Trends come and go quickly in marketing, but one truism holds: Email is king in B2B marketing. No other tactic comes close to combining the power of distribution, engagement and prospect information gathering.
A couple of interesting stats about B2B email marketing:
Trends come and go quickly in marketing, but one truism holds: Email is king in B2B marketing. No other tactic comes close to combining the power of distribution, engagement and prospect information gathering.
A couple of interesting stats about B2B email marketing:
Hello Hello everybody and welcome back to another episode of the industrial marketer podcast your place for the tips tech trends and tactics that us industrials care about when we're driving leads to our companies. I'm one of your hosts, Joey Strawn in inbound marketer and I am joined as always by Nels Nels Give me what you got Jensen? How are you my friend?
Nels Jensen:Joey I'm doing spectacular.
Joey Strawn:So am I I'm ready
Nels Jensen:for I'm ready for more industrial marketing love and one of our favorite topics today we're gonna be talking about email. And it's so much ground to cover so much good stuff, and a lot of people need some help with that. So really looking forward to you know.
Joey Strawn:This is a topic we could go on for days and days and days about nails. And then the funny thing is, is we get messages all the time. It's either on social media or ironically enough via email that are like Okay, give us the skinny is email marketing good. I will share like articles with his like email marketing is dead, the 2020 rules or whatever. So I could not be happier that we're diving in this week on email marketing and where it fits in and how it can benefit. industrials, b2b marketers, and people dealing with this stuff. Guys, if you haven't already subscribed to the podcast, please do the buttons like right below, it's really easy to do it. And if you're listening to it already, you should probably want to be subscribed. Come on, it's good stuff. All right. We're diving in to talk about email today. So now, I started off with a general quip of, we get articles all the time. And honestly, as me someone who reads about this on a regular basis, I see articles probably every three or four years that come up, they're like, email marketing is dead. And then like, give us the new thing of whatever it's gonna be health is email marketing dead, how our emails just like not useful anymore. What do we do?
Nels Jensen:You know, and every time somebody says email marketing is dead. I wish I remember where I first read this a long time ago, but the most powerful app there is, is that email icon, whether it's on your phone, whether it's on your iPad, whether it's on your desktop, you know, it it is, you know, Old Glory, Old Faithful, you know, whatever you want to it's, it's a foundational element. And, you know, as far as I'm concerned, it always will be it, you know, we could talk all we want about, you know, SMS, you know, and there's there's other things come and go and, but, you know, at least in the foreseeable future, email will be a constant in the business world.
Joey Strawn:I could not agree more email is one of those things. And I said it flippantly at the beginning. But the idea that email marketing is, quote, unquote, dead is laughable to me. And when we and I don't laugh, when, when people come and talk to me about I'm a very much professional, but the reality is, is that every couple years, someone gets a scare, because it's like, oh, well, Facebook has a messenger platform, or zoom, it's now going to be zoom, and everyone's gonna zoom in face message and FaceTime, and all these different connections. And there's all these different tools and, and everything. And we can talk about those in another episode. And we get to like remote workforces and digital remoteness and things, but when it comes to email, specifically, email is, I mean, is the electronic mail standard. But we still write letters, we still communicate via letters and memorandums and messages that need to be sent one to one or group to group. And until that that mode of communication has gone away, like we can just tell, telepathically communicate with our target personas, then emails always going to be a valuable tool in our tool belt, I won't say that it's going to be the primary channel for every marketer, or every industrial b2b that we speak with. But I will tell you, it's always going to be in the mix somewhere. Because no matter what the article say about email marketing is dead and open rates and blah, blah, blah, and people aren't going to pay attention. Because of now ads are going at the top of inboxes, all of that stuff. All of those studies are backed up every year by the fact that email is used more more frequently, and it is engaged with more often than other marketing channels. It's statistically proven year after year to still work.
Nels Jensen:Yeah, and it's a distribution system that you can put into a database and you can segment and you can write, you know, you can sort it's it's just a very utilitarian approach and it's there's there's low barriers. barriers to entry. There's low barriers to usage. So you know, I get it, Are there going to be challenges? Sure, you know, open rates tricks, but you also the distribution, whether it's video, whether it's podcasts like this, you know, it is just a very convenient platform for not only just distribution, but also the content itself so yes.
