You Ask, I Answer: Counterintuitive Email Marketing Strategies?

In this episode, Dennis asks, what are some email marketing strategies that might seem counterintuitive but work well? Well, gosh, there are so many um marketing strategies for email marketing uh that uh can be counterintuitive. Let's cat let's do the intuitive ones first, the the obvious ones. Your email's gotta be worth reading, right? If you publish an email that doesn't add value to somebody's day, it's a it's an it's a no-go, right?

No one's gonna read it. Yeah, and it is so trite, it is so cliche to say that you gotta create valuable content. And yet when I look in my inbox, 99% of the marketing that I get is crap. Right? It is stuff that you couldn't pay me to read most of the time.

I mean, you could pay me, you just have to pay me a lot um to read it, because it's so bad. It's so bad. It is entirely all sender-centric. It is all look at us, we're an awesome company, we've got all these awesome products. You should buy something.

Right. So that's number one. Number two, have a consistent sender. Right. Again, that's one of those things that people still do wrong.

Um they try uh messing around and being cute with all kinds of different senders and sender names and things to see if they can get you to pay attention. And if you want consistent results, you've got to have consistent processes. There's there's no way to to to sugarcoat that. If you are inconsistent in your subject lines, in your format, in your sender, you're gonna get inconsistent results. And there's there's a time and a place for testing, for sure, but testing should be separate from production.

And a lot of people that's not the case. Now, there are three things that I do that are people consider counterintuitive. Number one, I have a really, really, really obvious, bold, obnoxious unsubscribe button. It takes up the whole width of the email. It's all these horrendously bright changing colors.

It looks like a uh an acid trip. Um, and it and it's near the top of the email, and then there's another unsubscribe link up at the bottom. I want people to unsubscribe. I should probably clarify that. I want people to unsubscribe who don't want to be here, right?

If they're not interested, out of here. Why? Because the very worst thing that can happen is that somebody can't find the unsubscribe button and they just hit the marcus spam button in the email client. If you know anything about email marketing deliverability, reputation is what matters in email marketing now. It's stuff like you know, free in the sender line, like that was how we filtered spam like in the early 2000s.

Today it's all reputation-based IPs, uh, SPF, DKIM, DMARC, uh, and individual user behaviors. If enough people hit the Marcus spam button in Gmail or Hotmail or whatever, these services are gonna say, well, gosh, you know, this seems like everyone's flagging this spam, so let's uh move it to the promotions tab, or just not deliver it at all. People hitting that mark a spam button is so damaging, so damaging to your reputation. It's right up there with sending email to email addresses that don't exist, right? It's that bad.

So you never want to do that. So, how do you avoid that? You make it easier for people to unsubscribe. You say, here's the door, don't let it hit you, right? Where the good lord split you.

And that gets people who are likely to complain off your list. Now, why don't marketers do this more? Because a lot of the times they're measured on I hate the term vanity metrics, but they're measured on metrics that may or may not have any correlation to actual results. Just because your email list is big doesn't mean that it's good, right? If you send out an email to a million people and five people buy something, your list is really five, right?

And the other 999,995 emails are no good. If five people are only the only ones who ever buy anything, you may as well just have a list of five. And so we are taught a bigger list is better. It's not true. An engaged list is better, a happy list is better.

A list that looks forward to your emails is better. Bigger isn't better. And so if we get rid of that mindset, then we can get rid of the need to hide the unsubscribe link and two-point font and light gray text at the very bottom, the email. That's no good. Stop doing that.

So that's number one. Number two, um, blatant subject lines, particularly for sales pitches. A lot of my sales pitches start out saying blatant sales pitch. That's part of the subject lines. It's blatant sales pitch, Google Analytics 4 course.

I want you to know it's a sales pitch. I want you to know when I'm sending you a sales pitch. And again, when you look at the tactics your average salesperson uses, they'll do things like you know, put RE and then you know, our meeting last week or whatever, or uh, hey, you got a few minutes uh kind of thing. We're all adults, we've all been around for a little while. We all know exactly what those emails mean, right?

You're not fooling anybody and saying uh got two minutes, right? You're gonna your two minutes are gonna stretch to 20 minutes and it's gonna be a sales pitch. No, I don't have two minutes for you. If my subject line says blatant sales pitch Google Analytics for course, what happens? When you read that, it sets your expectations.

