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You have a list. You have a boatload of engaged readers. You have the tools to send out great emails. But there’s still something missing that’s not generating the engagement you wanted.
59% of marketers say email marketing provides their best ROI. If that’s not the case for you, it may be time to zoom out and see what’s wrong. 
How can you get back to the email marketing best practices that generate the kind of excitement you had when you first created your list? Here are a few ideas.
From now on, start split-testing everything you send out
You’re probably already familiar with split testing. It means sending out different variations of the same email to see which gets the better response.
For example, you might isolate the email subject. Same exact emails, different subject lines. 
Which one gets a higher open rate? Which one generates more sales? That’s the style to use on your next campaign.
But here’s the thing. You can apply the same testing principles to anything in your campaign.
At Campaign Monitor, we’ve even been known to split test entire templates. In one case, we saw a click-through-rate increase of 127% from that change alone.
Split-testing is a great way to get back to basics. Consider:

39% of companies don’t split-test your emails. Start this habit and you’re immediately in the top 61%.

Split-testing makes each email campaign a constant learning process. Even if you don’t get engagement from your current campaign, a split test might give you insights to carry to the next.
You’ll learn about your subscribers’ preferences. Do they respond to a coupon code more often than a personalized subject line? Do they want contests? Valuable information? Do they open an email more often when it’s “from the CEO” or from your entire brand?

What’s more, A/B testing will introduce you to more email campaign best practices.
At Campaign Monitor, we’ve learned…
…personal subject lines get higher open rates.
…for nonprofits, demonstrating impact is critical in driving engagement. (See below).

Source
…CTAs should differ depending on your industry and sales stage.
Chances are, there are some additional best practices unique to your industry. And you can only learn them if you start split testing.
To hook your audience, start telling them a story
Split testing is important. But if you lose touch with why people sign up to your newsletter in the first place, you can slowly drift away from your core message.
The solution: remember the story you want to tell.
Here’s an example from parkrun:

Source
Notice it only takes a couple of paragraphs to figure out what they’re all about. They tell their “zero to hero” story in the span of a few sentences as soon as you sign up.
Email marketing software like ours is important. It will get your message out there. But remember it’s just the template. 
You have to fill in that template with the human side of your story.
Don’t forget to include an element of intrigue or mystery in your story. Think of the great opening lines in the history of literature. They hook you right off the bat with a little bit of mystery. 
Call me Ishmael. Why not “My name is Ishmael”? What’s Ishmael hiding, anyway? We have to read more to find out.
In your emails, the same principle is at work. The two most important sentences you’ll write are the subject line and the opening sentence.
Take the time to consider the best way to hook your readers. Want some tips to make this work? Consider the open loops technique. 
In essence, the open loops technique means starting your email with an element of mystery. One study even says that we get feelings of anxiety when there’s a disparity between what we know and information we don’t know, but want to know.
What’s the little bit of intrigue and storytelling you can incorporate into your next subject line? Your first sentence? Keep trying until you’re certain it will intrigue your readers.
Write a “welcome” email with personality
We’re talking about best practices here, so let’s continue with one of the foundations: writing a good “welcome” email.
This refers to the email your readers receive upon confirming their subscription. There are two essential elements every “welcome” email should contain:

A personal note. You can get super-casual here, or you can simply thank them for signing up. Either way, let them know there’s a human on the other end of the inbox.

A description of what they’re about to receive. Remind them what they signed up for. Below, look how Monica Vinader’s newsletter reminds them why they signed up, then directs people to a CTA:

Source
Think of your “welcome” email as free real estate. It’s an opportunity to engage, personalize, and direct to a CTA. Why not make full use of it?
You can also incorporate a re-engagement newsletter for people who haven’t responded in a while. Check out how Morning Brew keeps it casual:

Source
It looks like a breezy, firsthand, personalized letter from the CEO. Who could say no to that?
Stay out of the “spam” folder and “promotions” tab
Email marketers have two natural predators: the spam folder and Gmail’s “promotions” tab.
Avoiding spam filters is one of the core best practices in the entire industry. Without it, you won’t get your meticulously crafted emails read.
Email providers like Yahoo and Gmail may categorize your emails as spam if they don’t meet quality guidelines. And yes, they can use formulas and “scores” to measure your success. Here’s what you’ll need to know:

Aim for high open rates. When users frequently open your messages, it’s a healthy signal. It means that your emails are valuable and people are more likely to move them to the inbox when they see them in the spam folder.

Be valuable enough so people call you “not junk.” One of the top numerical indicators of a high-quality email newsletter is how often your own readers rescue you from the junk box.

Remind your readers to add you to their address book. This, too, will help the email providers award you a higher score.