Joey Strawn:I'm very happy that you said, you said segmentation. And that's one of the things I do want to start with, because we can get dispel some misconceptions and things. Now, on this episode, I do want to do that. But I want to start with the idea that, you know, email is this hefty, hefty burden that you know, that clients need, it's not email, your email database, your contact database, is one of if not the most valuable marketing tool that you have at your disposal, the fact that you have hundreds, if not 1000s, of names of people who have raised their hand and asked to be communicated to by you is huge. And the ability to then take that that database and segment it by industry, by job title, by company by state by psychographics, whatever it may be, then gives professionals like Nels the ability to take those segments and actually write emails and content pieces that you can then send to those segments. I mean, now let's talk a little bit about how helpful it is for you, when you're given very segmented audiences to talk to and, and content that will connect with them.
Nels Jensen:Absolutely. So if you think about when you put together your marketing plan, let's say you put together you know, some goals, so you have some very specific goals in terms of outreach. So you've followed up with some specific content goals behind it, you've identified some personas. So here's how we are going to reach persona a or persona B, or persona C. So you have the ability with email to segment those messages, you have the ability to reach out at different times in the buying cycle, even with you know, depending upon how robust your inbound marketing system is, and hopefully, your CRM. Now I do want to point out that email marketing is not easy, especially, especially in the industrial world, it is so much easier in the b2c world. And you know, it's very easy to say, oh, okay, let's just hit these people. They're right about that purchase moment, right? Here's what you need to know, this week, right? You know, but it's, it's difficult, but that should not deter you from coming up with a good email plan, right? You want to educate, you want to make things aware to your prospects and customers, their consideration phase, the purchase phase, you should be aligning your email strategy, with your content goals in the personas in the buying cycles.
Joey Strawn:I couldn't agree more. And I actually want to go back and touch on two topics that you mentioned, Nelson, for us to dive in a little bit deeper. But one of the things that you mentioned was email marketing is not easy. Although that shouldn't be a deterrent for industrial manufacturers or industrial marketers to get into that game. Here's one of the things that I think that we as marketers fall into a lot. I mean, an LC you and I use email all the all the time, you know, we're writing emails on a weekly basis and sending them out. And so being able to kind of talk about the practice of email, it sort of flows right? right off of us, people who aren't dealing with it on a day to day basis, do see it as this large hurdle of Well, I've got to gather these contacts. And I've got to make sure that it is segmented, like we just talked about, and we've got to write the emails, we've got to test the emails and all of that. And, you know, let me not lie if there is an amount of work in it, but the the worth and the value of that work is going to be well outside of the range of email if you get your database segmented in a very helpful, efficient and exhaustive way that not only is that going to benefit email, but you can take those lists and benefit social targeting media targeted website updates and dynamic elements of content on your site. So there's a larger element and a larger benefit of doing the things that usually live within the email world. And although two analysis point can be difficult, and with b2b understanding the buying cycle is that's where I want to go next is huge. But the technical impetus there like it getting the right tool, and we can talk about tools in just a minute to make that easier. But getting the right tool will make some of those setup and segmentation processes a lot easier. As long as within your company, you know, who you're trying to talk to and why
Nels Jensen:And I'd like to sort of close the loop on why email marketing, you made a point. Early on, you said permission, right? We've already established a relationship with our email database. list, you know, that those, like customers and those prospects, so we have permission to communicate with them. So if nothing else, it's helping with the awareness and the, you know, avoiding the out of sight, out of mind, you know, phenomenon. So, you know, yes, it's, it's not easy, but it's important, you, you basically are invited into their world an email is when you're checking your business email, you are in a business frame of mind, it's not necessarily like social or you might be distracted, or you might be looking at other things, or you might not be in a business mood, but you're at your, you know, device, computer or laptop, you know, phone, whatever it is, when you are checking your business email, you are in a business frame of mind. So this is this is very important from a foundational touch point. And from there, that's where, you know, the more you're able to align it with your goals and initiatives. Great. But the key point is do to keep on is do it right, you know, you've got permission from these people, so touch them.
