5 Tips for your Email Marketing Campaign

We just created an automated email marketing campaign for everybody signing up for a demo ChatGPT chatbot. Since our strategy is to have partners white label our chatbot product, our incentives is to teach our partners how to most efficiently help them create an amazing email marketing campaign - Simply because if they sell more chatbots, we make more revenue.

This strategy aligns us with others such that our incentives becomes to teach everything we can to our maximum ability, which again has SEO consequences, since Google and other search engines cares a lot about what they refer to as "high quality content". In a way it might be argued that our incentives have been aligned in such a way that it "pays to be good and deliver high quality content, teaching our 'secrets' to as many as possible".

A Great Email Marketing Campaign

When you've created a kick ass email marketing campaign, the recipients of your email doesn't feel as if you're marketing to them at all, and they feel as if they're actually engaging in a conversation with a real human being, and that the human being is genuinly interested in the well being of the recipient. It is therefor crucial to keep the "human factor" of your campaign, to the maximum extent you're capable of. Nobody reads what machines generates automatically, unless it "feels" as if it was a human being that wrote it. The best example of that today is ChatGPT in fact.

ChatGPT isn't popular because people like talking to machines, ChatGPT is popular because people like talking to people, and ChatGPT feels more "people like" than most people

Before we start dissecting how a great email marketing looks like, let's first look at a screenshot of our own first email from our own email marketing campaign.

1. Ask Questions in your Emails and Provide Value

If you sign up for a demo chatbot, you will be automatically added to a SendGrid automation marketing campaign, and the above is the first email you will get. The subject of the email is; "👋 Do you need help with your ChatGPT chatbot?".

The above subject line starts out with an offer to help, phrased as a question. By offering help and asking questions, it's more likely that the recipient starts engaging with you, simply because human beings enjoys answering questions. You can see this from all the polls you get at LinkedIn where people give you 3 options to choose from. People like giving their opinions about things, and they like providing answers to questions. This is something all the best marketing professionals have realised a long time ago, so they are therefor using polls to increase "engagement" on their LinkedIn content. If we are to condense these facts down to a simple list of action items, it could resemble the following.

1. Ask questions
2. Provide value
3. Offer help
4. Encourage the recipient to reply to the email to continue the dialogue

2. Send your Emails from a Human Being

The second important factor from the above screenshot is that the email is sent and signed by Tage Leander Hansen. Tage is our CEO of course, and when the CEO of a company sends you what you feel is a personal email, asking if you need help, the statistical probability of that the recipient will answer the email drastically increases.

For the record, if the recipient answers the email, the email is sent to Tage in addition to me and Aria for reasons I will come back to later - But having an email originating from a "human being" dramatically increases the statistical probability of that the recipient will actually reply to it, engaging in a conversation with actual human beings working for the company you're sending emails on behalf of, resulting in more sales being the end goal of course.

Never sign your email from "Info", "Support" or "Team". Sign your emails with the name of a person, preferably the highest ranking human being in your organisation, such as the CEO or the President.

3. Keep your Emails SHORT

When you compose your emails, think of them more like a Tweet than an email. Nobody have time for reading through walls of text. If you study the above email, and measure how much time it takes for you to read it, you can probably read it in one minute. Life is to short to read long marketing emails. Sorry, I'm just the messenger here.

If I can't read your email in 1 to 2 minutes, I'll probably just delete it. The same is true for most others.

4. Avoid Bullshit Bingo in your Emails

Bullshit bingo is "buzz words", such as "revolutionize" and "empower". These are the words everybody is using in their marketing campaigns, and for these exact reasons they simply don't work. This is a sub-section of "the human factor" described above. Such words also increases the statistical probablity of that spam filters will trigger the email as spam, and the recipient won't even receive the email.

Avoid using words everybody else are using, they simply don't work, because everybody IS using them!

5. Get the Technology Correctly Applied

This is an obvious fact, but get the tech correctly applied means adding SPF, DKIM, and DMARC correctly to your emails. Then automate as much of your campaigns as possible, using for instance SendGrid's "Automation" features. It kind of shouldn't be necessary to even write, but this is arguably step one. When you've got your tech applied, test your emails, and make sure they're not ending up in spam folders. SendGrid has great infrastructure in place to achieve this. BTW, we're not affiliated with SendGrid, it just so happens to be the service provider I know how to handle. There might exist better alternatives out there, such as MailChimp and even modules for HubSpot, but SendGrid is the one I am acquinted with, so I kind of end up referring to them in my writings here.

Also for crying out loud, add unsubscribe links to your email campaigns, or a lot of recipients might end up reporting you for spam, which can in theory "destroy your domain".

Bonus tip, considerations

If you watch our email above you can clearly see we're using HTML emails, and we're adding emoticons to our emails. For us this makes sense, since our area of expertise and what we're known for, is being a "marketing and technology partner" for other companies. Sending out HTML emails arguably decreases "the human factor" since everybody understands these emails are not sent by a human being, but composed and sent out by an automatic email system.

For us, projecting ourselves as a professional marketing agency and technology company, this makes sense. If you're running the local pub in your village, and you're inviting your 1,000 closest friends for your Saturday night concert, you would probably not want to send HTML emails, but rather pure text emails. Because it further increases "the human factor".

And for emoticons, these makes the email more visible, but also further reduces "the human factor", since most email clients simply don't have emoticons keyboards. However for us, these are both things we've carefully considered, and found to be valuable for us. Whether or not you want to copy these parts from our campaigns, depends upon your target audience, the size of your company, and your existing company profile.

Conclusion

We send out 5 emails in total when people sign up for our chatbots. You can try it out and follow our whole campaign by signing up for a demo chatbot here. The first email we send is what the user requested, being a link to the demo chatbot, and the embed code required to embed the chatbot on his own page. The second email is an offer to help. Then we send out two additional emails informing the user of additional services and products we have, where we ask questions in all these emails, to encourage the recipient to enter into a dialogue with us.

The last email we send is a warning about that the demo chatbot is about to be destroyed, and is sent the day before the demo is destroyed, where we ask the user if he or she was happy with the demo, and if not asking them for their feedback. Yet again, people love giving their opinions about things. Asking for a user's opinion might be one of the most powerful weapons in the world when it comes to increasing engagement. This is true both for emails and social media.

The above is obviously not everything you need to know to create an amazing email marketing campaign, but it should get you started. When you've sent out email marketing campaigns for a while, you need to start measure the conversion on your campaigns. Maybe even apply some A/B testing, to slowly increase conversions, using facts and data as your foundation. Because in the end, the only thing that's important when you're doing email marketing campaigns, is how many sales your campaigns leads to.

As a final side note, I want to emphasize that as recipients actually answers our emails, we typically reply to them within 5 to 10 minutes. This is why we're sending the reply to our entire team. Because if one of us is busy doing something else, probably somebody else on our team is available to answer the lead, and engage in a conversation with it.

This might be considered the 6th tip, but when people answer your emails, reply back to them as fast as you possible can. This makes them feel important, and further increases conversions. Great email marketing campaigns is about balancing automation and "the human factor", implying use automation where you can, but don't overuse it. In the end remember ...

People likes talking to people ...