Bobcast The Digital Marketing Podcast

Is Email Marketing Dead? Top Insights on Effective Email Marketing

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Our Guest Speaker for this Episode:

Tracey Ellis is a strategic marketing executive with a refreshing perspective on driving marketing results. She has been responsible for the development and execution of multiple organization’s go-to-market initiatives including: branding, vertical product strategy, market development, lead generation, marketing communications, integrated campaign management, analyst/public relations and more. As the CEO of Leadous she spends her time helping organizations achieve results by leveraging marketing automation.

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Transcript of this podcast – Is Email Marketing Dead? Top Insights on Effective Email Marketing

Bob Tripathi: Hello and welcome to Bobcast. The digital marketing podcast and this is your host Bob Tripathi. So welcome to another show. And for those of you who haven’t tuned into previous episodes I suggest you go right now and tune in. We’ve had some great guests in all areas of digital marketing. Now today what we gonna do is we’re going to talk a little bit tactical and here is one tactic which is kind of the old as marketing tactic out there. It has been around since the late 90s and fact that was the only marketing tactic of a label today. And many people over the years have said is it dead yet or it’s not dead yet. In terms of the tactic and my answer is if this tactic if done right it can generate 50 percent of your revenues for your business through this tactics I guess. So if you have already guessed it but I’m talking about email marketing, email marketing has been around since the late 90’s were not the only marketing tactic that people have started to started with then came search then social content and so on and so forth and e-mail is done right can produce wonders because what email does is everyone gives you permission for them to send you an email and you can land directly in their inbox so they’ve given you this permission this privilege but with privilege I would take on the responsibility and that is to get your email marketing right. And there are many rules to it you don’t want to get caught by spam folders you don’t want to get blacklisted by IPs. So on and so forth. So what I thought is I’ll invite a guest who has been there done that who has been doing email marketing for a while now and email marketing has evolved and we’re not just looking at sending emails through platform but we are more in a complex automated world of email marketing. So I had this great chat and my next guest today is Tracey Ellis and Tracey Ellis is going to chat with me on All Things email marketing folks. So let’s get started.

Bob Tripathi: All right everyone welcome to this radio. This is the Bob Tripathi. Your host and part of Digital Sparx Marketing interview series. And you know there is one thing that people say that you know it is dead but it’s not. And you know it’s having a renaissance of sorts. And from what I know from our business and other businesses we work with if you do it right it can generate about 50 percent of revenues through that one channel and that channels email marketing. It has been around for a while. It’s kind of the. Oldest marketing tactic. But again as I said you can do a lot and not a lot of companies are actually leveraging. The full power of e-mail marketing as we know. Now. So I just know a few things about it but I thought I’ll invite an expert to you can talk more eloquently about it. So I have Tracey Ellis elcome. Tracey is the CEO or founder of Leadous Inc. which is a specialized agency based out of Minneapolis. So does Tracey . Glad to have you here would love to chat with you get your insights on all things email marketing and anything you want to talk about. So if you can introduce yourself. What you do your experience to our audience that would be great.

Tracey Ellis: Bob thanks so much for having us. As you mentioned the CEO and president of Leadous in Minneapolis we have been a Marketo Adobe partner for the last five years. Focused on. Really helping marketers understand marketing automation the different facets of it and then becoming steadfast supporters of Marketo and taking that technology with them wherever they go. Our goal is really around sharing our knowledge and best practices so that digital marketers everywhere can be successful. And one of the questions conversations that we know tend to get most recently is really this idea about email marketing and is it really you know a dying breed or is it something that’s going to be had this resurgence in and how people are going to use it. So we work with customers from every industry on every size yes mom and pop shops all the way up to some of the biggest prizes in the world. So have gotten great tips and tricks that we’ve used with those organizations and would love to share those with more people.

Bob Tripathi: Nice. This is great. And yeah you’re right. I mean you know people ask this question. This email marketing did or you know if it is still worth it. I think part of the reason is it’s not as fancy or hip as other channels probably does or it is but. You could correct me but I think if you do it right it can generate anywhere to 40 percent. 50 percent of your company revenues and depending on the type of business. But I’m going to throw it over to you. What is your answer when people ask if email marketing is to working or cool hip or not.

