In December the remarkable Cian McLoughlin from HubSpot gave a magnificent talk on email marketing and he spent some time focusing on how marketers can cope with recent changes made to iOS which will change the way you need to set up your reporting.

TRANSCRIPT:

Over to the fantastic Cian. He's gonna talk to us about the past present and future of email marketing. Thanks again, Cian. Thanks very much. John Love seeing all those things in the chat as well might not cover all of them off, but if at the end you know, we have some time for questions. We got 20 minutes to, like John says we can cover it off and I'm always more than happy with these holds. I think they're good race that are great networking events. So if wants to connect with me on LinkedIn after and have some questions, you know, feel free. I don't use LinkedIn a lot, so it might look a little bit dormant, but I will respond in few time. Okay. Now you can see my screen, John. Yes. Yeah. We can see you. Brilliant. Okay. Good stuff. Okay. here's my Mo on the screen.

So like I said, my name is Cian McGlocklin I work for HubSpot I'm AKI customer success manager. So I look mainly after our midmarket and our corporate clusters customers. So like these hubs are always great. Even if they are digital, hopefully like one day we'll get to do them in person. Again, I'd love to go back up to England, pretty Bristol and do a hog. So I'll be keeping eye out whenever we can travel again. And I'd look pretty forward again over to seeing all you guys. Okay. So let's start off about what this is actually gonna be about today. So the actual title of the presentation is the past the present and the future of market. So this is really gonna serve as more of a primer for someone who's looking to improv liability, looking for some ideas on what to do to email campaigns, give you a general lay, the land of all.

I'm seeing a lot with my customers and the email marketing, what some of the big hairs are doing. And generally what I'm gonna try and do is kind of tell a story about how emails kind of start off and how it's kind of evolved over the the last number of years. So the agenda pretty light. So first a brief history of email, obviously to kick us off, then I wanna talk more about the current state of email. So I've talked about the field of play, what market are doing. I've taken a lot of extracts from our state of marketing report. I'm not sure if anyone seen that, but we've go download the resource online. Then I'll go through some best practises as well. Now section two and three are kind of intertwined as well. They won't be mutually exclusive one another.

Finally, then I'm gonna do look to the future. So I've taken four of what I think are the key topics that are gonna be coming up in the next couple of years that everyone should, can keep their eye on. And then we'll finish off with some key takeaways. Okay, let's go. So first off, happy 50th birthday to email. I'm not sure if anyone knows this or it's kind of kept an eye on how old email is, but email first started in 1971. So it's a 50th anniversary today. I don't think a big deals being made out by anyone really email isn't the, the sexiest of the marketing tools at all. So it generally gets letter to the wayside, but I think it's very after the are kind of doing this presentation today based on this kind of milestone that it's sort of hit. So it has changed a lot over the last number of years.

Like it's the oldest marketing channel, one of the oldest available from a digital kinda standpoint, you hear a lot of people saying, oh, even American is dead and you know, but it really isn't. It's just a little bit of date. A lot of people aren't using it the way they kinda should, but let's have a look and see how it's actually changed over the last couple years. So 1978 first email campaign went out. So in the seven years prior to this, it was used by universities. A lot of internal businesses were used it, but from a customer facing standpoint in 1978 was the first time actually went out. And this guy Gary Chu think saying that, right, he is labelled the father of spam. For one reason is that he was the first one to ever send out an unsolicited email marketing campaign to, it was 400 people perspective customers.

And he said he made 13 million. I'm not sure exactly how he measured that, but that's what he said. I think he's a very funny character. If you go online and look pictures of them, it's him holding up Kansas spa. He's really embraced it as a kind of a title, but unfortunately he him doing that kind of paved away for a lot of the misuse of email. So when we look at the the 1970s and from that, anytime I see that you've got mail, I just think of that terrible Tom ANGs movie that he was in put from the 1970s on what you really seen was a move from the snail mail, traditional kind of email send types more over to the digital side of things. So people start to realise how cost effecti that it can be, how cheap it is and how quick, obviously it's its instance, and just gave people a lot more of a broader reach to actually engage in with their customers.

And obviously as time went on, more people got computers, more people got email addresses, the more prominent it became in the whole camera market in space. But this is exactly why we're not allowed to have nice things, particularly as marketers. We generally tend, we get new toy to use and abuse it more. So back in those days, the, the wild west wild west Canada days we call them was there wasn't really any laws around what you could do. It was very much out do whatever you wanted with the tools that you have. So that's obviously when they brought in the email privacy laws where there's like, hold on, stop a second. You, you can't do what you're doing at the minute. And the amount, one assisted emails, I don't have an exact number on the volume of them, but it was enough. So they brought out a can spam laws and 1998.

Now last year, 55% of emails were spam. And that that's globally not necessarily within the, the EU. I know there's kinda GDPR and <inaudible> restrictions that there is in other parts of the world, but there's still a huge volume of email that's going out with spam. And that's just unsolicited casting net to see what happens kind of emails, which is what we shouldn't be doing pretty much so brings you to the next bit. And I think, you know what, that is one of the biggest things that happened in email marketing over the last number of years, and that was GDPR huge, huge milestone from a data privacy perspective a big win for consumers from a protection of their rights and their own kind of privacy online in a digital space. And that regulation like it's trending the rights of individuals and it really put a lot more of the onus on businesses and how they handle data, what they do with it, and, you know, approach things a bit more ethically and do things from more customer centric kinda point of view.

