How to Implement Better B2B Email Marketing Campaigns

SPEAKERS

Jamie Woodbridge, Christian Klepp

Christian Klepp  00:01

Welcome to this episode of B2B Marketers on a Mission, and I’m your host, Christian Klepp. Today I’ll be talking to Jamie Woodbridge. He is one of the co-founders of The Inbox Club, an email marketing agency with one mission: Get real results for brands with email marketing without all the boring stuff. Jamie has over 13 years of sales and marketing experience. Who can turn your newsletter from a box-ticking exercise into a truly engaging piece of content that nurtures and converts your contacts. Tune in to find out more about what this B2B marketer’s mission is. Mr. Jamie Woodbridge, welcome to the show.

Jamie Woodbridge  00:41

Thanks Christian, thanks for having me on.

Christian Klepp  00:43

I’m really looking forward to this conversation, Jamie, but before we jump in, I’d like to give a shout out to Mr. Anthony Leung for the introduction. Thank you, sir. It’s all on you. Okay, fantastic. Let’s, let’s dive into this conversation, because I think the audience is going to get a lot of value out of this. So you know, you, you’re on a mission. I’m gonna just quote what you said on your LinkedIn profile to help B to B companies develop and implement content that is interesting, relevant and generates the right results. And for this conversation, I’d like to focus on a topic that I think is going to be very useful to B2B marketers, and that’s how to implement better email marketing campaigns for B2B. So I’m going to kick off this conversation with this question, where do most email marketing campaigns fall flat, and why?

Jamie Woodbridge  01:28

It’s a great question. Christian. And we at The Inbox Club, we’re very passionate about this subject, and actually this question was something that we asked ourselves when we created our email marketing agency, because we saw it happen so often. And so when we talk about how, why do email marketing campaigns fall flat, it’s usually because of one of two things. Firstly, they’re boring, right? And so this was something that we saw a lot of… in newsletters that were going out, particularly from B to B companies, they were just too boring, and that’s sometimes about the kind of content that was in them, but also the way that they were written. So that was one thing. And the second thing is about the audience, and about gathering the right audience, and then once you’ve gathered that right audience, talking to them in a way that’s relevant. So those are two ways in which we see B2B email marketing campaigns fall flat. And hopefully we can explore both of those areas a little bit more today. And as I said, you’ll have to catch me if I’m waffling, because it’s something I’m really passionate about, so we’ll continue to talk about but, yeah, excited to be here. Thanks again.

Christian Klepp  02:44

Yeah, absolutely. And waffle away. Well, those are the fantastic way to kick off this conversation. Good points, and I’m gonna play the devil’s advocate now, because I’ve seen this a lot on LinkedIn. I actually got into it, and I would say, a very polite argument (laugh), for lack of a better description, with someone on LinkedIn on the topic of boring, on the topic of boring content, right? And basically this individual was arguing that boring wins at the end of the day in B to B something that I passionately disagree with. But over to you, define boring for us?

Jamie Woodbridge  03:23

Absolutely, I think boring is more nuanced than you would originally assume. I think what we mean, or what I mean certainly by boring, is that it’s not relevant. Because ultimately, if it’s not relevant, then it’s boring for you, because it’s not resonating with you. It’s not the right content. So when we talk about boring, we talk about it in a sense of, okay, maybe, how are you writing? So, you know, are you writing in an entertaining way? And that’s something that we like to do at the inbox club and for our clients. But also, what are you writing about? And you know, it’s got to be the right fit for the audience. Because if I was to pick out an example, someone who subscribes to a newsletter about Napoleonic military strategy, some people find that incredibly interesting. Some people find it boring, right? So when we talk about boring, we talk about it not matching the audience. The content isn’t matching the audience. But I would love to have a conversation with a guy that you had a polite disagreement about with, because I would like to hear what his definition of boring is. Because, in a way, I can kind of see his point right, in terms of, you know, getting a content strategy nailed down, sticking to it and doing it consistently. You know, maybe that’s what he meant as boring. But I just, I still think that there’s a place for us to be entertaining and for us to write passionately and in a very conversational and authentic way, as well as getting the content strategy right as well.

Christian Klepp  05:01

Absolutely, absolutely. That’s great point. And, oh yes, by the way, I’m one of those people that finds a Napoleonic military strategy interesting. (laugh) But you brought up something that I’d like to dig into a little bit deeper, Jamie, if you don’t mind, on the topic of entertainment or entertaining content in B to B, right? What’s your take on injecting humor into B to B content?