Joey Strawn:Yeah, well, and that goes back to I mean, I forget when the book was written, but that, you know, they the standard, great Seth Godin book permission marketing is all about this, as digital started to take hold. And as we as a society changed, our expectations of how to be marketed to that permission element has become more and more important. And so you can see that in social and the use of social media is built on that email is as well, because email is one where you have to get someone's email address. And there are ways to do that they all obviously, there are tools that you can source, and you can scrub and guess and all that. But if you really want to do it the right way, these are people that are actively giving you their contact information, their email, with the knowledge of either receiving something, or continuing to be communicated to by you, which is huge now, where it becomes a very big difference. And Nelson, you pointed this out earlier, and I want to touch on this for a minute between the two of us. But is that buying cycle, understanding the industrial buying cycle is more important with email marketing in this sector than it is in any other vertical retail. We know specifically when and how people buy their we know that groceries and things like that, obviously. But the buying cycle for industrials is so different for every industry for every segment, for every NAICS code. And for every you whatever business you're listening to this as it's different. And you need to understand yours to make sense of how email fits into it.
Nels Jensen:Yeah, and I think that's one of the challenges slash opportunities for us is, how much do you even want to segment your messaging to? So there's a lot of industrial giants that have multiple newsletters, right? They basically have one, right specifically, that's for the purchasing finance department, right? It's all about the economics, it's all about the ROI is it's all about investment and how you can, you know, you know, leverage capital for equipment, and then there's a different persona for engineers and for solutions, you know, and not every company is going to want to do that much work. But it might pay off or at least align it with your content plan, right? How are you reaching these different people, these different personas, and at different times, so if you're able to take your database, and you know, okay, these people have been in this funnel for about two months, it's time for them to move from education into consideration, right? Or they've been in for four months. So okay, now let's throw out the, hey, here's how you calculate the ROI or here's the right questions to ask, you know, if you're ready to invest, you know, now that becomes that can become very sophisticated. But as you know, God, the tools are out there to do this, right. The tools are out there to have and in some cases, I think we get stuck in the we have to write fresh emails, every single you know, newsletter or whatever, right? But in some cases, it's we're not talking about newsletters, we're talking about nurturing sequences, right and right, those could be in the in the can, so to speak, because you want to deliver a specific message when somebody has been in that funnel for this amount of time. This is not just email marketing is not just newsletters, it's nurturing sequences. It's basically how do you tend to the people They move through the funnel. Right?
Joey Strawn:Well, and one of the things that is really, really important with that is knowing what those stages of the funnel are. So if you know that you have a very long buying cycle, but at the consideration phase when when a sale is imminent, and that conversation begins that they always download a spec sheet for the for the tool, or the deliverable or whatever. If we know that, then we can go in and tag those actions as saying, Okay, well, if someone has checked out our blog, and if someone has looked around, if if someone has now filled out this form, and in raising their hand about this stage of the buying cycle, let's send them an email that then gives them this information or this asset that we know is imperative at this stage of the fire.
Nels Jensen:Yeah, you're.
Joey Strawn:And that's where that email strategy that you mentioned, becomes so important having whether it's done in Excel or some fancy tool, but have a spreadsheet that's listed out for the entire year of we know every month, what our topic is going to be. We know every quarter what our main themes are going to be. And we know which months and which weeks promotions, seasonal things, do you have a business that primarily runs on shutdown season or run some around someone else's business, then that should be heavily identified in your calendar, that should be a very heavy time period, the time leading up to your busy months. And those types of things need to be mapped out planned. So that way, you're not doing just buku oodles of work all the time, you can batch elements, you can atomize content from a piece that you're writing for the site to then use as email content to promote the piece on the site. But it that you need to have some sort of bird's eye view to see how all that touches.
Nels Jensen:You know, and you talked about atomizing content. So you know, somebody may do a large piece of gated content, right, let's say you write a very extensive white paper, you know, or guide to something. And that's when we say gated content, you know, you're asking people to fill out a form and give you information. So you can then nurture them, if you will. But it might also be you made a really good point earlier, downloading spec sheets, downloading CAD files, downloading the some of the visuals and the documentation. You know, that's different than getting a whole white paper. But it's it's equally as effective, if not more. So, you know, people, people don't download CAD files unless they are seriously interested in whatever that product or service is.