Now for this, I also mentioned GDP the chat for any of these marketing webinars, strictly the email ones that I do, I don't go into too much detail on GDPR. Really hesitant to kinda give comprehensive guidance and of, but one thing I will say it's 20, 21 now coming up to 2022, you know, we're kind of coming to that 3, 4, 5 year mark from GDPR now is a good time to start doing maybe a GDP audit in your own portal internally. Like we do have some guys online, but I know the guys at these monkey, they actually do a kind of GDP, your guy sort of service. So maybe connect with John or, or Katie after I know the rock stars, that kind of stuff. So yeah, just a good time to, to really reevaluate where you're in a GP perspective. Okay.

I put this slide together as well. Cause I just wanna give people an I landscape of how it's changed over these last 50 years. There's what I said in 19 70, 1 of the first network email was sent and you can see in 1978, first American email sent same year, first spa email sent. So abusing system straight away. Then you seen the nineties Hotmails purchased. Everyone had a Hotmail addresses on stage. Some of them were awful names 400 million, which at the time was a huge number out for a company to be acquired by. And now you can see as time has kind of gone on more users, like 300, 300 billion emails being sent a day. I think it's gotten up to that number now and now in 2021, moving on, we've got 4 billion users of email daily, sorry, have to hit it globally. And some of the things that were kind of seen up more as the automation side of things, personalization, interactive mail, and then the privacy.

And we were talking about a couple of them in a little bit more detail. Okay. So it's been too long that that's kinda a summary of the past, basically wild west. You could do whatever you wanted. There was a very previous privacy, not, not a whole lot of psych. It would've been like on a very, very small scale. But little to, none of it, no real personalization within there. A lot of email clients back then, they weren't built on top of CRMs. Didn't have the personalization tokens or any of that kind of software that we have now to be able to do that. It was very manual as well. So you had to come in, build the email, get the list hit, send there wasn't really a whole lot that automation piece as well. And it was kinda difficult to track and measure. It could be done to a certain extent. But it, it was very difficult to do anyone I've ever spoken to. That's a, we call like a legacy first adopter of email, like, yeah, we weren't a hundred percent sure lot of the time how our email was doing, but there were, there were some ways to do it. Okay. So that's the actual past of email. Now we figure to look at the actual the current state of email and kind what's going on, what's going on the field of play right now.

So this is something that I've heard people say in a lot of my calls with them, they'll say, oh, email, marketing's coming back. But in fact it actually, it's like, it's never left. It's always kind of be there. People have always kind of put to the wayside. I said, the start it's like not one of the, the sexier marketing tools that people have. We see a lot more people kind of lean into social media, these days website. But emails kind of always been the forgotten marketing two, even though it is actually one of the, the more effective ones and do a slide later on that kind of goes through the numbers of emails of why you should be using them if for some reason that you don't have in your academics right now. So email market is actually the third most used channel in 2021, which I think is actually amazing.

When you think about it, obviously social media's up there top everyone's using social media, having a website, but then email marketing. You don't hear about it as much as say maybe the paid social, even PPC or display, but over 60% of people use it as a, as a marketing channel. And it is something that's really, really effective. And it marries quite well with the, the top four that you see there combined in your, your market, your email marketing content website, and social media, obviously on the bottom, then you've got less of your ones like WhatsApp and Facebook messenger, which I kind of feel are falling off year on year. This graph is taken from our 2021 state of marketing report that I think it maybe 1500 markers kinda get these figures. So if anyone's wondering where, where these figures are coming from, that's where this is the email by marketing numbers that I was talking about.

So I, the percentage the check met earlier 99%, like you don't get that high of a penetration with any other channel that, that you look at even, I don't even think it was that high. When you look at traditional TV back in the nineties, the naughts it's right there, it's in people's phones, it's in their pockets. It lines up with, with SM in terms of the most penetrative marketing channel that you can do. So it should kind of be more of a, I suppose, a central channel that you're thinking about in your overall marketing mix, if it isn't right now. When we look at then millennials, which is the, the biggest former marketers and from a disposable income sample comes to see senior leadership in a lot of businesses, this where millennials are kind of stepping into in 2020 and beyond, you're seeing 73% of them prefer to communicate through email as well.

So just another indicator, they should be focusing a little bit more from the email side of things. And then for every dollar that you spend on email, you can expect to get 42 back. That was from a HubSpot research that that was done the last time we gave one, these presentations, it was $38. So it's actually only going up in terms of your ROI that you're getting from your email marketing campaigns. So when it comes to even records, they're not necessarily working harder, but they're working smarter a lot of the times. And that has come down to the tools that they actually use, which I'll go through in a bit, but just from being more data inform with the campaigns that they're sending I think a good site to kind of open. This is like, how many emails should I be sending?

A lot of people think that more is bad, but right now in, in 2021 generate the, the less you do the better it is. And there's a couple of reasons for that. Like when you send too many evils emails, you'reY, oversaturating people's inboxes, but by limiting that and making sure that all the emails you send are value adding, and they got focus on delivering value for the cost customer. You're going see more people engaging with those emails and by over mailing it actually leads to higher opt outs, unsubscribed rates complaints, and that can actually impact our send reputation as well. If you can just see that you're getting a lot of emails in each day from the same company, they generally don't open them. Like I know I get a lot of emails from wish and companies at that. And I do about an image from which later on in the presentation, but I just don't open them a lot of time because I just know that they're they're trashed or in there.