Jamie Woodbridge  05:27

I love it. I do it so I’m quite active on LinkedIn, and all of my posts, I’ll try and be funny. You know, sometimes I’m funnier than I am. Other times, in all of our own marketing, we try and inject humor. Humor is a great tool for a load of different types of content. I think B to C is obviously really good at it, right? You know, they, if you see a lot of the B to C or D to C brands, they will use humor as a ballast in their content. And this is something that’s not an original thought from me, but when we talk about B to B audience, you know, we are still talking to people, and it’s just humor is a great way to connect with people, to resonate with people, but we’ve got to balance it out with the brand as well, right? So if your brand, if you’re running a pediatric surgery, humor might not always be well placed, or if you’re running a funeral home or something, you know, so we have to balance it out with branding as well, and even some of the more professional services, maybe say lawyers, accountants, I would say there is still a place for humor, but we’ve got to balance it out with the brand guidelines. So I’m a big advocate of using humor. It shouldn’t be something that is your differentiator, and it shouldn’t be the main pivot of your of your content strategy, for sure. I think it’s an embellishment, but it’s a very valuable one.

Christian Klepp  06:53

As you said, I suppose it depends on the situation, it depends on the vertical and depends on the target audience, right?

Jamie Woodbridge  06:59

For sure, absolutely, yeah.

Christian Klepp  07:00

I’m gonna move us on to the next question, and I’m sure you’ll have an opinion about this. But where do you see the untapped potential in email marketing?

Jamie Woodbridge  07:11

So I talked about a little bit earlier about how one of our passions is in entertaining, exciting, relevant content, right? That’s kind of one of the cornerstones of what we do at our agency. The other cornerstone. So we’re founded on these two cornerstones. The other one is about first party data. And I think gathering high quality first party data in the form of an email list is an incredibly untapped opportunity for most B to B businesses. I heard a chat, I can’t remember his name, on another podcast talking about how an email list is probably a business’s most valuable asset, or at least one of their most valuable assets. So if we talk about it in those times, we start to understand the importance of gathering an email list. There’s a couple of reasons why it is so important. One, it’s the data that you own as a business. So it doesn’t matter if Elon Musk buys a platform and you lose a following overnight, or your following is impacted. It doesn’t matter if the platform gets banned in the US because it’s owned by China. You know, these things could be fragile, and you could lose audiences overnight. So if you own first party data, you own the email list, it’s yours to control within the confines of data privacy laws, etc. The other thing is that you could speak to your whole list at any time or at any point, and this was something that you’re battling with on social media platforms, for instance, where you’re battling with an algorithm, and your content might be shown to you know, 5% 10% whatever it is, of your following. With an email list, you can contact all of them at any point, and you just have to make sure that your content is relevant enough, entertaining enough to be able to inspire opens, and then the only thing. The only other thing you’re battling with is perhaps spam restrictions, where you end up in the junk folder, etc. But those things are much easily or much easier to remedy than battling with an algorithm on social media.

Christian Klepp  09:19

Absolutely, absolutely. And I’m glad that you brought up the topic of first party data, and we’re gonna talk about that later on in the conversation, right? So moving on to the next question, and it’s again regarding email marketing for B to B, what are the pitfalls that B to B marketers should avoid, and what should they be doing instead?

Jamie Woodbridge  09:40

Yeah, I think one of the pitfalls for me is having this element of vanity around your subscriber count, and so chasing a high number of subscribers so that you can almost boast about the fact that you’ve got X amount of subscribers, where I actually think it’s much more important to focus on a smaller number of subscribers that are really high quality. And what do I mean by high quality? One they should be, they should match your ICP or your ideal customer profile. So be really clear on that, and gather those people on your list. And then the second thing is, is that they should be engaged. So what we want to do is keep everyone on your list engaged through great content and through creating content that is relevant for them. Because you’ve created this persona, this ideal subscriber. So for me, that’s a pitfall. And when people come to us and they need help with list growth and building their email list, we’re very clear to make sure that we are getting high quality subscribers, not a high number of subscribers. You know, there is a key difference there. So yeah, I would say that that’s that’s one of them. And again, that goes back to one of our cornerstones about building first party data, which you mentioned we’re going to talk about a little bit later on.

Christian Klepp  11:06

Absolutely, absolutely. You know what, Jamie, you just made me think of another question now as you were talking, and I think it’s very, very relevant to email marketing, and it’s because we all experience it, I certainly do, but it’s this, the email sequences and the cadence, yeah, at which these emails go out. I’m not asking you for the the secret recipe here, but I’m asking you for what, in your experience, tends to be the right number of emails, the right cadence, right? Because sometimes you get, you get these spammy emails and you get a follow up, like within a day and then two days later. So it’s almost like you get five or six emails until they finally break up with you, right?

