What Makes a Great Email

1. what makes a great email?

2. What Makes a Great Email? By Benchmark Written by Andy Shore

3. About the Author Andy Shore found his way to Benchmark when he replied to a job lis- ting promising a job of half blogging, half social media. His parents still don’t believe that people get paid to do that. Since then, he’s spun his addiction to pop culture and passion for music into business and marketing posts that are the spoonful of sugar that helps the lessons go down. As the result of his boss not knowing whether or not to take him se- riously, he also created the web series Ask Andy, which stars a cartoon version of himself. Despite being a cartoon, he somehow manages to be taken seriously by many of his readers ... and a few of his coworkers.

4. Why we made this guide, who is it for? As an email marketing service we see millions of emails sent each mon- th. Some emails look amazing! Others not so much. Besides the look of the email, we wanted to know, what really goes into the making of a good email? How can you use email to help build the relationship with your subscribers? What makes a subscriber enjoy your emails and get exci- ted to receive them? So, we dug deep into hundreds of campaigns and countless hours of research to identify the points detailed in this guide. Who is this guide for? This guide is for anyone looking to improve their email marketing com- munications. If you are just getting started with email marketing, read this manual in detail and you will see major improvements right away! If you are an expert at email marketing, you can probably skim this guide to get a refresher and a few updated stats about the industry. Whether you’re a beginner or a pro, this guide can immediately improve your email marketing results.

5. Table of Contents What Makes a Great Email? 06 08 Types of Email 10 1. List Segmentation: Understand Your Audience 2. Set A Goal 14 3. Less Is More 17 21 4. Design Is Essential 23 5. Tone 26 6. Clear CTA 30 7. Be Prepared to Listen 32 8. Go Above and Beyond 36 Conclusion

6. What Makes a Great Email? If you haven’t heard about how crowded the inbox of today is, you’ve probably been too busy trying to read all the emails in your own in- box. They’re seemingly never ending. “The average office worker receives 121 emails per day”, according to the Radicati Group. Every work email chain is fraught with needless Reply Alls. The daily deal emails. Promotions from every airline or store with which you’ve ever made a purchase. It’s important to stand tall in the crowded inbox and to create an expe- rience with your email marketing. A good open rate and/or click-throu- gh rate (CTR) will only get you so far. You need to learn how to engage with your subscribers and foster a relationship with them. 6 of 42 what makes a great email?

7. The good news is that it’s easy. When you aim for great with each and every email you send, it builds a relationship with your subscribers. Great Email Bad Email So what makes a great email? 7 of 42 what makes a great email?

8. Types of Email Before we get into the elements of a great email, it helps to have context. There are countless ways to accomplish email marketing, but many of them boil down to four main ways to use email marketing: 1. Newsletter or Recap Email Theseare the regular updates you send to your subscribers. Important company news, popular blog posts, etc. 2. Promotional Emails The campaigns you send any time you’re running a sale, have a new product to hype or want to run any other type of special promotion. 8 of 42 what makes a great email?

9. 3. Engagement, Follow-up or Guidance Emails These are the emails you use to onboard a new customer and to pro- vide the additional education they may need to get started. These are the emails that will set a customer up for success and keep them loyal to your brand. 4. Transactional Emails These are the emails that confirm a purchase, send a receipt or emails that otherwise have to do with your eCommerce. After extensive research and analyzing our own inboxes, we found that it comes down to eight points that make a great email: 9 of 42 what makes a great email?

10. 1. List Segmentation: Understand Your Audience “…you can’t please all of the people all of the time.” - John Lydgate. A great email is on target. That means each email you send finds the right subscriber. Often times, your entire contact list will not be inte- rested in every single email you send. Are you sending to the correct segment? You need to be serving each subscriber’s interests and needs. A great email means it is relevant to the subscribers who receive it in their inbox. In fact, according to the 2015 National Client Email Report from the DMA, 77% of email marketing ROI came from segmented, targeted and triggered campaigns. That’s right. Nearly 80% of email marketing ROI was a result of being relevant! 10 of 42 what makes a great email?

