Jen Capstraw: 0:00 I attended an industry conference and a number of technology companies and email space were sponsors of that my email address was shared with those sponsors. One of them said thanks for joining us at this event. However, them unsubscribe page was in violation of can spam and was asking me for data points that I legally should not be required to share to get off their list. But nobody else acknowledged where they got my email address, why they were sending me email campaigns? What was their value proposition? What was I going to get out of these campaign, if really sketchy?
Hillel Berg: 0:38 Today in inboxing, Jen Cap straw speaker, evangelist email geek and co-founder of Women of Email. Welcome back to another episode of inboxing. Inboxing is very thrilled to have this next guest. This next guest is a super veteran of the industry. She’s been doing email since about 2000. She told me she actually I let her tell it but she’s been doing this a long time she’s become really almost like the queen of email. I would say. She’s super strategists, got tons of tips, tons of great knowledge and she’ll be a pleasure to work with and hear from. So without any further ado, let me introduce Jen Cap straw. And here she is.
Jen Capstraw: 1:25 Thanks for having me.
Hillel Berg: 1:27 Jen welcome to inboxing.
Jen Capstraw: 1:29 Thanks so much. I appreciate the invitation to be here.
Hillel Berg: 1:33 For sure, for sure. I’m really excited to have you. Yeah, I apologize if once actually, I lost internet in the middle and Emily McGuire saved the day and just kept going. So if that happens, I just mentioned that because we’re having a thunderstorm a little bit. It’s been on and off.
Jen Capstraw: 1:51 Oh, that’s awesome. Yes, I’m happy to talk to myself if you vanish. I’m used to it.
Hillel Berg: 2:00 Alright, let’s jump right in. Alright, so tell us how did you get, you know, how do you get started, and then you become an email Queen and this, you know,
Jen Capstraw: 2:07 I mean I don’t put myself the email queen.
Hillel Berg: 2:11 I think when everyone starts calling you the email queen, you’ll know where it started.
Jen Capstraw: 2:17 My first email campaign was in 2002. And everyone in the email community says, "Nobody picks email, email picks, you email chooses you." And I was thinking about that. And I realized it’s kind of like a cat that is stray and start sniffing around your front porch. Right? It’s in your life. And maybe, you feed it a little bit, some water out gets a little cold out, maybe there’s a little box in a blanket, one day you open up your front door, you let the kitty in. And then one day you realize, "Oh, I own a cat." And that’s how you end up in email. It’s just, it gets kind of delegated to someone. And if you have a little problem solving savvy and it’s not always considered a very exciting channel, it’s not a sexy channel. And so it’s just kind of cast off as a necessary evil and delegated to someone. And if you have a certain kind of problem solving capacity and a love for challenging complex ideas, then you stick with it, and you discover the community and you just make it a part of your life. And so in 2002, I was working for a nonprofit Trade Association, in Huntersville, North Carolina, and our members were in the art supply industry. And I was doing graphic design communications marketing, I had created their first ever website because I learned Microsoft front page. So I was an expert. And so one day somebody said, "Well, we’ve got our trade show coming up. Why don’t we invite people via email? Let’s do an email campaign and tell people to register for our event. And it was like, "Whoa, that’s so cool. That’s a great idea." So, I created this email campaign in Microsoft front page. It was actually an it was fluid with which I have no idea if that actually worked in anyone’s inbox. But it made sense to me, this email was so ugly, it would just burn your eyeballs. I found it a couple of years ago on an old hard drive. Yes. And I’ve been incorporating it into some of my presentations. It is so horrible. And the call to action tells you to download a PDF form, fill it out by hand and fax it back to us, so bad and it didn’t have an unsubscribe link, because it was 2002. It never occurred to us that there’d be anyone who wouldn’t want this horrible email and so we had to get compliant when can spam happened a year later, but it was a thought that didn’t even come to our minds and it’s just so obvious to us now.
Hillel Berg: 4:59 Right. Yeah, I mean, it was really you know, yeah, actually the inbox was a pretty quiet place for a while, until like spammers started really getting excited. Like, I remember.
Jen Capstraw: 5:09 Even then, spam was becoming a thing, you know, Hotmail was the big equalizer and in 1997, prior to that, you could only get email through your ISP, which I know we were chatting earlier, you said you had an email address, I think as early as 1994.
Hillel Berg: 5:26 I think so. I mean, you imagine you’ve got mail every time you got an email.
Jen Capstraw: 5:33 But I couldn’t afford internet, I was very poor. So, I got a Hotmail account that I could check at work. And that’s when BAM kind of happened. That’s what email marketing really started to hit. And when the spammers came out, because everybody had access to email at that point.
Hillel Berg: 5:50 It’s a really great point. What ways do you think companies are hurting their relationships with their customers?
Jen Capstraw: 5:57 I see this so much. And I was just talking about this at Digital Summit last month. And it’s a misdirection, cheap tricks and a reliance on negative sentiment. And so some examples of that are using Re, or forward in the subject line to give the impression of a one to one conversation, or using kind of a strange from name to again, give that impression of a one to one conversation to trick somebody into opening their email and I screenshotted so many examples from my own inbox that this Cheap Trick just never dies. And it’s still being professed as a best practice or something you can do to get a lift in your open rates. And then some of the more egregious examples of this would be someone in my network was let go from her job, she’s looking for new employment, she signed up for some job search websites, and she got something with the subject line, your job interview, and she was like, I have a job interview. And she panicked and she opened to this email. And it was like, "If you got a job, congratulations. But if you didn’t, you should update your preferences and alerts." And that is not going to make you feel good about your relationship with that company. And the reason this advice keeps getting traction is because it can give you a temporary lift in some vanity metrics, you could get a little bump in your open rate. Sure. But is that sustainable? No, for me once, that’s all you get. And you’re also damaging the way that people feel about your brand. And so that undermines your long term relationship with them. If somebody is a friend to you, and they’re pulling pranks on you that are not that clever and just kind of mean spirited. Your feelings toward them change and the attitude toward brands can change when you are very reliant on tricks like this. And so yeah, you might even get some sales out of these people. But are they going to continue to feel good about you? Are they going to be a long term customer? Will they be loyal? Will your customer lifetime value be maximized? Probably not. And even things like an overwhelming sense of urgency, that’s grossly overused, you need to be very careful about sense of urgency, because if every sale is last chance, we’re on to you, we know it’s not the last chance and effectiveness. So these are some of the things that kind of drive me nuts when I see them in my inbox and it’s a disrespect for our subscribers, we need to treat them as though we know them and put ourselves in their shoes and like our friends, they deserve our respect. So no cheap tricks, none of that silly nonsense and stop reading the blogs that are like I got a 10% lift in my open rate with this one simple trick. I mean, if they’re telling you stuff like that they’re spammers, plain and simple.
