Each profession leaves its mark, most often through the habits you develop after hours/days/weeks/months/years of practice. It doesn’t matter if you’re a doctor, manager, or… an email marketer.
After doing a bit of email marketing for about three years, here are a few habits I discovered you can pick up as an email marketer.
1. You subscribe to a lot of emails
And it’s mostly for the sake of research.
I know what you’re thinking: ‘What does this have to do with it? Isn’t this like… for newbies?’
No. Doing research is good for email marketers at any level. And what better way to do research than by subscribing to emails?
Besides, this is also a great strategy for inspiration. By subscribing to lots and lots of emails, you build your personal email marketing idea bank. The idea bank concept (sometimes referred to as a scrap file) is about storing all sorts of pieces and ideas to use later on, when needed.
Whenever you need some inspiration, you can easily draw from the thousand emails you’ve signed up for. A simple search and voila… a number of different approaches for a product announcement or sale campaigns at your fingertips.
2. You carefully analyze email marketing pieces you receive
Not only do you subscribe to countless emails, but you also analyze them. You check the layout, the sender, the from eld, calls to action, design. How many images, which one stands out? What’s the purpose for this email? Does it accomplish that? Why is the call to action so long? Geesh, who wrote this?
After a while, the real email marketer in you comes out and sees all the ways in which the email can be improved.
3. It’s HTML templates over email template editors
As an email marketer, you learn quickly why design matters. Good design gets your message across, loud, clear and in a memorable way.
Email template editors are a great solution for someone that’s: 1) not that picky about design and 2) doesn’t have a lot of time to invest in design. Most editors don’t have a steep learning curve and the emails generally look good without a huge amount of effort.
But once you’ve experimented a bit with email marketing, you want something more. You want to be able to move that text just 5 pixels away from the border. You want more control over the design. That’s when HTML email templates become appealing.
Because pixel-perfect padding is totally worth the effort.
4. A Litmus subscription is on your email marketer Christmas wish-list
One of the biggest challenges for email marketers is making emails look consistent across clients. That’s why it’s sooo nice to get live previews across all email clients. And it’s even better when you get that while you’re designing – say hello to Litmus.
There are other services that provide this feature, Mailchimp or Campaign Monitor for example. But there’s something about Litmus that just makes you go: WOW!
But, as an email marketer, you resign yourself knowing that it’s a bit too pricey. You’re lucky as it is if you get a good email marketing provider, especially for large volume sending. Or, the opposite: you know straight up that since there’s no budget for a good email marketing provider, there sure as dawn won’t be for a platform like Litmus.
Still, in secret, you hope. That Santa exists, that he knows you’ve built your lists, you’ve checked them twice. You haven’t been naughty, you’ve been kinda nice: delivered relevant content, with optimized images, alt tags and unsubscribe links that aren’t hidden in the footer.
So, fingers crossed for Santa to consider sparing you the trouble of testing across email clients. With a lifetime subscription of Litmus.
5. ‘Hmm, what are they using to send emails? Let’s see…’
Ok, this one might be a personal quirk I can’t get rid of after researching email marketing providers. But it’s kind of fun, after a while. Especially when you start guessing the provider just by the email layout.
For email marketers, and especially those who manage large contact lists (50.000+), finding an affordable email marketing provider is no mean feat.
If you have the budget for it, it’s no biggie. But that’s often NOT the case. There are two ways to research providers:
- Make a list of every available service, compare them across relevant features and pricing.
- Check email headers of about 10-15 emails from popular apps (or tools, services, online store, publishers and so on). That’s not to say that the most popular email marketing provider is the best, but there has to be a reason why it is used so often.
I know transactional email providers offer way better deals. The problem comes with e-mail blasts like newsletters or product announcements. What works well for one category might not work that well for another. Also, there are services like Postmark that run only transactional email, and it’s a way to protect your servers and your reputation.
What’s more, email marketing providers don’t offer a common ground for pricing. With transactional email, you get billed by the number of emails you send. Bulk email services, on the other hand, charge according to the number of contacts on your list. To make it even harder to compare, some provide a limit for the number of emails you send to your list – and others don’t.
Going back to the point – this is also a good way to keep up with technology, especially as the marketing technology has boomed over the past 3 years.
6. ‘Where’s the text-only version?’
I know that Apple iPhone and Gmail hold about 50% of the overall email client share (source) and neither of them display text-only emails (unless designed that way).
But that’s not the point. Text-only is important even if it can’t be seen.
It’s about respecting best practices, maintaining a good reputation and getting by spam filters to land in the all mighty inbox. It is also the only way for people with disabilities to actually get in touch the content of your emails.
So, as an email marketer, you know better than leaving the text-only version out. To quote The Dude: Not cool man.
7. ‘Gee, I wish I had written that…’
We live in an attention economy. Media is very fragmented and we’re bombarded with hundreds, if not thousands of messages daily.
Email is no different. The average office worker receives about 121 emails per day and in March 2015, 205 billion emails are sent each day. (source) Yes, that’s right: every day.
Let’s pause for a moment and assume – assume, because you don’t know how much of it is spam – that all those 121 emails land in the inbox.
You, as an email marketer, know it’s important to attract your audience’s attention. This holds true regardless of channel or medium, but it’s a bit harder with email. With banner ads, you can use images, colors, text and combine those. With email, you get about 52 characters.
That’s why you sigh when you see a creative, attention-grabbing subject line. You know the one I’m talking about. The one you have never seen before, and you just know it’s good. The email marketer in you wishes he/she would have thought of it sooner. Oh well, maybe next time…
8. You know what transactional email means
Even if they’re widely used, there’s a large chunk of email marketers that don’t know what transactional email refers to. The spike in “automation flows” in digital marketing just adds to the confusion.
According to Mailchimp, transactional email is ’email triggered by the recipient’s action or inaction’. For instance: creating an account, making a purchase or not logging in for a specific amount of time.
However, there is a slight confusion due to marketing automation. Automated emails (also known as drip campaigns) refer to a flow the user enters after taking a certain action. Their purpose is to nudge users towards conversion and can take the form of a lead nurturing program, educational series, or just a flow that aims to re-engage users with a product or a service after a certain period of time.
9. Deliverability really matters to you
Way more than emailing that contact for the 100th time.
Email marketing is like a relationship. You need permission to get in touch and you need to provide some good stuff if you want to keep it going. Of course, the other part has got to do its share: open emails from time to time, not go straight for the spam button when you’re having an off day.
Still, when you’re trying too hard and the other part is just not interested, there’s no ongoing relationship. Despite the initial flirt – you did get that email address, didn’t you?
What’s more, chances are you’re starting to hurt yourself. Read sender reputation and deliverability. Those are directly impacted by things such as spam complaints and low open rates.
Segment your list carefully and don’t email people who aren’t interested. It’s for your own good, after all.
10. You see the big picture
Unlike paid or organic search, email is not a standalone acquisition channel. Unless you’re buying email lists, a practice that is pretty much frowned upon.
At some point, as an email marketer, you understand that email is a tool. It helps you communicate, stay in touch, educate, inform and sell.
And maybe that’s one of the stepping stones in becoming an experienced email marketer. Seeing that email is a piece of a larger puzzle. It’s a great tool, with a lot of potential. Sure. there are challenges – but what satisfaction would we have if we didn’t have the challenges to give us something to strive for?
Going back to you – do you know any email marketer habits worth mentioning? Besides adjusting metrics…