11. 2015 National Client Email Report from the DMA 77% 80% Segmented, targeted and triggered campaigns Relevant What To Segment Knowing the importance of segmenting your list is the first step. The Knowing the importance of segmenting your list is the first step. The next is understanding what you could or should segment. next is understanding what you could or should segment. Did you know? Among marketers who have built campaigns incorporating segmentation, 43% use up to six segments on average 11 of 42 what makes a great email?

12. List segmentation can begin at the signup form. Based on your data fields, you can sort new, incoming subscribers from the get go. Demographics is one set of data that you can use to segment your list(s). Gender, age and location are all options that can help send more targeted emails. If you can gather that data in your signup form without being obtrusive, you’re already a step ahead of the game. Subscriber activity is another segmentation option. It’s possible to sort your list(s) into your most active and engaged subscribers. This is a helpful group if you want to send a poll or survey for feedback or if you want to create a loyalty program. 12 of 42 what makes a great email?

13. Inactivity is also an option. Great email marketing means sending to individuals who want to hear from you. A re-engagement campaign can help you reactive some subscribers and clean your list of the rest. Purchase history is another way to segment your list for better targe- ting. You already know the goods or services a customer is interested in. Using this data to create segments will help you segment and reap the benefits in increased sales. One helpful way to set up your segments is by creating customer per- sonas. For each segment, go to Google Images and pick a photo of a person that represents each persona. Think about what car that per- son drives, where they shop and what magazines or websites they mi- ght read. This will give you a better understanding of which segments to target with each email. 13 of 42 what makes a great email?

14. 2. Set A Goal Be focused. It is easy to go on autopilot. Sometimes, we’re all guilty of falling into our routines and send emails for the sake of sending an email every month, because that’s just what we do. Right? That’s not what makes a great email. Each email you send should have a goal. The goals should be measura- ble as well. This will help determine how you create your emails as well as gauge the success. Ask yourself, “why am I sending this email?” Action Based Goals The goal can include the action you want your subscribers to take wi- thin the email. 14 of 42 what makes a great email?

15. If you want more people to read your emails, the goal should be an in- creased open rate. To achieve that, work on making your subject line great. If the goal is to drive more traffic to your website, an increased CTR should be your goal. A great email, in this case, means having great content with compelling calls to action (CTA). If creating more of a conversation with your subscribers is the goal, you can set the bar at a 5% reply rate. To accomplish that goal, write a compelling CTA inviting your subscribers to respond. The Purpose of Goals Your subscriber’s needs should always come first and foremost when it comes to what makes an email great. However, we’re all doing email marketing because it’s good for our business as well. As such, it’s im- portant to understand the purpose of an email when deciding if your email is great. If the purpose of an email was to announce a new product, did the link 15 of 42 what makes a great email?

16. to the product page get a good CTR? Has traffic to the product page increased since the email was sent? It’s important to track the success of your emails to determine if you’re achieving your goals. If you’re segmenting your list(s), compare the results of campaigns be- tween specific segments. That way you’ll know if which segments are performing best and if your campaigns have been successfully targe- ted. It’s also important to track your goals to see if you’re improving with each email you send. Reports are only helpful if you know the measu- rable goals you set out to achieve. If you can see improvements by the numbers, you’re sending great email. 16 of 42 what makes a great email?

17. 3. Less Is More When it comes to what makes an email good, oftentimes less is more, but more can be OK too if it’s done right. Whether or not school was your favorite thing, we are all creatures that love to learn (even if we can all think of that one stubborn relative that may make us believe otherwise). However, contradictory to that is our culture of short attention spans. Most people will simply scan an email to get the gist of it. Even with the time spent reading an email increasing by 7% between 2011 and 2016 to an average of 11.1 seconds, you don’t have much time to win a subscriber’s attention. 17 of 42 what makes a great email?