Tracey Ellis: Yeah. So email marketing although it’s not very sexy and definitely still trending. There’s reports that show that there’s an average thirty eight dollar return on every dollar that spent in email marketing. There’s also data that shows that you know half of every email goes into the garbage. It goes into junk and never gets to where it’s supposed to be. And then email marketers and people in digital marketing also deal with the fact that as savvy as they get and as savvy as the providers that they use get I.T. gets just the savvy to keep us out. Right. So there’s a lot of challenges and what it is that we’re doing. And previously you could you know put up a beautiful email really you know graphically put together design super well and people would look at it in a big monitor on your computer and now the majority of people are really looking at any kind of marketing emails on a device which is you know three by six you know usually at the biggest and so you’ve got a little bit of space to put a lot of information and be compelling. So it’s definitely here to stay. It’s just what are the best ways that. It should be used in. You know each individual use case and then following some best practices to make sure that when you do send emails you’re going to get the best deliverability rate you’re going to get the best open rates and the best conversions.

Bob Tripathi: Yeah. No I’m good I get all into it and you know I’m going to pick your brains as we go along. But how was e-mail evolved you know like real looking at a very advanced kind of an email workflow systems and then you have this whole conversational marketing. Piece of it and the slack channels and things like that. How effective Email still is when it comes to acquisition. You know and how it does evolve.

Tracey Ellis: Yeah. So I mean I think you know really originally in business right email was meant to be a way for you know internal people to communicate with one another and then savvy marketers said hey wait a second. You know we can get in on those emails build lists and actually reach people via this email communication that they’re using internally. And then I got down here and said wait a second you know marketers are doing this. How can we keep them out. And so then marketers and new guidelines and compliance about you know things to do. So it’s really evolved and changed over time. But I think that one of the ways that you can keep email marketing effective is segmenting to people. So we still run into a lot of clients. It’s not you know an odd scenario to hear that people are still doing batch and blast emailing which definitely will not get you delivered into the inbox. So helping people really understand for their specific business how they can segment how they should look at you know who they’re sending to you know not just by that segment but by the titles and the type of content and information that is most relevant to them at any given point. So you know handling that components really key. So basically the right message to the right person.

Bob Tripathi: Hopefully at the right the right time. Right. Oh yeah. So you know I think let’s get into it like right. Looked at a different ways right. I think the first thing you’ve talked about that I heard a lot about the authentication protocols right. Yes it is, which is on the technical side offered. What are some of those things when it comes to those.

Tracey Ellis: Yeah. So really if you kind of need to look at it in a little bit broader of three categories there’s the authentic authentication protocol and really technically how you’ve set up your platform to deliver and push those emails out. And you’ve got your reputation which is in the middle of you hear about you know getting blacklisted and white listing and reputation scores and then the final component of that is actually the components of your email themselves the copy the visuals ext. And so the authentication side it’s a matter of how are you setting that up. And. Understanding whether you’re on a shared. You know a shared IP a trusted IP or a dedicated IP to yourself right. The volume of emails are going out across it. Should those things be separated by multiple domains. Should it be just online. What’s the volume and then making sure that those things are tested and continued to work for you. There’s a lot of different protocols and things that companies need to go to go through on that. That facet from a marketing perspective often times that’s really hard to manage because marketers are supposed to know their business and how to market it and know how to be creative not necessarily be that deep in technology. And so a good platform is going to have checked those boxes for you and have a really easy setup but you still need to take ownership of that and revisit that on a regular basis. That second category which is around your reputation you know that’s how often you’re spending where are you sending to. Are you keeping your database clean and then are you doing things. Depending upon where your score is to improve that score so that you are listed on these sites and that you can actually get in and get your marketing communications to people. And then the third thing is really the biggest part that marketing owns which is what type of subject line you used. How much code you have in your email. How many links do you have. How long is it. You know those types of things. So being able to control that as well and then updating it based on what’s working and what’s not working now.

Bob Tripathi: On an average what do you think about how many emails are not getting delivered like people see like oh 90 percent emails and 90 phone calls and emails have been dealt with. But how many actually get into the inbox if you will.

