Is the Customer Always Right?

0:00: Even just reading your spam metrics is different. 

 0:02: Instead of hitting unsubscribe this audience internally terms, marketing messages as spam and will mark a perfectly valid legal non spam email that they consented to as spam. 

 0:13: Welcome to email swipes where we peek behind the scenes at the emails that catch your attention and earn their place in your swipe file. 

 0:20: Every other week, we’ll talk to an email expert about an experiment they ran. 

 0:24: And in the following episode, we’ll dive into the strategies and methods used in the email so you can inform and inspire your own email work. 

 0:30: I’m Micky Elvas, the copywriter behind winning emails for eight and nine figure Sass and e commerce brands like Shopify for Stigmatic and Sprout social. 

 0:38: And I know that hearing the background stories to these emails will help you turn pie in the sky, insights into plug and play actions. 

 0:44: Ready to make inspiration tactical. 

 0:46: Let’s go first, a quick recap of the email we discussed last week that we’ll be digging into today, Nikki. 

 0:54: I’m really excited to welcome you to Doodle Premium Pro. 

 0:57: I used to dread getting emails with a bunch of res in the subject line meetings are bad enough. 

 1:03: We schedule too many invite too many cooks, squeeze in too many agendas or worse. 

 1:07: Don’t set an agenda, but scheduling a simple meeting is even worse. 

 1:13: Endless rounds of emails, that stuff. 

 1:14: Our inboxes distract us from our jobs. 

 1:16: Confuse meeting guests or worse meeting guests. 

 1:20: Unless you schedule your meetings with Doodle Pro with Doodle Pro in a couple of clicks, you can instantly share availability, find the best time to meet and send reminders or not your call ready to get back hours in your day and earn your coworkers applause. 

 1:35: Sync your calendar and set up your next meeting in less than two minutes. 

 1:39: Sync my calendar fast. 

 1:41: Here’s to never sorting through a million emails. 

 1:43: Gabrielle Ceo. 

 1:46: All right, let’s start with a topic that I find really interesting and that is marketing to non marketers. 

 1:54: I feel like a lot of what we learn as marketers, a lot of the best practices that we read a lot of the methods we’re taught even. 

 2:00: No shame. 

 2:01: Some of the things we discuss here on email swipes, they apply to this little marketing bubble of people who have a lot of familiarity in the digital space for sure. 

 2:10: And Zass and even in ecommerce, we tend to address the segment of the population that spends time in funnels is familiar with a lot of different marketing messages across different platforms, et cetera and this usually works fine. 

 2:23: It is where a lot of our audience tends to live, but sometimes we’re working with an audience that is just unfamiliar with all this stuff. 

 2:31: And when that happens, the rules are different, even just reading your spam metrics is different. 

 2:36: Instead of hitting, unsubscribe this audience internally terms, marketing messages as spam and will mark a perfectly valid legal non spam email that they consented to as spam. 

 2:47: It’s just the reality and obviously the strategy needs to be different too. 

 2:52: It kind of reminds me of what Nick audio referenced in episode nine when he taught us about the benign violation theory. 

 2:58: If you haven’t heard that episode yet, it was brilliant and the link is in the show notes. 

 3:02: But anyway, in order to benignly violate a belief that your audience has, they have to have that belief, the red email poked fun at the overdone marketing practice of sending holiday emails. 

 3:12: If your audience doesn’t receive holiday emails or enough of them to realize they’re cliche, your joke is going to fall flat. 

 3:18: They need to have the reference point to understand where you’re veering off. 

 3:23: In my case of using re in the subject line, the marketers in the room were rubbed wrong by all the fake reads. 

 3:27: They get for cold emails and the non marketing savvy audience just didn’t get that. 

 3:31: I wasn’t seriously asking them to meet the CEO on Monday. 

 3:35: They didn’t receive enough marketing emails to understand that it wasn’t an actual 1 to 1 email. 

 3:40: So as much as we hate on best practices sometimes because they truly do get stale and IGN rable, they can be useful. 

 3:46: And that brings me to takeaway number one, which is to know your audience and tailor your strategy to the reality. 

 3:51: And by the way, your audience is not just your email subscribers, your audience is also your client or coworkers. 