Hillel Berg: 9:00 Yeah. So what do you think, we’re here talking about building human connection. So, what should we develop when you’re talking about like that really deep connection that will maximize overall value, and keep them as long term customers?
Jen Capstraw: 9:18 We were just talking about this at mail con. Last week, I moderated a panel called the best idea I ever had. And one of my panelists was *Sue Chow* from Calm and Calm is a meditation app. And they’ve got these sleep stories. And I’m a user of the Calm app. I enjoy it, [it] puts me to sleep every night. And Sue said when she arrived at Calm. They had just forged a relationship with a very famous author and this woman was going to be narrating one of their masterclass sessions. So they’re all excited. We’re going to capitalize on the star power of this author. And so Sue, we need you to send out a newsletter and you need to like push heavy on this author and we’re going to get so much engagement on this new product that we’re very excited about. And she was like, I don’t think anyone really cares about this famous author as much as you think they do. So, let’s do a test. And let’s see what users really care about. Because I’m putting myself in the user shoes, I’m looking at it from that perspective. And I don’t think that they’re going to, it’s going to matter much, it’s not going to affect their engagement with our other products. And it’s not going to really get that much traction on this new product. And her test results were correct. And she discovered that people were actually very interested in the Daily Calm, which is every day, there’s like a new 10 or 15-minute meditation session with a specific theme. And that’s what people love. They want to listen to the Daily Calm every single day. They love the variety of it. And so she didn’t run the test just to prove like I’m right, and you’re wrong. And I hear a lot of email marketers suggesting that that’s a good reason to run a test. It’s not really.
Jen Capstraw: 11:02 So the point was not to like prove that Sue Chow is right, it was to prove that her instincts about what customers care about is different than what the company cares about. So and she says, "You’re not always correct in these predictions, and you really should test them", but the test results, gave her enough ammunition to then create a new campaign to actually eliminate newsletters altogether and introduce a Daily Calm campaign. And it’s so successful, that people if they don’t get the email, as expected, then they will complain to the company, where’s my email, what’s on tap for Daily Calm this week. So putting yourself in the customer’s shoes is so important delivering value, delivering on the expectations that they had when they signed up with you, just hammering over the head with offers and promotions and why you’re great is not really going to resonate with anyone. And that’s why we saw such a trend toward personalization over the last five plus years. And especially those Year in Review campaigns, which I’ve seen lots of different variations on that idea. Because it’s all about me, the subscriber and I like seeing information that’s about me and for me. So, delivering value and focusing on building a relationship, you know, little fun things like hearted campaigns can really make someone feel good about your brand and build that positive sentiment that’s going to drive loyalty, in the long term. Something that I have observed over the past few years is a big trend toward brands, talking about their values, and even controversial values, like social issues and political issues. And we see this most often from brands that have leadership that is a little more liberal leaning or progressive in the United States. Conservative companies tend to be conservative, and it’s considered impolite to talk about these touchy topics. And so they shy away from really promoting their beliefs.
Jen Capstraw: 13:11 But more and more, you know, we’re seeing companies talk about, they value the environment, and here’s how they’re supporting that they, there was a campaign a few years ago from REI and it was very subtle, like, it was not very obvious that it was a highly politicized message. REI, obviously is a company that values the great outdoors, they sell gear for outdoor experiences. And there was Donald Trump evaluating some parks with National Monument status. And some of our national treasures were in at risk of losing protection and status. And so REI, kind of subtly, they’re like, we know that our national monuments should be protected. And super political, but not obvious. But there’s one brand that has just kind of thrown caution to the wind. And the owner of the company speaks his mind. And he says very controversial things, especially, about the Trump administration and the company is Penney’s spices. And he got a lot of visibility The day after the 2016 presidential election in the US, when he just said, I don’t like Donald Trump. I don’t like Trump’s supporters. You know, you all stink, and I want nothing to do with you. And people are like, how dare you? Or they were like, yeah, with you, Bill Penzey. And I’m going to buy all your spices. So he does these super political campaigns and he’ll build promotions out around them. And every time he does one of these promotions, he sees a huge spike in sales. And he released some information in 2018, I believe, or he said, "You know what, sometimes I see an 80x lift in my sales when I form a campaign around my political opinions. And so I’m okay with a bunch of people boycotting me because I’m really rallying the people who are with me, and I’m not doing this for the money, I’m doing this because I think it’s the right thing to do. But the money is just a nice side effect of that."