Tracey Ellis: Yeah. The average number that I last looked was that more than 50 percent of emails in one month. Like on a you know entire world scale right from a marketing perspective don’t actually get into the inbox. So 50 percent and you can kind of use that as a rough estimate. However we’ve got some clients who got really good at caring about that deliverability. And looking at those three areas and constantly iterating and evolving that to make sure that those spending numbers go up. So some we have deliverability in the 90 95 percent others come to us and they’re like hey we’re getting like a 5 percent deliverability. We don’t really know why. Can you help us. I mean it’s a matter of doing short term or almost immediate things that can affect that then short term things and then long term things are going to take a little bit longer like your reputation right right you’ve got to kind of run things differently for a while that’s for that to increase.

Bob Tripathi: And I think in the short term what you mean is like keeping a clean list and pruning it as everyone this keeping a clean list and making sure that you’re breaking up your sense you don’t have huge like a million records come through once in a blast.

Tracey Ellis: Those types of things. So just some very you know. Honest mistakes that some marketers can make that just don’t follow best practices. And once we provide those best practices people are just you know the kind of mind blowing like oh you know some really minor changes or different ways that I need to be looking at things I can make a really big improvement.

Bob Tripathi: Know when you I think I heard it somewhere and you can correct me if I’m wrong but I think there was some stats somewhere that every email goes bad after 120 days or something. So if it’s in old thing for more than a hundred and twenty days and they haven’t opened your email then you should delete that record is that correct.

Tracey Ellis: It depends. So depending upon your industry and how often you’re talking to people and what that cadence is and what you’re selling you need to adjust that timeframe based on you know yourself right now with a lot of the new regulations specifically if you have an international company and you’re dealing with compliance issues like PR or can spam they have new laws and regulations around that which if you use a preference center and you know leverage that to determine how often people want to get on you know emails you can really help manage that and make that not be an issue for you. But it really depends upon the individual companies themselves. So I think it’s a lot about increasing making sure like I see a lot of emails where it’s shown a send on behalf of.

Bob Tripathi: Say yeah email marketing platform and that’s going to affect the value of the email. Right.

Tracey Ellis: Right. Right. Whenever you’re on a shared IP you know anything that anybody else does that’s on that IP with you can affect. What you’re doing. So you know, make sure that you’re with a reputable company that’s managing those things for the other clients that are also on that shared IP and then making sure that you’re doing your due diligence making sure that your emails are being sent appropriately as well.

Bob Tripathi: Is there any way to check it because for example if you talk to an email marketing provider there’s an oh we have ninety nine point nine percent whatever. Right. Is there any way that you can see like hey how many of you guys have been blacklisted. You know.

Tracey Ellis: Usually you know your email provider’s right to have the reputations they do and be the size companies that they are. They do a really good job of managing that stuff. And you know we know that with you know Marketo for example they’re really transparent with their customers. They really stay on top of making sure that everything is clean. And so it’s just a matter of you know how that how that looks for people. And. You know. If at any time you’re concerned about something if you kind of checked off OK we’re doing all the right things. The best practices perspective we’re doing all the right things. My reputation perspective there has to be something else being able to go back to your provider and just have one of those conversations and understand like where do we sit. What does this look like. All right.

Bob Tripathi: Great. Good. I think the second part of this you mentioned was reputation. And I think one of the ways. What are some of the ways I think you’ve talked about sending volume for example right now. Is there any preferred send volume there. OK. You should only send this many emails both week and the number around.

Tracey Ellis: Yeah. So initially depending upon how big your database is when you’re first starting to get up and running on marketing automation you want to do what they call a warming your IP so that you don’t want to send out you know a million all at once and then wait. Right you kind of send, send and send that first campaign you kind of bucket over some period of time to two days and then. Depending upon how large your database is and how often you’re sending out emails you set that cadence and then you kind of need to keep at that continual pace to create that solid reputation of what it is that you’re doing. So this is one of those few things that don’t go all in.

Bob Tripathi: Exactly right. Yeah great. Great. That’s a great engagement. If people engage more that means your reputation will go up. Is that true and what does that cutoff time like hey if you don’t you know.