Jamie Woodbridge  11:52

I don’t mind giving you the secret recipe, because it’s it’s not that easy to put in action. The secret recipe is testing, so we want to make sure that whatever we choose or whatever we decide upon is our cadence, that it’s something that’s decided upon through testing. And that’s one of the beautiful things about email marketing as well, right? Is that the presentation of the engagement metrics are so transparent. You know who’s is, who is opening, who is clicking. And so you can test this, this send schedule. And some topics can get away with emailing, perhaps even multiple times a day. Some topics once a month. And I would say once a month is usually a minimum for us. We usually don’t. We usually advise clients that they should be sending at least once a month. My co-founder, he runs a fantasy football newsletter, and the idea of that newsletter is that they send tips on what you should be doing your with your fantasy football team. And so it’s a hobbyist newsletter. It means, and it’s very deadline-specific, and that newsletter goes out three times a week, but for some B to B businesses, three times a week will be overkill. So again, we’re going back to that, thinking about the audience, thinking about the purpose that you’re serving with your newsletter, and how often communicating with that audience kind of ticks the box of the content strategy that you’ve chosen. So I don’t know if it’s Napoleonic military strategy. I’ll have to ask people who enjoy that kind of content how often they’ll want to read about it. But like I said, start sending emails and the data will tell you the story.

Christian Klepp  13:40

Absolutely yeah. To answer your question, I would say every 30 minutes. No, I’m just kidding. All right, moving us on to the next question, right? So talk to us about the importance of the following as it relates to email marketing. And I’m happy to repeat because there are three points, yeah, so having a deep understanding of your target audience, and you’ve kind of brought that up already, having the right strategy and approach. So obviously, we’re talking about the content plan here, and having the right messaging and call to action, right it’s not always just book a demo call.

Jamie Woodbridge  14:15

Yes, I’m going to try and remember all three of these Christian so we’ve got, we’ve got number one, which is understanding your audience. Hopefully, by the time someone decides to start sending email campaigns, they already have identified their audience and will know their audience very well, because that audience are the people they serve as customers. So hopefully they have done that work prior to to deciding, okay, we’re going to send a newsletter. And if they haven’t, then they’ve got a more fundamental issue, you know, as to, other than, are my email marketing campaigns going to fall flat? They’ve got a more fundamental issue is, does my business really understand who it serves? When it comes to email marketing, specifically understanding the audience is really key. You need to know who they are. You need to know what problems they have. You need to know what opportunities they have, and you need to understand your relationship with each of those points as a business, and how you can help them, how you can offer value. Because the newsletter needs to do that thing. Do that for those people, understanding an audience also helps with how you communicate with them as well, not just what you’re saying, but when and how you’re saying it. For instance, if you’re targeting if your ideal client or your ideal subscriber is someone in a C-suite role, you can assume that they are incredibly busy. It’s the reason why executive summaries exist, so that you want to keep your newsletter short and snappy, perhaps in the morning before their before their morning starts at maybe 8am 8:30 or something. And, you know, make it really easy and keep it short, sweet and snappy, and offer the value up front without burying the lead, you know? So it’s understanding your audience is key to not just what you’re saying, but how you you’re communicating it as well.

Christian Klepp  16:09

Fantastic. The second point is strategy and approach.

Jamie Woodbridge  16:13

So I touched on it a little bit there. But once you’ve understood who your audience is and your ideal subscriber, then we start to think, okay, what are we going to send these people? So if we know what their problems are, if we know what opportunities they have as a person in their in their job, then we can start to understand how my business can serve them, help solve those problems or help capture those opportunities. And then what we want to do is, in our email marketing campaigns, we want to talk about that, and we don’t want to give everything away, right? Because we’ve got to sell something at the end of the day. But your newsletter should have a proposition of its own. It’s almost like a gateway drug to your service, right is it’s the foot in the door. It’s how you demonstrate expertise in your field and you develop familiarity and trust. So your newsletter should have this proposition. Now, if we go back to the C suite idea, we talked about how they might be incredibly busy individuals, and we talked a little bit how we might target them. Okay, well, maybe I run a project management tool and what I’m going to send them each day or each week in the morning. Here’s your time saving tip for today. You know. Here’s how you can save an hour today. You know. So something that’s helping them something that’s welcome in the inbox every time it lands. So think about once you understand your audience. Okay, now let’s develop a content strategy. What are we going to send that’s going to resonate with them.

Christian Klepp  17:49

And then it’s the right messaging and call to action?