18. Combine that average per email How people view email with the sheer amount of emails in our inboxes, and you’re already fighting an uphill battle. Given the above stat, it’s impor- tant that a subscriber can take in your entire email within that time limit. Doing so will either make them want to spend more time there or at the very least let them take away the important parts. It’s important to know what your subscriber will see either in the preview of the email in their inbox or above the fold (everything they can see before they have to scro- ll down). Designing your email to have a wow factor in this space 18 of 42 what makes a great email?

19. will capture the attention of your subscribers. A wow factor could include several aspects. A catchy headline will work similarly to a great subject line. A captivating image can also work. Anything that will pique the curiosity of your subscriber that can lead them to want to read more is helpful. That’s where less is more comes into play. Don’t overwhelm your subs- criber with too much content right off the bat, or they won’t have any takeaways. Worse yet, they may decide they’re too busy to read it now and then likely forget to return to it later. Just because what’s above the fold is most important, doesn’t mean you should ignore the rest of your email. While you don’t want to dis- tract your subscriber from the purpose of the email, you can set up breadcrumbs throughout to tell one compelling story with your email. 19 of 42 what makes a great email?

20. Spotify sent a year- end email to close out 2016 that was a shining example of putting your focus on the above the fold design. 20 of 42 what makes a great email?

21. At first glance, you can grasp the purpose of the email. Not only that, there aren’t many music listeners who would not be curious as to see the rundown of the music he or she had listened to that year. Plus, the- re’s a CTA that takes them directly into Spotify. We can all agree this is a great email. 4. Design Is Essential We alluded to it before, but the design is another element that will help keep your subscribers in your email longer than 11.1 seconds. That doesn’t just mean hiring the graphic design freelancer with sleeves of tattoos that you see at the local coffee shop to create mind blowing graphics or email templates. You need to go back to the pur- pose of your emails and make sure that the graphics you’re using are appropriate for it. It’s not only about your graphic elements. Emails are meant to be read. Is your font big enough and easy to read? Is it spaced well enough? 21 of 42 what makes a great email?

22. An example of a well designed email Many subscribers will say they prefer HTML emails to plain-text, but in A/B tests run by Hubspot, the results proved otherwise. In every sin- gle test they ran, the simpler-designed email won. If your subscribers are guilty of being email skimmers, it’s important to design your email to accommo date that. Things like headlines and 22 of 42 what makes a great email?

23. sub-headers, bullet points and other text call outs or CTA buttons crea- te a pattern for your subscribers to be able to more easily skim your email. Whether it’s 11.1 seconds or 11 minutes, your subscribers are giving you their time. Make it worthwhile for them with a well-designed, enjoya- ble experience. This will lead to more engagement and less list churn in the long-run. 5. Tone Tone is an aspect that many people forget. This is also often referred to as the voice of your emails. Tone is the personality that your emails have. It’s the voice your subs- criber hears when they read your emails. Sometimes our tone can become stiff, simply by subconsciously knowing it’s for work. Try writing an email as if you were writing a holiday card to close friends and family. Or you can use your customer 23 of 42 what makes a great email?

24. personas and picture each one when you write the email geared for that subscriber segment. If the voice you write your emails with is always one note or straigh- tforward, you might delight or even surprise with something fun, or even something as easy as a more personal, humanizing tone. You may be surprised at what changing the tone of your emails can achieve. Granted, it’s a fine line you walk when you try to break away from the standard. You need to retain trust in your brand. When you think of banking, fun and playful is not the tone you’d expect. Simple, an online banking service which looked to break from the tra- ditional banking model, with a more user-friendly approach, applied that same attitude and tone in an email campaign regarding their Pri- vacy Policy. They are required by law to update their Privacy Policy and share it with customers. They put a spin on it. If you’re like us, the idea of a Privacy Policy email sends shivers down our spine. Or at the very least thoughts of immediately deleting it. 24 of 42 what makes a great email?

