

I know, I’m more lenient with when it comes to that, so I don’t mark messages as spam because I know how it affects a little bit…

Oh, I do, I do!

See, that’s good though! If you don’t know why this message was sent to you then definitely the only problem is that there’s this thing called feedback loop, which basically means if you mark this message as spam, the brand that sent you the message will know that you want to be unsubscribed, not all email providers like, Gmail, Outlook, not all of them provide a feedback loop.

Okay! How to measure the effectiveness of emails?

Sure! As I said at the beginning, email is very measureable and most important matrix are open ratio and click through ratio, so if anyone opens your message then, like a small pixel is being loaded, so ESP knows that the message was opened and then someone clicks on the link directly to the separate domains, they will know that the link was clicked and then you could see which sort of offers were interesting, which one’s the people clicked on, every singles of the messages but you have more matrix such as bounces, how many of the messages were not delivered because of technical issues or because of the way he created the message, and probably the most important one, if he don’t know if your email marketing is doing well, is the unsubscribed and complaint ratio.

So how many people unsubscribed after receiving a message or how many of them complaint and marked your message as spam, this definitely will show if you’re sending too many emails, or if you’re not making it clear, why are you sending these emails, or if you’re not making, or you’re not sending relevant information.

So basically, do you recommend testing sending emails like for example, changing the email subject and changing the copy, so it’s more interesting?

Sure! Definitely, A/B testing is important, so sending out different versions of the same email to make sure you sent the best message to the most of your list and that’s one of the things that we’ve learned over the years is that, what you think is going to work fast isn’t always what the audience thinks and sometimes you create a beautiful messages, beautiful email, and think that the call to action is very interesting and then you send a regular one using the regular contraction or just a link or text link, then you see that this one has a better result.

So at this moment you’re sad probably, I probably disappointed that the test has proven you wrong, but then again, that’s a good thing, because automatically can send the better messages to the most of your list and after all at the end of the day, it’s your audience that decides what you should be sending to them.

Can you recall any case study that proven email marketing to be great for business?

Sure! There are plenty of great case studies out there and I’m glad the marketers share their ideas with others even if it’s competitors, even if it’s you know, different providers of software, it’s great that they show their ideas how to run the campaigns, because after all, that’s what we want to achieve to.

We recently did a case study with the company called Hair Store, it’s an eCommerce site that sells hair products, lotions, gels, and so on and we helped them out because they have the email list but it wasn’t growing as quickly as they want it and the messages wasn’t went right or didn’t just have enough transactions, so we just implemented a few things like a pop-up and that was looking almost exactly the same as the embedded form that we put a signup form on Facebook page, and then we reminded the uses that there’s a possibility if you sign up to the email list and that will be getting only limited content so no one else get it, so like exclusive content and they will get a discount as well.

And then we created an onboarding site messages that remind them about this discount code, some blog information, useful content and after that we generated more than 50% more sign ups, generated 60% more visits and almost 32 transactions.

And that’s just another example how companies can shortly improve their results using simple solution because we didn’t use any abandoned card or eCommerce tool that won’t, yeah, so, all we did is just create a simple pop-ups and automated welcome messages.

Yeah, these results sound really amazing! And how much time did it take, a month?

It took us month to come up with the idea on how to do it.

And to implement it, right?

Yeah! Exactly, so we measured the results, of the free months and that’s the results we generated, we try to make sure that they stay the same and that’s how it worked out.

Okay! So it means that if you don’t use email marketing, you should start it right now. Alright, thank you very much for this interview!

Thank you so much, thanks for having me.

Now it’s my time to put two cents in!

If you want to start your email marketing campaign, you should focus on these steps:

Step 1: Build your email list.

Don’t buy it, don’t copy it, build it. It’s quite easy in online business as almost every time your customer buys something from you, they give you their email so you can send them order details.

But if you don’t gather your customers’ emails, start doing it.

Step 2: Choose the right software.

I do recommend choosing an email platform as thanks to that you’ll be able to send your campaigns really quickly. Is it GetResponse, MailChimp or Campaign Monitor, they will help you to build your email from the scratch: add contacts, choose the right template and send it!

Another step: Establish your goals.

Why do you want to start an email campaign? What do you want your recipients to do when they get your email? How do you want to measure your KPIs? It’s worth spending some time thinking about what you want to achieve with your email campaign.

Maybe you want them to buy more - then you can send them promo codes or information about sales. You can also educate them about your product or keep them engaged.

Once you have your goals, choose the type of campaign you want to send.

Will it be a regular newsletter? A marketing offer, an event invitation, a survey? You choose.

Last but not least - monitor the results.

All good email platforms give you the ability to check how successful your campaign was. What was the open rate, click through rate, bounce rate and unsubscribe rate. It will give you an overview of how your audience likes your email and will let you test other templates and offers.

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That’s all for today, thanks for listening! All the best!