Joey Strawn:And we use we should be able as marketers to notice that action is happening, and then optimize it or benefit from it and see, okay, we know that every time someone talks to a salesman, and they get to this phase right before purchase, they ask about this XYZ, well, let's create something that automatically gets emailed to that person around that time when we know that a salesman is working with them. So we can anticipate their needs, give them a better experience and hopefully, speed up the velocity around that conversion and around sale. Sure. A lot of this, you know, it sounds like oh, well, we don't have the tools to be able to do that we use Outlook or we use whatever it may be. And while that's understandable, there are a lot of msps or you know, email service providers that can do these things that aren't that expensive. I mean, Gmail is a great suite of tools for people. outlook is a good one. MailChimp is out there, you've got more sophisticated marketing automation systems, like Active Campaign, or HubSpot, or Marketo. And partite. Constant Contact is one that is very, very popular among a lot of people just quick searches online, can let you know that these tools exist. And you can find one that fits with your budget, because most of what these are going to do is lay the groundwork so a lot of the hard work, you don't have to do manually in Excel spreadsheets or in other tools, you can kind of all manage it from one system. Exactly. A bit more, more advanced than just an outlook.
Nels Jensen:Right, but you've you've qualified a lead, right that that is currency in the marketing world. How do you leverage that?
Joey Strawn:Right? And then now that we have those leads, communicating with them on a regular basis, listen, we don't we may not need to be Kirkland's. You know, and send emails every day to everyone on our list. And you know if that if that works for your business that works for your business, but you know, the the simple rule of the more email the better is a myth that I would like to toss out the window. We need to make email work for your buying cycle and your customers experiences and expectations. And so really sitting down and understanding our calendars and our plans for the year. helped with being able to line that out. But also, one of the other benefits of setting up a tool like HubSpot, or a MailChimp or constant contact is they're going to be looking out for some of those can spam laws. You know, we've lived in this era of canned spam since about 2003, in 2004. But within the last handful of years, they've become a lot more prevalent. And a lot more things need to be taken into consideration. If you're listening to this, and you're not familiar with can spam or it doesn't send shivers down your spine as an email marketer. The quick just is there are laws that surround the practice of email marketing to make sure that you're not marketing to people who don't want you mark. Yeah. And, and there any legal ramifications if you just ignore them? Sure.
Nels Jensen:Right. And we'll talk more about that when when we get into the best practices to because, you know, your definition of permission might be different than your prospects definition of permission. So at some point, we'll talk a little bit more about how to analyze that. But yes, the can spam laws, you know, you really don't want to get in sideways with that stuff. And, you know, you it's not just a matter of doing the right thing, it's it's a matter of following the loss, right?
Joey Strawn:Yeah, no, and that's where, you know, it's not going to be a thing where you're going to get dinged every time you make a little mistake, but it is, if you're not paying attention can be something that can crop up and kind of bite you in the behind, if you will. So paying attention to those can spam laws, but again, you don't have to be an expert in that just find a tool that works, because most of them will have that built in to their infrastructure.
Nels Jensen:Yes. And then follow follow their recommendations, right?
Joey Strawn:Yes, of course. Of course, it you know what, here's a good rule of thumb, guys, if it feels shady, it's probably shady. Look into it a little bit more. Man, I, I'll tell you now, we've hit a lot of stuff on email, I want to talk about content, before we head down to the shop floor, but I'm itching to get some of our best practices for everybody. So before we head down, I want you to talk a little bit about when you're crafting content for an email, how what's the approach that you like to use? Like, where where's that content come from? What do you find is most helpful for you, when you're drafting that up? Like, what are some things that people I can learn from our experiences from?
Nels Jensen:Yeah, so you know, obviously, at some point, you know, it starts with the subject line, and, and all that, you know, we'll talk a little bit more about some of those practice, you know, best practices kind of thing. But I touched on it earlier, it's basically it's basically alignment. So what is it about the message, the time in place, you know, is really important. So who are you trying to reach? When are you trying to reach them? And why are you trying to reach them, it's really a three dimensional game. So, you know, the more you can narrow that down, the more specific the message will be. And it will resonate more with people, they will resonate with others, because they're not that person at that time at that place. Right. That's, that's email marketing is never going to be a high success rate. That's just not what it you know, yeah. You know, we're happy with open rates, right? That that are in the 20s, or 30s. Depends on the circumstance, right? But you definitely just have to factor in the personas, you have to factor in the buying cycles. And then what are you trying to get people to on your site, what is the content that you're trying to take them to on your site.