Jen Capstraw: 15:08 So we’re seeing more and more companies get in on these political and social issues. There was a lot of it over this summer, during the Black Lives Matter protests. And companies actually started getting better at avoiding the virtue signaling of like, "Hey, we support this", but like, we’re not really doing anything meaningful. So, they’re smart about it now. And there were so many terrific authentic campaigns that said, here’s how we’re trying to solve the problem. And we are reflecting and seeing that we have been a part of this problem, or that we have not been contributing to a solution. Here’s what we’re doing now. And here’s what you can do. And so there were a lot of excellent campaigns over the summer. But again, there are a lot of companies that are going to stay away from this. This is not for everyone and it’s risky. I’ve only seen one brand go hard on the conservative point of view, politically, it’s a pizza chain based in Dallas called Pizza In. And in the days leading up to inauguration, they released a press release and social media information saying that they felt that the election was fraudulent in the US, and that there shouldn’t be an inauguration. And they were like tagging all these conservative pundits trying to shamelessly get PR and visibility for their failing brand, which was at risk at that time of being delisted from the NASDAQ because their stocks had fallen below a $1. So this was like, you can see that this did not come from an authentic place. And they put out a press release, it was picked up by some news outlets the following morning, and hours later, the Capitol was attacked. So this because this crisis ensued, and they’ve got stakeholders and franchisees who are like, "Dude, how are we going to sell pizza now? What are you doing?" So they had to step back and retract, but it took them a week, but a lot of companies are not going this route. And I’ve seen an interesting trend with trying to build a human emotional connection with people and its dogs. If you go into your promotions tab, and you just search dogs, pups, puppers, puppy dog, you’ll be amazed at the number of campaigns that pop up. Everyone’s putting dogs in their email to get your attention and to make you feel something. And that positive emotion would then be associated with their brand.
Hillel Berg: 17:46 I never thought we would come away with that; guys use more dogs.
Jen Capstraw: 17:53 Or maybe think of something different because they are getting a little overused at this point.
Hillel Berg: 17:57 It’s very interesting, that political story you just told, especially, the guy he was like, but if you think about especially because the last results he saw, like things are so close, you get half the market share, you’re doing pretty good.
Jen Capstraw: 18:13 Well, [inaudible 18:13] bad close. And there were a lot of people who did not who did vote for Donald Trump, who were very accepting of the election results. So it was a minority position. And sometimes the minority position can rally support. But it was the authenticity of it. That was the biggest issue. And also, it just didn’t seem to come from a place of good, what is the motivation for this agenda?
Hillel Berg: 18:42 Yeah, something interesting, I thought you were going to tap on but I just noticed, there’s more and more of these subscription ad based subscription services that just send a daily email. It’s almost like, Robin Hood snacks, and, you know, the morning brew. And I feel like that’s a trend that’s just going to keep going, just niche down more and more, you get your day. It’s like a little newspaper that people are downloading and reading.
Jen Capstraw: 19:05 Oh, yeah. The newsletters trend is huge. And it’s truly a whole separate community, from email marketing, they are a community unto themselves. And yeah, so and Twitter just acquired review, which is a platform for those types of newsletters and being monetize those newsletters. And yeah, this is a very interesting thing that’s going on. Journalists are leaving their traditional jobs and trying to build their own audiences and monetize them themselves. But like all things, only the few will be really successful in this and become a shining star using this strategy. I think it’s awesome, but it’s not going to work for everyone, in terms of like, are you going to be able to support yourself on this. Can you make an excellent living doing this? Some people? Yes, most people No. But newsletters are super-hot and curated content, or you don’t even have to generate original content. You can just refer people to other people’s content and tell them what you think about it. So, I think it’s a fascinating trend. I’m glad you brought it up.
Hillel Berg: 20:20 Yeah, it definitely is. And you’re right. I mean, that’s why I think we’re seeing you know, Robin Hood snacks is obviously comes from Robin Hood’s, they’re already making plenty of money. They have a base of support before they even started and they had an audience.
Jen Capstraw: 20:33 I’m assuming that’s something different than the Robin Hood trading app.
Hillel Berg: 20:37 I think it’s their newsletter. I think it’s related. I don’t know for sure. But [inaudible 20:42] I signed up for it. Because I was looking for things I asked them to community in the email geeks, slack chat, like what is everyone listening to or watching with. What would we you know, what should I be looking out for? So that was that’s how I got that one. But I assume that theirs thing.
Jen Capstraw: 20:59 Yeah. And that’s another very controversial subjects these days as well.
Hillel Berg: 21:07 [inaudible 21:07] to boost ratings there.
Jen Capstraw: 21:10 Not relevant to email. But it is a fascinating thing that’s going down with Robin Hood right now.
Hillel Berg: 21:16 All right, what do companies need to be doing to really nurture that, and we kind of just touched on that, but you want to talk about that at all?
Jen Capstraw: 21:24 Boils down to respect, empathy, delivering value, giving them what they expected, when they signed up. No, no cheap tricks. [inaudible 21:33] maybe, a little entertainment be human. There are certain brands that are very hesitant to talk to you like you are a real human person. But even if you’re B2B and you’ve got a conservative brand voice, that doesn’t mean that you can’t treat people like people. You should be thinking about how would you interface with someone? If you were in a room with them? Would you send an email that says, "Dear Jennifer M Cap straw, we effort to improve our customer value initiatives? We wish for you to complete this very brief survey. No, don’t send me that email. "Hey, Jen, we value you as a customer. And we’d love to do better. Would you mind taking this brief survey?"
Hillel Berg: 22:20 Right. Just keep everything you’re saying no matter what brand you are? Just keep it human? Keep it conversational?
Jen Capstraw: 22:26 Yeah. Avoid high level.
Hillel Berg: 22:29 High levels if we’re giving a speech. So let’s talk about how can companies build their list, what [are] good practices in terms of building a list, just content pieces, or just general strategies for building your list?