So if you're some, one of those people that are sending customers, maybe eight, seven emails a month, maybe kind of hold back on those things. Now this is the, from the tools perspective we loaded. So when we ask of what was the, you know, the tools and that you're using right now to kinda achieve your email market objectives, this is what they came back with. So personalization top of the pile which is fantastic to see generally more personalised user-centric approach is going to get you a lot better results. When they also mobile friendly emails, this kinda goes out in 2021, everyone uses their email, you try their mobile, look their emails, and I've got some stats on that. And a couple of slides down segmentation and automation appearing at least a little bit lower than actually thought they would within here, but obviously still super, super important.

The more segmented your campaigns are to a certain extent, the more successful they're going to the, and from the automation side of things, it's just really useful for delivering timely content to use it when they come in. But I do, I'm not gonna spend too long on automation today. I know a lot of email webinars that we go to now, they're very automation focused, but a lot of people are still using automation, but not as heavily as the, so I kind go through what that is now, let's take a close look. So I'll go through each of those top four that I spoke about on the last side. And we'll go through a little bit more detail for each of them. So I think we'll start off with per yeah. Personalization here. So a good quote from Megan Kinney Anderson. She was our old CMO here at sorry, VP from marketing here, hobo she CMO is the one those group now says personalization market and content requires skills, nuance, and good intention.

And intention is something that's really, really important there whenever you're looking to personalise any of the content and you're send it out. So when you ask like, oh, why is personalization important? And here's some personation by number, so 14%, that's the average increase in click rate, just when you put personalization into your emails. Then we look at transaction rates just from a BTC standpoint a six times increase when there's personalised emails. That's just not now, you know, putting in a personalization token and putting in someone's first name, that isn't gonna be a magic switch to get to you six times more transactions when personalization, I mean, dynamic content generation for products that they looked at online, different stuff like that back to them, that's relevant and more likely for actually click on. Finally then the 41% 41%, that's the potential increase in open.

You can get from a personalised product in the actual subject line of the email and for these kind of things, personalization, it's always good to be tested. And I think that kinda goes out saying always be tested in any of the emails that you're doing. So I've just got some examples of the code and the bad. So here's a really good example. The classic one you'll see of Spotify delivering back content. The at you've looked at previously in the past. So for this one, if you click on any of the, you know, gimme a good example of personalization in marketing emails, this is the campaign where just send people emails based on the artists. They'll listen to the highest artists that they listen to. If they're paying a concert in their area and it gives them the option to buy a ticket to that artist.

Now that's heavily personalised to that user, and that's definitely gonna drive a lot more action than say this email that I got from wish, which is for my motorcycle, which I don't own. I've never looked at any motorcycle content. I don't, I probably never will. Maybe who knows, but wish send out this stuff all the time. Like they're obviously outta control with a lot of the emails they send. I'm sure everyone's seen on social media wish would send you ads for products that you would never been treatment buy in. And this is a, they're a class example of just bad personalization. It's not even personalization. It's very much just a blanket approach to sending out content and then seeing, you know, wherever, wherever.

So in saying that there is a point where you can actually become over personalised a lot of the time with are content. So just because you can do it doesn't necessarily mean that they should. So a good example is like local content for restaurants and things like that. So say for me, be like, Hey, keen, are you interested in re in the, the nav area where I live? If that email gave me like my exact address. And I was like, were you interested in restaurants that are in like a 500 feet radius to this place? I'd be like, that's a little bit creepy. It kind of feels I can be in watch. It's kind of on the verge, like some black mirror stuff. So just kind of be cautious of when your person personalising your content, that if it seems creepy to you and over personalised, it probably is.

You don't want the customer to feel like they're really being tracked down to the most menu detail. So it's a kind of a thin line that we're trying in there. So just kind of be careful with that. Okay. Automation, this something I said, I wouldn't spend a whole lot of time on I would've got two or three slides on it. So jump in the first thing about automation obviously is just letting the robot do the work. So setting up the automation and automation emails and email nurturing campaigns, well like our workflows tool, the HubSpot, that's something that's really, really useful for initial first customers. When they're coming in, you've got like a very guided customer journey that you wanna get someone on. You wanna deliver it on certain bits of content that's in line with kind of a good inbound strategy.

That's, that's perfect. There comes the stage though. You need to take the, the automation wheels off and maybe focus on some more kind of personalised kinda campaigns. And that's what I'm saying, why we let the robot do the work and do a lot of heavy lifting with these marketing campaigns. It is important sometimes as well. So lemme next side. Yeah, that more automation actually sometimes means less personalised. So automation can only take you up to a certain stage, but there does come a point where you have to kind of put a, I suppose, an, an ended line on your, your email automation campaigns and move someone out and maybe focus them on a, a different campaign, move them into another another workflow even, but don't just leave someone, the one workflow for months on end always be doing regular Q and a, which automat email campaigns and make sure that you're reviewing them as they go.