Joey Strawn:And so it's in wrapping that thought up. And just to kind of give a very tangible example, for people like if you're writing an email, if you let's say, you segment your audience, let's say you know, who you're sending stuff out to, and you're writing an email for your engineer segment, it is going to be very imperative that you write for engineers, it shouldn't be too marketing fluffy, it needs to have details, you should link to a CAD file, or some sort of prototype file, something that would benefit the engineers on your list. But if you're talking to a finance person, you better be mentioned in money savings, you better engineer efficiencies, and you better be mentioning how easy it is and the invoice and payment processes. So knowing what those audiences are, can then to your point nails know exactly what content you're pulling from the site. But more than that, how you're writing the piece in general. Well, it could be in that email.
Nels Jensen:Right. And it could be you know, we talked earlier about maybe some, you know, especially large OEMs. And companies might have separate email chains for their different personas, but a lot of small and medium manufacturers won't and that's okay. Yeah, one one items directed at the finance department. A different item is directed at engineers. It's like you're not spamming these people with tons and tons of email. They get something from you once a month. That's fine. You can address multiple personas in one company email,
Joey Strawn:Right top of mind, that's all you need to do is know understand your buying cycle, understand where your contacts are in that cycle, and then communicate with them effectively.
Nels Jensen:Right, but you're not missing, right? Every item isn't for everybody. Right?
Joey Strawn:Exactly. And that's okay. And I don't read everything and all the emails I get, but I opened the ones that are helpful to me. So what I want to do now now is let's take a break, let's walk on down to the shop floor. Today's very special because we have a top five list of some best practices that everybody can take to the bank when it comes to email marketing for industrials. So are you ready to head down to the shop floor with me now else? Let's do it. All right, here we go. All right. That was a brisk walk now. So I'm glad we're down here on the shop floor. Today, we don't have a guest. It's all just us. But one of the things we wanted to do is because email marketing is such a tactical activity, we want to give you guys some best practices that you can hopefully write down, take note of and refer to as you're building emails. And as you're planning this practice, with you, with your team, with your CEOs, with your investors, with your stakeholders. So now I've got five things that I think are imperative, when putting together and thinking about email. I would love us to dive in and talk talk about them if you're ready.
Nels Jensen:Yeah, this is your lane. This is you live for this stuff. This is we're deep in Joey's worlds here, this is good.
Joey Strawn:I do. I love making things better. I love finding efficiencies and ways to just really cut through to the heart of the matter, because that's what industrials really live for. That's where the ROI is. And so when it comes to building emails, I have five things that I think are imperative. And the first thing is offer value. This sounds like it should be common sense. But if you think about all the emails that you get, the ones that you delete without opening, the ones that you delete immediately upon opening, those ones that do not provide value to you. So content marketing, and with your blogs, news, tips, helpful information. I mean, it's offering value and giving people a reason to open those emails, is the foundational point of an email marketing program. If you don't have anything to say, then you don't have anything to say, and you don't and you shouldn't be using email. I mean, like when it comes to providing value now it's like, where do you land on? Like, what, what types of value? Do you think that, you know, these b2b should be offering?
Nels Jensen:Yeah, and I get back to my buying cycle, right? So you should be educating or you should be helping people through a consideration phase or even to a purchase phase. So value comes at different points in buying cycles. In terms of education, you know, I do a lot of research online. So I will go search for something. You know, we did a show recently, and CRMs, you know, so I was searching around CRM. And I'm immediately inundated with, you know, the the company that I was looking at their stuff is like, Okay, I'm now a subscriber to their email,
Joey Strawn:Right? Yes, like, all right, got me?
Nels Jensen:Well, but but if they're providing value in terms of helping me make decisions about how to proceed within that specific category, then they are providing value now. Yeah, make it easy, make it easy to opt out if you know, but if my goal is to learn more about CRM, you know, I quickly end up on three different CRM newsletters. That's okay. If that's I'm receptive for that messaging right there, given that I'm seeking, I'm seeking information, and they are educating me, right,
Joey Strawn:Exactly. All right. So after you've decided that you've got value to share, number two, make sure you have the right tools. Now, I'm not gonna say you have to use the most expensive like Marketo, or HubSpot platform out there. But I am saying that having the correct tools will help you make sure that your efforts are connected to your wider marketing goals, and that you can then accurately see what email is doing for you. But having those email marketing efforts connected to a system that allows you to design emails, schedule emails, get information on open rates and data around the emails that you're doing is really, really important to knowing the value that email can bring and being able to do the segmentation that we were talking about being able to do the timing and the seasonality that we were mentioning. All of those can be done manually, but take an extraordinary amount of time. beginning the right tools in place can save you so much time and in the long run a lot of money because you can gain money from your email marketing efforts while saving money on time. lost time. To do it all manually, so having the right stack is critical.