Tracey Ellis: Yep. So engagement does affect your reputation and so they’ll look at you know where’s it going. Getting it in the inbox. Like what people are doing with those emails that people are all deleting it or it’s all getting sent into spam. Your reputation will go down. But you know engagement. If marketers are really focused on that it affects a lot of different areas. And so that’s a matter of you know. It got to the inbox. Right. So like you’ve got over that battle in and of itself. But then what is your subject line look like is it compelling enough to get somebody to open it. And then once they open it you know where that call to action and is it really directed at them that they’ll take swift action and engage in that email and open the email. Click on it and then go to wherever it is that you want them to go.

Bob Tripathi: Nice, Nice. Which brings me to the third point you made which is the email content which is the fun stuff I would imagine. Yeah but I think one of the big things that you mentioned was having images like the kind of images as any best practice like what kind of images you should have in the email content and things.

Tracey Ellis: Yeah. So if we back up a little bit when we talk about the images and deliverability you always hear about people talking about rendering on different devices right. And so what people have to realize is that you’ve got HTML email code that is not native to any specific platform every platform uses that code. It goes through some servers and it gets to. You know. An e-mail client and then that email client is open on a whole platform of either desktop or mobile devices and then there is you know how many versions of a mobile device and you know how many versions of our work you know even your email client right. And so it really depends you know. And so. Depending upon you know being able to break down your emails you can actually your platform should be able to tell you. Who is actually opening it and what platforms or mobile users are more P.C. users and in which platforms are the most popular you can actually adjust your code to that you can even segment out specific people so you might have two versions of the email depending upon how friendly any of those platforms or devices are with certain HTML code. But what we see is that people really need to keep it simple and especially because more and more the space that you have to put that call to action again is so small on a mobile device. We’ve got companies who come to us who provide us beautiful sexy images that their comms teams have spend months putting together and it’s like that’s a beautiful poster but nobody has a phone that big. And so let’s squeeze all that down and figure out like what do we know we’ve got this little tiny square what are we really trying to do. Right. So kind of teaching people that it’s not about. You know. It’s not about what you want them to do and kind of throwing up every possible thing about the offer or the call to action but what can this how can the subject line be engaging to drive to that specific call to action right away. And then if they’re interested they’ll go in there and find the specific things right versus sending somebody a laundry list and kind of having them pick what it is that will work best for them or what they should be looking at.

Bob Tripathi: Yeah. Yes so true I’ve seen so many people working months and months on what you just said you know the beautiful email but if it’s not going to render what’s to use and I think increasingly I see a trend going more towards using visual images in your email as opposed to copy. This is ideal.

Tracey Ellis: Viewpoint. Yes we do see we do see a lot of that. So I would say there’s a good balance of driving people visually and then also using words and so on combining short phrases good headers good sub headers and good words and a call to action. But those few things and a solid subject line you can really increase your engagement but then it’s a matter of how big is that like how big is that graphic that you have in there. You know we always talk to clients about overlapping buttons and overlaying you know copyright on that. So basically that whole photo and the overlying headers actually becomes your. Your call to action button or your visual and so for all the different platforms that comes across there’s less code than if you have all those things layered on top of one another so there’s just some tricks tips and tricks that help people kind of navigate and get to those and try to keep up with the sadness and those I.T. people trying to keep us out.

Bob Tripathi: Yeah I’m going to talk a little bit about that but what about the call to action. Do you still subscribe to the theory that orange buttons work better than the red or blue looks better than this. What’s your theory. Well as you can see our brand colors aren’t I shouldn’t have asked that I should have asked you that question.

Tracey Ellis: Yeah I think that the big thing is that your call to action wherever you put it it needs to be at the top right. So whether you’re opening your email now on a phone or whether you’re opening on a P.C. it’s the call to action button if they can’t see it right away. You’ve already lost half your people that opened up your email right. The number of people that are going to scroll is relatively small and so making sure that it stands out and you know its greatest its arms. But as long as it’s a contrasting color and is really clear where somebody needs to click for that call to action you should be successful in doing that.

Bob Tripathi: The call to action to you know like there any limit like should you have one to three what’s your recommendation. According to me too is like there should be just one call to action right. What do you think.