Jamie Woodbridge  17:52

Yeah, perfect. So I guess this ties in nicely with, you know, putting with what we’ve just spoken about with those other two points. Once we have the audience down in the content strategy, then it’s about how we write to these people. And I talked a little bit there about how your newsletter should have a proposition, you know, you’ve got to, you’ve got to sell the idea of being subscribed to your newsletter or your email campaigns, because it’s… you know, it’s a privilege to be in someone’s inbox. It’s a privilege to own their data and to have permission to email them. So we want to make sure that we aren’t that… that we are extolling the virtues of being subscribed to this newsletter. What’s the value you’re going to offer? And then call to actions is a great point, because when we talk about a call to action, we want to make sure that whatever we do, whatever we ask people to do, is moving them meaningfully through the funnel. Okay, so at this point, they’re already in your funnel, to a certain degree, in your marketing funnel, because they’ve chosen to subscribe, which is a meaningful step forward. They’re not just a stranger anymore. So when we put in a CTA, we want to make sure that we move them along the funnel in some way. And sometimes that might be book a demo, and sometimes that’s too big a step. So we might want to think about, how can we get them to be engaged even further with our business? You know, maybe we’re running a webinar series, maybe we have a podcast that we want them to listen to, whatever it is. We want to move them into the next piece of the puzzle when it comes to the marketing funnel, I’m not a massive fan of moving people backwards in the funnel, and so when I talk about moving people backwards, directing them to a social media post or directing them to a blog post, can be bit of a move backwards. We want a meaningful step forward. So when we ask people to take action.

Christian Klepp  19:44

Absolutely, absolutely no, I agree with you. You know, moving them a step back, well, that not only prolongs the journey for them, it might also hopefully not, but it might also like frustrate them, like it will lead to a bad user experience, so to speak, a bad journey, in a sense, right?

Jamie Woodbridge  20:04

Yeah, absolutely, yeah.

Christian Klepp  20:06

Moving on to the next question. So you touched a little bit earlier, but like talk to us about how the following impact email marketing, so data privacy, so for example, GDPR, and we can throw in the topic of first party data as well. And the second point AI, because, you know, it’s 2024, and if I didn’t ask you a question about AI, then where would we be.

Jamie Woodbridge  20:31

Of course, yeah, you got to expect the AI to rear its head at some point. And for good reason as well. Let’s talk about data privacy first. It’s one of those things that had marketers rolling their eyes a little bit, especially here in Europe when GDPR came in, and it was this kind of panic stations approach, and was seen as perhaps a little bit frustrating for some people as well. What I will say about data privacy is that it is a good thing for marketing, because we have people who come to us where they might have, I won’t name any names, but where they have might scraped some data, or maybe even purchase some data, which is a big, big gray area. We usually turn those people away, because what we aren’t doing is we aren’t gathering an audience that wants to hear from us. And when you’ve got these data privacy rules coming in, say, GDPR, what that’s actually doing is it’s curating people’s inboxes. It’s getting rid of the noise a little bit, and it’s kind of making sure that whatever is coming through is welcome. So you know, it’s not in a perfect place at the moment, but it actually is helpful from my point of view. And it goes back to gathering an email list where I said earlier about people chasing the high number, as opposed to focusing on making sure that their subscribers are of high quality. It kind of puts the responsibility on the business to think about how they’re gathering their email list a little bit more. You know, instead of just scraping, you know, 1000s of email addresses and kind of spraying and praying and, you know, quoting and hoping and just hoping, you know that something comes in, we are thinking now about building almost a community in some sense. You know, if we’re gathering this first party data we’re gathering this email audience, you know, we’re only a couple of steps away then from building a community. And community, community marketing is something that’s, that’s kind of big right now as well. So that’s why I like data privacy and why I don’t roll my eyes when people talk about it, or, you know, I think it’s a good thing. And, yes.

Jamie Woodbridge  22:45

The other thing you asked was AI, right?

Christian Klepp  22:46

I did, yeah.