Divide your list into segments
A segmented list can increase revenues by as much as 760%.
Think about the math for a second. Two nearly identical lists can generate different revenues, almost at a ratio of eight-to-one.
Why is that? 
Personalization. If you split customers into segments based on shopping preferences, or which types of emails they prefer to receive, that alone can drive higher conversion rates. 
Here are some ways to do it:

Behavior-specific segmentation. Do some customers buy small-ticket items, while others prefer the larger ones? Do some spend lots of time on your website, and others less? You might start crafting different emails and promoting different products on their established behavior.

Content-specific segmentation. If you have data on your specific contacts, you may be able to create new segments based on the content they prefer. For example, if one reader prefers to download eBooks and guides and another prefers to make product purchases, you have enough information to create entirely different campaigns.

Some email marketers even ask their customers directly: which do you prefer? 
They then ask their customers to visit their link preferences. This gives the email marketer the knowledge to split customers into different groups based on their individual “votes.”
Optimize your email marketing frequency
No one likes to hear from you too much.
And others won’t want to hear from you too little.
It’s the classic Goldilocks quandary in email marketing: how often should you send out your email blasts? 
26% of people respond that they unsubscribe from email lists because they get too many emails in general. 19% say they do it because a company specifically sends them too many.
On the other hand, you don’t want to send out so few that you never make any sales.
Split testing is one way to cure this common problem. But you might also consider adding a footer to your emails that let users gauge their own frequency preferences.
Wrap up
Email campaign best practices can work so well that it’s easy to get away from them. You figure you’ve got this email thing figured out, and no updates are necessary.
But if your habits have gotten too far out of whack, it’s time to get back to the bread and butter. 
With these best practices in hand, you can either grow an entirely fresh list or inject some life into an existing list. Either way, chances are your readers will notice. And they just might reward you with higher open rates.
The post Email Campaign Best Practices in 2021 appeared first on Campaign Monitor.

You didn’t think we’d launch a podcast network without a new HubSpot show, did you?
We’re excited to announce our new flagship podcast, The Shake Up, featuring comedian Alexis Gay and Venture Capitalist Brianne Kimmel. It’s produced by Senior Producer, Matthew Brown and brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network. 
The Shake Up offers business leaders unfiltered insights into companies that dared to be different. Alexis and Brianne talk with business leaders from disruptive companies like Square, Daily Harvest, and Nerdwallet about their investments and go-to-market strategies.
Sounds pretty cool, right? Well, now we’re going to tell you how we did it, including:

Our planning process
Building the format of the show
The structure of a successful podcast team

Let’s dive in.

How Can We Be Better and Different?
Once we know our business objective, audience, and budget we set out to put together a show concept that will resonate with our audience and help us hit our goals.
To do that, we needed to know what our audience is listening to today.
According to Chartable, there are over 8,334 branded podcasts on Apple Podcasts.
While we couldn’t audit all of them (we’re only human), we did want to understand the tactics used by the top podcasts in the business category. So, we did an audit.
We evaluated 20 high-performing business podcasts and gained five insights.

Male Voices: 87% of the hosts were male.

News & Commentary: 18 out of 20 podcasts provided commentary on industry news.

Broadcast Communications: Very few shows used audience engagement tactics to connect the audience with the hosts.

Business & Academic: The tone of the shows was lackluster and many used jargon.

This audit gave us the context to define our strategy.
How would our show be better and different?

Diverse Voices: A commitment to diverse voices across hosts and guests.

Research & Stories: Focusing editorially on relevant stories with added depth.

Audience Engagement: Featuring our hosts and implementing tactics to engage the audience on social media.

Business & Entertainment: We don’t have to be boring and unfashionable to talk business.

These became our editorial guidelines for the rest of the show.
Deciding on the Show Format
Next, we set our show format.
There are a few common podcast formats that have the ability to grow an audience.

Interview: A show type that brings on an expert guest for a Q&A.

Chat Cast: A co-hosted format where hosts provide commentary and criticism on a variety of topics.

Debate: A co-hosted format where hosts take one side of the argument. Debating the facts, figures, and opinions on a given topic.

Narrative: A journalistic-style podcast that includes research, scripts, and a strong storyline.

After exploring various formats, we went with a hybrid format — Chat Cast + Interview.
Bringing together the energy of a chat cast with the expertise of an interview.

Sample Episode topic: Why Is Every Company Suddenly A Media Company

Segment 1: The Context
In the opening segment, our co-hosts will provide context and talk through some fun facts and stats about the episode topic Ex.) HubSpot acquired The Hustle

Segment 2: The Debate / Discuss
In this segment, we’ll give our hosts a series of questions on the topic and questions we are featuring for some off-the-cuff opinions on both. Ex.) Should more SaaS companies follow suit? What happens to media companies if all companies are media companies?