So that's all I had on the automation side of things. Just one thing to be cautious of more automation generally means less personalised. And in 2021, we want more personalised campaigns. That's what we're seeing is driving the best results and getting the more engagement from our prospects and customer base. Okay. Mobile optimization, sorry, tripping over my words. Mobile optimization. So this one, it kind of goes out saying, I said in a couple of slides, it goes that everyone's using mobile right now. And if it's not something that's top of mind for you in a lot of your strategies, you really kind reevaluate where you're at with that. All getting the text heavy slide here, but mobile is where the action is pretty much just somebody's figures are great. Like 55% of global web traffic is coming from mobile device. It's something that everyone's got in their pocket.

You get a super high level of penetration whenever you're doing any kind of mobile campaigns and people now are much more receptive to engaging making purchases on mobile. So that hesitancy of saying, oh, well maybe, you know, someone's actually not gonna make a purchase through mobile. You know, that's kind of long gone in the past. A lot more people are more open to, to doing that on mobile right now. And the, the last that I kind of have in there. So it's the Mo mobile front emails, most use tag emails for improve their performance. If you launch a mobile responsive email design, it can improve unique mobile by 15%. That's like a huge percentage increase for any campaign that you're doing. So even just making sure that, you know, your emails are mobile optimised, that you're sending people from mobile landing pages, it has a huge impact on the campaigns and results that you're actually gonna get.

So I've got some tips from mobiles from kind of like take home tips that you can, you know, maybe implement some of your campaigns. The first one is kind of a bit of a no brainer. Some no hanging through is just investing in response of mobile. Temperas for email in hope, the spot out the box, you get that, but if you don't use those spot, if you use something else, you know, definitely spend some time and actually invest in those more responsive templates, because if you're actually emails that you send out, don't look good on mobile. You're not gonna get any results. This is a very interesting one. There was a study in Harvard that looked at people on a touch screen and the average sizes of someone's index finger. And they determined that a clickable link or a CTA on a screen should be larger by the 57 by 57 pixels.

So that's just the ease of someone actually clicking on the screen. That's just from reusable a standpoint as well for, for customers. You don't want these tiny little called actions that someone can click on. So just something to keep in mind from it, from a sizing point of view, whenever you're putting out your campaigns, next one then is reducing the subject line to match up with the mobile. And, and this that's really overlook for a lot of the customers, even that I deal with is that they have big line subject lines where it doesn't get to the point where before people can see them on their actual screen. So just keep that in mind and look at your open rates. Not, sorry, not even open rates, your delivery rates for, for mobile, for any your campaigns and just see and write, maybe put down by subject lines so people can see what the email that share, and that can actually maybe increase open and write a little bit more.

And then finally testing your emails across multiple email clients. You can do this in HubSpot as well, but an email that looks good on one email climate might not actually look just as good on another one. So there's a couple of take home tips that you guys can have maybe try and some of your campaigns, okay. Segmentation last for the current state of marketing. So this is just a really nice fact and figure, see, so recipients are 75% more likely to click on emails from segmented campaigns than non segmented campaigns and the type of segmentation that we talk about. I've got a list here different segmentation models you can use, but say doing it by demographic. Some people do it by behavioural needs based, which is a huge one for driving just more open rates. So the needs based segmentation for a product or an actual service.

So I could say, for example, if I wished on any needs based segmentation I wouldn't have received that email about motorcycle kinda stuff. If you've got a customer who is, I dunno, let's just say they're under your CRM and you only do business customers in the UK, but they're based in Germany, segmenting them out of the campaigns. Just make sure that they're actually probably going to engage with it a little bit more and doing these segmentation exercises, it improves your overall deliverability, and it kind of has a small knock on effect to your email centre reputation, overall deliverability kind of metrics. So just kinda keep that in mind, whenever you're doing segmentation, like, am I sending these emails to people who are actually going to open them and actually going to engage with them? Or am I just sending these emails as a kind of a casting out widen net and, and seeing who, who really you know, what kind of fish do I catch in the way?

And so segmentation should be key in a lot for campaigns and bring onto my last slide for segmentation. They don't forget about CRM decay. This is something that when I say to people, their mind is just bamboozled by it. Like the average decay rate for CRM is 24%. So that means the data in your CRM on average, 24% of that will not be useful in one year's time. And we do have a database decay model hopes if you Google that it'll pop up and you can just type in a number of contacts on your CRM, how many you get from your website, et cetera. And it will give you a, a predicted database for decay forecast. So when you're doing segmentation to send people emails, you also wanna say out people aren't interacting with your emails. So avoiding things like grey mail people just havet opened emails in the year.

If they haven't opened in the year, they're probably not gonna open tomorrow. So just something to keep in mind and taking those people out, improves your deliverability, your overall send reputation, et cetera. Okay. That's kind of a quick bus up on tour on the, you know, the present day of American email. And this is what I'm seeing from our state American report. These are the top tactics that everyone's using to get more engaged campaigns, drive more results with their contact list, people in your CRM. So the difference between this and the actual pass is that it's a lot more personalised. It's way more segmented than you're seeing a day is nineties huge focus on mobile, which is only gonna become bigger as time goes on automated. And then it's very, very easy to measure with so many of the tools that we have <inaudible> within HubSpot, the, the report and two emails are, are really, really good.

And they're good across all applications that you see. It's just a it's part and parcel and necessity. When you're doing email campaign need to be data driven, we need to be able to see performance again. Okay. So let's have a look for the future. These are the top four things that I've seen with my customers that I'm hearing a lot of chatter about from our product team as well, where we kind of think the direction of email marketers going and things to kinda be looking out for I putting on your radar. So the first thing is having just more interactive emails now that you can put gifts in I've seen emails that you have reviews there certain emails as well, where you can actually answer quizzes within them, interactive emails, show us drive more results. That's what we're seeing right now, but it's got quite a low adoption at the minute.