Jamie Woodbridge  22:48

So AI, look, I’m a non techie person, right? So I’m a marketer and I’m a sales person, but I do have kind of two perspectives, which people will have heard of these from other people. So they’re not kind of groundbreaking things. But firstly, uh, content generation is the first and most obvious thing that that will be impacted by AI and is being impacted by AI. So writing the emails, I actually, I’m not against it. If you can make these AI tools do it in a way that sounds like you and sounds like your brand. And it is on point when it comes to being authentic and personable. My feeling, having experimented with these things and seeing people experiment with these tools at the moment, is that it’s a little bit off. It’s too far off to be there yet. So in terms of using AI for email marketing campaigns, it’s great for ideation, it’s great for brainstorming, it’s great for research, as long as you’re checking the sources and make sure it’s  quoting accurately, because sometimes it doesn’t. When it comes to writing the content, I think you’re much better off writing it yourself at the moment. It’s, you can make it sound like you, you can… I heard a great guy talk about AI and how it’s not very good at coming up with the unexpected. And that’s something that humans are really good at doing. It’s coming up with the unexpected and coming up with this great storytelling. And I do think that if you aren’t able to write, which I would challenge, because I think most people can write how they talk. And if you run a business or you run a marketing department, you’re able to talk in an engaging way, in some way, shape or form. So writing how you talk is the first step. But if you aren’t able to do that, engaging a copywriter to help you do it. You’re far better off than using AI tools right now. The other way in which AI will impact email marketing is around the more technical back end. So we’re talking about algorithms that will help you target people better. You know, if we have these AI tools that will start to paint this picture of how people are engaging with your emails to a better degree, in terms of what time they’re opening, how long they’re spending and then to help you manage your send schedule, I think that’s one thing that might come in and we are seeing kind of this the beginnings that at the moment as well. So that assistance, because that is a big area for people. It’s like, well, how often should I send, and what time of day should I send? And what, you know, what day should I send? And all of those are probably some of the most Googled questions when it comes to email marketing. And so AI tools that will help you do that, I think will be something that’s that we’ll see and more and more of.

Christian Klepp  25:37

Great answer. And you kind of set yourself up for a follow up question there, if we’re, if we’ve been talking at length now about AI tools, if you can just what are some of these AI tools that you’ve you’ve tested out or you’re working with, and which ones would you recommend for email marketing?

Jamie Woodbridge  25:55

Yeah, for sure that we aren’t using that full a suite of AI tools, if I’m honest. We in with regards to running our agency, there are a few tools that we use that are incredibly helpful. ChatGPT is the most obvious one. We use it fairly often when it comes to researching, when it comes to ideation. Not very often. We don’t use it for image generation that much openAI, but we are using it for ideation. We’re not using it for content generation. I wouldn’t be against it if it makes some leaps and bounds eventually, but right now, it’s nowhere near where it used to be. And you know, as copywriters, we need to be at the top of our game in that respect. Another AI tool where we use quite often, which isn’t necessarily email marketing specific, but around, you know, note-taking apps in meetings, etc. And actually, for a long time, I didn’t adopt one of those tools, but now that I do the analysis that it gives me in the background after each call and the summary, huge time saving for us there. And I would encourage anyone that’s not using a note taker in their meetings, especially for those ones, but that have action points and minutes that get written up afterwards, I would definitely think about bringing one of those in. We use Firefly for that. We There are obviously native AI tools that we’re seeing on a lot of these platforms as well. So MailChimp is one that’s a platform that’s using at the moment, they have tools. I’m not on commission, by the way, but MailChimp has tools within their platform that will you put your website in for your business, and it will start to automatically generate, using AI, some design templates for you for your emails. Those are a little bit off at the moment from a finished product, but it gives you a starting point, which is great. And then there, you know, a lot of these platforms also have these kind of AI tools and tips that they’re kind of operating in the background. We have to be really careful with what we’re using there, though, because at the moment these, a lot of these tools are too early on to rely on, is what I would say. And you can see that with a platform like LinkedIn. You know what I hear, what I see, people being frustrated at how primitive the AI tools are on LinkedIn at the moment. You know, so you’ve got these suggested replies or suggested comments on people’s posts. So you’ve got these. Even suggested rewrite this in AI, you know, and it’s it… I think that’s a bad thing for for that platform. So we have to be careful that we aren’t just using it because it’s something that’s trendy and in right now, but it’s actually serving us a purpose, and it means that whoever’s receiving our emails. Gets a better quality email at the end of the day, because that’s the only thing from us.

Christian Klepp  28:45

That’s the key phrase right there, serving us a purpose, right? You don’t want to just use it because it’s the next shiny object. Or, you know, like a lot of people, they just want to chase the next hack, the newest hack. You know, throw in whatever analogy you want, the easy way out, the shortcut, right? It needs to have something that will make your work, that will complement your work, or make it more efficient, right? And help improve the quality, help save you some time, but not completely replace the work that you do.

Jamie Woodbridge  29:20

Yeah, absolutely. I think, actually, you know, if I was to sum that up, I think someone… a talk that I listened to, I must get better at remembering the names of people who taught me these wise things. But someone mentioned, you know, write down the business problem that you have first and then find a tool that solves it, as opposed to, you know, coming across these tools and then finding problems for it to serve, you know, so that’s a great example of why I started using an AI note taker app, right? Because I had a problem that needed solving. And so eventually I got one in, and it serves a great purpose now, so and that, I think that could go down for any, any piece of software beyond AI, you know, write down the business problem first and then find a solution for it.

Christian Klepp  30:06

Yeah, no, absolutely, absolutely. Okay, so we get to the part where we talk about actionable tips. So provide us with something actionable here. If somebody were listening to this conversation, what are three to five things that they could do to implement email marketing campaigns that generate better results.

