Love and Links: How Bit.ly’s Valentine’s Day email stole the internet’s heart

Speaker 1: 0:00

That ended up kind of getting scrapped just because of legal uncertainty, I guess at the moment. So I was having a conversation with our social media manager, daniel, who said why don’t you write a love letter to our customers?

Speaker 2: 0:11

That’s so cool. I’ve never heard of legal making something better. 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 Every other week. We’ll talk to an email expert about an experiment they ran 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. I’m Miky Elbas, the copywriter behind winning emails for eight and nine figure Sassan e-commerce brands like Shopify, forse, ecmatic and Sprout Social, and I know that hearing the background stories to these emails will help you turn Pine the Sky insights into plug-and-play actions. Ready to make inspiration tactical, let’s go First. Let’s read today’s email To our beloved Bitly users. From that very first visit, when you clicked Get Started, our Bitly family grew by one and with it too, our hearts did. We loved watching you grow. With every link you shortened, you made meaningful connections with the click reports to support it. We’ve grown quite a lot ourselves, from a flower to a full bouquet. Once a humble tool for trimming URLs. Now Bitly means much more today, adding QR codes. That was for you to grow your reach to greater heights. All your links in one convenient place. So simple, it’s black and white. Now there’s even Bitly link in bio, a page to share. That’s uniquely you. We did it all for you, every last bit, because our Bitly hearts all beat for you. Xoxo. Bitly Devan, thank you so much for joining me.

Speaker 1: 1:38

Yeah, thanks for having me.

Speaker 2: 1:39

Let’s talk through your role at Bitly. What led you to be? You mentioned you’re an accidental email marketer. How did that come about?

Speaker 1: 1:48

Yeah, and maybe I’m not unique in this way, but I spent the first half of my marketing career on the creative side and as a copywriter, which you’ll probably see bleeds through into my email work a little bit as we get deeper into the conversation here. But yeah, didn’t necessarily set out to become an email marketer but was fortunate to kind of stumble into the opportunity to lead the email team at my previous job and just kind of fell in love with email marketing from there and yeah, the rest is history.

Speaker 2: 2:20

Cool. That’s actually interesting because it’s a similar story to mine. Started in copyrighting, now I’m an email, so email is just so good for copy because it’s really conversational. So, I can relate. That’s pretty cool, nice, nice, okay. So what does your day to day at Bitly look like? What kind of emails are you sending out, planning things? What does that look like?

Speaker 1: 2:38

It’s interesting because our email is split up among a number of different teams and people at Bitly, so I specifically focus on our. Well, as you probably back up at Bitly, we have a couple of different main products. We have our Bitly platform, which we call our connections platform that we’re probably most known for, and then we also have a product called QR code generator that we acquired beginning of last year, and so we have two members of our life cycle team and we kind of split the roles there, where I’m mostly focused on our connections platform and my counterpart works on our QR code platform emails, and then we also have emails coming from our sales teams, emails coming from our customer support team and a variety of sources. So I’m focused more on conversion for the most part and how can we move customers from our free plan into our paid plan, and then also partnering with the other teams to make sure that emails across the board are up to the standard and doing the best we can to you know, once they’ve signed up for a plan, make sure they’re having a great experience and just really seeing the value of the Bitly products.

Speaker 2: 3:42

Cool. That’s interesting because in this specific email there is this melding of we started with this and now we’re adding all these other new features for you, new products. So was this a partnership developing this email, or was it someone’s idea and then you just kind of got approval from the other side? How did? How was the creation process for this email?

Speaker 1: 4:00

Yeah, so originally it was going to be a little bit more of a crossover between Bitly and our QR code generator website and we were still we’re still working through some of the legal leads of like what can we say or can’t say across the brands and sharing customer data and things like that. So that ended up kind of getting scrapped just because of legal uncertainty, I guess at the moment. So I was having a conversation with our social media manager, daniel, who said why don’t you write a love letter to our customers? So it actually came from an idea from him, so I kind of just set to work writing a love letter to our customers. It kind of fits within the overall strategy that we have for our emails. Once you see this email, you see like it’s not really a hard sell. There’s not necessarily, even though I said you know I’m focused on conversion but nobody wants to be sold all the time, right? So I really believe strongly in building engagement and trying to connect and create that relationship with email subscribers and that’s kind of what we were trying to accomplish here.