 3:57: Like I said, the marketers in the room were irked by this email. 

 4:00: Also, it wasn’t just the subscriber base. 

 4:03: And ultimately, that’s why we had to change the email because of the internal team, not because of the subscribers. 

 4:09: Your first sell is your superior’s approval. 

 4:12: This can be difficult because the two audiences are different. 

 4:15: Your client slash coworkers slash boss may have likes and preferences and beliefs that may be totally different than the likes and preferences and beliefs of your subscriber base. 

 4:23: This is where research comes in and is so useful in being able to point to why you made the decisions that you did. 

 4:29: But even still sometimes some things are so ingrained that all the logic in the world won’t help. 

 4:35: So take away number two, always remember that your first sell is the internal team, not just the subscribers have your research proof points and decision backers ready. 

 4:44: On a similar note to all this negative feedback talk, many digital users complained about getting too many emails. 

 4:49: Again, they weren’t used to getting an onboarding series that spanned a week or two and definitely not anything longer than that. 

 4:55: So, should we have listened to the customers and cut back on the number of emails, I’d say? 

 5:00: No, especially given the success of the overall onboarding, maybe I do a little expectation in the beginning emails letting them know that we’d be showing up often but lower the frequency. 

 5:08: No way. 

 5:09: See, because as much as the customer is always right, we humans are funny. 

 5:13: There are so many studies in which the subjects say that they don’t like something, but they do actually act based on that disliked thing. 

 5:20: Anyway, shout out to Hannah Sham for giving me a name for this cognitive bias. 

 5:24: It’s called the say do gap pop ups are a great example of this. 

 5:28: Everyone hates them but they work really well. 

 5:30: Another example when people were asked whether they liked pretty designed html, emails better or plain text emails better majority said html, but then they actually reacted more favorably to the plain text emails. 

 5:42: So takeaway number three is that we may be best serving our customers even if they think we’re doing things wrong on boarding emails are frequent. 

 5:49: But they’re also incredibly helpful for subscribers. 

 5:52: These emails were truly guiding users to best take advantage of the platform. 

 5:56: We saw that from the conversions. 

 5:58: Did we also annoy some customers? 

 6:00: Sure. 

 6:01: But the benefits we were providing to the majority outweighed that downside. 

 6:04: But like grand Fishkin mentioned in episode 30. 

 6:07: It works to just charge people monthly and not send billing reminders. 

 6:10: The question is just because something works. 

 6:13: Should we be doing it? 

 6:14: Essentially? 

 6:15: We need to take a few steps back and dig into our values. 

 6:17: As a company, each brand needs to think about where their lines are and what kind of customer experience they want to provide. 

 6:23: This is way more important and longer lasting brand messaging than color palettes or font families and all of this, all these takeaways all lead to the same place of knowing how you want to show up for your customers, knowing what your business goals are at both a financial level and an ethical level. 

 6:37: If you have that in place before you perform an email experiment, you can keep your calm. 

 6:41: Even as you get negative feedback, you have an internal compass to know whether the feedback is relevant or not. 

 6:48: I mean, just using the couple dozen brands we’ve featured so far in email swipes, they’ve all received their share of irrelevant feedback. 

 6:54: Drizzly got plenty of hate mail. 

 6:55: Spark Taro gets asked for suck to compliance all the time pod match gets insults and yet each brand is a strong brand serving a base of customers that is absolutely in love with them. 

 7:05: Well, ok, not drizzly anymore, but everyone is devastated about that. 

 7:09: They know what to tune out and when, because they know what’s important, they know how they want to show up and that’s a critical first step to any email strategy. 

 7:17: So take away number four, know your lines, what matters to you as a brand, what matters to you for your customers? 

 7:24: Wow, this was so interesting for an email that did so phenomenally. 

 7:27: Well, in a conversion sense, we sure did talk a lot about what wasn’t right about. 

 7:31: It just goes to show that we can always be iterating and improving. 

 7:35: Thanks for gee out with me about that email story. 

 7:37: If you enjoyed either of these episodes, you’ll probably enjoy getting my emails. 

 7:40: Plus you’ll never miss another episode. 

 7:43: Sign up at Nikki albus dot com slash subscribe. 

 7:46: And yes, that link is in the show notes.