Jamie Woodbridge  30:25

I’m going to go for five here Christian because we want to deliver as much value as we can to the listeners as possible. First and foremost, we’ve got to think about the subscribers and we, you know, I’ve talked about this a lot already, but what I would do is as an actionable tip here, get a piece of paper and a pen, open a Google Doc or Microsoft Word, whatever you use, and start to write down the key elements of your ideal clients or your ideal subscriber. You know, who are they? What do they do? What job do they do? What do you understand about them? What problems do they have, what pain points, you know, so that would be my first actual tip. Start to write out a profile for your ideal subscriber. The second one is now that we understand that is writing a one sentence proposition for what your newsletter will be, or what your email campaigns, marketing campaigns will be. And I can give you the example of hour one. Here is that at the inbox club, so it’s once a week, you’ll get email marketing tips that will help you send better emails, and it will take three to five minutes to read. So that’s our proposition. You know, it could be better. We probably need to work on it a little bit. But what we want to get to is that one sentence, and once we understand the audience, in our audience is email marketing managers and founders of small businesses and medium businesses. Once we understand that, then we start to build this one sentence proposition out. The next thing so number three is to make your sign up forms really, really good. So like I said, we’ve understood the audience. We understand the subscribers we want. We now have a proposition for what our newsletter will do in terms of delivering value. So let’s make our forms really good. And I would encourage anyone who is sending email marketing campaigns to have three different forms, at least an embedded form at the footer, or, even better, at the header, on the header of your website. You know, make it a really high priority call to action on your website. Secondly, a pop up. I’m a big fan of pop ups. Some people don’t put them on or put them in action because they think they’re annoying. Yes, they can be annoying. And Christians hand is up. You think you’re there. They are annoying. They are annoying, especially if you get on your mobile you’re opening a website. You get the cookies pop up, and then you get the email pop up, and you’ve not even had a chance to to even visit the website yet. So what we want to do is we want to think about, okay, let’s be more clever here with the pop up so we can put time delays on them, you know. We can say, well, they only pop up as you with once you’ve scrolled, you know, a certain way down the page. We can make sure that they only appear on certain pages. We can make sure that they only appear on exit intent. You know, there are lots of ways that you can configure a pop up to make it so that it’s not annoying. And what we want to do is we want to make sure it’s popping up at a point in which the person on a website has had enough time for the website to resonate with them before the pop up gets served. And then whatever the pop up says needs to be super relevant to get them to move. Because what we’re doing there is we’re moving them along funnel, right? We’re moving them from website visitor to email subscriber. Yes, two forms embedded pop up, and then the third form is having a landing page of its own that is just for your newsletter. And we have that, and what we use that for is we send it to people, we display that on social media, and that’s where people go to sign up. You don’t want to say, go to my website and find the sign up form. You know, make it easier for people and create a landing page for your newsletter. So make your forms really good. That was point number three. Point number four is about the your email list, going back to your email list again, and it’s about audience management first. To sum up number four succinctly here, I would say you should be cleaning your list. And this is something actually that we wrestle with our clients and people that we’re talking to quite often, because the action of reducing your subscriber count seems counter intuitive, but there’s a very good reason why you should be archiving or suppressing email subscribers. What we want to do is we want to make sure that our email list is engaged. An engaged email list is a better email list so those that have stopped engaging and you can set the parameter. Is for this yourself, you could say, Okay, someone hasn’t opened an email in the past 90 days, which is three months, and that’s a long time, especially if you’re sending, if you’re sending weekly, for example, or more than weekly. So we set that pro app so no one’s they’ve not opened the email in the past 90 days. So what we want to do is perhaps then target them with an automation and say, okay, for anyone who hasn’t opened an email in 90 days, send them this to email automation that is aimed at specifically to get them to re engage with your emails so they then become engaged again. If they go through that automation and still don’t engage, then let’s archival, suppress them. And there’s two reasons why you should do that. One is because poor engagement metrics, so low open rates, low click rates, etc, high bounce rates, small scan place, those affect your sender reputation and can harm your deliverability, ie, you’re more likely to land into the spam folder. And the second reason why we want to archive these people, if they become unengaged, is because it might reduce the bill that you’re paying your email platform. You know, because a lot of these platforms will you’ll pay per subscriber or by subscribe account, and if you archive them, I would stress, archive them. Don’t delete them. They quite often come off your bill. So you know, you’re, you’re you’re curating this list, then you’re keeping people that on there that want to be there, and so you’re not paying for people that aren’t don’t want to be there and aren’t engaging with your emails. So that’s not before, that’s clean your list, and I would do that today. Number five is about your CTAs. So the call to action, we don’t want to give to people too many options. And this is something that you know. Marketers should know at this point, if you give people too many options, they end up doing nothing. So what we want to do is we want to reduce the amount of links and calls to action in our emails. You know, I once worked with a client very briefly, who had an amazing click rate on their emails. You know, we’re talking like 40% click rate, which is huge. But when I, when I looked at their emails, they had between 50 and 75 links in their email, and what we said, what we’re thinking about, then, okay, if we’re getting the clicks, that’s fine, but what are they going because if you’ve got that many links in your email, people are probably accidentally clicking links at that point, you know, because they you your farm will land on something. So we want to make sure that whatever we’re getting people to click, that it’s something that’s really intentional, something that’s that’s really meaningful and demonstrates an affirmative action, not just, you know, an accidental click or a low quality click. So reducing the amount of actions in an email when it comes to clicking on things is great, and actually sticking to one main CTA and then repeating that through the email is probably the best practice here, I would say. And what that does it just keeps the email focused centered, and any tips that you do get are very intentional.