Speaker 2: 5:00

That’s so cool. I’ve never heard of legal making something better. I mean, I guess sometimes limitations help you be more creative and think outside the box and all that, so I guess that does make sense Very cool. Yeah, it’s interesting what you mentioned about how this is very much a nurture email where you’re just trying to, you know, keep people engaged and interested in your product. There is no CTA in this email. Was there any consideration or thought of okay, we’re sending it to this group who never used the QR code generator. Maybe we want to push them there, or the opposite side of things. Was there any thought to add in any CTAs or anything like that?

Speaker 1: 5:32

Like you pointed out, there’s definitely an awareness element to this email. Within Bitly, which I referred to as the connections platform, we are trying to create some awareness for the fact that within the Bitly product, even though we’re most well known for link shortening, we also, right within that platform, have QR codes where you can generate QR codes from your short links or just QR codes directly from any link. And then we also last year launched link in bio as a product as well. So a variety of different link tools that are all in one platform. And that’s kind of one of the goals of this email here is creating awareness about those different products, because even though they’ve been around for, in some cases several months or years, they’re still new to a lot of people who maybe either joined the platform a few years ago and so they kind of know it best for link shortening and that’s what they came to Bitly for or even some people who are new were continuing to really find ways to make those products better and put them more front and center and really just create a better platform. So that’s kind of one of the goals of this email was building that awareness of the different products.

Speaker 2: 6:35

Yeah, so smart because it’s so nurturing and fuzzy feeling. But at the same time, it’s also furthering a business goal, which is very cool. Okay, so let’s talk through the idea of this love letter. You sat down and what happened?

Speaker 1: 6:51

So, like any good marketer in 2023, my first step was to go to a chat GPT. I was going to ask that Amazing, okay, cool, so of course I asked chat GPT to write me a love letter poem. I wasn’t sure whether it was going to be a poem or just a letter at first, whether it was going to rhyme or not. I was kind of going to see how it went. I didn’t end up using any of the content that was created by AI in this one, but it was a great starting point. It definitely got the juices flowing up the ball rolling in terms of just brainstorming some ideas of what to say. So then I just kind of started writing on my own and just writing out some different lines. I definitely wanted to keep it. It’s still a little bit long, but I wanted to keep it as short as possible while still getting in all the content that I wanted to get in there. And I really wanted the focus to be that you, our customer, to be the focus of it, and that’s kind of. There’s just something in email in general, right. If you can really make it centered around the receiver of the email, you’re going to be a little bit more successful, right? The one thing that bugs me is when brands just talk about themselves all the time Because this is not about us. And it’s great, you know, it’s great that we’ve got these additional products, that’s great. But the customers want to know what’s in it for me, right. So you have to kind of make it about them and build the story around them for us, these additional products, how that benefits them, how they can use it, and that’s what we were trying to do here.

Speaker 2: 8:09

Cool. Yeah, it’s a really nice balance of all those things that you mentioned. You know the length of it, how it feels like there’s meat to dig into, but I fit it in a screenshot in my screen so it’s not too long that no one’s going to read it, although that’s a whole nother story. Blah, blah, blah. And also this balance of really talking about the brand but really getting to the core of that Everything we do is for you and it feels so authentic and I’m trying to figure out why it feels so authentic. Do you have any ideas of why it feels that way? Is it because it’s unique? Is it because it has all that you balance? Is it because the XOXO what do you think gives it that authenticity, where you really feel like, oh, you guys really do care about me. Like, yeah, this is coming from a team that cares about its customers, versus like, oh, this is another gimmick. It feels it has that authenticity. Any thoughts there?

Speaker 1: 8:56

I think it’s a combination of I mean, it is authentic. You know, we do really feel this way about our customers. We are in love with them. So there’s a big part of it that is real and authentic. But in terms of, okay, how do we create that and communicate that realness and authenticity? Making it about the customer is a big part of that. I would also say, from a design perspective, it’s pretty stripped down, it’s pretty simple. I did use, I threw in a little bit kind of like that handwriting font at the bottom to like XOXO bitly, to make it a little bit more fun and because there’s not CTA buttons everywhere, I think that also adds to it. When the customer looks at this, when the recipient looks at it, they will realize like wow, they’re not just doing this to try to get me to click on something, to get me to upgrade. That’s you asked me before, like why there aren’t a lot of CTAs here? I’m not trying to win the conversion battle in one day. That’s a long. It’s a long game for me. It’s a long journey where I’m trying to build a relationship. I’m trying to show value, demonstrate, take the user along the journey to the point where, hopefully at some point they realize that there’s value in converting to a paid plan, but it’s not going to happen all at once. Trying to accomplish that all at once in one email, and especially an email like this, if we were trying to really push an upgrade CTA or even some of the product CTAs in there, I think that would have taken away from the authenticity. So it was really important for me to not fill this email with links and not worry about that when I think as marketers we often tend to have, you know, have a tendency to try to put in as many links as possible and get as much traffic and attribution as we can, and there’s a time and a place for that. This email just wasn’t the time and the place. This was more just engagement, and I don’t even care if they click In some ways wouldn’t even have a way to measure the engagement of this email. They’re not clicking and they shouldn’t in some ways shouldn’t be clicking because there isn’t a lot to click on. But surprisingly there is a little bit of a banner at the top where you know you can view our pricing page and view the plans, and I was actually surprised. We had a pretty strong click-through rate on that. So, even though it was really subtle and not the focus of the email, I guess we made enough of an impression that a good number of people did decide to. You know, take a look at the plans.

