Want better engagement on your marketing emails? Don't we all?! This 50 minute webinar with email marketing expert Maret Reutelingsperger will arm you with all the tricks you need to start seeing a distinct improvement in your 2021 email marketing strategy. You'll learn about anti-personas, the importance of segmentation and why Debenhams is on Maret's hit list. Check out the recording below!

Transcript

Jon Payne:

Hello. Welcome to Business as Unusual, the webinar. Don't do a big err in the introduction. It looks unprofessional. Well, I've done it. It's a webinar about how to thrive in the pandemic and whatever comes after with a focus on marketing sales and business growth. Today we're joined by Maret Reutelingsperger.

Maret Reutelingsperger:

Yes, you did it. Well done.

Jon Payne:

Yes. That's the hardest name I've had to pronounce on this.

Maret Reutelingsperger:

I feel like you probably didn't breathe for a second beforehand there.

Jon Payne:

It's why I screwed up the whole intro. I was going with Reutelingsperger, Reutelingsperger, Reutelingsperger, Reutelingsperger.

Maret Reutelingsperger:

Sorry, it's a bit greedy, isn't it that?

Jon Payne:

Yeah. It is. It's really resource hungry on the brain. But I'll tell you what. Once you do it three or four times, Reutelingsperger, Reutelingsperger, Reutelingsperger ...

Maret Reutelingsperger:

Look at you go.

Jon Payne:

It's beautiful. It's like saying [inaudible 00:00:52].

Maret Reutelingsperger:

Yeah. Wow.

Jon Payne:

Anyway, enough about the mouth feel of your beautiful surname Maret.

Maret Reutelingsperger:

Yeah.

Jon Payne:

Also, and in honour of Maret and to remind me how to pronounce her first name, I'm eating amaretto biscuits with my Bristol hipster coffee here.

Maret Reutelingsperger:

That is dedication. I feel like that is dedication to the cause, that, buying biscuits to match your person.

Jon Payne:

It's the way we roll here at Noisy Little Monkey. Maret, enough of this nonsense. Today you're going to talk to us about emails and how to stand out in a crowded inbox. We're so glad and so grateful for you making the time. Thank you for that. But before we get started, tell us a bit about you and how you came to be where you are.

Maret Reutelingsperger:

Okay. Well, I mean, we've started off with the most important part which is Bramble, but I'll do a little bit ... I'll say a little bit about my company and then a little bit about me.

               So my name is Maret Reutelingsperger if you speak English, Reutelingsperger if you speak Dutch, just to confuse everyone with the rolling Rs and the flammy noises. I'm the founder of Mobe Digital, an inbound marketing consultancy, even though I forgot to link in any of my promo for this webinar. I remembered today. I did it today.

Jon Payne:

And we'll put lots and lots of shout outs. Mobe Digital, we'll do it on social, we'll put it in the email.

Maret Reutelingsperger:

It's going to be great. We know exactly what we're doing, how to get people involved. Anyway. Yeah, I basically specialise in telling a business' story in sort of two ways. The first one is on the website using SEO. So making sure that the website can be found and that we're sharing useful information online, as well as capturing interested people's information. And to sort of then increase our conversations and our relationships we use digital comms. So we use email marketing and marketing automation to make sure that we share relevant information with the right people at the right time as well.

               You've met the CMO of our company. Bramble is basically our head of marketing. I asked her to make some time free for this webinar, especially would she kindly put some time in her diary. So yeah. I guess it's not a real coincidence that I've ended up here, although I think like pretty much everyone who's here right now or who's watching it later, it's been a bit of a strange journey as it is with most people in digital marketing. But I've always loved telling stories. So I wanted to share with you one of the first ones I wrote.

               I wrote it when I was six, and basically it was about Donald Duck who was going on a fancy holiday which he won, which I think is just a great why am I thinking of that when I'm six, winning a holiday. But yeah, Donald Duck won a holiday and nearly missed his flight because he forgot the tickets. So there's a whole adventure of him trying to get home and get back on time, but spoiler alert, he makes it and he goes on holiday.

Jon Payne:

I mean, I'm happy to buy the book. I don't want to destroy a six-year-old's ability to earn royalties on this, but can you tell us without spoiling it maybe where was Donald Duck going on holiday?

Maret Reutelingsperger:

I feel like there's more, it's more of a descriptive place than an actual place. It's a place that you can feel where there's sunshine and a beach and palm trees and just a lot of happiness in your heart.

Jon Payne:

Oh man. It's almost ... Man, I'm almost welling up a little bit. It's the perfect story for a pandemic. We can't go there but we can imagine ourselves there and bring ourselves, much like Mr. Duck in your story, a bit of peace and maybe some calm.

Maret Reutelingsperger:

Absolutely. No, I hope that you all enjoyed that.

Jon Payne:

Brilliant. How long have you been working in kind of marketing then?

Maret Reutelingsperger:

So I've worked in marketing for, gosh, probably longer than I want to admit.

Jon Payne:

Well then, don't let me make you give away your age.