Tracey Ellis: Yep. So in our own branding and emails here for Leadous what we do is a call to action. And then if the person doesn’t click the call to action and wants a little bit more information we’ll have brief copy and then usually a link that also goes back to that same call to action at the bottom in your photo. Then you can maybe provide like if that wasn’t the right thing for them maybe they need to see your broader product portfolio or your broader services portfolio so you can have something kind of hidden down there if their appetite is to go that route. But we usually find that having one call to action with a couple ways to actually get to that same place works really well.

Bob Tripathi: That’s great. Now let’s get to the fun part. Subject lines. All right. I was going to get there subject lines is something that everyone loves is so creative but you know it’s so much sometimes you think this is the best subject line you know and then you see that subject line being used and always use. But so many different marketers do you have any best practices when it I know you do subject lines.

Tracey Ellis: Yes. So you know one of the things that we always talk about with clients is that you know they’re so in tune to their own product and internally how they’re clocking their company talks about things and so oftentimes a subject line. Will not mean anything to the person that you’re sending it to. So internally at a company that would really resonate because that’s how you talk about things. But really understanding how are people outside of your company. Right. So how does somebody who doesn’t know about your product or service. What would be the best way to explain to them and get them to do something catchy based on that subject line. Especially when you’re just them like an awareness stream early on kind of get them to know who you are. And there’s just you know things to avoid. Right. So using words like download using the word now like N O W that’s not great. We actually had a one company who thought it was really savvy to include the word Rolex like a free Rolex and there is no communication. It was a B2B company and we let them know that that probably was not going to work. That’s also like a scam from some other countries where they try to get people to open emails and give them a free watch and really provide information. So. You know so trying to be. You know. Not use keywords right and find ways to be savvy and interesting is that people want to learn more about what it is that you’re saying every platform. You know if it’s worth it’s dollar value who is going to have the ability to help you. AB test and a lot of times with our clients we’ll do the AB testing and not necessarily be upfront about the fact that we’re going to do the A B test so they’ll give us their subject line in their email and their copy and we’ll put it all together and then I’ll look at it and say wait a second. Sending A B test and use their subject line and then make the other one this. And then we’ll send it out and we get the results back and they’re always in our favor and we go back to the client say hey listen we were kind of concerned when you’re putting this campaign together and so we change some of these words. That seem to be a little bit more consumable to somebody who doesn’t know about your product. And we sent them to two test list and this is the results. Do you still want to send yours or do you want us to sign ours. I think you can guess what the answer is to that.

Bob Tripathi: All right. Right. Right. Even though they worked on it there was a best creative idea in a long time. Exactly. What are some of the subject line words you should avoid. I’m guessing downloads one Rolex is the other three is another one.

Tracey Ellis: Yeah I’m using the word NOW you know driving people to like you know register you know using any type of punctuation in a in an email. I did have a conversation at one of the events that I spoke at recently where somebody came up and said well I feel like if I’m asking a question. I should use a question mark. And I said well if you were sending a note to a co-worker and asking them for lunch and you just said want to go to lunch and you didn’t use a question mark and you don’t even use capital letters like. They would still respond to you with yes or no right. And the guy was like. Well you know I guess so. So I think sometimes you can realize that based on the words that you use you can apply punctuation. And so you don’t limit it the best that you can. And the other thing is that using. You know emojis. That’s kind of hot a little bit more in the B2C space. So sometimes that works when you’re you know. Emailing more to personal email addresses. However in the business space a lot of times spam traps are gonna be set out that’s like a key to like knowing that it’s marketing right. So you have to be careful of the use certain industries will tolerate it. Others won’t. So you can really have of. Look at the use case excuse me for the use of images as well.

Bob Tripathi: All right. That was my next question. But you preempted me. I see that so many people using emojis and things like that. So what about the best practices like you mentioned some of these any other best practices that you can think of when it comes to email marketing like data hygiene anything.

Tracey Ellis: Yes. So I think the first you know best practices to really have an initiative in place. And under you know share what it is and share why you’re looking at email deliverability. Right. Share why it’s important in kind of the process that you’re going to go through. Having a checklist for every email that you send out to make sure you’re checking off all of those things to make sure that it’s going to have the best opportunity to get you the engagement that you’re looking for. And then also you know having a list of subject lines that work and don’t work for your organization. Right. Limiting you know you know images and those things and a lot of times it helps if you know what those deliverability steps are. Keeping all of the assets that are in your platform that you’re going to use to those standards. So if images of a certain size work on one you know one plant one email platform over the past have those ready to goals that you can really help if you’re in marketing options you can help marketers and for the marketers think how big your team is. Have them readily accessible for you and your other team so that you’re not spending a lot of time trying to resize images and update things and go through stuff. You really have it right there at your fingertips.