Speaker 2: 10:59

Hmm, I think that’s really insightful what you mentioned how we’re always trying to stuff in links, get people to do action, so we can attribute something. So it’s really cool that you kept the goal in mind instead of just our typical rote best practice. Follow this rule, follow that rule. To really just wait, that’s not going to work here. Pull back a little bit no, we have to strip it down. We’re not putting that in there. That’s great, that’s really awesome. And, like you said about the nurturing versus the conversions, I think some people will work really hard to nurture, nurture, nurture, and they’re scared of that sale. And then there are some that are sale, sale, sale, sale, sale. So getting that balance really is I like the way you phrased it in terms of it’s. It’s a long game, it’s going to happen, we find that balance and we’ll get there. So that’s really nice that this kind of thing can fit so nicely into that kind of strategy and at the same time, you’re also getting the business goals with those clicks, the people that are clicking regardless. I think that’s really fascinating. When you kind of pull back and just nurture that engagement and that relationship, then it actually ends up working anyway, but it actually serves you, so that’s super cool. Was there any other ideas when you sat down to plan a Valentine’s Day campaign, any other ideas that were next or shelved? Or Daniel said, hey, let’s write them a love letter. And you’re like, all right, awesome, let’s do it.

Speaker 1: 12:09

We had talked about trying to create a little bit more of a crossover email with our QR code generator product and in some ways talk about the kind of match of using Bitly, the connections platform, and QR code generator product, and I’m kind of glad that that didn’t work out because I think when we talk about the authenticity like, that is more focused on us as a brand and not as much as we maybe should be here with focusing on the end user. We also were toying around with some ideas of trying to drive customers to social media and trying to come up with some ways to do a giveaway or something like that, and again it just kind of ran into like we didn’t have enough time to execute on some of these larger ideas. So we just kind of stripped it down to what can we do in a short amount of time, keep it really simple, and I wasn’t necessarily sure or sold on the idea of the love letter, but I figured, well, let’s see what happens, let’s sit down and try to write something and see if we can turn this into a decent email. And obviously it worked out okay.

Speaker 2: 13:06

So it didn’t start out as a Valentine’s Day email. It started out as an awareness email about the balance of products, and then it became a Valentine’s Day email.

Speaker 1: 13:13

Well, we were always discussing like what can we do to be present for the Valentine’s Day discussion and somehow tie it back to that, one thing I really like to do personally. I actually steal a lot of elements of my email marketing strategy from social media strategy. If you think about, like, building around different holidays or even social media holidays. Like we had an email a couple of weeks ago that was themed around National Proof Reading Day, which you know it’s like nobody knows when that is, but we’ve looked it up, it’s on one of those marketing calendars. So I actually like really leaning into certain holidays as a way to be timely and relevant and create something interesting, kind of build an interesting conversation. So there was always a plan to kind of be present for Valentine’s Day. It was just a matter of figuring out like, okay, how do we do that in a way that’s tasteful? You know, valentine’s Day can be a touchy subject for some people, for a lot of people. So we wanted to do it in a way that wouldn’t cause any negative feelings and that would be genuine. But we were prepared to scrap it if it didn’t work out, didn’t want to be overly committed to like it has to go out on Valentine’s Day, but it did work out that way that the love letter ended up coming across pretty well.

Speaker 2: 14:17

Yeah, cool. Okay, so tell me about some of the responses you got. Was it like you opened that inbox and we’re just like whoa? Or did you not even see it and the customer success team was like whoa? You got to check this out, devin, come over here. What happened after you hit send?