Maret Reutelingsperger:

I started off probably about eight years ago in an in-house role, which was great because it gave me a really good overview of how to really go deep for a company. And anyone who is here who is in-house will know that when you're in marketing, you do all the things. It's not just marketing. It's event management. It's comms. It's internal comms. It is just getting your team organised. It's merch. It's everything. So that was really interesting.

               After that I learned there about websites and we got a new website, so I helped with the migration and creating that, and I found that really interesting. So as a result I joined a digital marketing agency called Aira where I got onboarded as an account manager first, which again was really good because it showed me a really broad overview of all the different marketing channels that they employ and it really helped me understand how they work together. But after a while, I am a bit of a nerd. I think most people who have seen me anywhere before will know that. I basically realised, okay, this is all really nice, but I want to go deep, I want to really understand and help people tell their story.

Jon Payne:

Thanks [inaudible 00:07:06].

Maret Reutelingsperger:

So I went deep and I chose SEO and digital comms to be my channels and make them work together to have that sort of circle idea.

Jon Payne:

Yeah, yeah. And Azeem and [Arige 00:07:23] are celebrating your journey. And I think we've got to move on to people hearing your great tips. But along with them is that is they call it sometimes a t-shirt shaped employee. I can't remember who coined that phrase.

Maret Reutelingsperger:

Yeah, t-shaped, t-shaped, that's it.

Jon Payne:

T-shaped. I said t-shirt shaped. Why? Of course it's t-shaped. I am quite quiet. I'll be louder. Sorry Sanjay. But a t-shaped employee where you learn loads of different things and then you decide that one or two things you want to really specialise in. This is really good. I'm loving the fact that people are bigging you up and I'm getting audio and other criticism in there. That's exactly how it should be. This is-

Maret Reutelingsperger:

I'm really enjoying the build up. I mean, I can hear you fine.

Jon Payne:

Thank you Maret. So chaps and chapesses, and people who identify as anything other than that, put your questions if you could. We could put them in the chat, but actually can we try and experiment, and you should be able to see a little thing on the bottom of your screen that says Q&A. Stick it in there because then people can upvote their favourite question. Let's try that as opposed to me, Katie, and Claire, all trying to pull the questions out of the chat. So when you have questions, stick them in the Q&A. We've got some time at the end.

               So Maret, start off. You were going to ... I think one of the first things you're going to talk about is the key to effective email marketing. Sounds to me like it might be actually underpinning a lot of what you do.

Maret Reutelingsperger:

Yeah, absolutely. So when we start thinking about effective email marketing, really what we start with is taking a step back and understanding your customers, right? We all know the phrases like e-shot or email blast, that scatter gun approach that some people I think may have taken from back in the day when flyering was a thing, so it's just like, ah, throw everything against the wall and some of it might stick, I don't know. And okay, I guess, fair enough, but also no.

Jon Payne:

Yeah.

Maret Reutelingsperger:

We live in 2021-

Jon Payne:

No, it's fair enough.

Maret Reutelingsperger:

We live in 2021. We have so many tools that we can use to our advantage to understand not only the market, the broader market, but also what our existing contacts engage with. We can see what open rates look like for certain emails. We can see if people keep opening emails if you put them in an email flow. So this is actually a good moment for me to declare 2021 as the year of the purge.

Jon Payne:

Right.

Maret Reutelingsperger:

Now that might sound a little bit existential, but really what I mean is let's make this the year of the targeted list, right? Most people who are here or who are looking back, they will know about the market research they can do, creating content, creating buyer persona, sorry, for your company so you fully understand your customers and the content they engage with. Just a few off the top of my head are ask your existing customers. So schedule interviews with those who are happy with your product or those who decided against buying during their buyer's journey, and understand how you could have helped them better.

               In actual fact, take that a step further and talk to your team, like talk to your sales team, talk to your customer service team. They will have templates ready with frequently asked questions that they just copy and paste. And that's content that you might not find in keyword research, but it's the questions that people are actually asking your company. So basically get a step ahead and answer the question before they even know they have it. And you're great. Like check on your competition and see what they are doing and then reflect on whether that would work for you. It might not, but equally, they might be using some tactics that you've forgotten about.

               And I guess, use your social stats as well. There's so much demographic and information hidden about the people who are engaging with you on pretty much any social platforms insights page that you can really use to your advantage. So that, I mean, we all know this kind of stuff. I just thought I'd repeat it anyway.

               I can go on rants about customer research.

Jon Payne:

So lots of people on the call will, but lots of people who are new, like we were once, don't know this, and their boss is saying to them, "We need to go and do this. We need to ... Our email never works. Can you make it better?"

Maret Reutelingsperger:

Yeah.

Jon Payne:

Excuse the dog running around. "Our email never works. Can you make it better?" But this is kind of like, "Oh, okay, maybe if I try some of these things." I'm really glad. Don't worry that it's, sometimes it feels a bit beginnery. If we don't start where it's important, if we don't get our foundations right, our building is wonky. Cool.

Maret Reutelingsperger:

So that's about your target audience. But what I also want to talk about is creating an anti-persona because ... Well actually, Jon, I don't know if this is possible, but I think we should do like an audience participation moment. So I'm going to ask a question.

Jon Payne:

Yeah?