Christian Klepp  38:23

No, those are some fantastic tips. And you know, I’ve been scribbling furiously away here, but let me just recap for the benefit of the audience, right? That’s all these tips. So the first one you said was thinking about the subscribers. The second one was, write a one sentence proposition for what your email marketing campaign is going to be about. The third one is make your sign up forms really good, and you have three different forms, right? So you had embedded, you had pop up, and you had landing page. Number four is clean your list, and number five is regarding your CTAs. Don’t give people too many options. That’s fantastic. You know, on the topic of pop up pop up forms, I’m not entirely opposed to them. And I’ll actually give you an example of a website where I think they’ve they’ve been very clever about it, and use this time delay. HubSpot, the pop up form does not appear until about you’re about halfway down the page, on a page with an article that that is about a seven minute read. So you’re looking at about maybe after, after four minutes have elapsed, then the pop up form appears. The one I’m opposed to is you haven’t even finished reading the headline, and bam, pop up. And you keep scrolling, and the pop up follows you.

Jamie Woodbridge  39:41

Yeah, those are super annoying. I completely agree. And if anyone’s going to get pop up forms, right, it’s going to be HubSpot, you know, you know, those guys know what they’re doing. So, yeah, I completely agree. And that’s, you know, it’s got to serve. We go back to that serving a purpose, right? So if you’re using a pop up, it’s got to serve. Purpose.

Christian Klepp  40:01

Absolutely, absolutely. Okay. So for this next question, love it or hate it, metrics, right? I mean, you can’t do email marketing and not look at the metrics, and you did bring it up earlier. But short of giving us this exhaustive list of metrics, just give us maybe the top three to five metrics that B to B marketers should be paying attention to if they’re implementing email marketing campaigns.