Speaker 1: 14:33

Yeah, it was funny. It started with our social media manager kind of starting to share some screenshots from, I think Twitter was maybe the first place, and then LinkedIn. And then we started getting responses in the email inbox and it just like all over the place just really a flood of positive messages from people just how much they loved the message and appreciated the message, even people saying like I don’t like Valentine’s Day but I love this email, you know so like even people kind of acknowledging that the difficulty of the holiday. You know, other people just latching onto the message and sharing that out. It’s a little bit foreign to me to see emails being shared on social media, especially my emails, but amazing to see also, you know, that people loved it so much that they wanted to take to social media to share what Bitly had sent them, which I think that’s something every brand would strive for. It wasn’t certainly what I thought would happen when I sent the email, but amazing that it did happen. And then credit also to Daniel again for not only, you know, sharing back this but seizing that opportunity to continue that dialogue and conversation right there. He had some amazing responses on social media. So if you’re ever looking for some great engagement. Feel free to add Bitly on our social media and you’ll get some great replies from our social media team.

Speaker 2: 15:44

That’s great. That’s so awesome, Because that’s half the game when you’re talking about customer relationship but when you do get these kinds of responses to continue it and to figure out how to make it keep going and attract more eyeballs and all that kind of thing. So that’s cool that you had that support to not just give you the idea to begin with, but also to follow through with that and to give you all that nice feedback of hey, they’re screenshotting your email all over social. That’s a great feeling, that’s super cool.

Speaker 1: 16:09

Yeah, definitely a collaborative effort and, yeah, I got shared a lot and even the leadership amplified that by sharing the screenshots of social media. Even so, I think it reached even wider following than what it was sent to. You know, by having it shared on social media, we were able to reach even more people who maybe aren’t using Bitly right now and maybe pull some people in that way too.

Speaker 2: 16:29

Yeah, definitely I knew about the QR code generator, but I never really didn’t like cement. Until I read the email and then the link in bio, I had no clue about that, so that’s good to know too. Okay, so you mentioned that you weren’t sure about the love letter. What was your kind of hesitation there?

Speaker 1: 16:44

That was just sort of like I wasn’t sure necessarily how well I could write the love letter to our customers or what to say exactly. There were definitely some additional stanzas that got fully scrapped, went through a couple of different versions. Again it was sort of like, okay, let’s write it and see what comes out, and just kind of tweaked it a little bit and ultimately, once I had the finished product, it felt pretty strong. But at the outset I don’t know. But sometimes you just have to sit down and write and just let it come out, and good editing is definitely the key there to make sure you get rid of the junk. But oftentimes you just have to start the process, to start writing.

Speaker 2: 17:16

Yeah, for sure I can relate, because this kind of thing like poetry, this kind of like vulnerable you know it’s not my thing. So that’s where the chat GBT question that I was going to ask you that you preempted came from was that would be my initial like okay, do this for me. I don’t want to do this. If you were to go back in time and perfect the email, what would you do differently?

Speaker 1: 17:35

That’s interesting. I mean I think that we had a really great response from it. So I don’t think I would change a whole lot. One other thing that I might do is something that I’m kind of working on here. So for these types of emails I mentioned that we don’t have a great way to measure the impact because of they’re not really being a whole lot of opportunities to click in the email. So it’s also not fair to just judge an email like this on its open rate, right, because people who didn’t open it don’t know what’s in it. So somebody opening it is not necessarily a vote of confidence for the content or anything like that. So one thing that I’ve applied previously and previous experience for these types of strictly engagement-driven emails where we knew in particular that there wasn’t necessarily going to be a high click rate or anything like that is a rating system where at the bottom of the email we’ve put kind of a thumbs up, thumbs down where I’ve seen kind of different smiley face, frowny face type things, different systems like that, and that’s something that I think can be a really powerful feedback mechanism. But my last position it was really helpful in helping to get support for this type of content, because we’re not able to necessarily demonstrate a whole lot of traffic that it’s driving or attribution that it’s driving immediately, because a lot of that impact is a longer term impact where there’s not going to be that last click attribution all the time, but you still. In some ways it’s helpful to be able to demonstrate the impact of an email like that. So that’s one thing that I had success for is putting a rating system at the bottom of the email, and then that led the users to a form where they could add additional comments, and so when we had emails like that before, we would get amazing comments from people saying love this email. It really helped reinforce the strategy that there was value in these types of emails, and so, especially with leadership, I’m really fortunate and thankful that at Bitly we’ve got an amazing leadership team that is really supportive of these types of ideas. So in some ways I don’t necessarily need to prove that, but as a way of validating it, it is a really great way to create kind of another KPI that outside of just opens and clicks, and a great way to get feedback, something you can apply to really any kind of email, even if it’s not strictly an engagement email. It is important to get customer feedback on what you’re doing because we want to be providing value to them and sending helpful, relevant content, and the only way to know that for sure is sometimes is to ask them if that’s really the case. So that’s probably the one thing that, if I were to go back, it would be great to get that feedback. Now, fortunately, we did end up getting a lot of feedback through social media, but I think that’s kind of the exception, not the norm, and so for most brands I would say, asking for feedback is definitely the best way to get that feedback.