Maret Reutelingsperger:

And I want everyone, everyone who's watching to raise their hand. And then, Jon, if you can get the techie bit done, we might turn on someone's camera to make sure they're playing along?

Jon Payne:

Claire might be able to do this, because I'm not actually the host. Claire. Oh, she might be able to. Let's see.

Maret Reutelingsperger:

Yeah. So anyone who's here watching, we might be turning on your camera, are you ready?

Jon Payne:

Oh, this is great.

Maret Reutelingsperger:

Jon is the host now. It's with you.

Jon Payne:

This is brilliant. I mean [crosstalk 00:13:44] this?

Maret Reutelingsperger:

So if you have ever had a client that you are talking to about digital comms and they said, "We could have anyone as our customer, we want to target everyone," please raise your hand now. Right.

Jon Payne:

I can't ... I tried to turn Sanjay's camera on because I thought he would let me get away with it, but I can't.

Maret Reutelingsperger:

It didn't work. Oh well, we blame the tech. We blame the tech.

Jon Payne:

If you didn't raise your hand, Sanjay said he was waiting for it. He's my go-to guy for anything that's a bit dodgy and I need someone who's going to forgive. Yeah, if you didn't raise your hand, put it in the chat. But yeah, I've heard that millions of times. It's so frustrating.

Maret Reutelingsperger:

Isn't it? Because, sure, and especially with e-commerce, I can understand that you go broad, but you don't want to target everyone. If you sell trainers, then you're probably not targeting corporate professionals.

Jon Payne:

Yeah.

Maret Reutelingsperger:

If you sell gin, you are probably not targeting teetotalers or children.

Jon Payne:

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And hardly anybody's targeting people over 80.

Maret Reutelingsperger:

Well, I mean, that's a loss, isn't it? But ...

Jon Payne:

It's a loss, yes, yes. Absolutely.

Maret Reutelingsperger:

But sometimes it is hard to know who to target, and I totally get that, and you have ... You might have a corporate professional who is also an avid runner. So they might still fall into the target audience, but you wouldn't want to talk to them as a corporate professional to get them on board with your trainers.

Jon Payne:

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. How do you go about creating the anti-persona?

Maret Reutelingsperger:

Basically it is essentially like a buyer persona but it basically reflects your least favoured or lesser desirable customers. So that can be built on behaviours or demographics or real-life situations that you've encountered which basically means that they will not be one of your happy paying customers.

Jon Payne:

Yeah.

Maret Reutelingsperger:

If I sell Dutch sweets to the UK market only, why would I target someone in Brazil?

Jon Payne:

Exactly.

Maret Reutelingsperger:

It's just not going to work. That's not my ... It's not my persona. I don't want to ship-

Jon Payne:

We know a couple of them at Noisy Little Monkey. We've got one-

Maret Reutelingsperger:

Really?

Jon Payne:

Yeah, we've got one called Dickhead Dave, and ...

Maret Reutelingsperger:

Excellent.

Jon Payne:

Because they've got to be alliterative. That's the laws of HubSpot, isn't it?

Maret Reutelingsperger:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Jon Payne:

Where you have to have alliterative personas, Dickhead Dave.

Maret Reutelingsperger:

So he's a negative persona, right?

Jon Payne:

He is, yeah.

Maret Reutelingsperger:

Yeah.

Jon Payne:

It felt a bit rich calling a positive persona a dickhead. Although ...

Maret Reutelingsperger:

I wouldn't put it past you, I'm going to be honest.

Jon Payne:

One time we got our forms wrong and all of the persona names were public and all of their external facing names were internal, and someone said, "I'm not a Dickhead Dave, but again, my name is Dave." Oh shoot.

               And we've got another one that is Startup Stu which is, well, we do work for some startups actually. They're really ... If you're a marketer and you're ... They can be quite difficult to work with because they don't know where they're going yet. So you kind of, as an agency, we're a bit slow for them. So while they might be potentially very profitable, actually we know we don't do necessarily our best work with them unless they've got lots of funding and have already got lots of people on and are much more scale up.

               So that's the kind of thing. And it's easy for people to kind of come up with those. One of the ways we used to come up with them is by asking the sales team and going, "Who do you really not like selling to anymore?"

Maret Reutelingsperger:

Yeah.

Jon Payne:

Worst customer. And they're like, "Oh, Barry. Oh man, I wish we'd never sold to him. It's a nightmare," or the [crosstalk 00:17:50]

Maret Reutelingsperger:

Oh, no, Barry the belter I'm sure.

Jon Payne:

Yeah. Sorry. I'm just-

Maret Reutelingsperger:

No, no, that's exactly, you're illustrating my point perfectly, because you're not bycreating anti-personas, you're not wasting time building strategies, you're not wasting marketing budget on the wrong people. And it's almost like a pre-qualifier like that, isn't it?

Jon Payne:

Yeah, yeah. And we should probably move on to thinking about engagement perhaps which means we're cutting this a bit short. But thinking about engagement, creating an anti-persona, excluding those people from your list because 2021 is the year of the purge, love that-

Maret Reutelingsperger:

Year of the purge.

Jon Payne:

I was making a note about earlier.