25. However, that’s not the case when you see “Legally Required Annual Celebration of Pri- vacy Policy Updates” at the top of the email. Wouldn’t this make you want to read on? 25 of 42 what makes a great email?

26. The tone of the entire email carries similar per- sonality. It makes you want to read the entire thing. For those that do, undoubtedly a higher percentage than any other business’ Privacy Po- licy email campaign, they’re rewarded with a fa- vorite on the internet. A picture of a cute animal: And that’s pretty much it for our Annual Celebration of Privacy Policy Updates and Disclosure of Regulation E Guidelines for Electronic Fund Transfers! Hooray! Did you make it this far? If so, you now know more about bank rules than most people in the world. You also get this puppy photo: May the rest of your day be free of legalese, - The Team at Simple View live email 26 of 42 what makes a great email?

27. Simple managed to take a very serious email that they are legally re- quired to send each year and turned it into a fun experience for their customers. Now it’s an email that their customers even look forward to every year. Imagine going from being deleted immediately to saved, shared and even talked about across the web! 6. Clear CTA Flint McGlaughlin, Founder and Managing Direc- tor of MECLABS, likes to say that you cannot sell anything with email marketing other than a click. He’s right. The purchase will happen more often than not on your web- site or at your brick-and-mortar location. What you need to focus on in your emails is the click. Enter CTAs. If you have properly defined the purpose of your email, the CTA should be obvious. It should be clear and easy to follow. So easy, in fact, that there are staggering stats out there that support only having one CTA in an email campaign. 27 of 42 what makes a great email?

28. A clear and inviting CTA from Farewill 28 of 42 what makes a great email?

29. Recently, Toast tested having one clear CTA in their email campaigns. This test yielded in- creased clicks to the tune of 371% and boosted sales 1,617%. Your subscribers are busy (or worse … lazy)! Don’t make them do too much work. You may rightly be thinking that there are more than one thing you might need a subscriber or customer to take action on. That’s OK! Just use more than one email to achieve this. Automation is a great tool to accomplish multiple user engagements, actions or interactions. You can set up a sequence that is behavior-ba- sed. When one goal is completed, the next email in the journey can be triggered. This lets you split the big wins into micro wins. If you go for little vic- tories at each step, you’re going to accomplish the same goal. The Toast stats above support the results. One CTA equaled a whole lot of great. 29 of 42 what makes a great email?

30. 7. Be Prepared to Listen A great email is a two-way communication opportunity. Email marketing can often feel like a broadcast channel, but successful email marketing carries the conversation both ways. Sending your emails from a name that will be recognizable to your subscribers makes them feel like there’s someone on the other side. The email address from which you send is also important. You should never send from a no-reply@yourbusiness.com address. This makes subscribers feel like you don’t even care what they have to say. If you’re listening, a great email also speaks to you through your re- ports: • A high open rate tells you that you wrote a great subject line and that your from name and address are familiar to your subscribers. • A good CTR lets you know that the content in your emails is inte- resting and that you’ve written an effective CTA. Say you own a bookstore. If you’re paying attention to your subscribers and the data, you’ll know their interests. 30 of 42 what makes a great email?

31. Seeing what types of books your subscribers click on will help you crea- te segments. You can sort your list into segments on Young Adults, Co- medy, Non-Fiction, etc. and tailor individual campaigns to each list. The goal, tone, design and CTA can all benefit from listening to your subscribers through your reports. Listening allows you to accomplish the other aspects of a great email, by crafting emails that check the boxes of each aspect for a specific audience. Your comedy list can be a bit more cheeky and fun. We don’t recom- 31 of 42 what makes a great email?

