How Can Email Marketing Drive Engagement?

In this episode, we interview Lisa Wendland, Director of Lifecycle at Blue Wheel Media. Lisa shares her extensive expertise in email and SMS marketing and provides actionable insights to transform your marketing strategies.

What you'll learn in this episode:

• The core principles of lifecycle marketing and why it matters.
• Innovative ways to go beyond traditional newsletters using quizzes, VIP campaigns, and more.
• How to leverage historical performance to set realistic benchmarks.
• Tips for organizing email content efficiently for timely execution.
• The pros and cons of using animated GIFs in your email campaigns.

This episode is packed with tips and tactics to elevate your email and SMS marketing strategies. Tune in and discover new ways to engage your audience effectively!

Transcript

Lisa Wendland (00:02)
So it's very important as part of your creative brief to have your goal listed out, right? So everyone working on the content has the game plan, right? So if it's an email where we're not expecting more than 10 % of people to click, we know who we're trying to reach, then it's a little bit easier to set the bar,

Ben (00:45)
Welcome back to another episode of content amplified today. I'm joined by Lisa, Lisa. Welcome to the show.

Lisa Wendland (00:51)
Thanks so much for having me, Ben. Great to be here.

Ben (00:53)
Yeah, I'm excited to have you on today. It's going to be a lot of fun. We're going to talk about a medium that a lot of people use, but kind of in a different way and give you some fresh ideas. So I think this will be fun. But Lisa, before we dive into it, let's get to know you and your background a little bit about your career. And then also we'd love to ask, what do you love about content and marketing?

Lisa Wendland (01:11)
my goodness, that's funny. I have been in marketing for 15 years. And what I think is funny is like, I love everything about content. really, I've specialized in email marketing and SMS marketing. Over the last part of my career, I've been in an omnichannel sort of role, but focused down on how email can drive results for different industries. So.

Right now, I am the director of Lifecycle at Blue Whale Media. We work with DTC brands. Our favorite saying is from click to ship. depending on what your brand needs to be successful in drive conversion, we offer a number of services. like I said, I lead the Lifecycle department. launched it almost three years ago here.

Ben (01:55)
I love it. That's amazing. So Lisa, we're going to talk about emails today. And this is a medium and a format that marketers and anyone in business uses probably for several hours each and every day. And I feel like sometimes we get stuck in a rut where we look at email marketing and we just focus on, you know, the newsletters and a couple of things. We're also going to, you know, kind of dive in a little bit to SMS and things like that, but

Some of these platforms again, how do we think about them differently? Like what is your thought on why email is powerful? How should we start to think about it? Why do we, why do we care so much about this channel in general?

Lisa Wendland (02:33)
Yeah, great question. So really we sort of give email and SMS together this life cycle marketing sort of label. So when I say life cycle marketing, I'm talking about both channels and they, do things differently, but similarly and work together email and SMS. So you can be successful with one channel. If you just decided to focus on email or focus on SMS, really depends on your brand and your demographic, but high level life cycle marketing is all about guiding your customer from discovery to loyalty.

So at each stage, email and SMS marketing play crucial roles in keeping that conversation going. So if you have an ad, so to speak, it's definitely very broad, targeting, depending on your settings, of course, but you don't have that one-to-one connection necessarily where you've reached their inbox or you're front and center on their phone. And then with email marketing specifically, you have a larger palette where you can educate, you can entertain, and ultimately drive sales.

just about newsletters, you can use it to share product information, really drive engagement. We've seen some cool things with interactive email and then of course nurture relationships. So again, like you are essentially sending a letter, but it's totally different now where you have all of the creative aspects and freedom to incorporate graphics and get the data behind what people are clicking to further the conversation and say, I understand you're interested in this. Let me give you more of that.

Ben (03:56)
I love it. So again, like I mentioned at the very beginning, I at least have often been stuck in this rut of newsletters where I feel like everyone does it. Sometimes they're a value, sometimes they're not. What can we do to kind of expand our horizons? What are some ideas of different ways to make content on email engaging and not just the newsletter?

Lisa Wendland (04:18)
Yeah, yeah, I love that question. you can definitely use email beyond the standard newsletter format. There's nothing wrong with a newsletter, but it's one tool, right, that email can do well. So there's at least four different sort of categories I'd love to go over real quick. So I would say one of the most impactful is surveys and quizzes. So surveys are a little bit different than a quiz. A survey would be, you know, hey, like, what do you think of this? What are, you know, what's your top choice out of these?

Whereas you're sort of just getting that feedback and not necessarily sharing like a result, so to speak, right? The result would be, everyone polled did this, or you just close it off with like, thanks, here's your coupon, right? Because you're trying to understand like what their sentiment is around your brand or your product. But a quiz, you can recommend products and gather insights and you see a lot of those, what's your best haircare routine, right?

or what does your skin really crave? And so you ask these sorts of questions on more about their lifestyle, where they work, what their struggles might be, and then you use that data to follow up and say, hey, based on that, the season where you live, what have you, you're have that very personal recommendation and drive engagement and then just drive even deeper interactions. So that's like this first bundle of surveys and quizzes.