Maret Reutelingsperger:

Yeah.

Jon Payne:

That should begin to give you a bit more engagement, right?

Maret Reutelingsperger:

Exactly. And while we're talking about email engagement, I am going to do a super quick throwback to the legal time we had to all purge our lists, because in 2018 obviously GDPR law came into place. But what I want to say about that is it's not actually such a bad thing. I completely understand that people are sad about their lists that they've acquired one way or another, but what we're ending up with is smaller but more engaged lists. So again, you are removing people from a list who were allowing you in their inbox, but were probably deleting it every single time they got it.

               And at the moment everyone's working from home. They're on their phones. They're at their desks. So we're seeing a real increase in digital marketing generally but especially in email marketing. And that is awesome, because there's loads of stories to tell, but it also means that the inbox is a crowded marketplace. So you need to make sure that you stand out.

               So tip number one, know your audience. So that's what we've just been waffling about for 15 minutes.

Jon Payne:

Goodness.

Maret Reutelingsperger:

Tip one.

Jon Payne:

It wasn't waffling. It was quality content for these people.

Maret Reutelingsperger:

Tip one, what we just talked about. Awesome.

Jon Payne:

Done. We can move-

Maret Reutelingsperger:

But basically ...

Jon Payne:

To tip two.

Maret Reutelingsperger:

It just, it helps you send better targeted, more personalised emails. And there's plenty of proof that using personalization sees increased open rates. If you use a name in the subject line, generally speaking, you can look at 26% higher open rate of the email. So that's 26% more people looking at your email already. Then if campaigns are segmented based on user interest, so again, you are further targeting who you're sending these emails to, we tend to see up to a 74% higher click rate. So that's people who have already opened it and then click through to your offer or your website. That's loads of people.

Jon Payne:

That's huge, huge.

Maret Reutelingsperger:

Yeah, that's huge numbers. That's like main tip, personalise, like understand your audience and then personalise to them. I've already kind of given a little bit of an example of talking to each other, but making sure that different departments are communicating so that you are not bombarding people and their inboxes with emails.

Jon Payne:

So that's different in your organisation, so ...

Maret Reutelingsperger:

Yeah. So that's for ... Exactly. So make sure that in your organisation different departments who might be sending out different categories of products for example are talking to each other.

Jon Payne:

Gotcha.

Maret Reutelingsperger:

So a really good example, and I know this is like kicking a dead horse which is awful, but I am going to use Debenhams as an example because the only reason I'm still on their marketing list is to prove the point that their email marketing is awful. Okay? It is awful.

Jon Payne:

And I think if any of them ever watch this, they'll be like that, "We've got to get Maret in."

Maret Reutelingsperger:

"She must be so easy to work with."

Jon Payne:

She's already a big fan.

Maret Reutelingsperger:

I am a big fan. However, at times, when it's sale season, I will get several emails, up to seven emails per day several days in a row for different departments, different offers. And something which is just a pet peeve of mine, they'll have like a subject line and then the preview text refers to something that's not the subject line, which means that I will never open the email.

               But there's more. There are more options now. You can give your audience and your contacts the power to decide when they want to see you in their inbox. So that could be every other week or once a month.

Jon Payne:

Of course.

Maret Reutelingsperger:

But it could also be about what they want to see. A really good example which a lot of particularly stationery type like gift cards and gifting companies in particular are picking up on really well is that sometimes celebratory days, so that could be Christmas, it could be Valentine's Day, at the moment I'm seeing a lot of it for Mother's Day. Those are days which could be really painful for people because they may have lost their mother, they may not have a good relationship with their mom or for whatever reason they don't want to see it, but they do still like the brand. They want to see their other emails still.

               So this is a great step forward where companies are emailing you to say, "Hey, if you don't want to hear about Mother's Day, let us know and we will stop emailing you about it." And you're giving your contacts the power to decide when they want to see you and what they want to see. Perfect.

Jon Payne:

Yeah. And in the real world that builds so much positivity around the brand. You hear it so ... I hear it so often. Particularly, one of the problems about working at Noisy Little Monkey is it seems that everybody's parent dies reasonably quickly after they join. Just we have a terrible mortality rate. We're all quite buoyant about it though, which is why I'm so flip. But we all discuss the different businesses that give us the option to opt out of that stuff, and we slag off the ones that don't-

Maret Reutelingsperger:

That don't, exactly-

Jon Payne:

... absolutely slag the ones that don't.

               And just as an aside on that actually, if you're doing ... We work with a few companies that are doing big mailings, and it's really easy to send out the same sort of stuff but for people who ... So to people who've been buying a lot of Vitamin D and stuff like that and they appear then and buying baby magazines in Sainsbury's or whatever, they then start to get marketing about three or four months later for people that would typically be in their second or third trimester. And you can just buy the list. And it's a suppression list. You're not allowed to mail it, but it just goes, if you've bought a list like that or if you have a massive list, you can suppress everybody who has requested that they don't get any marketing about babies and which is so ... I mean again, I mean, it's just, a) it's the nice human thing to do, but-

Maret Reutelingsperger:

Yes-

Jon Payne:

... there's so much positivity around your brand for doing so.