Jen Capstraw: 22:42 The best way to have a big list is to retain the subscribers that you have. And there was this really interesting study, and it’s a little bit old. It’s a few years old, but it was from Forrester. And if you’ve ever been to my sessions, especially my workshops, I talk a lot about like, stats and benchmark reports. Take them with a grain of salt unless they’re from a very reputable source, Forrester, I would consider an exceptionally reputable source. And they did this study on personalization back when everybody was talking about personalization and they were trying to quantify what is the value of personalization, what’s the ROI and what they found was, it didn’t necessarily cause subscribers to spend more or to spend a lot more on your brand, or to convert in whatever ways you’re looking for conversions. What it did is it retained them, and so they weren’t unsubscribing, they weren’t leaving your list. And so your list grew a lot faster, it got much bigger, your reach became further. And so by keeping them and having more people’s eyeballs on your messages, that’s the ultimate ROI of delivering email that people want. So focus on retention, I see so many brands that are so quick to delete people that they have categorized as disengaged and they’re like, "Oh, you haven’t opened in 90 days. That’s it, you’re off my list." And that’s very short sighted. And we’re making a decision for them that they didn’t make for themselves, they signed up for your list for a reason.
Jen Capstraw: 24:32 They’re not engaging for a reason. So what is it that you, like you should be looking within and addressing that problem, rather than just cutting them from your list and I think we’re going to talk about reengagement a little bit, a little bit later, but meeting expectations are so important, the value proposition that you have at the moment of signup, deliver on that and a great way to keep your list large and healthy, is to give people a few options on your unsubscribe page, so most people who click on the unsubscribe link, don’t actually want to fully unsubscribe, they’re just disappointed in what they’re getting from you. And some percentage of them, yes, maybe, you’re not relevant to them and their needs anymore. And that’s great. And you should set them free. But there are people who if you give them a little more control over the relationship that you have with them in their inbox, then they’ll stick around. So, if you maybe have some categories of campaigns, you know, do you want to opt out of the in or out of these categories, promotions, articles, new product releases, but you have to keep it really simple. This is not a full blown preference center, this is just an opt down preference center. And you can set expectations in terms of frequency, like promotions, about three per week, new product announcements, one per month, something to that effect, to let them know, this is what’s going to happen if you make this selection, and you’ll discover that a lot of people will stay on your list with a very simplified up down preference center on the unsubscribe page. And then, there are so many different ways to acquire subscribers. And that’s not always something that an email marketer is involved in often that’s other departments, other channels, other teams, but just be certain that your onboarding and is going to match with their expectations.
Jen Capstraw: 26:36 For instance, if you are getting subscribers through some kind of a co-branded contest with a partner, then they’re in it for the contest. So they’re probably not high quality to begin with. But then if you don’t actually let them know, the reason they’re getting your emails now, thank you for participating in our contest. Here’s what you can expect from us going forward, and then deliver on that promise. If you don’t do that, they’re going to be like, who is this brand? And like, why are they in my inbox and unsubscribe or spam report, this can harm your deliverability. So think about that the source of it, of your acquisitions and be relevant to that set expectations. I feel like onboarding campaigns are just underutilized. And it makes me sad when I see this even in the email industry. I attended an industry conference last year, and a number of technology companies and email space were sponsors of that my email address was shared with those sponsors, which I understand, is it best practice? Not really, but okay, it happens a lot in B2B and I’m okay with that. But not a single one. No one, one of them said, "Thanks for joining us at this event" and then carried on in putting me in their email communications. However, them unsubscribe page was in violation of can spam and was asking me for data points that I legally should not be required to share to get off their list. So that was a big faux pas, but nobody else acknowledged where they got my email address, why they were sending me email campaigns, what was their value proposition? What was it going to get out of these campaigns that was like, here’s our report? Here’s a blog post. Here’s why our solution is awesome. And I’m like, I didn’t ask for this. And this is actually an address. I don’t use to subscribe to anything. So this is, you know, it’s really sketchy. [inaudible 28:33]
Hillel Berg: 28:37 It is really sketchy. And you know, that I think when you talk about, you know, somebody just shows up in your inbox and sort of like someone who just walked into your house and say, "What are you doing?"
Jen Capstraw: 28:46 Do I know you? We met at a party, I was in the corner, you might not have noticed me.
Hillel Berg: 28:59 So how should companies treat contexts that don’t engage like you got people come into a funnel and then you see they’re just not opening anything what would you do?
Jen Capstraw: 29:06 Okay, so I hate that everyone is doing the cut and run. Somehow this idea that it is a best practice to just delete them. It’s ludicrous to me and as I mentioned, email marketers are not always actively involved in subscriber acquisition. And as such, they don’t necessarily respect the level of effort and the cost of subscriber acquisition. It might cost five bucks for that email address, it might cost 10 bucks might cost 100 bucks. If you’re B2B and you acquired them at an event, I’ve seen the cost per lead be as high as like 1500 bucks when all expenses are considered and what happened like they took a pair of your logo socks and never engaged with anything again, because you didn’t send them anything valued, like they saw value in your logo socks, but they don’t see value in your [inaudible 30:01] So, step back and think about cost of acquisition and have some respect for that. And don’t just throw those people away. You should be sending reengagement campaigns, before you ever cut anyone, you should not be making these executive decisions for them unless they have been not engaging for a very long period of time. Now, it’s true that a lack of engagement can be harmful to deliverability. So that lack of engagement does need to be addressed. But it’s not like the first step to just start deleting people. Also, there’s a KPI that we cannot quantify. And it is subject line impressions. So, I see a lot of emails in my inbox all the time that I don’t open, but it’s keeping those brands Top of Mind and that has value to me, if I don’t want those emails, I’m going to unsubscribe, I know how to do that, I should own that relationship. So, re-engagement is so important. If people are not moving through your funnel, that’s an opportunity to re-engage people are just not opening, that’s an opportunity to re-engage.