Segment 3: The Interview
In this segment, we’ll bring on the business leader of the company/topic we are discussing to get the real story behind the decision and the other decisions that have made them successful. Ex.) Kipp Bodnar about the Hustle Acquisition

Finally, we had to figure out how we were going to make this thing.  
Your Podcast Team
To build a high-quality podcast, you need to invest in a team.
There are countless things that need to happen in the making of a show. We have broken down those responsibilities into eight core roles, but there are often teams of much more, and there are also teams of much less who are doing 3-4 jobs each:

Executive Producer — The showrunner. Head of operations, creates a vision for the overall show, leads pre-production through post-production, and manages the staff and logistics.

Senior Producer — Establishes content and narrative arc for each episode, writes and edits the scripts, coaches the host, manages the production calendar, research, prep; as well as produce interviews, tape edits, and does preliminary sound design.

Producer — Booking, research, interview prep, transcriptions, edits tape, creates outlines, and works on scripts.

Editor — Oversees the development of story ideas and gives critical feedback on story frameworks and scripts.

Host — Storyteller who shapes the show through their editorial decisions and personality. They prepare for interviews and write / edit scripts.

Managing Producer —New podcast development and builds management processes/paths necessary for a successful program.

Engineer —The first and final stop in the production process. Creates the soundscape for the show by editing and mastering audio to create a seamless listening experience.

Editorial Director — Shapes the vision and leads all planning and execution for podcasts. Drives the creative conception from ideation to execution. Collaborates with company leaders on distribution.

This list does not include the folks involved outside of podcast creation, including the creative team involved with making promotional assets, the person responsible for the communication plan of the show, and more.
Another layer of difficulty here is the decision of whether to build a team in-house or search for a podcast production agency that can fill these roles for you.
Resourcing was one of the biggest challenges in the creation of The Shake Up. We’ll let you behind the scenes on some of our decisions:

Internal or external talent for hosts: A host will make or break a podcast. Simple as that. They can either draw an audience in or push them away. We had a very specific vision for the hosts of our show and for that reason, we chose to lead an external search for talent. We chose Alexis and Brianne because of their combination of dynamism and experience, among other things.

Hire a sound engineer or bring in an agency: Engineers perfect the sound of your show. Because of the quality of sound we wanted for this show, we decided to bring in an agency because of the heavy expertise of their team and the resources they have for the job.

We were also lucky enough to have a Senior Producer, Matthew Brown, on staff, who has won awards for previous shows like The Growth Show.
So if you’re looking to invest in a team to create podcasts, use this list as a starting point to gain an understanding of the different moving parts, and carefully consider the decision of hiring for these roles, or bringing in some external help.
But the list is just a starting point, and if there’s anything that we can recommend about podcast creation, it’s the quote from Lao Tzu, “There is no greater danger than underestimating your opponent.” And your opponent, in this case, is the amount of work involved in creating a show.
Invest in the resources to do it right, and understand that it takes a village.
What Are You Waiting For?
Podcasts aren’t a new medium, but they are having a moment.

Spotify has heavily invested in the podcast portion of their platform, striking exclusive deals with podcasts like The Joe Rogan Experience, and designing a total rehaul of the podcast UI.
Statista predicts the industry will have a CAGR of 17%, reaching 164 million listeners in the US by 2023.
Apple, not to be outdone, is making a bet on podcast subscriptions.

Will podcast marketing become as standard as content marketing? Will having a podcast become as ubiquitous as having a blog?
Time will tell, but it’s clear that this is the “wave” that many podcasters predicted.
At HubSpot, we have chosen to invest heavily in media going forward, and podcasts are a large part of that strategy. The HubSpot Podcast Network and The Shake Up are the first parts of that.
If, after reading this, you choose to invest in building one, here is a checklist you should follow:

Define your audience and their problem.
Decide if a podcast is a good medium to provide a solution to that problem.
Audit the podcasts in your target space, figure out how you can be better and different.
Propose the theme and format of your show.
Build a podcast team: host, producer, sound engineer.
You’re off to the races.

We are incredibly proud of the hard work that went into launching The Shake Up. Listen to it here on your favorite podcast platform.

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Early adopters will receive 1000 free credits, access to the private community group, and premium support. They will be able to request features, provide valuable feedback, and shape the product roadmap. If you are interested or have any questions – do not hesitate and let me know. Feel free to contact me via DM or leave a comment.
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Customer expectations have changed since the beginning of 2020. Research shows that consumers have become more thoughtful and selective since the pandemic. They want to build a connection with the companies they’re buying from.  So, where does inbound marketing fit into all this? When done right, inbound marketing provides consumers with tailored content at each…
The post Here’s How Inbound Marketing Drives The Ultimate Customer Experience appeared first on Benchmark Email.