Next, I'd say VIP and loyalty. you, you, if you have only ever sent a newsletter, you are able to still see who's clicking frequently, who's opening every newsletter, who's very interested in what you're sending. And then you could think about VIP or loyalty emails, right? So you like, let's say Ben opens every newsletter I ever sent. I want to acknowledge that. want to say, Hey, you know, I'm glad the content is resonating with you. there anything else you'd like to see? And so it's not exactly a survey. It's just sort of open ended email.

You could certainly have buttons within there if you already know your next four topics. You could ask, know, what's, what are you most excited to see? And then if you have a product, then, you know, those people that are highly engaged, clicking often, repeat purchasers, you can target them and send a message that says like, appreciate your loyalty. You can be the first to see this or, you know, what is something that you want to see? Again, like, you know, really making them feel seen. The last couple I think would be

you know, more event-based or product launch, so to speak. there's opportunities to create hype around what you're doing. You don't necessarily need to bury it in a newsletter where you have like three, four other things competing for attention. You can do a one-off email on an event or a launch of a product that actually goes really well. The one thing I would say is have a banner at the bottom. There are times where you send something and it's just not a fit, right? And so they're gonna, you know, open it, not click through.

Maybe the subject line is very direct and it says, here's the new, I don't know, salt and pepper popcorn flavor. Maybe I don't like that. And so I don't even open it, right? So you definitely want to bundle it with something, but it can still be the hero of the email. And then outside of that, educational emails, right? So your newsletter probably has links to more content, but being very specific about a how-to, an industry insight, you know,

At Blue Wheel, we work with a ton of beauty brands, so there's definitely a lot of room with our clients to talk about specific use cases for products, season changes, what does that mean? And it's not limited to beauty. There's definitely a lot of room to think about seasonality and product lines and then, again, educate your contacts on what they ought to know about what you're an expert in.

Ben (07:39)
I love that. That's amazing. So I'd love to go just like one step deeper into the real tactical side of things. Really just like when the rubber hits the road, how do we actually implement some of those buckets and categories? How do we get that out and really get people engaged in email? What are some just like fun ideas that people should just be thinking about and potentially put on their radar to use?

Lisa Wendland (08:03)
Yeah, that's a great question, right? Because you can hear all these great ideas and then get back to your desk and be like, I don't even know where to start. So I definitely take time to look at the quarter ahead. I know that might sound a little bit broad, but really we know what's coming, right? We know New Year's is in January. We know there's a holiday season where there's a lot of gifting going on and people are highly distracted between travel and time off and what have you.

So, you know, definitely look at your calendar and start plugging in the dates. If you already have a weekly or monthly newsletter, great. So now you want to think about, okay, if I only have a monthly newsletter, you can't just start sending every day. That will totally upset your list, right? These people don't necessarily expect that sort of cadence. So it might be something where bi-weekly now, you're looking at doing one of these one-off sort of messages. And then if you are at a higher cadence, right, maybe you send once a week.

Maybe again, like you look at every other week or every 10 days, you send one of these sort of one-off messages. It is gonna depend on your business. It's gonna depend on what you wanna know too, right? So as far as content goes, having an efficient setup where you can find your assets quickly. So if you're looking for product imagery or specific UGC, having that sort of information saved somewhere where you can find it,

quickly and easily and then just pull it in once you have your copy written then that makes things very easy, right? So if I know, okay, next Tuesday is my bi-weekly, just being able to quickly access that and pull it in will go a long way for sure.

Ben (09:34)
I love it. I love it. So when we're looking at email and you mentioned that you can gather some insights, you can gather some data, gather some information. Often it's kind of hard to know what to do with it. And it's kind of difficult to understand where do I put that data? How do I tailor the message? How do I do this or that? You mentioned VIP emails, but

kind of throwing you a curve ball. How do you look at some of that data and actually have it inform your strategy and help things update, you know, and get better as time goes on?

Lisa Wendland (10:09)
Yeah, great question.

So it's very important as part of your creative brief to have your goal listed out, right? So everyone working on the content has the game plan, right? So if it's an email where we're not expecting more than 10 % of people to click, we know who we're trying to reach, then it's a little bit easier to set the bar, right? So

fake example, let's say I'm gonna send a thousand...

email like sent to a list of a thousand people that have purchased and I only expect a hundred people to complete the survey and we hit that mark. Okay, great. Right. And it's going to be based off of what we're seeing within the industry as far as like what type of brand it is. Just going back to, know, let's say you're in the fitness space, right? And you kind of know the benchmark for your open rate and where it usually is and then how a survey is going to perform differently.

And we've seen them perform differently between having a promotion and not having a promotion. I'm talking about surveys and emails in general, right? So if there's a promo, you automatically have a higher click-through rate, higher open rate because someone's looking for a deal. So with click rate, know, it'd probably be lower than you'd expect.