Jen Capstraw: 31:09 And some of the best re-engagement strategies that I’ve seen incorporate humor, because how do you get an open from someone who hasn’t been opening like you really have to get their attention with the subject line. So, I’ve seen great examples of humor in re-engagement, a strategy that I personally had a lot of success with, with a lead gen client was a little first name, personalization and action requested. I’ve seen more aggressive like action required, which, okay, like, what’s going to happen if I don’t engage with this Pottery Barn email, nothing. But action requested can help first name personalization, I know is so rudimentary. And we like to say that first name, personalization is not really personalization, it always gives you a little bit of a lift. So don’t use it constantly use it sparingly. This is a good place to use it. And then ask people, are you still interested? If you give them the option of yes and no, then the choice like making it a multiple choice question where your calls to action are actually answers to the question will achieve incredible engagement. So, I have had up to a 6% click rate on a disengaged lead campaign. Now the majority of those clicks were on the no button, no, I am interested and they have that opportunity to unsubscribe. And if I had more sophisticated resources, I could potentially ask them questions on that landing page, like, is this forever? Or should we circle back around in six months or a year? Maybe, it’s just not right now. But just Yes, and No, stay on the list or unsubscribe, having both options can be very powerful. So, I definitely recommend that in reengagement strategies and also the power of multiple choice can be put to work in a lot of other campaigns.
Jen Capstraw: 33:07 But you also, if you’re not seeing engagement, you have to step back and look objectively at what the heck you’re doing. Why aren’t people engaging? What are you doing wrong? Because if people aren’t engaging, you’re not delivering on their expectations. So the solution is not to just cut them, the problem is not them. The problem is you. So what could I do to better engage? What could I do? What am I doing wrong? Could you survey a handful of people? Could you? What are you doing to put yourself in their shoes? What kind of tests are you doing to see what like strategies engage more highly? So, think about your email content. And that’s what needs to be modified. It’s not just delete, delete, delete, and when you delete, then the cost of reacquiring those people right, then there’s more money that you’re spending. I see a lot of marketers say, "I’m just deleting them to save money, right? They’re just never going to engage. They’re not going to buy anything cut and run. I’m going to save money." And there’s this obsession with saving money among email marketers. It’s like discount mentality, coupon cutting, your budget should not be shrinking every year. People who are doing display ads for your company are asking for less budget every year. No, in fact, your budget should be growing every year, you should be spending more money every year, you should have a greater reach every year, you should be adding more complexity and sophistication and additional strategies and campaigns every single year and all these things should cost more money. So, email is already under budgeted in almost every organization. Don’t try and cut your own opportunity to do the best work that you possibly can. And I also want to reference a really cool reengagement strategy that I saw a couple of years ago from Blue Apron. And I think there are some other brands that are taking this approach with like abandoned cart, but in the context of re-engagement or a lapsed subscriber.
Jen Capstraw: 35:13 What Blue Apron did was the typical, you were a customer and you haven’t been a customer for a while, would you like to resume being a customer and like, click here to do that and it would take you to a landing page. And you could reactivate your Blue Apron food subscription where they deliver little kits to your door, and you don’t have to go to the grocery store. And they had great success with it. So they decided to take it a step further, if they could minimize friction, in creating that conversion, could there be an uplift. And so they used interactivity in email. So, the email clients that would support interactivity, they had a different experience, if it didn’t support interactivity than it was the traditional experience. They built in some graceful degradation, where you would still go to the landing page, confirm and so on. Now, they have your credit card on file already, because you’re a former customer. So if you were in an email client that supported interactivity, they would say, "Do you want to resume with credit card ending in 1234?" Check a box, yes, you click resume deliveries and the transaction happens right there in the inbox, you never go to a landing page. So, it’s one or two or three fewer clicks and they saw an increase in conversions. So that is really cool. I think that’s amazing. And this was before amp for email came out. And so there’s the possibility of amp for email to be used for strategy similar to that, as well as a gazillion other use cases and I could talk for an hour about amp for email.
Hillel Berg: 36:52 Today, I think everyone in the email community is crazy excited about amp for email. And I know, I saw Mark Robbins presentation last week, MailCon. And I was like, "Oh, my gosh…"
Jen Capstraw: 37:04 And Mark Robbin, a pioneer in the interactivity in the inbox space, that having his buy-in on amp is going to really be beneficial to getting more brands to start experimenting with it or to ask their email service providers to support it. And I haven’t caught that session yet. I was at MailCon too. And I haven’t watched everything on demand just yet. But I’m definitely going to watch Mark Robbins because I am such a fan. But the sidebar is something that’s so fascinating about amp for email is it’s a whole separate mime type. So, we’ve got HTML, email, we’ve got the text version of the email, amp is a third MIME type. And so the email clients that support it, it’s going to look the same in every email client. And that’s the problem. The challenge of email is that HTML looks crazy and different. And every single email client, that’s what makes it hard. But amp looks consistently the same. And Google is committed to working with their competitors and getting more of them to support this. And they made a lot of headway. So, I’m excited that email standardization is potentially on the horizon. And not only the interactivity and the rich experience that we can get from amp, but just like, just making it look the same and every inbox could be within reach. And I think that’s super cool.
Hillel Berg: 38:30 Yeah, I think it’s definitely come a long way. And like, I could say, myself, it’s coming from the dev world where, you know, everything we did have to be bulletproof. You know, and, and recently, I saw, you can just see models just use regular HTML, and it almost works, maybe 9% of clients a little discussion with this about with, with J Orem from rocket production rocket. It’s Cody free email is getting easier what you just said about amp, that you’re busy. You’re saying that amp will be the same amp on every device. Like if amp is respected [inaudible 39:06]
Jen Capstraw: 39:12 Isn’t that cool?
Hillel Berg: 39:13 That is very cool. That’s like a big change. That’s very, very cool. All right, let’s jump into boom Jen, top five email marketing tips for 2021.
Jen Capstraw: 39:25 So, I have this email strategy workshop. And the overarching theme is basically that best practices are BS. And there’s a lot of bad advice out there. And I keep running into marketers who are blindly following these rules that they read somewhere. And I’ve worked with clients where they’re making decisions that seem to be undermining their success. And when I say, "Well, why are you doing that?" They just go because it’s best practice. And I’ve already given one example of that practice …
Hillel Berg: 40:02 It’s like a bad Twilight episode. Yeah, Twilight Zone.
