Catch up with CMSWire Contributor Chad S. White
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CMSWire Editor-in-Chief Dom Nicastro talks to CMSWire contributor Chad S. White about automated email marketing best practices.
Remember all those automated email marketing campaigns you created? Neither do we. As CMSWire contributor Chad S. White points out in this year’s article on getting the most out of his automated email campaigns, some marketers are using his 300 emails at once. Sending email.
“Automation is hard to manage when you don’t know the number of automations, what triggers them, and what their purpose is,” White wrote. “One of his clients did an inventory and identified nearly 300 active automated emails, prompting our efforts to consolidate and improve the management of these campaigns.”
We caught up with White on his article.
Editor’s Note: This transcript has been edited for clarity.
email marketing rules
Dom Nicastro: Hello, this is Dom Nicastro, Editor-in-Chief of CMSWire. I’m with his CMSWire contributor He Chad S. White. He is the author of “Email Marketing Rules” and Director of Research at Oracle Marketing Consulting. How are you doing, Chad?
Chad S. White: It’s going well.
Nicastro: Excellent. Thank you for joining us. Approximately how long have you been a CMSWire contributor?
White: It’s only been a year or so, so I’m relatively new to the group.
Nicastro: We love newbies and can’t thank you enough for getting you in the door and bombarding our audience of marketing and customer experience experts with your wits. I am a marketing specialist. And speaking from Chad, at the end of the day, we can go crazy with marketing and talk about AR/VR and so on. such as a kiosk. After all, we are sending some emails. This is the end result of marketing. So it would be great to keep writing on that topic. it never goes away.
I think email is the best platform for collaboration in the history of the world. You can talk to anyone, anywhere. So my first question is about the book “Email Marketing Rules”. Email marketing rules, email marketing rules, or email marketing rules? Awesome.
White: Both, of course. But yeah, pun intended. But yes, about various rules and best practices regarding email marketing.
Related article: 6 ways to review and improve your automated marketing emails
300 automated emails
Nicastro: ok, cool. I am happy to clear it. So it’s a little bit of both. In this article, I write about a client who, when doing a little audit, or perhaps just by accident, always found that he had 300 automated emails sent out his door. how does that happen? What can marketers do about it?
White: Well, I mean, it’s a problem and it’s not a problem. So it’s good to have a lot of automation, and it’s good to target them.The hardest thing about 300 automations is that they’re hard to manage. And I think that’s sort of the point of my article. The thing is that these programs are often considered set and forgotten, and sometimes even praised. And that’s the furthest thing from the truth.
These are like living, breathing campaigns. They act over a period of time. From changing mailbox providers and inbox providers, to changing his web pages in the company, changing messages, etc., there are many things that can cause problems in the meantime. So this article is all about these 6 methods you need to take care of and how to nurture these campaigns.
Generally, these are the campaigns with the highest ROI of all you send. Still, it’s the campaign most often ignored by marketers. They set them really often and forget most of them. This is a tragedy. Because these programs make so much money and commitment.
Related article: 10 common email marketing mistakes and how to fix them
Email design needs updating
Nicastro: And one of the tips you give is to look at the design. As you know, my marketing team is buried in best practices around data, analytics, send times, and email content. Let’s change things. But what does the actual design look like? Are too many marketers not seeing enough of it?
White: Well, I think marketers care about design. I think the disconnect here is that they only regularly redesign their broadcast promotional campaigns and don’t put the same love and care into designing their automated campaigns. As such, their designs tend to stagnate.
And even if you redesign your website and redesign your broadcast emails, you don’t always port the same design elements to your automated campaigns. And it’s a must do. Every time you redesign an app or web page, those designs are incorporated little by little into your email marketing program, reflected not only in broadcast campaigns, but also in automated campaigns.
I think one of the little silver linings around the pandemic is that many brands have had to re-evaluate some of this messaging and add things like cruise control. And in light of the pandemic, some of the messages really struck the wrong tone. Like the cart abandonment, the messages were a bit deaf and nothing like what’s current or what’s going on.
And many brands have gone and changed and updated it. And it was so good. And you know, we don’t need something as dramatic as a pandemic to continually re-evaluate that message.
One of the things I tried to do in this article is give people lots of reasons. So check QA to make sure there are no broken links or broken images, but also check for optimization opportunities. Triggered messages are AB tested at lower rates than broadcast emails for ROI. This should be the other way around.
But there are also things like seasonal optimization. Many brands are seasonal. So there are plenty of opportunities to incorporate seasonal messages. If you’re a retailer and you’re not doing a New Year’s Eve update in your welcome email or an abandoned cart, you’re leaving money on the table. Because there is an absolute opportunity to add seasonal images and seasonal messages there. It’s about actually talking to seasonal shoppers in a way that’s more relevant than treating it like the old days of the week in the middle of summer.
Related article: Recession message: 3 opportunities for marketers
Stay in sync with your subscribers and customers through email
Nicastro: Yeah, a very good point about the pandemic waking us up to so many things. I can’t escape It’s a pandemic, we’re in lockdown. That kind of thing woke me up and I need to check back often.
White: First of all, as an industry, I thought we did a really great job. But the kinds of questions we asked ourselves early in the pandemic are the kinds of questions we should ask ourselves every cycle. Are we keeping pace with our consumers? What are consumers thinking? What are their top priorities? what are their priorities? What are their needs and desires?
Again, in March, April and May of 2020, we did a great job of really scrapping the playbook and what we were trying to do and coming up with a new campaign and a new topic. I think. Align. But we shouldn’t let it go. We definitely need to keep the mindset of making sure we are always in sync with our subscribers and customers. Certainly automation is one of the ways we can make sure we are working together. .
Email Radar Privacy, Cookies
Nicastro: The final question for Chad is what can we expect in 2022? What are you likely to see or write while contributing here to CMSWire?
White: oh that’s a good question. I definitely have a list of things I want to write about. But I think one of the things I’ve learned from the pandemic is not to plan too far ahead. But certainly, I think some of the big issues of the moment are still unwinding some of these pandemic changes. I think there are three big ones. So I think it’s probably a safe bet to keep writing about these things.
But the great thing about email marketing is that everything is complicated, there’s a lot of nuance to talk about, and a lot of room for improvement.
Nicastro: It’s good not to lock yourself up, you talked like a cookie. And Google itself is constantly changing. FloC and now Topics API. So you can’t lock yourself into something specific. But it’s good that you’re highlighting the importance of privacy and cookies. Because I think a lot of marketers obviously do that too, so we’re looking into that.
White: And arguably, it will have many impacts, far beyond advertising. Email addresses, email address harvesting, zero-party and first-party data harvesting have undoubtedly had a major impact on email marketing approaches.
Nicastro: Yeah, we also track compliance issues such as regulations, but I wonder if the US will enact federal legislation.
White: It’s just a matter of time.
Nicastro: It’s only a matter of time…one federal law will surely streamline things.
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