Maret Reutelingsperger:

Yeah, exactly. And there's lots of other examples as well. For example, Adidas. I never know. Am I pronouncing it right? Adidas?

Jon Payne:

I say Adidas, but that's-

Maret Reutelingsperger:

Adidas-

Jon Payne:

... from the '70s London.

Maret Reutelingsperger:

Adidas.

Jon Payne:

Everybody else says Adidas.

Maret Reutelingsperger:

Okay, well that one.

Jon Payne:

Right. It's a Dutch brand, isn't it?

Maret Reutelingsperger:

Yes. Is it? I didn't actually know that-

Jon Payne:

[crosstalk 00:26:17], yeah, they are brothers I think, I think Dutch brothers, Adidas and Puma. Anyway, shut up Jon.

Maret Reutelingsperger:

Oh, well. I'll look that up after. But they are very good at. When you sign up for their newsletter, they ask you a few questions, but in a very easy way. So by the time I signed up for their newsletter, they knew that I was female, that I enjoy running and I enjoy hiking, and so they tailored their email to exactly that. When I get emails from them, there will be women in the pictures, it will be people climbing or hiking or running. Arige is just mentioning Bloom & Wild. They are excellent for making sure that you are comfortable with their comms. Absolutely.

Jon Payne:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, they were one of the first to really get it right.

Maret Reutelingsperger:

Yes, I think so, yeah, yeah.

Jon Payne:

[crosstalk 00:27:07] is German ...

Maret Reutelingsperger:

There you go.

Jon Payne:

Says Marina. Thanks Marina. Sorry.

Maret Reutelingsperger:

Yeah.

Jon Payne:

But yes, Bloom & Wild, fabulous with that.

Maret Reutelingsperger:

Absolutely. So yeah, it's all about giving your contacts the power, which means that when you do appear in their inbox, they'll be like, "Oh, hi, this will be something I'm interested in because I've told them what I'm interested in." So that's tip number two, is give your contacts the power.

               And tip number three is A/B testing, testing, testing, testing. You can always improve how you speak to your contacts. That could be visually. It could be the language used. It could be do you use emojis in your subject lines. Do you use image CTAs instead of text CTAs? There's so many different ways of finding out what works. One precautionary tip I guess is only test one thing at a time.

Jon Payne:

Right.

Maret Reutelingsperger:

Just, if you're going to do two subject lines, don't change the email. If you're going to change an image, don't change anything else, because you won't know what made the difference otherwise.

Jon Payne:

Yeah.

Maret Reutelingsperger:

Right? If it either was Jon wearing glasses and a Noisy Little Monkey t-shirt or it was Jon with a hat no glasses and a coffee in his hand and a purple t-shirt, then how would you know which one performs better?

Jon Payne:

They're both going to get 100% open rate.

Maret Reutelingsperger:

I wouldn't actually be surprised to be fair.

Jon Payne:

I think we both would be very surprised if they got even close to 1%.

Maret Reutelingsperger:

So yeah-

Jon Payne:

Thanks Arige, no percent.

Maret Reutelingsperger:

You're being burned Jon.

Jon Payne:

Also, I set myself up for it.

Maret Reutelingsperger:

Oh yeah, testing, testing, testing, but just one thing at a time.

Jon Payne:

Brilliant. Okay. Okay, cool. Sorry. I'm making notes of questions.

Maret Reutelingsperger:

That's completely fine. I'm just trying to think one other thing that you could test, so I'll just keep talking.

Jon Payne:

Yeah, keep talking.

Maret Reutelingsperger:

Is there's so much you can actually learn. There's so much you can actually learn from how your contacts engage with your emails, right? For example, what do they do following an abandoned cart email. And then you could have a look at do you offer a discount, do you not offer a discount, is it just the reminder nudge that they need or is it actually maybe they're looking to get a discount or ... There's so many things that are already in your email platform that you can learn from and improve on.

Jon Payne:

Yeah. And it's the context of time as you say is just, yeah. I'm still stuck on the thing that Adidas sends you stuff that is with people who identify as female, obviously.

Maret Reutelingsperger:

Yeah, yeah. But it helps because I see-

Jon Payne:

[crosstalk 00:30:25] context and everything, all of that stuff.

Maret Reutelingsperger:

Absolutely. It's right content for the right people at the right time. Like I see a reflection of myself. I see a diverse selection of women in those emails, and therefore, I engage with it so much more than if I just see a generic one with ...

Jon Payne:

Just a geezer doing press-ups.

Maret Reutelingsperger:

Well, yeah.

Jon Payne:

Not so good.

Maret Reutelingsperger:

Not as good, no.

Jon Payne:

It's all right for me. I like that kind of stuff.

Maret Reutelingsperger:

So if you could get that email, that would be great.

Jon Payne:

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Anybody's got any pictures of a man with his top off doing press-ups, just email ... You saw my email address earlier. Yeah, I'll take them.

Maret Reutelingsperger:

Exactly.

Jon Payne:

Sorry. Way off track, way off track. Okay. So that's cool. I've got questions about A/B testing but let's get to the end.