Jen Capstraw: 40:06 And I hit the example like people are like, Oh, I need to just disengaged subscribers after 90 days. No, like, that’s terrible advice. And there’s a lot of terrible advice out there or best practices that might be good for some, but are not good for all. And so we need to be critical in processing these, we need to be thinking about does this serve my business objective? And does this serve my audience? And if the answer is no, then maybe, that is not a best practice, there are so many of them. But even some of the good best practices are made to be broken. And I know you wanted to talk about some of my favorite brands, and most of them, the reason I love them is because they break the rules. And the rules are there for a reason. But things like, your friendly from should be consistent. It should be your company name, or a leader in your company and you’re consistently using that leader’s name. And there has to be a reason that you’re using that leader’s name. So, some of these brands are doing crazy things in the inbox like, using a different from name for every single campaign using nonsensical subject lines or random things. It’s bizarre.
Hillel Berg: 41:29 They’re a lot of friends doing that guy I know of one. I don’t know if it’s the one you’re going to talk about, but …
Jen Capstraw: 41:34 I can think of a couple.
Hillel Berg: 41:36 Yeah, is that to do with any monkeys? Go to the moon.
Jen Capstraw: 41:40 I don’t know. We’ll talk about it.
Hillel Berg: 41:44 It could be your new favorite brand. We’ll talk about it in a few minutes, I guess.
Jen Capstraw: 41:49 These rules, because you think you have to when you think it’s the right thing to do. And sometimes it’s okay to break the rules, even when it is very good rule. Because everyone loves a maverick. Like I’m a rule breaker, I do not do good with authority, don’t tell me what to do, I’m going to find my own way. I need to know why everything you tell me that I need to do something, I’m like, you need to give me an explanation. I was a pain in the butt as a kid in school because I couldn’t blindly follow rules without understanding their purpose. And so that has bled into my career as an email marketer. And when I see these brands that are just doing outrageous, interesting things, I think it’s really inspiring. Now, not everybody can do that, right. It’s not aligned with their brand. And it would be chaos in the inbox, if all of us from names and subject lines and free headers were just like outrageous and unpredictable. So like, that’s not the correct way. But there might be some other rules that you can break. So, do not have this emotional attachment to best practices. Also, testing everything, I think is a huge mistake that marketers make. Test everything is bad advice, you need to test smart, you need to test what matters, it needs to be statistically significant, you need to then have learnings that you can apply so that you don’t, can have to continue to keep testing all the time. And that’s another subject that I could talk about at length. But my number one testing suggestion is to use the freeze AB Test Calculator, have you seen this?
Hillel Berg: 43:29 I have not.
Jen Capstraw: 43:29 It’s awesome, it’s going to tell you, you tell it the size of your list or your segment, you tell it your average open rate, it tells you how many splits you should have. Or even if you shouldn’t test it all, in some cases, it will tell you maybe you should just do a 50, 50 split. And you might get some learnings from this, but they won’t necessarily be statistically meaningful. So, I created a memorable short link so that people could get to it easily because it’s buried on their website. But it’s Jen tips, slash test. And it’s awesome. Like it’s the best tool that you can use and you know, subject line tests being our most common test. So be sure your tests are statistically meaningful, use the phrase the subject line AB test, split test calculator. I also see people too dependent on stats and benchmark reports. And as I mentioned, most of them are not that reliable. I think benchmark reports are awesome, and can give you some great ideas and some information to compare yourself against but you can’t put too much stock in them because the numbers are not normalized. You don’t know how the different brands that are represented there, what they’re doing that’s different from you. Is brand a cutting everyone who’s disengaged after 30 days or 90 days. Well, yeah, their open rates are going to be very, very high as a result because math, that doesn’t mean they’re open volume as that is at its maximum. So and then somebody else who is keeping the disengaged on longer, they’re nurturing them and re engaging them and trying to keep their reach as wide as possible, their open rates might be lower, but their open volumes might be higher. And so all of these numbers are kind of skewed. And I also run into a lot of marketers who are like, "Okay, I need a stat that is going to tell me how much of a lift I’m going to get if I do this very obscure random thing in my very specific vertical" and it’s like, "Dude, that does not exist, stop looking for it."
Jen Capstraw: 45:33 And if it did exist, it’s not something that is truly reliable. An example of this is there was a lot of talk about video in email, like, seven years ago, if you put the word video in your subject line, it was going to increase your open rates and people want video content. And I was like, "Oh, gosh, I got to put video in my email." And all these blogs and reports are telling me this percentage open rate this percentage, click right. I was like, okay, clients tell me what videos you’ve got, what assets Do you have, we got to get on this video band rat wagon, because the stats say so this is the hot trend. And every single campaign I put out following this advice, it tanked, my audience did not want video. And in fact, I would have a whole campaign where it’d be like non-video then video, non-video then video and it would be non-video, high engagement video, low engagement, non-video and it would just do it. And usually campaigns kind of drop off over time. But this was ridiculous. And so that I was just blindly following a trend and a stat without giving it enough thought, is this appropriate for my audience also recommend a lot of times email marketers get excited about cool factor, like, "Oh, I saw this thing. This example I saw a webinar it was rad. I want to do that." Again, not thinking too much about is this going to deliver ROI? What’s the level of effort? What’s the best way for me to spend my time? Is it to do this cool whiz bang thing? Or is it to maybe create that reengagement campaign I still haven’t created yet. So look at what you’re doing, measure it by return on investment and level of effort and prioritize these things. Don’t just chase the cool thing, figure out the best way to invest your time. And my number one tip, though, bonus tip is coming to one of my email strategy workshops. They’re fun.