I think my next slide actually shows the percentage of people actually doing these interactive campaign types. So now is a really good time for you to get ahead of the curve. And when we start trying to do some interactive campaigns, that's figured on the bottom market reporting at 200% improvement and click rates and using activity, that's huge. If by just putting in a silly little gift, you can get a couple more clicks, easy. That's really, really low hanging fruit, but in there this is, yes, this is title. I was talking about mega model from litmus or another email provider and 91% of consumers wanting directive content, only 17% of marketers provided. So over 80% of people aren't doing what 91% of people want. That's another way to look at that. So if there's one thing I would say you take away from say that you can maybe implement even next week is interactive email, super simple freely, low hanging fruit.

Here's just some examples, all this loads. There we go. This is one from lifestyle sports. They're like a JD sports here in Ireland. Interactive. I can just leave reviews for them right there. I can share a photo right there from the actual email. This one is from the zoo, just has a couple of dishes dancing around and something as simple as that gets more results from users. Next thing, user con user generated content, sorry, tripping words. Again. This is something that I've seen a lot more of in there generally becomes bra. A lot of brands have become so distrustful and it's very hard for you to take what they say at face values. So now what everyone's doing is they evidence actual users for reviews, for user generated content to try and win over trust of normal consumers in there. And over the next couple of years, just keep an eye on it.

Now as I've said, you're probably gonna notice it a whole lot more, but in a lot of emails that are sent out, just one of your reviews in there, there's gonna be quotes from people where customers and it's the best two would gaining social proof for any of you guys like that sta right there, 90%, 2% of consumers trust our media more than owned media, which just a huge number, which is basically saying, yeah, if it's a brand saying it, I'm not gonna take that it's value, you know, why should a lot of the time, and then 79% of their person decisions are highly influenced by user generated content. Like we have a lot of this kind of perceived risk when we're buying something. But if we see someone who's a consumer like us making the recommendation, it kind of brings down that barrier within there.

There's just some really good, some really good figures from stack as well about consumers in 2019 versus consumers in 2017, and what's impacting their purpose and decisions. Here's some examples of the user generated content and sorry, it's taking so long to load. I, for one side that run beds because I'm looking for a bed right now, but these are just some quotes within here. And if I see that and I saw something like this, where you got the dog and, and they're happy everything, and a small coat with that, I'm much more likely to kick into that than the duvet king, you know, saying by our beds, you know, it just makes more sense of an actual humour or a person is doing it. This is the big one. This is the user privacy side of things. I know we've gone a little bit over times where I'll only be two or two more minutes, John. Right. You're absolutely

Fine, mate. You're absolutely fine. We, we only had a few people on early on and there was a, a, a chorus of don't put my camera on. We've we've just skipped over the networking. So we've got, we've got a few more minutes,

Don't you? Okay, brilliant. Okay. I'll take a little bit more time with this though, because this is like a hot topic that I talk about a bit with a lot of my customers. So like first I'd just like to say personally, I think this is a really good thing. And I think HubSpot shared that for you as well. You see a lot of people from our ability team saying, yes, this is a really good thing. The whole idea of inbound inbound marketing is that it looks at things from a customer point of view, and we want to respect the customer and we want the best customer experience possible. And if adjustments like mail, privacy protection is something that customers want. Then I think the step in the right direction, I think right now from a privacy and data standpoint, you know, it's quite loose still on the internet.

So these kind of steps, I think towards a future is something you're gonna be seeing a lot more of, like in my first part of presentation, zero privacy laws current state of play GDPR, next data play hands in the consumer with their own data protection side of things. So just to kinda go through the iOS one basically there's two functions to it. Or two features. There's a free version that gives mail privacy protection, where basically the email finder apple will just open the email on customers or behalf hides your IP addresses. So you can see where they're actually open or from, or see the location of it. So this kind inflates your actual open, right, that you're seeing for your campaigns. The other functionality comes with that one. It's called hide my email. So let's, the users have unique email addresses are random ones at forward.

Their own person message F own person, email addresses, say if they want to get a bit of gate content within there as well. So like the, the one thing I said there is about open rates is that your open rates are gonna probably rise with no change in the actual engagement themselves. So just kind of be cautious of your send out email campaigns now. And you've got very high percentage of apple users in your actual email base. You're like, oh, my email open rights are true to roof. This is fantastic. Passing the back all around. That's probably a metric you should be moving away from. You probably should be looking at more of the actual engagement, like clicks, clicks replies to emails, conversions on site, that kind of thing. As opposed to open rates, like a lot of people are kind of up the view that open rates, a vanity metric.

And I think that's a, an opinion that's gonna come more to the forefront over the next couple of years. I think open rate might even go the way of what we saw likes where on Facebook, a lot of businesses were pushing for likes on, on social media. And when it's just a van metric, when there should be other ones you're looking at, maybe open rates, won't go as far as that, but definitely would with changes like this security changes, I wouldn't put it as your primary metric if you're trying to determine success and it's, and it's not just apple that are doing these as well. I do have a slide here that has another couple of ones. We're seeing a, a lot, like people can actually just go into their email sentence and the block track and activity. Anyway, this isn't something that's necessarily new, but apple are doing that on such a scale.