But if it's the right segment, like if I had 100 people that open every email and 50 of them have purchased before and they purchased in the last 30 days and I don't have a product you would buy again that quickly, I'm not gonna expect them to purchase. So we get really specific about our segments and set our benchmarks like that as well. It's.

really kind of a loaded question then because you have to know all of the things going on behind the scenes, right? To set it up. So if I know I have a thousand people that purchased in the last 30 days, I'll probably get more than a 10 % click through rate on a survey. I would probably get lower than 10 % on buy this again, unless it's a holiday season and it's highly giftable, right? Like maybe they bought it, they loved it and they want someone else to have it. So I talked a lot about click rate, open rate to me,

for a benchmark across the board, I don't care what industry you're in, it's probably about a 50 % open rate, even on a welcome email, even on that email that someone just signed up for and they know is coming, it's probably about 50%. I can't say that I've ever seen 100 % open rate. I've sent emails to people that won the giveaway and they hit spam, this giveaway that they signed up for and we're trying to contact them to send them their free product.

So you would be surprised. I think the best way to look at the data is to look at year over year and have the history of your list so you know generally, you know, what percentage are purchasers, what percentage are non-purchasers, and then kind of break it out from there, right? So your purchasers are going to react differently from your non-purchasers. I mean, we could talk all day about what we dig into, what we look for. As far as like repeat strategies,

your top performers in terms of clicks and conversion if you are selling a into those, see who you sent it to, who clicked through, who bought, what's unique about them that might match a poll of other target audience, and then kind of work from there, test different things.

Ben (13:11)
I love it. And I think one message that was really cool that I think sometimes we don't really pay attention to, you're using historical results and the context of what you're doing to set realistic benchmarks. think sometimes we'll just set like de facto, this is the expectation for everything we're doing. And it's so nice to say, okay, there's a reason for this email. However,

Lisa Wendland (13:24)
Yes, absolutely.

Ben (13:35)
The expectation is probably not a super high click-through rate because we have the context about the audience. Here's the historical performance. Here's where they're at in the buyer's journey, things of that nature. So I think that's a really cool element that often gets overlooked. We'll write an email, send it, say yes, it worked. You'd know it didn't. And then we move on with life. I love that you're looking at historical performance and saying, great, here is our benchmark. So when we get the results back,

I can actually say yes at work, no it didn't with like legitimate actual metrics. So I think that's really, really cool how you're doing that. So one final question, cause we run like we're running out of time. I have to ask it though, because I'm obsessed with animated GIFs. What are your two cents on using them in emails? Pro, con, good, bad, low time. What are your thoughts in general?

Lisa Wendland (14:10)
year.

Yeah, great question. So it definitely grabs attention when you use a gift. It has to be high quality. can't have like, unless you're selling something that's like eight bit, right? Like, it's got to be high quality. It is successful, you know, regardless of it's a product launch or holiday campaign.

Ben (14:35)
Yep.

Lisa Wendland (14:42)
Let's say you have a campaign going out in winter and you added animated snowflakes to one and not on the other and it's an A-B test. I would not rely on it being the deal breaker that causes conversion, right? You're not gonna know. And now maybe you have your segment down to where it's like, here's a hundred people and I'm using smaller numbers because it obviously depends. But let's say you have a hundred people that just abandoned their cart and everybody gets the same promotion and one has moving snowflakes and one doesn't.

that is not gonna be, you that's not gonna be Now there are other instances where I have seen excellent like unboxing of a product. You know, you can see a person moving around with the product. You can kind of get the size of it, the use case. We work with a lot of fitness brands. I would say like that sort of inspiration of like, okay, that's how you use that or that's what the motion looks like. You know, things that you can't, that aren't necessarily as tangible when it's flat on a screen.

I would absolutely incorporate it. The other caveat is that they don't load an Outlook. So if you have a very, you know, significant amount of users that are using Outlook, on a, you know, a computer, not on a phone, like they're not going to load, properly, which is kind of a bummer. I get the same question about video a lot. Video doesn't always run. So then you're kind of stuck, but GIFs, like, absolutely. I would, I would use them. like I said, it, if it adds to the story,

But if it's something like little insignificant sort of hints of action, it's not as impactful, it is cool, and it makes your brand stand out, for sure.

Ben (16:12)
Very

cool. Well, Lisa, we could go on for hours about everything that you know about email, but we like to keep these short so people can consume and get on the go and get back to their days. But if anyone has any questions or would like to connect with you online, how and where can they find you?

Lisa Wendland (16:29)
Yeah, great question. I would say the most direct path is through LinkedIn. So I'm sure Ben will share that. happy to answer questions on anything, email or digital marketing. The other thing they can do is check out the bluewheelmedia.com website. But yeah, you can always drop me a DM. Happy to chat.

Ben (16:47)
Love it. And like Lisa mentioned, everything will be linked in the show notes, so feel free to click through and connect with her there. Lisa, again, thank you so much for your time and insights today.

Lisa Wendland (16:57)
You bet, thanks Ben.