Bob Tripathi: What about the personalization. Like you know those emails a first name personalization then even in the subject line. What’s your take on what is.

Tracey Ellis: Good personalization. Yeah. So personalizing things you know as with anything. Right. Gets you a lot more engagement. But again it’s a balance of how much is too much personalization. It almost looks creepy and how much is just that right level that makes people feel comfortable and wants to engage with your brand. So you know for example using you know the company name and a subject line using an individual’s name in a stomach line isn’t as necessary because you already sending it to them so that they know it’s for them. But you know oftentimes you also have really limited space and so depending upon the templates people use you know we’ll just go right into the copy. So say the company names those particular to them and then in the copy. You know go right to what your message is about them as well. We see that visually that’s where personalization can really help. So if you have segmented your audience if for example your multiple industries send a health care image to the health care people send a commercial real estate image to the commercial real estate people so doing it at least at that industry level. There’s a lot of really cool platforms coming out that are really allowing people to connect to all the different channels and brands and then going down that path. So I think that the biggest thing is just making sure that people can personalize it to the extent that they have time to do and then manage that. So don’t just do it and hope that it works but look to really iterate that on a regular basis and review it.

Bob Tripathi: So I guess you’re right. I mean data hygiene segmentation personalization is part of everything. And before I go into this. So where do you see e-mail when it comes to your broader digital marketing. Like I remember when I worked for a large company discover, we used to manage our ad campaigns that used to. Combine it with search combined it with paid search. And then you give those worked that we find and so to use it in the email right as opposed to into the lingo which we talked about earlier between features and benefits. So those should play with the other digital channels.

Tracey Ellis: So I think that you know for a long time people had email on a Web site and those were there to digital channels. Now that’s gotten much much more diverse though depending upon the company you’ll use different social channels you’ll use different chat channels you use different media plays whatever it might be. And so it really just helps to understand and test those different channels. Right. And then understand how they should fit together. Right. So. Some people will you know use only email marketing and then kind of wonder why their results fall flat. And. You know metrics years ago I think it said it takes seven different mediums with the same information to get somebody to connect on your brand. And now with the speed at which information is being shared it’s something like twenty eight times on different mediums right. And so you can’t just do one. And I think that the challenge for companies is trying to figure out. Which one they should do one. Right and how to actually. Stream them together so that they’re the most effective. So you know email is here to stay right. Every business depends on it just to do their daily operation and individuals you know work on it as well and so you know getting into their inbox and I’m going to click on it of course is another thing. But you know really knowing that it is going to be something you can use in a smart way to be really effective.

Bob Tripathi: Nice thank you. Yeah that makes sense. Thank you so much for sharing your insight. You mentioned platforms. What are some of the platforms for small businesses, big. I know you are the authorized or rather the agency partner for market over you work a lot with Marketo as well. So that’s on the enterprise side. What are some of the other platforms that do you think people can go under.

Tracey Ellis: You know the Adobe brand now you have Marketo which is you know great enterprise tool it’s been around for a long time but they also have a huge commercial base which is really where Marketo started and then grew enterprises because it was marketers building a platform for marketers. Right. So very intuitive. On the Adobe side they have product. Their Product Campaign which does for B2C. And then you’ve got a whole plethora of other players out there so Oracle purchased Alex four years ago Salesforce purchased her Pardot they purchased ExactTarget now called Salesforce marketing cloud and then HubSpot. And then you’ve got a whole plethora of other players that provide a. Kind of sliver of the features and functionality and those other tools so you know we have some clients that start out in there are MailChimp that now they’ve been involved they want to move over and we’ve got others that are. You know on HubSpot our product and are ready to migrate to Marketo and get additional features. So there’s really a huge you know a huge space out there even though there is some consolidation lately. Gartner just put out a new magic quadrant and they talk about the different providers where Marketo has really kind of come out ahead because of their features. But I think that for somebody that has a platform it’s working for you right. That’s great leverage. The features that it has. And then as you start to understand the data and understand information that it’s providing and it’s asking more questions you have a path of how you could grow depending upon the plan for your organization and the size that you want to get to.