Maret Reutelingsperger:

Okay.

Jon Payne:

Because I think you've got some more stuff that is much more important than me asking questions that I personally want answered.

Maret Reutelingsperger:

Yes.

Jon Payne:

What's coming next or what's coming around the corner or what's growing in email marketing?

Maret Reutelingsperger:

Okay, so the trends in email marketing, I thought I'd do it like a little ...

Jon Payne:

Okay.

Maret Reutelingsperger:

Like announcement. Okay. Email trends, let's go, let's go.

Jon Payne:

I don't think this is a very trendy dance.

Maret Reutelingsperger:

Well, I'm going with it. One that's really big which is already coming, it's just becoming more and more popular is video. Now, before you go, "What's up Maret?"

Jon Payne:

In email? I'm sorry, before I go like that, and I went like that, sorry.

Maret Reutelingsperger:

Yeah. No, you're right. It is something that people are baffled by. And arguably there are a lot of email clients that won't let you ... that don't support an embedded video. Some do but most of the big ones don't really yet. If you want to be super thorough, you can embed it, embed a video in your email using HTML5 and then put a placeholder like an image or a gif in place for those using an email client that doesn't support it.

Jon Payne:

Yeah.

Maret Reutelingsperger:

However, it would be easier, an easier workaround would be to either implement a very visually appealing image with the ... We all know the play button sign over it that it's clear and say click here to play or create a gif, not dissimilar from the one that was made about me.

Jon Payne:

Oh. It's one of the classics.

Maret Reutelingsperger:

And that was used in email. So there you go, case in point.

Jon Payne:

It's like we knew you were going to say it.

Maret Reutelingsperger:

So that is a great workaround because you show a moving image which will then entice people to see more of it.

Jon Payne:

Yeah.

Maret Reutelingsperger:

So absolutely, I would recommend starting to use that and moving images. People get so many emails it's definitely a way to stand out. Second email ... Sorry, not second email. Well, second email tip, there we go.

Jon Payne:

Second email tip, like it.

Maret Reutelingsperger:

I just saved that-

Jon Payne:

Second email trend. It's a trend.

Maret Reutelingsperger:

Yeah, it's a trend.

Jon Payne:

It's new trends.

Maret Reutelingsperger:

Second email trend ...

Jon Payne:

Trend.

Maret Reutelingsperger:

Is ...

Jon Payne:

How is this [inaudible 00:34:06] a trend?

Maret Reutelingsperger:

Is the rise of marketing by person rather than a company.

Jon Payne:

Oh.

Maret Reutelingsperger:

I know that we've chatted about it before, but we're seeing this a lot right now. We're seeing that companies are hiring brand evangelists. They are hiring ... They are adopting a more personal strategy. At HubSpot, for HubSpot CMS you've got Luke Summerfield who's all over it. He is the face. He sends the emails. He does the webinars. He is that person.

Jon Payne:

[inaudible 00:34:48]

Maret Reutelingsperger:

Even though there's a massive team behind him, I'm sure, he's a great guy.

Jon Payne:

Yeah.

Maret Reutelingsperger:

Fantastic guy.

Jon Payne:

Yeah, right. He's the face, isn't it? And you ... Do you get emails from him, do you?

Maret Reutelingsperger:

Yeah.

Jon Payne:

I don't get emails from him.

Maret Reutelingsperger:

Oh!

Jon Payne:

Maybe I do and I just ... No.

Maret Reutelingsperger:

This is awkward.

Jon Payne:

Are you sure Luke isn't just trying to ... [inaudible 00:35:13]

Maret Reutelingsperger:

All right, moving on. Another great example is Shopify have recently started working with Kristen LaFrance who is this amazing woman. I think she's in Canada, definitely North America, and she is just an excellent person. She has built up this real following, this real engaged community on Twitter around email marketing for DTC brands in particular and Shopify brought her on board. She's now got a podcast series called Resilient Retail. She's still really engaging on Twitter and it's just an all-round awesome human.

               So that is very much where Shopify have gone, "Right, this is someone who can be an evangelist for a brand." A hot off the press announcement is that Val Geisler who, if you're into email marketing, you will be following her on Twitter. She is awesome. She had her own business called Fix My Churn, specifically about ...

Jon Payne:

Oh yeah.

Maret Reutelingsperger:

Specifically about making sure that your email marketing is up to scratch and customer research and digital communications. She has been hired as a brand evangelist for Klaviyo. Klaviyo, just for those who don't know, is an e-commerce focused email platform. So again, it's very much a SaaS company showing that having a personality, having a person who has a following and has that engagement to stand for their brand is ...

Jon Payne:

So rather than it being marketing@insertbrand.com because not all of us can afford an influencer.

Maret Reutelingsperger:

Sure.

Jon Payne:

But would you say that like rather than it going ... So let's say we at Noisy Little Monkey are emailing everybody on our list because we want them to come along to an event that we're holding. Would you say that that would be better to go from just any human in the business rather than marketing@noisylittlemonkey.com?

Maret Reutelingsperger:

Yeah, for sure. We're all in digital marketing in an industry where we talk to each other, we know each other, we are online. Giving your company a face and a bit of personality I think is you have to these days, that's really what I think.