Hillel Berg: 47:27 All right. So let’s look first, what are your thoughts [inaudible 47:30]? And we talked about this a bunch, but you can just read over it one more time.
Jen Capstraw: 47:35 Yeah, again, just like blindly following those best practices and obsession with vanity metrics. Like, oh, gosh, we got to increase our open rates. open rates don’t really matter that much. What matters more is your open volume. You need to have high enough engagement that your deliverability is not suffering. But we’re obsessed with open rate. We’re obsessed with click rate. These are important, but like, what are you really achieving? Are you getting conversions? Are you generating revenue and profit? Are you pushing people through your life cycle to whatever the next conversion step is? These are much more important KPIs. And marketers find it difficult to connect the dots between what they’re doing, and all these downstream metrics. So start having those conversations in your organization, bring down those silos, and start bringing all this together, looking holistically. And also looking holistically at the relationship between like email and the other channels. You shouldn’t be operating in that silo. Data silos are problematic. So yeah, vanity metrics. Bad don’t get too obsessed with them.
Hillel Berg: 48:46 Okay, what are your favorite brands? And why?
Jen Capstraw: 48:48 Wait, wait, can I pick that back to you? And you tell me about the monkeys first, what were you talking about?
Hillel Berg: 48:53 I was talking about that Baboons to the Moon. Baboons to the Moon looks like some brand that was like, I don’t know, I hope they have a better story. But I just feel like there’s probably a big brand behind it. But they’re basically they make bags, like makeup bags and all kinds of bags, nothing fancy, really. And then so cheap, super cheap or anything like that. But they just their whole strategy is just kind of crazy. They had like [inaudible 49:14] in December, they use all caps and all their subject lines. They’re just doing whatever the heck they want. They did this whole thing about Do you know what’s [inaudible 49:22] and said, "Do you know what space smells like?"
Jen Capstraw: 49:29 I will open that. I will absolutely open that.
Hillel Berg: 49:33 And they’re [inaudible 49:33] so yeah. And it was like they’re selling a candle. Some kind of scented candle that smells like …
Jen Capstraw: 49:41 I have jotted it down. I’m adding it to my list. I [inaudible 49:47] Hillel Berg: 49:47 Yeah.
Jen Capstraw: 49:48 So in that same vein. I love shine sty. I love chubbiest. They are ridiculous shine sty sells sometimes, obscene products, mostly light hearted friend products, chubbiest sells shorts. And they’re just so unconventional they’re breaking all the rules. Every email marketer loves these brands and you need them in your inbox and in your life to like, bring you a little joy, as you’re like getting through your mundane day. I also love humor in the inbox, and I love drizzly for that, like I think they are killing it with all of their cross channel marketing, and they’ve become and drizzly if you’re not familiar with it, they are an alcohol delivery company. And obviously, the pandemic was very good for them. I think they actually got acquired yesterday, I think I saw that headline, but their sense of humor is just spot on and relevance. I’ll get emails that are like, Oh, looks like it’s going to be a snowy cold day we know how to warm you up. Alright, so it’s relevant and playful. And then I mentioned Penney’s Spices who does these like crazy political screens, they break every rule of like, excellent email design and layout and copywriting. Like, they’ve got images, that text embedded in images, no call to action button walls of text crazy political opinions, and they get unbelievable engagement and it works for them. This is emails so bad that it’s good, it is ugly, it does everything we’re not supposed to do. And it is achieving great success for them. So, even, I just love the Mavericks. I love everyone who’s just you know, not doing what do you expect and you should love humor always.
Hillel Berg: 51:44 What are your all-time favorite campaigns? And why? Why, just go with campaigns, specific campaigns. Every email marketer has those. I know mine.
Jen Capstraw: 51:54 Alright, so I’m going to go a little outside the box here with this question. I’ve given a presentation about humanization in the email channel. And the first example that I give is not the email channel at all. And it’s a photograph of a fun size pack of Skittles that I received from a restaurant after I ordered on Grub Hub. And it had a little like a mailing label kind of attached to it just like a sticker stuck on with a little handwritten note that said, "Please review us on Grub Hub. Thank you!" And that’s it. And I was like, wait a minute, wait. So first of all, this is a triggered campaign based on my behavior. I made an order in this app. And it triggered the campaign for them to drop the Skittles into my bag with my food order. And it’s the handwritten element of it. That’s a kind of like a touch of personalization, it humanized it. But what was most important to me, what really struck me was that they delivered value, they gave me something in exchange for what they were asking for. They weren’t asking me to do something for nothing like here is a small offering here are some delicious Skittles. And by the way, it would be really cool if you gave us this review on Grub Hub so that other people will buy our food on this app. And so by giving me value to being empathetic to me, too often, we’re asking people to do something without telling them what’s in it for me. So, that it just struck me and I felt like that was a huge message to email marketers cross channel marketers, like every marketer could learn from this little packet of Skittles.
Hillel Berg: 53:42 That’s a great story, I think. Yeah, you’re right. They could have just like, put a card in the button, in you in your order, like, please review us, putting on Skittles. We’re going a different direction now. So you’ve started organization called Women of email. What is that exactly? And when you start that, what’s it all about?
Jen Capstraw: 54:09 I’m one of four co-founders and I’m the president of the organization. We’re a 501C3 nonprofit association for women whose careers touch email. Most of our members are in email marketing, either practitioners on the brand side, or at an agency or working for a technology vendor in the email space. And we’re open to cis women, trans women, gender queer and non-binary people. Membership is free, so that it is accessible to everyone. So anyone who would benefit from our community and our member benefits, there’s no barrier to entry. So the people who need us most have access to us. We are the biggest organization in email history. So we’ve got more than 5000 members and last time I checked in 55 countries. So, we’re on six continents, which is very cool. No email marketers in Antarctica yet. So if anyone here is listening from Antarctica, please join. World Domination sounds pretty cool to me. And we’re best known for our Facebook group community, which is a safe place where people can ask questions without being felt that they are stupid, or making a mistake. [inaudible 55:01] of community, there are some other communities that I was a part of where people could be very hostile, and judgmental. And so women tend to not engage as much in those environments, and they don’t feel like they’re part of a community. So we provided that space where they could get to know each other ask questions, and just friendships form. And we allow off topic content as well. So it’s a lot of fun. But more importantly, we were the first organization to address the issues of gender parity among thought leaders in the industry.