Bob Tripathi: Yeah. And I think the platform is great where you are comfortable with and gets it done because a lot of times I see clients where they love the bells and whistles but if you’re not going to use them it’s not going to applicable to your business what’s the point. ROI.

Tracey Ellis: Yeah well I just had this conversation today. Don’t tell Marketo that I said this but you know any of these providers right you can start you can start small because at any time if you want another feature they’re going to be glad to take your check. So I always tell clients you know start with what you can handle initially and then as you add in. Social and retargeting and real time personalization and all these other things you can always add those features on as you grow and move forward.

Bob Tripathi: Crawl walk and run. Right. Yeah absolutely. Maybe some belly time first. Do Yeah. That’s important too. This is great. Tracey is there anything I didn’t ask or maybe in my limited knowledge I didn’t ask you about that you think that people should know about email and where it s or anything do you think.

Tracey Ellis: You know I think one of the big things that’s really tied to email is you know your CRM so you know a lot of cases either Salesforce and some clients on dynamics as well. I think the big thing is really understanding your data. Right so your Email Deliverability and what you’re doing has a lot to do with your data. And so you know taking an effort to really understand what you know is the e-mail address correct. Like how are these people so they’re but understanding what’s happening when you send those. And then what are you going to do for each one of those categories. So recently when I presented we’ve actually taken a sample of a client’s database and showed their 50 thousand records all the different categories that those emails fell into. And then the suggestions that they should take for each one of those so you know is it a hard balance. What do you want to do with those. Is it a soft balance. What do you want to do with those that really does affect your or your email. And then you’re going back to your sales team having conversations about I know you think the database and so to send this to as a million and you want 20 percent engagement out of here. But the actual database of marketable people is maybe half that. And so our engagement is going to be half of what that number needs to be. So you can really use email deliverability and the data behind it to get yourself a seat at the table talking you know numbers and values and our why and when I always tell people is that if you don’t have a seat at the table you’re probably getting eaten there. And that’s definitely been the history with marketing. So we’re trying to just elevate that conversation and help people be super successful.

Bob Tripathi: And you’re right. This is like such a numbers driven right with e-mail that is no black and white. So you can actually make a big difference. But this is great. Tracey thank you so much. Now for our viewers and listeners how do they reach out to you this find you on LinkedIn

Tracey Ellis: Sure that would be great. It’s Tracey Ellis. You can definitely find me there you can also e-mail info@Leadous.com. And we’ll get back to somebody as soon as any questions.

Bob Tripathi: This is great and I’m sure you have some free resources as well that they can download probably on your site too.

Tracey Ellis: Absolutely. And you know our goal is just sharing information and helping people be successful so we’ve got a new Web site. We recently launched with tons of downloads and resources and things to help the digital marketers kind of get their arms around marketing automation and email marketing and continuing to help them evolve that practice within their companies.

Bob Tripathi: That’s great. Great. Thank you so much Tracey for your insights and spending time and hope everyone listening watching. Good good. Great value out of it but thank you so much Tracey for your time. Thank you for doing this.

Tracey Ellis: Absolutely. Thanks for having me Bob. I appreciate it. Take care. Thank you.

Bob Tripathi: That is it. But I thought that was a great episode. And me and Tracey had a great chat and there was some great fun that Tracey brought up. My favorite part of mom and dad was the whole subject line discussion with subject line is so critical when it comes to email marketing and simple things like writing simple words and just putting an exclamation mark can actually get you caught by the spam filters. But that’s it for today. Email me your questions email me a topic suggestions by email as Bob at DigitalSparxMarketing.com. And we’d love to hear from you. And please leave us a review please leave us a rating on your favorite Apple podcast or Google Play, Spotify wherever you listen. But every little review every little feedback goes a long way. So it would be great if you can chip in as well but that’s it. Signing off for today and talk to you guys on our next episode of Pop guest digital marketing podcast. See you then. Thank you.