Jon Payne:

Yeah. It was a loaded question. Absolutely, we see it all the time. We see it in the construction industry, can you believe. And now I would not advocate this, but they did some A/B testing, one of our construction clients, and they sent emails from a name that was very obviously standard issue CIS mail and then they sent the same email to the same list, same subject line from a standard issue CIS female name. And it was a construction industry so it went to mainly men, and the female name got opened dozens of times more. I mean, it was, the scale was colossal. And the chat we did, it was like that.

               Would you advocate that we just then continue sending it from someone who doesn't exist and all of that? For success, yes, but morally it does feel like it's dodgy ground dude.

Maret Reutelingsperger:

Yeah.

Jon Payne:

But it was odd that, and both of them did better than when they sent it from, nearly said the brand name, when they sent it from marketing@brand.com. But it was just odd that actually there was a gender split in how those emails-

Maret Reutelingsperger:

Yeah. That is interesting.

Jon Payne:

But given the market maybe traditionally, I don't know. I don't know. Anyway. So that's okay. So ...

Maret Reutelingsperger:

I think in most situations giving a personal touch. Like obviously all of the examples I've just given are digital. They're digital people who have a personality. So these are quite extreme examples. But I think in most situations, having a person or having some personality for your brand is absolutely priceless.

Jon Payne:

Yeah. Yeah. Agreed. Agreed. We're just on the same page. This is so cool. We've got some questions come into the Q&A. If there's any on the chat Claire, do let us know. If you've got any questions, we've got like 10 minutes to run through these. Anna Corbett, I'm going to do one of yours. I'm going to do your first one first, and then, if you've got time, we'll come back and do your second one. So what are your tips Maret on warming up in inverted commas a dormant email database? That's a tough one.

Maret Reutelingsperger:

Delicious. I like it.

Jon Payne:

You're just a gift. You're the most beautiful lovely gift.

Maret Reutelingsperger:

That's a good question. I like it. I think it would depend on ... I understand it's a dormant list, but it would depend on previous comms that had gone out, and whether it includes customers. But really, even just a short email to say, "Hey, we've been a bit quiet but we're back. Let us know if you want to continue getting emails from us." You're telling them, "Hey, we'll start emailing you more regularly again. If you don't want that, that's cool. Here's the unsubscribe button. But if you do/don't click this button. Then we'll keep emailing you."

               And really, I know that we're running out of time, A super good example is this happened a couple of weeks ago actually, Seer Interactive who are a digital marketing agency in the US, they moved their email marketing from MailChimp which I found mind-blowing to find out that they were on that, but they moved it from MailChimp to HubSpot, and actually used that as a good reason to email all their contacts to say, "Hey, just to let you know. We've moved our email platform. That's why our emails might show up in your spam. However, if you open it then, we won't anymore, or "that's why we may have shown up in your spam. Let us know what kind of communications you'd like to receive from us." And it's really easy, really quick way of engaging people and learning what it is that they want from you.

Jon Payne:

And so Seer to use that opportunity to do something that feels ethically and morally right.

Maret Reutelingsperger:

Yes.

Jon Payne:

Absolutely hero agency, I love that to-

Maret Reutelingsperger:

Excellent-

Jon Payne:

... to bits. Okay. So then a question from Claire Blacker. What would be the first A/B test you would run?

Maret Reutelingsperger:

If you have names, I would A/B test names in your subject line. I know we pretty much know the answer, but I'd want to have it confirmed. Recently I did an A/B test which was good. I swapped out. I had two CTAs and they were ... In one email they were like get it now or buy it today, and in the other one they were a bit longer form, so they were find out our whole new product range. And they were actually a lot softer. And they actually did better in that case.

Jon Payne:

Wow. It's good, isn't it? So that, typically for me would have been like, "Oh, that's a surprise in this game."

Maret Reutelingsperger:

Yes, exactly.

Jon Payne:

I love it. You just learn so much new stuff about it, but it just means that you're even more niche for that one particular targeted list.

Maret Reutelingsperger:

Exactly.

Jon Payne:

[Arige Abu Ali 00:43:42], I don't know whether you've heard of her, has asked with newsletters that only go out on a monthly basis, how do we keep the audience engaged as it's not a weekly email?

Maret Reutelingsperger:

So you can use other channels to keep engaged. And I mean Arige, I don't know if anyone doesn't know this, but Arige has an extremely engaged audience in her entire community which includes a Slack channel, it includes a Facebook page, it includes Twitter. It's amazing.

Jon Payne:

That woman has goals.

Maret Reutelingsperger:

It's ... I wish. I wish.

Jon Payne:

Yeah. Yeah. Damn you Arige.

Maret Reutelingsperger:

Yeah. I want to be like you. But yeah, I would say bring it out into the open. So share the newsletter maybe a couple of times across the month via Twitter as well. And I'm saying this because I know what's in the email. I would encourage people on social media to share articles with you and to share people that they'd like to see in the spotlight. So again, you're giving your contacts the power to share what they want to see.