Nels Jensen:And you mentioned a bunch of them in the first segment, too, it's, you know, they could be part of larger inbound platforms, and they could be just espys, you know, that are that are email only right?
Joey Strawn:There are a lot out there. And like I said, I mentioned a handful but MailChimp, Constant Contact, Marketo, HubSpot Active Campaign, all those come to mind quickly. But a quick Google search can find you more and more and more, and any that will fit into your price range. Some of them will be outside of the range, but some of them will have more tools than you need. So find the one that's right, pick the right one, do some research. And then or, you know, partner with somebody who can do the research for you. But finding that right set of tools to know the value that emails bringing is important. All right, the third best practice, we live in an age of digital communication, everything that I see is like hey, Joey, hey, Joey, you need to know about this, here's something that you love. So the third is to personalize the experience. You know, this comes with, again, having the right tools in place. So you can add in first names and last names or company names. But more than that, personalizing the experience to the types of content that they get. I mentioned earlier that if they're engineers, maybe we shouldn't be hitting them every month with finance documentation or you know, pro promotions that don't benefit the engineers or you know, the the doers in the field, making sure that the content that they are receiving is somewhat designed for them and their experiences, having all of those pieces in place. We've seen open rates skyrocket with that in the 30s and 40s percent open rate if you just personalize the experience and content for
Nels Jensen:So when you say personalize though, some of this is segmentation.
Joey Strawn:Right? Some of it is like some their segmentation of saying, well, this is our you know, these are our Michigan contacts. And these are our Eastern contacts. And this is our west coast contact, right? Or you may have the appropriate things. Or it could just be having everybody's first name and last name sure separated out in the database. So you can say, hey, Nels. Hey, Gabriella. Hey, you know, Rajesh, these are the elements that you should find it should have their name, it could have their name in the subject line at the top of the email. There's a lot of different ways to personalize the experience.
Nels Jensen:Yeah, your list segmentation to you know, if you're able to separate finance from engineers, Oh, man. Oh, yeah. And then can you segment that content? You know, that's I realize it's not exactly personalization, it's,
Joey Strawn:It could be that s the one thing is that think of how impactful it could be as i you know, nails were designin a newsletter for a client. And the middle section in every news etter is there's like, the top section is the main story. T e bottom section is a new hire and the middle section chang s for every person. So if they're engineers, they're getti g CAD files, if they're finan e, they're getting a finance pro otion, if they're a CEO, they'r getting an ROI, calculator to l or whatever. Right. But th t's another way to personalize i with just the content that' presented by a simple list s gmentation.
Nels Jensen:Yeah. And, and that you may have more content on your site than you think, especially if you've been doing content for a while, and there's no reason you can't refresh content and bring that back up to so
Joey Strawn:Exactly. And you got new people on your email list all the time. So you know, reusing that if it's valuable when it's valuable, is is smart. Not only just a good practice, it's smart. Right? All right. Speaking of smart the next number four best practice is to experiment. Email Marketing is, is a playground, we have a lot of run time and a lot of room to play. So sending at different times of day sending with different subject lines, you know, nails, I have the team write two or three different subject lines for me, so we can a B test those Sure, sure to open the emails day of week, learn as much as you can about your email practices. And when people engage with you the most if you're not experimenting, you're not learning and yeah, making your practice better.
Nels Jensen:I should have just been patient because actually my segmentation thought fits it a little better here than it does hardly personalization, right? So and, and then obviously learning to it's, it's okay, if you are doing a particular thing, and it's leading to a super high opt out rate, okay, how do you just change something, try something different. Or if you It turns out that segmenting, you know, leads to a much lower opt out rate for this persona then Okay, how do we leverage that And do a little bit more. I mean, it's the it's not just obviously your experimentation is going to be more powerful if you have the data, you know, to provide you with those actionable insights, then take action and try it.