Speaker 2: 20:09

Yeah, after the whole Apple privacy update, that sent us all into a panic. I thought we would see those like sentiment ratings at the bottom of every email moving on forward and surprisingly, a few people have actually implemented it. So here’s a reminder, I guess, to put those in. I think that’s cool that they can comment not just give that thumbs up but also comment. I think that gives more that qualitative stuff. So that’s very cool to hear that there’s tech for that.

Speaker 1: 20:33

Yeah, definitely helped to capture a lot of that feedback, to understand what was it about the email that people liked and didn’t like. So definitely worthwhile. If you’re wondering how are my emails doing to people find these valuable or not, I definitely would recommend it, even if you just do it for a period of time. We would kind of implement it for a couple of months Because if you’re not looking and using the feedback, if you’re not looking at it, don’t waste your customer’s time asking for it.

Speaker 2: 20:54

And then get them mad that you don’t respond or do what they asked you to do or anything like that.

Speaker 1: 20:59

Yeah, so if you’re going to ask for it, make sure you use the feedback, make sure you read it, listen to it and, if necessary, respond to it. But it can be a really valuable source of feedback.

Speaker 2: 21:08

Nice, very cool, okay. So what is your favorite brand to call inspiration from and why so?

Speaker 1: 21:14

this is a tough question. I’m gonna kind of cheat a little bit and say that I think I get more inspiration of what not to do.

Speaker 2: 21:23

That’s not a cheat. That’s a good way of looking at it.

Speaker 1: 21:27

I mean there are, I will say there are a lot of amazing emails and brands that are doing great things, but there’s also a lot of bad emails out there and my inbox is filled with them, unfortunately, and so I’ve learned a lot over the years. I mean, I try to absorb inspiration from everywhere, just as somebody who loves marketing, so I don’t necessarily just take inspiration from emails. Like I mentioned earlier, social media is a really big source of inspiration and you know, if you think about what is it about social media versus email, well, email is a push channel and social is a poll channel, where social is something that most people are choosing to receive that content. And I mean, in some cases, you think about, like the amount of hours that people spend scrolling on social media versus how many minutes maybe they’re scrolling email. Right, there’s something really powerful about that social media content that is driving people to want that, and I think a big part of it is there’s not as much selling there, and you know, a lot of it’s not necessarily just engaging with brands. A lot of it may be, if it’s influencers or friends or whatever, right that they’re not there to be sold, and that’s not why they’re there, and so that’s something that I really take away from my email strategy is you know, how can we make this more like social media and the types of poll channels that people want to receive, as opposed to the push channels that the brands are like, hey, we want, we have a sale, you know, go buy this and the things we want you to do? And how can we make our emails just more engaging, something that people want to receive? And so that’s a really big thing that I’ve taken away from that and, like I said, just kind of learning what not to do from all of the junk that have ended up in my inbox brands that are always selling and hounding. There’s a lot you can learn not to do just from studying your inbox as well.

Speaker 2: 23:06

Yeah, I hear it, I like it and that’s cool. You’re taking inspiration from all sorts of different streams as well. That’s always a great way to look at it what not to do, where to pull things from and apply different kinds of things. So that’s super cool. All right, thank you so much for joining. This was super, super. So many great insights. I’m sure our listeners will appreciate all of them. I enjoy this really creative email, so thanks for joining.

Speaker 1: 23:28

Yeah, I really appreciate you having me on. It’s been great. Thanks so much. Thank you, thanks for joining me for email story time.

Speaker 2: 23:34

If you enjoyed today’s story, give this podcast a review so email marketers like you can have more fun with email. See you next week when we dig into this story’s takeaways. Up next, on email swipes, take off your marketer hat when you finish writing an email and put yourself in your customer’s shoes. How close are those two articles of clothing? Sorry, sorry, I couldn’t resist. It’s just so funny. Why do marketers get hats but customers get shoes?