Now that it's people are kind of noticing a little bit more, there's also rise a lot of company, these that are offering these burner services where people can kind of come in and just create these dummy burner accounts to get what they want. And then it just deletes the email. Like 10 minute email is one Firefox. The they've actually created their own one as well. There's a huge wait list for it. So there is a massive demand for these services and the, if we're looking for a future, I think this is gonna be the centre point of everything where a lot of the powers being put back into the hands of the actual users data's gonna be more in their hands. They take control and marketers need to respect that and give them the space and understand that they're the ones that control what they want to see.

And we can't necessarily push what we want in them right now. We're seeing a lot more of the personalization stuff as well. It's just the way things are going with market. Okay. That's my top four for in the future. I've got some key takeaways one or two more slides and we're kinda jump into questions. So key takeaways. So if we're, I just wanna look at everything like side by side, just to kinda give you a view. Wish I had that said slide by slide for a minute. I'm not that no, don't do the whole thing again. It was good, but there's no time has everyone gone under a half an hour? I was wishing I could actually create a, you know, a graphically, a better one, but these cards will do, I suppose. We can see the past press in the future, like the past lets know privacy and in the future advanced privacy functionality, we're seeing on a lot of things.

No personalization in the past. Now it's heavily personalised and there's a fo a focus on user generated content moving forward in the future. But the key one down the bottom of each these cards is where the power sat with everyone previously in the past, it's sat with the marketer. They're the ones who decided what you got. You couldn't stop it. If they had their email address, you're getting an email, whether you'd like it or not. Right now, power is shared between market and consumer. A lot of the time where there is a kind of a no one's necessarily holding all the cards and with GDPR and, and some other restrictions, consumers do decide what they want and heavily segmented campaigns do kind of funnel users with content that they are interested in. But there's still a lot of businesses and marketers that, that aren't necessarily doing that.

They're still going for this wide cast net approach, but in the future, the consumer is probably gonna have more power. They're gonna be able to decide, I don't want any of this. It needs to be hyper personalised, interactive, and really focused on what the, what the user actually wants. So if I was to say like five things for you to kind of think about and take away from today is like be smart email campaigns less is sometimes more of the time. You're probably gonna saturate your customer's inboxes and you're not gonna get anywhere. If you go for that, you know high volume approach, maybe just take a step back and reconsider how your marketing maybe box a little bit more clever on that point. Personalization is key for all these things. Like some of the figures I showed you, those are only three figures I pull out.

If you go into any other website, there is any amount of metrics and studies that show personalization leads to more results. The interactive side as well. That's one of my top tips for the future. Again, just some of the figures I pulled out, the studies is small little things like more interactive email drives me. More results makes you stand out as a brand and a business as well. Be user orientated, a lot more user generated. Content is gonna help you earn the trust of your customers. And we talk about the whole time here at COPO, and it's like turning your customers into advantages, make them shout about you. And word of mouth is gonna be a lot more powerful than any amount of words that you can ever push out to people through ads or anything like that. And then find is just being respect of people's privacy.

If you get a reputation of being a business, that's very pushy. You bend the rules to send emails and you're not respected of someone's digital privacy and space. It's hard for us to visualise a digital space online, but we all have it and that should be respected across the board. So just that's number one, I would say to take away from today for the future to be respect all people's privacy. So sorry, I went seven minutes over but that's it everyone. Thanks so much for, for coming. Thanks for John ke and the guys for having me, I love doing these virtual hugs think they're great agency. So yeah, that's pretty much it. And now I'll try and figure out how to stop sharing my screen.

Thanks, Cian. That's really good. Some really useful stuff there. And, and I've made a note, some of the questions we got at the beginning, a lot of which I think you, you answered as you went through so well done. That's, that's really cool. If anybody's got any quest further questions, they wanna stick in the chat we'll we'll go through the questions that were put in before or pick up on any that come into the chat or into the Q and a if you are really keen, we can even turn your microphone and, or your camera on and you can ask them in person. Right. So let me just quickly zip through some of the ones that we we got earlier. Sean Thomas was her biggest challenge was getting responses and engagement. And I think you probably covered that off with like every, every bit of it was, you know, what, personalise, not too much.

Yeah. At segment send relevant content. I, I can't think I, I, I don't think there was a bit of your, your talk that didn't, didn't cover that off. Yeah. Thanks. Sean agrees the, the, the next question, the next challenge we had was B2B marketing engagement are after acquisition and lead magnets. So I guess that's from Elise. And I guess she's talking about, okay, well, we've got them on the list. Yes. How do we engage 'em after that? And I guess we didn't really have time to go through that, but do you have any kind of general high level tips on that Ken high

Level tips? There is something you can not sure if it's public facing. But I can try and find the presentation. A lot of our deliverability experts and email experts talk about these things of rivers and pools for acquisition, whether you can actually get them onto the list. And what maybe my rivers and pools is rivers is you will guide someone on these very specific journey. These that have a determined, desired action at the end that might just be downloading a bit of content, giving them an update about something. But they always have these end goals. They're not necessarily just emails for sending up the sake of emails. And then when they're finishing these streams you put them into what we would call pools which are essentially like your newsletter. They're still value add, and they're still informative within there, but they don't have any kind of specific kinda drive within them. That's kind of the best engagement strategy we've seen when you've finally gotten them on the list. I think I've kind of answered that was that.