32. mend pandering to a Young Adult audience by using words like fleek but do what feels right for your brand. A fun non-fiction campaign for a book promoting a biography could be crafting an email using as many quotes from the subject of the book as possible. 8. Go Above and Beyond Like we said at the start: a great email creates an experience. It’s your job to make sure that your subscribers enjoy receiving your emails. Successful email marketers will even make their subscribers look forward to their emails. One way you can do this is by delighting your subscribers by doing a little extra. Some inboxes have images turned off by default. This can cause an email to look broken or unappealing. 32 of 42 what makes a great email?

33. The PlayStation Store decided to have a bit of fun with this aspect of email marketing and turned a negative into a positive. They designed their email campaign to work both with images turned on and with the images off. Check this out: Optimus Prime was right there, hiding in plain sight. The email itself is a Transformer! When image loading is enabled in mail client When image loading is disabled what makes a great email? 33 of 42

34. You don’t have to be quite as nifty as the previous example. Finding other opportunities to delight or create some fun with your email cam- paigns goes a long way towards making an email great. Using a fun, holiday themed variation of your email template will help spread cheer. You can add a GIF to your email in place of standard gra- phics to add some movement and excitement. Don’t forget, email is easily forwarded. That means individuals other than your regular subscribers may be seeing if you managed to go abo- ve and beyond and created some excitement. That hammers home the importance of a consistent brand experience, even if it’s a first impression. Know that each email may be the first time someone engages with your brand. If you can wow them out of the gates, you’re already winning. 34 of 42 what makes a great email?

35. The email continues on to tell a story of your year in music. It shared how diverse your listening habits were, on what days you listened to music the most and the artists to which you listened most often. It’s a fun retrospective on the year and definitely created a story which you would be excited to share and compare with friends. Even with a simple text-only email cam- paign, CD Baby found a way to do a litt- le more with a transaction email. We dare you not to smile at this: 35 of 42 what makes a great email?

36. In Conclusion When broken down into the essential elements, it’s not difficult to see what makes a great email. Emails that are not great are one-way communicators only looking to sell and not serve the needs of your subscribers. They’re boring or stale newsletters that do not create an experience. Great emails look for a response. They inspire engagement. These are the elements of a great email: 1. List Segmentation: Understand Your Audience 2. Set a Goal 3. Less is More 4. Design is Essential 8. Go Above and Beyond 7. Be Prepared to Listen 5. Tone 6. Clear CTA 36 of 42 what makes a great email?

37. When creating an email, ask yourself: what is in it for your subscriber? What are the emails you get most excited about in your own inbox? Was it a Black Friday or Cyber Monday deal that yielded your new favorite gadget? Maybe it was a tour announcement and dates from your favorite band? Or was it a newsletter from one of your favorite influencers that helped teach you a new skill? Are you sending great email? What kind of feelings are you delive- ring to your subscribers? 37 of 42 what makes a great email?

38. Perhaps it was a Father’s Day email that helped you find something other than a pair of socks or a tie for the man who taught you right from wrong. Each of the above examples gets you excited about something and keeps you engaged. 38 of 42 what makes a great email?

39. Put What You’ve Learned to Use Are you ready to get started? If you’re not already using Benchmark, the totally free Benchmark Star- ter Plan was built to get you off the ground with your email marketing and engagement efforts and to experience the practical tools available. Send email campaigns to your subscribers for $0 per month. Access ba- sic features and upgrade when you’re ready to find out what happens after great email marketing. Get started today! BenchmarkEmail.com/RegisterFree 39 of 42 what makes a great email?

40. About Benchmark what makes a great email?

41. Since Day One We help businesses thrive with online sales and marketing solutions. Benchmark Email offers an integrated, automated and robust feature set built to help the enterprise of any size. A powerfully simple and simply powerful email marketing solution designed to help you create and send compelling campaigns with ease. Engagement tools designed to help your business guide your custo- mers through the customer journey. Bring customers in with signup forms that automatically fit into any space on your site you want. Automated and triggered follow up tools to stay in touch with your subscribers. Target, Test and Track success. Learn more at www.benchmarkemail.com/about-us what makes a great email?

42. what makes a great email?