Jon Payne:

Yeah, yeah, cool. Oh yeah. And particularly, if you've got quite an engaged community like Arige has already, then getting them to submit stuff is just going to be awesome. She just works too hard. So getting her community [crosstalk 00:45:18]

Maret Reutelingsperger:

Getting others, getting others to send articles in. I know.

Jon Payne:

And then Arige, take a sit down and don't look at anything.

Maret Reutelingsperger:

Yeah. Yeah, maybe set it up to send automatically and then [inaudible 00:45:32]

Jon Payne:

Have a lie down woman. You are a machine. You aren't a machine.

Maret Reutelingsperger:

She is an incredible machine. I love her.

Jon Payne:

Yeah. Okay, enough of the loving with Arige and Will and everybody. Claire can't smile, which I thought was our Claire but it might be another Claire.

Maret Reutelingsperger:

No. I know which Claire that is.

Jon Payne:

Oh, okay. Cool. Okay.

Maret Reutelingsperger:

You know her, Claire, Claire Carlyle.

Jon Payne:

Ah, okay. Yeah. Got, yeah. There's other reasons why I thought it was another Claire. If you inherit a list says Claire Carlyle, for example when you start in a new job and you have responsibility for email marketing that list but you're not sure how the opt-in process has worked, how would you approach that? These are great questions.

Maret Reutelingsperger:

These are great questions. Okay, I'd probably, first things first, I'd look at the oldest contacts on that list, and if they're pre-May 2018, I'd probably say get rid. And then actually do something similar like the warm-up email, just send a quick note, say, "Hey, we've been quiet." That is presuming that you can't talk to anyone internally to actually ask. I'm presuming that the predecessor knew and took that knowledge with them and didn't put it in their hand over.

Jon Payne:

Yeah. Which I hear is a popular thing. I know that that can be quite difficult to get over the line with the boss or the customer sometimes, because they go, "Oh, it doesn't matter. No one's going to get us." And I think there is that I don't have an answer for that how you convince your employer or you convince your client. Oh well, in that case I've got an answer for how we convince our clients. We fire them. Which is why we're a smallish agency.

Maret Reutelingsperger:

Get out.

Jon Payne:

Yeah, exactly.

Maret Reutelingsperger:

Get out.

Jon Payne:

We're not spamming these people. We're a data processor. We're also-

Maret Reutelingsperger:

Well, I mean, you have the law on your side. So you can just say, "Look, we're not allowed to contact people who haven't opted in, and therefore we have to make sure."

Jon Payne:

Yeah, yeah.

Maret Reutelingsperger:

So you can always hide, hide behind the ...

Jon Payne:

Hide behind the law. I really didn't know we were going to go here. This is great. Okay, so we've got time for one more, and I'm doing them in order, but I think Mariana whose name I got wrong earlier, sorry Marianna, she said, should a newsletter always be one-way communication? I think with one of your answers you indicated that no, it should be two-way.

Maret Reutelingsperger:

No, absolutely not, and this is ... I am going to take a tiny step back away from maybe I guess in-house and businesses, but using as an example there's a lot of people, so I'm referring back to Kristen LaFrance. She has a newsletter and it's very ... She very much it's a two-way street. She'll share with you, but is asking, give me feedback, give me feedback. What do you think?

               Another example is a course that I'm following at the moment called Row Class who are amazing. Their email marketing is absolutely on point, and during the course it's really great as well. So they check in with you regularly and they make sure to point you to lesson material ahead of time and stuff like that. But again, they very much ask for tell us, tell us what you need to know, tell us what you need to ... what you need in order to make this a success for you. So yeah, absolutely.

Jon Payne:

We are at time. This has been brilliant. For people who are about to leave, Maret is going to put some stuff on Twitter.

Maret Reutelingsperger:

I am?

Jon Payne:

We can find you on Twitter Maret?

Maret Reutelingsperger:

On Twitter you find me under itsmaret, and you'll probably see a gif of me floating around because I would imagine Jon or Claire will share it later.

Jon Payne:

She's one of the most visible people on the planet right now.

Maret Reutelingsperger:

But yeah, I'll bring all my thoughts together and everything that we've chatted about today and do a little tweet storm later and I'll add all the references, I'll add all the people that I've mentioned. But before we go, just a massive thank you to Jon and Claire and Noisy Little Monkey for having me. I've had such a laugh, and I said earlier. I said this off recording and I'll say it on recording. We've been chatting quite a lot over the last couple of weeks and has brought a lot of positivity and laughter to my day, so thank you.

Jon Payne:

You are too delightful for words madam. Thank you very much. And as I said to you at the time, you reap what you sow. You sow a lot of positivity Maret.

Maret Reutelingsperger:

Thank you.

Jon Payne:

Which is always going to come back to you in spades. Jeremy and anonymous attendee are two questions that we haven't got around to answering, three questions we haven't got around to answering. What we'll do is we'll tweet them to you perhaps.

Maret Reutelingsperger:

Yes, that sounds.

Jon Payne:

And then you can give your answers later. I'm sorry we didn't get around to them. Thank you so much everybody for joining and being so flipping delightful in the chat. It's been wonderful.

Maret Reutelingsperger:

Yeah, thank you everyone. This was great fun.