Yeah. Yeah. I love it. So it's almost like, okay, you might have missed the opportunity or, or, or the, the initial opportunity with a lot of people, but actually you've gotta try and get them from the pool into a river, if you think they're the right sort of person and they, you think they wanna hear from you. So,

Yeah. And, and the thing that brings people into these from pools into river is I always indicators of interest or S or as sales already actions, if we love these kind letter Ingrams, what you call them and what, like a indicator interest might be is look at the pricing page, a classic example a sales already action, talk to sales when someone's on that, you'd move them in from a pool into a river. So the pool is kind of something there to kind keep an eye on them, and you can see, you know, necessarily, you know, you're not tracking them to the, to the minute, but you can see if they're taking these actions like within HubSpot, if they're tracked online, you can, you can see what pages they've gone to, what emails they've opened, et cetera. So keeping an eye on these indicators of interesting sales or the actions to move someone from a pool into a stream excuse me, is probably the best. Yeah.

And, and it's, it's that thing. And the reason I kind of said about you, you might have almost missed the opportunity is it's difficult to do that after the fact, but if you can start having those conversations with your sales teams or your revenue generators now, as actor Elise, you can start saying, right, well, if people are in this pool, what's, you know, what, what do they think? What do we think some of them want as their end goal? Okay, well, let's, let's begin to, to, to, to have a almost we, we use lead scoring to do this for our clients and we'll go, okay, well, if they looked at the pricing page and they last, I, they spoke to us, they said they had this much budget and they were looking to, to find a new supplier in the next six months. Well, okay. They're back in a river and yes, automation takes place, but you can't kind of generalise it, Kenny, you have to do it per, per, per, per buyer, basically. Yeah. Like

That, that that thing is, you mentioned there that data point, when are you next interested in and buyin, like, if someone says six months, I simply ask that question online and set up workflows around that. So they would have a, you know, a six month river, if you will. Yeah. To have that desired outcome at the end, where at the end of six months, you know, the action would be booking a call with member of sales or who, whoever it needs to be kind of within there. So, you know yeah. All, all great software

We're in danger of just getting very excited about the river, the fast flowing rivers

And slow flowing. Yeah. They're yeah. That's it like, doesn't go too deep on the analogy, but I hope that kind of makes sense to everyone's the best way to, to visualise it and can think about it.

Yeah. Cool. we have Mark Turner also asked about engagement. Clara Lou asked about she had two questions. So one of them is house to build an immense email subscription list in spite of GDPR mm-hmm <affirmative>. So and then the other one is about attributing the impact of emails on conversions and deal mm-hmm <affirmative> I think I know Clara uses HubSpot, so attributing that we should be able to do that within reporting, right. Keen yes. Over the

Box. Yeah. It's so you can do that tracking your URLs as well is you know, yeah. A great way of doing that. So you can, you can do all that in <inaudible>

Clara ping me or Josh an email when you get a moment and we'll show you how to do that. Because it's, it's, it's relatively simple. The, although nothing is relatively simple for Clara's business. It's big, big, complicated business. So yeah, we we're happy with that. The, the immense building, an immense email subscription list, any tips for any tips for that?

I actually when these hogs were actually in person, I don't want an an for, but I don't like maybe like a full four email session on like building immense kinda email subscription list. And like the, the thing about building like these great email lists is that you're relying on your other channels to do that. So couple, couple of top tips, like out the box, really low hanging fruit kind of popup forms on site as a HubSpot tool there's a couple of different ones you have on there. If you've got long form website, long form website, long form content on your website set the popups to be after a certain about a scroll depth. So you kinda know someone's interested if you have like a specific offer or something, maybe have a popup that's based on exit intent. So if someone goes to click on the page, like, Hey, join our subscription, this, you get 10% off your first purchase.

Generally if people have like a high lifetime value of their customer, like repeat purchasers, that's a, that discount amount is higher or whatever kind is, but that's like a really, really good one. Yeah. The, to have them there, like number out the box, there's also the one that you'll have like bot Mehan corner sign up for the newsletter. Just kind of very simple things like that. It would be, would be number one. The second thing there is actually using pay ads and people think, oh, hope about you. You're kind of an inbound company. I thought everything was like, you get customers to come to you that, but there is an, an inbound way to actually do ads. And there's a lot of articles we have on our blog about this. You might have seen, I think it was 2019. We done a thing with LinkedIn and I believe it was Twitter as well on Facebook about using ads in an inbound way.

You can find all that kind of stuff online, but supercharging your male subscription lists with hyper focused, targeted marketing campaigns on social is a great way to build your list. Like obviously the, the channel depends on you like Facebook, you're gonna see like a high number of subscriptions might not be the best quality a lot of the time. And if you're a B2B, if you're a B2C, go for it. If you're primarily a B2B business, LinkedIn, that's your, that's your comfort zone. That's your space. That's where you're gonna get high quality leads expensive. But these, these leads, these leads work. These are people hanging out. Hey, and no one, like people do kinda rely on LinkedIn a little bit, but they're generally truthful. A lot of the times that they're tagging quite good on their particularly if you're Tagg people by persona.