Joey Strawn:Exactly. Well, and like a again, I love to do tangible examples. But let's say that you're an email professional, you know, you're you're a marketer at a company or coordinator, and you're tasked with sending out emails, your director, hates emojis, hates the little visuals hates all of that. But you've read the emojis in subject lines can help open rates, if you test those over time and say, here's the subject line without emojis. And here's a subject line with emojis. And then you can come and say, listen, director, I know you hate emojis, but I've been testing this for five months, and we can see a 21% increase in open rates when I use emojis is like that. That's value that you can't it, it goes over gut ensure Oh, sure. Well, that down to Oh, I hate that. And we're not going to use it. That's fine. But at least you know,
Nels Jensen:And data is very p werful. persuasion model. Yeah.
Joey Strawn:Well, Speaking of that, that segues right into our last best practice, number five, measure, you can't improve what you're not measuring and learning from so know how many open rate or how many open emails you have, know how often you send, know what days of the week, and what times you're sending, measure the data, look at the data and over time, look for trends. So are our open rates staying the same, getting better, doing worse? What should we do about that, always be measuring. And again, this connects back to another reason to have the proper tools in place. Because those will give you that data, a lot of them will export them out directly into csvs, or into x Excel files. But having that data and then looking and measuring it on a regular basis, gives you the opportunity to learn from it and make those improvements that are necessary. Do you have a lot of people opening your emails, but nobody's clicking through? Do you have a lot of people clicking but not a lot of people opening? Do people get to your website, and then immediately leave? All of that stuff should be things that you're looking at understanding and trying to fix? Or, you know, make better?
Nels Jensen:Oh, sure. And you know, you probably have a more powerful dashboard capability than you think, you know, when was the last time you write what was the last time you tweaked your dashboard? Or when was the you know, do you? Do you open like communicate with stakeholders that your company? Hey, here's here's the recent history. And oh, by the way, here's where we did x, and it correlated into why, you know, right, some of that is and some of that takes work for sure. But the automated dashboards very powerful tools, you know, if you share them, you know, in the right context,
Joey Strawn:I totally agree. Well, that's it, I know, we kind of ran through those over a long, so I'll run through them again, number one, offer value. Number two, have the right tools in place. Number three, personalize the experience. Number four, experiment. And number five, measure your results. Those are what I would say if anybody walking away from this episode wants a single list to help them do better at marketing their industrial business via email. That's where you should start. Those are the checklist items that you need to go through to feel good and confident about moving forward with email. And let me say again, guys, I cannot stress this enough. move forward with email, there is value to be had in the email channel for your marketing practice, I assure you, and if you can't find it, reach out to someone who can we can help you find it. I know it's there. So if you can't find it, talk to us talk to somebody, but you can find value in your email channels. If you build it right and you execute it correctly. So now it's what do you think of the top five? Do you think that's going to help people get where they need to be with email?
Nels Jensen:Oh, absolutely. The experimenting with data, you know, you know me, I love data, it ultimately comes down to, you know, understanding your data so you can take actionable insights, right. And email is right up there at the top in terms of the playground for actionable insights. Yep.
Joey Strawn:I couldn't agree more. So, again, we're only scratching the surface of email marketing. We're gonna we'll probably have an entire episode on can spam we'll have an entire episode on email marketing and marketing workflows. But I feel like we got the ball started rolling today now so I'm excited to dive deeper. But I feel good about where we landed. Are you ready to move forward with email and let these Let these people dig a little bit deeper with us next time. Yeah, ping me when we're ready, huh? Oh, you know I will And guys, if you're listening to this anyone listening to this, I'll ping you when we're ready to if you subscribe to the podcast, subscribe to the podcast and you'll get an automatic thing the next time I have an episode ready for you, we announced are working on all these episodes and you need to know when they're coming out. You're gonna learn so much so have this pain yet, subscribe to the podcast follow us on social media you can find us at the industrial marketer, industrial marketer comm all of our social media profiles are there wherever you listen to podcasts, Google Play Apple podcast, Spotify, anywhere your mom's garage, I don't care subscribe to this podcast. And finally, guys, if we can help you answer an industrial marketing question if you have episodes that we want to that you want us to dive into, feel free please reach out to us messages on any platform. Leave us comments we want to grow and learn and do this and whole industrial marketing world growth together with you. So please listen, subscribe and until next time, I've been Joey, he's been else and we are so glad that you joined us on the industrial marketer podcast. Till next time