Jamie Woodbridge  40:23

Yeah, for sure. I think this is one of the beautiful things about email marketing. It’s that you can, you can really track how well they’re performing, and there’s no second guessing, you know, with with the small caveat that, you know, there’s a apple privacy thing which inflates open rates or affects open rates, sometimes, but this is one of the, one of the huge plus points for using email marketing as a channel. So there are the really obvious ones right as open rate and click rate that we could talk about a little bit here. And those are super important, right? They are. They are two of the main pillars when it comes to understanding how well that your email writing campaigns perform. I think the mistake that people often take is try is looking at those metrics in isolation. What we want to do is, we want to tell a story with these metrics. You know, if we’re talking about open rates, you know, what is it that affects open rates? It’s many things. People often attribute subject lines to open rates. But actually, subject lines is something that, you know, is only one small part of what affects whether people, if someone’s going to open your email or not. You know, the from name is also super important. You know, I will open emails that come from my mom every single time, because I can see the from name that it’s from my mom. So, you know, getting the from name right and choosing the from name that that’s that resonates more with the audience is key. Preview text is another one, and something that gets massively overlooked. By the way, preview text is that small snippet of text that you see next to the subject line as you’re in the inbox view, right? So it’s the it’s the quite often it will default to text that’s in the email, but you can edit that and put what you want, and that should support your subject line. It should be a continuation of your subject line. And then, when we talk about subject lines from names and preview text, one thing that gets massively overlooked when it comes to open rates is the reputation that you have for sending good emails, right? So if someone has received, you know, a ton of emails from you, and they’ve start to paint this image of you, of someone who sends emails that just aren’t very good, that’s obviously, no matter how good your subject line is they just won’t open your emails. They’ll fall out with you. And it happens the other way around as well. If you have this reputation for sending good emails, that will have a much bigger impact on open rates than being trying to be clever with the subject line click rates. And so we’re telling a story here with the metrics. So we want to go from open rates then to click rates. So if once people are opening them, then, is the content good enough to get them to click on, you know, is it resonating with them enough? Is it ticking enough boxes? Is it valuable enough to then for them to take a affirmative action into click? And we want to take those two into, you know, in tandem, opens and click should be working together, and that’s why we quite often get the reported metric of click through rates, which is the percentage of people that have clicked that have opened your email. So the reason why that’s so good is it’s quite easy sometimes to get a high open rate, because you can resort to cheap methods like click baiting and all of these kind of things. But what we want to do is we want to get a healthy mix of open rates and click rates. To give people an idea of what they should aim for. Look these things could be Googled, Google, whatever your industry is, and benchmark over rates, something like MailChimp, HubSpot or whatever will tell you these things. I think we should be aiming for at least 40% aspirationally, getting over 50. And if you’re an email marketing agency like we are, there’s additional pressure on you to send really good emails. Ours can vary somewhere between, you know, high 50s up to into the 70s for really good ones. So we want to be in the 40s, at least, is what I would say. Click rates. I would say you want to be somewhere, you know, 2% up to 6% again, if you get it right, like, you know, sometimes we do, and we do for our clients, it can be as high as 13 to 15% you know. So those are the kind of figures that we’re talking about here. If I was going to touch on to on one more metric Christian that doesn’t quite get talked about as a as often as click rates and open rates, is replies and forwards, and some platforms will track replies, some won’t, and almost no platforms are able to or will report on forwards, but that we should be aiming for these things, right? And I talked about metrics being one of the. The things that makes email marketing beautiful in a way, if you know, and that sounds cheesy and a bit corny, but another thing that makes email marketing beautiful is that it’s, it’s, it should be this personable communication, one to one, with your subscribers. And so when you’re writing email campaigns, it should be from one person to another, and again, someone clever, who I don’t remember the name of, said that newsletters should be less news and more letter. And so we want to make sure that we, when we when we’re sending things, that we’re writing in that way, and when we do that, and we are engaging and we provide enough value. What will people do if you’re writing conversation and you’re treating it well, you’re treating it in the right way, people will reply, and you could even ask for replies. You know, because people aren’t conditioned to reply to newsletters. They just aren’t. It’s something people are so used to getting emails from these no reply addresses, right? So asking it encouraging conversation is great. And similarly, for forwards, right? That’s the Holy Grail, because then you’ve provided enough value that someone wants to share it with someone that they know. So let’s aim for those things. And those, those two metrics, are something you probably have to track on your own. And forwards, good luck tracking forwards. You know, you’re just not gonna be able to track that, but you know you could. You one way to do it, perhaps, is you. We’ve experimented this before, is to put a link for people who have received your email from someone who’s forwarded to them to subscribe, and then you can track those subscriptions through that link. So yeah, I would, I would target those two things replies and forwards as well.

Christian Klepp  46:46

Fantastic, fantastic. That’s a that’s quite a great list of metrics. And I hope the audience is taking notes and paying attention to these things. But Jamie, thank you so much for coming on the show today and for sharing your expertise and experience with the listeners. Please. Quick intro to yourself and how folks out there can get in touch with you.

Jamie Woodbridge  47:04

Yeah, for sure. So I’m Jamie. I run a email marketing agency that specialize in B to B marketing. Our agency called is called the inbox club. We fundamentally do a couple of things. One, newsletters, if that’s not already obvious, so we help B to B companies send great newsletters. So fully managed newsletter service, we build automation, something that I didn’t talk about today, but it’s incredibly powerful in B to B email marketing, helping helping people build these automated nurture sequences. And then we also have list growth services to help people grow their email lists in a very meaningful way that brings in high quality subscribers. And the beautiful thing about that I’ve said that b word again, because I do think email marketing is beautiful, or it should be, is that a lot of these B to B firms that are listening today will be selling high ticket items, and that means the value of one subscriber is quite high, you know. So these the one subscriber is incredibly valuable. So when we talk about building an email list, we’re not talking about hundreds of 1000s here. Perhaps just hundreds will do when we when we want to target these people. So, so yeah, that’s us. That was that’s what we do.

Christian Klepp  48:13

And how can they get in touch with you? Through LinkedIn, through email, or …

Jamie Woodbridge  48:16

Catch me on LinkedIn. So Jamie Woodbridge on LinkedIn at the inbox club, or you can send us an email. Our email address is party@theinbox.club.

Christian Klepp  48:28

Fantastic, fantastic. Jamie once again, thank you for your time. Take care, stay safe and talk to you soon.

Jamie Woodbridge  48:34

Thanks, Christian. It’s great to be on.

Christian Klepp  48:36

All right. Bye for now.