So you're looking at their job title, actual specific industry or business that you wanna get within there. So that's kinda the, the second way I kinda had in there, the third then is just good content. And SEO. This is a, it's a long play, a long game though. If you wanna get like a really good subscription, having good content is one of those pillars that you're going to need to get people who want to sign up and give them over your email address, like have good content. And when I always say content, I just don't, I don't mean blogs. Well, I kind of mean some of the gated stuff as well, like PDF downloads and reports and things like that. What you're looking for is this mutually beneficial exchange of their email in return for a value add piece of content that you're given in.

There's no such thing anymore. It's like, give me your email address. That's mine. I'll send you whatever I want. <Laugh> like people want something in return within that. So we always talk about the new usually beneficial exchange when they, that's just something to kind of keep in mind, again, give the people what they want, and they'll give you what, what you want. So top three tips to kind of move away from today, we're kind of building that list, low hanging fruit with the forms. That's a, that's a big one. The, the ads, if you're looking to really supercharge things and you've got budget, there is just content that's gold content that I, that people want to engage with.

And we've, we've tried all of those three things and it's, and it's really it's and they work. The nice thing is, is you'll hear someone. So my agent above say, well, we used to just buy a list. Can't we just buy a list. Yeah. And you've got, well, there's the decay thing, but actually you also, you don't have permission to market to those people. And even if you do those people are idiots, cuz they've given everybody in the world permission. So you don't wanna buy that list. Investing in building a list is what it's all about and you've you, the way you've just described. It's perfect. You know, you're, you're doing a particularly with just three ways. Brilliant. Thank you. Got, I've got so excited about that. I forgot to look at the next one. So we've got two more questions, maybe three, perhaps we've got <inaudible> asked how to land in primary. So he's, I suspect that when I, we, we checked it's I I'm landing in social I'm landing in promotions and all kinda stuff. What's, what's your feeling on that?

This is a tricky one. Like there's no, the only way to kind of overcome this is how the user on the other side actually interact with the actual email itself, that's it? There's, there's no magic hack or secret to it. You just need to do that. I'm not sure if there's a it's, you know, depending on your bit, there could be a way to tie you know, certain emails to making the user actually take an action to kind do that. But no email client is gonna take an email out of promotions or social and place it in primary unless of an interacts with that's just the way it's the way it's set up. Unfortunately. Sorry, it's gonna a cough out answer, but yeah, I get asked the whole time.

It's the truth, isn't it is that thing of creating such a good subject line and such a compelling offer for those. And like, it's, it's a, we it's a campaign in itself. We'll often speak to people early on in our process and they'll say all of our emails go into junk or they go into spa or they go and it's well, because often when they're coming to us, that's been that's, that's your footprint. You've had people drag your email into junk. You've had people drag your email in spam. So now you've gotta look it the other way. I'm not saying that's what the problem you've got. <Inaudible> but, but yeah, you've gotta make 'em drag it the other way or, or you've gotta make 'em interact with it and if you can get it, and it's just normally a really good offer and it doesn't need to be something that they have to buy, doesn't have to an offer of that. It can be something really useful to them. So knowing your customer again, helps you out. Sorry. I've that's ah, man, I love talking to people about that. Right. Katie had a question, although she's there. So Katie, it feels a bit self-serving if I ask both of Katie's question I'm glad that people still ask talking about buying lists in the 21st century, but here you are. Katie, what about you've got, you've got one out of your two questions to ask.

Ah, okay. I'm interested about effective subject lines because I think I've, I just enjoy a funny subject line and I didn't know whether you've got any sort of anecdotal experience of using effective subject lines and to increase open rates or reply.

Yeah, good question. It, it depends. <Laugh>

What are you an SEO? Oh

Yeah. Sorry. I hate saying that, but it depends a lot of the time. I have seen a lot of people now experimenting with emojis and I've seen some really good results, but a lot of them there was a, an inbound, there was someone that done this a whole session or basically around subject lines, like key to subject line, those personalization that's that's it, when it comes down to like the bare basics, like having their actual name right there that increase that, you know, dramatically based on just not having anything there at all. You see a lot of people do the tricks though. You know that this is your last chance to get this offer. You know, you do this now you get 50% off. That kind of stuff does lower people in. And when I say it depends, this kind of leads to, you need to be testing these things.

Always be testing is, is the best answer I can kinda give there. Like emoji's always something I just top mind, I've seen it a lot more. If you guys go into your email now, you're probably gonna see a lot more of them as well. For some reason they just stand out because when you're looking and like your email clients, whether it's on desktop, on a phone, it's basically blocks of text divided by the, the narrowest of the grey lines. Anything that you can do to make them stand out it you know, is going to help. And that combined with the personalization, those are kind of things you do to be eyecatching, but then there's being a catching and then there's, what's behind that, you know, you can have, like I said, in presentation, you have the biggest open rate of all time from people that click into it, but it's got no substance behind it. Then, you know, it's not really, you know, point by subject lines of now on <laugh>. Yeah.

We can like see through the tricks now as well, where people will send a cold email, but in the subject line it will say like Bri, and then they'll pretend they're replying.

That's, that's what Sean said exactly. That as you said it, yeah. Like, you know, like, as you say here, like we're wide to this kind of sitting there, like we're wide to the tricks. We know what people are doing. So yeah, but like I said, always be testing, use personalization, maybe tryout emojis. But if there's no substance behind that, you're you're in trouble. Cool. Cian you have been brilliant.