Jen Capstraw: 56:04 So the inspiration for the organization being created was that there was a severe imbalance of female speakers at email conferences. And the industry, we later learned through a couple of surveys is about evenly split. It’s about 50, 50 in the US, men and women. And so why would conferences have a speaker lineup that’s 25% men, or, excuse me, 75% 25% women, it doesn’t really make sense, what what’s causing this. And so, we sought to solve that problem and to help nurture more thought leaders among the women in the email industry. And we’ve been really successful at that. So we have a speaker’s bureau. And we match speakers with conferences, and webinars and interviews and podcasts and all sorts of things. And we’ve placed we filled about 150 speaker slots, since we were founded in 2016. We’re going to do a much better job of like tracking that quantifying that going forward, we’ve actually just expanded our board of directors added some new leadership, we have a scholarship program, where we will partner with conferences, and we’ll get some free passes to the conference. And you can apply to get a free pass because a conference can be career changing. So, if you just don’t have the funds, you are perhaps underpaid, you’re a person from a marginalized group. For whatever the reasons that it is difficult for you to attend conferences and get those networking opportunities and those educational opportunities that could level up your career. You can apply for a scholarship. And so it’s need based priority, we also give priority to people from marginalized groups. And if we still have some leftover, and we just hand them out, like as many people as we can get into these conferences as possible. The last conference we partnered with was MailCon, who was super supportive of us.
Jen Capstraw: 58:00 They worked with our speaker’s bureau, they worked with us on our scholarship program, something else we’ve done a great job of within our community is bringing transparency to compensation in the email industry, because the wage gap is real, it has been quantified in email. And it is about the same as the national average women in the industry are making less than men. Sometimes, it seems to be due to gender bias. When it’s people in equal positions. However, the biggest disparity is that men are assuming the more senior roles and the higher paying roles. And women are not ascending at the same rates. Women are also not negotiating as effectively, and they don’t understand what market competitive rates are for the type of specialized work that they do. So we have a policy, a lot of companies come to us, we’re looking for email marketers, and we want to want you to tell your community about that. And we’re like, Okay, great. What’s it pays? And will you accept remote applicants, and we will post it unless they tell us the pay rate as the pay rate is low, I’m honest with them, I’m like, nobody in my community is going to apply for this, you need to rethink it. Let me tell you about more competitive pay. So by hosting these pay amounts like this is what this job is paying, in this job. And people it’s been normalized now. So our members are also when a recruiter comes to them about a job they’re probably not interested in, they will ask, but what’s it pay? They were afraid to ask that question before now they’re asking and then they too are sharing these posts within our community like, "Hey, I heard from recruiter, here’s the job. The pay is this amount. And so and sometimes we have people so the board of directors will not post jobs without the comp, but members can post jobs. We’ve normalized them putting the comp in there. Not everyone does, and that’s okay. But when they don’t, our members will now ask, well, what’s the problem? What’s it pays? I’m not going to waste my time on this if you don’t tell me what it pays. So people are being very open about [inaudible 59:59]
Jen Capstraw: 1:00:01 And that information that access to information has helped many of our members negotiate better, even if they’re not necessarily applying for those jobs. They now know what is competitive, and I had multiple members tell me, they have doubled their income. With this information, it gave them negotiating power. And one member who said, she tripled her pay with this information, which is amazing. Our next step is to reorganize. Right now we are a nonprofit, private foundation, legally. And we’re reorganizing as a nonprofit public charity, so that we can get larger donations from corporate entities in the email space. And that’s going to enable us to then build out a staff and have employees who are running day to day operations, because we are 100% volunteer run right now and expand our programs, and just do so much more for our community. So we are really excited about that. And thank you for giving me a chance to pitch that [inaudible 1:01:05] Facebook group. And also you can find a member application at womenofemail.org. Again, it is free.
Hillel Berg: 1:01:15 All right, thank you so much for that. It’s time for your final thoughts.
Jen Capstraw: 1:01:20 Well, I mean, something that I’m passionate about through women of email is helping aspiring thought leaders find their voice and get out there and find opportunities. And so someone like yourself, who is an aspiring thought leader, an emerging thought leader, you created this program, you put yourself out there, it’s risky, right? It’s scary to say I’ve got something to say, I don’t know [inaudible 1:01:40] I feel about it, but I’m going for it. And so I just want to thank you for the opportunity to be a part of helping you on your ascension is becoming a thought leader within our space. And congratulations on launching this and taking those steps. And it’s been great getting to know you and being a part of this.
Hillel Berg: 1:02:01 Absolutely. Same here. So thank you so much for joining us today. And maybe, I don’t know when but maybe you’ll come back another time. We get around to it. So big round, big round of applause to the nobody here. Thank you again, really, and I’ll just sign this off. I’ll be there in a second. Thank you so much the Jen Cap straw. Yeah, for a long time. Actually, her name was [inaudible 1:02:27]. And I couldn’t say, I couldn’t find her. But yeah, I’ve got it now. Jen Cap straw. You can follow her on LinkedIn and Instagram and Twitter. All Jen Cap straw pretty easy to thank you so much. This has been our program for this week. And we’ll be back next week with I believe our guest is going to be Danny Tal from Engage has to be a fascinating topic we’re going to talk about ESPs in vendors and SMTP and the technologies related to it and really trying to make sense of that entire space. So, that’s it for today. Have a good one.