You know what's in the box, you know you're getting a sales pitch, right? What happens if I have a deceptive subject line, right? Like, check this out. You open the email and then you're unhappy, like, ugh, it's a sales pitch, right? What happens when you're unhappy?

You unsubscribe, right? Or worse, you mark a spam again, don't want that. If I say blatant sales pitch, you know it's a sales pitch, and then what are you likely to do? You just skip it, right? You hit the delete button.

Cool, fine. If you just hit the delete button, then guess what? You weren't gonna buy anything anyway. So tricking you or trying to trick you is a fruitless endeavor. Just call it a blatant sales pitch so that people know what's in the box.

And if the subject line is good enough that you know, in terms of advertising what's in the box, if somebody's like, gosh, I've been thinking about taking a Google Analytics for a course, and look, here's a sales pitch for one. Maybe I'll at least look at it. Right? That's what I want. I want people to have realistic expectations when they open the box, when they open the email and go, huh, says blatant sales pitch, and look, it's a sales pitch.

Right? Again, expectations are met. No one feels fooled, no one feels deceived, no one's unhappy. If you open a sales pitch and it's a sales pitch and you're unhappy, something, something went wrong there. So that's number two.

Number three is I rigorously clean my list. I scrub my list weekly, right? Of anything that bounces, um, and then I do a full list clean quarterly. I just validate my entire list. Um I get rid of a lot of emails.

A lot of emails go away because they're marked as you know no longer valid mailboxes or undeliverable or something like that. Again, a lot of marketers really hate doing this because your subscriber numbers always go down. Whenever you clean your list, your numbers go down, sometimes a lot, and then in your quarterly board report or your monthly marketing metrics review or whatever, you know, this that bright red negative number and everyone's like, oh, what happened? You know, it's not a failing. It's not a failing on you as a marketer if your email list has emails that go bad, right?

In the same way that it's not a failing that if you buy some fruit at the grocery store and one of the apples is rotten, yeah, you didn't make it rotten, right? You just bought it, it's just that was a bad apple in the lot. What it does do is it keep your reputation clean. Because again, one of the markers of spammy behavior is sending a whole bunch of emails to addresses that don't exist. And the more you do that, the worse your reputation gets.

And it's quick. It's not a lot. If you look at the deliverability metrics, for like Amazon's simple email service, they will warn you when your um invalid email lists uh sends go to one percent. Right. If you get a one percent of a send is goes bad, you get a warning.

If you go, I believe to two percent, your account just gets canceled. Right. Um, same is true for um people complaining. Like they think that's like 0.1%. Uh, it's really low.

Their thresholds before they just kick you off their service are really, really low. So you cannot afford to have just bad addresses piling up. So you've got to get rid of them as quickly as possible. And the faster you get rid of them at the front end, the more your reputation improves on every single email service provider out there. Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo, those people who still use AOL, whatever, it's all fine.

All of them are looking at reputation. All of them are looking at what's going on. Right. So those would be my three counterintuitive things. And it works.

It works really well. So my balance rate on my list hovers around um 0.0016%. Right. It's really low. My complaint rate, 0.0004%.

Again, super, super low. I am well far below, you know, a thousand times below the threshold where an Amazon SES would say your account is canceled, right? Way below it. That's what I want. I don't necessarily care if people you know read every single email.

I don't care if you know people don't get a ton out of every single email I send. I don't care if people don't buy immediately in an email. What I do care about is they stick around. I do care that I don't get complaints. I do care that addresses don't go bad.

And I do care that if you don't want to be here, there's an easy way for you to leave. There's the big bright unsubscribe button that says, here's the door. Thank you for being here while you were here. We'll miss you. But the content no longer suits you anymore.

So that's it. That's those are the tactics. And I would encourage every marketer to embrace those tactics. Have that big unsubscribe. Have those clear as day, you know, can of soup style subject lines.

Um and clean your lists frequently, aggressively, and set expectations of your stakeholders. Like, hey, we're gonna clean the list at the end of the quarter, and it's gonna go down. It's gonna go down a lot, right? Um, but our deliverability will go up, our results will get better, and our reputation will improve. And those are the trade-offs.

Really good question. We could spend a whole bunch of time on email marketing, but these are these are some of the tactics that work really well that I think everybody should try using at least once. Anyway, thanks for the question. I'll talk to you soon. If you like this video, go ahead and hit that subscribe button.