Engaging your Email List & Measuring Results – Slides from Net Tuesday Toronto

Improving your email
broadcasts
Eric Squair | eric@squair.ca
Growing and Engaging Your
Email List & Measuring Impact
Wednesday, May 8, 2013
Hello everyone!

Eric Squair
Email Newsletters | May 2013
Here’s what I am about. Most recently I have begun consulting and training in helping organizations make
decisions based on their web data instead of best guesses or faith-based initiatives.
rs of Parliament, provincial legislature and even city councillor easily, and subscribes people automatically to your
email list.

Assumptions:
Write emails, don’t send press releases
Use an EMS: MailChimp,
VerticalResponse, etc.
Pay attention to results
I am making a few assumptions about you, from the course description
The first is that you actually spend some time writing a ‘custom’ email newsletter - you don’t just send out press releases
You can’t get stats from a BCC: get a good email service provider! Don’t be embarassed, a lot of people still do this. But
MailChimp is free for up to 500 email addresses, and really cheap thereafter - you can’t afford not to use a real EMS.
Finally, I am assuming you at least glance at the stats provided by your EMS - open rates, click rates, unsubs - on a
regular basis. The advanced among you may be using something like Google Analytics to track how your email list
interacts with your site. Good for you!

How to grow your list
<break>
How to keep people
engaged and measure the
impact of your email
This is tonight’s agenda. Before the break, we are going to look at some ways to
grow your list.
After the short break, we’ll be looking at ways to keep people engaged with what you
are creating.

The secret...
We all want to grow our lists, to get more signups, and I am about to reveal the secret to doing this.
It’s very simple. Can anyone guess what it might be?

Offer people something
they value.
Sounds simple, and it is. Offer people something of value.
But what the heck does that mean, and how do I do it?

What’s Your Superpower?
What can your organization do that no one else can?
What can you tell people, teach people, connect people with that no one else can
offer them?
If you can hone in on this, you have the basis for a pretty unique email
newsletter.
Here are some examples:

What can you offer?
Event invitations
Information your supporters want
Humour
Ways to improve their lives
You have something to say that people want to hear: put it out there!

What’s Your Superpower?
LeadNow: opportunities to get involved

Freshbooks
Freshbooks: tips for their audience.
NOTE: they only subtly mention their product, Freshbooks, and they’re offering
workshops in how to use it better.
Otherwise it’s all about how to do better at what you do: news you can use.
This is probably my favourite email newsletter right now. What do you notice
about it?

Worksheet
What’s your superpower?
What can you ‘trade’ for an email?
What’s amazing about your email?

Landing pages
“Anatomy Of A Perfect Landing Page” - Kissmetrics
This is the ﬁrst of two quick tips before we break : the ﬁrst is think in terms of
landing pages.
There is a really well-developed science of landing pages, mainly from the E-
commerce world, on how to persuade people to give you their money, or in this
case, their email address.
Here’s a great graphic example from KISSMetrics, Google it.
All this to say, that simply asking people to sign up for your list may not work:
you need to sell them on it! Establish credibility and trust, give them a sense of
what they will be getting.

Google grants
Finally, before we break, one quick way for charities to grow their email lists:
apply for a Google Grant, which allows you to advertise free of charge online.
Send people to your landing pages and you should see signiﬁcant email list
growth.

After the break
Engaging with your audience
Measuring the impact of your emails

Benchmarks:
www.e-benchmarksstudy.com/
If you haven’t checked out this year’s non-profit benchmarks study, take a look. It’s from 44 different orgs in the US, and
gives a reasonable benchmarks on email, social media, advocacy and fundraising benchmarks, so you know what is
relatively ‘normal’.

Open rates depend on:
Subject line
Previous experience with the sender
The first one is pretty easy: use good subject lines! Shorter, descriptive or not.
The second is much harder: it means you have to keep the trust, that you will send people info they actually want to read.
If you don’t, you often don’t get many second and third chances.
How many of you have email list subscriptions you don’t read?

Don’t send crap!
Offer people something
they value.
It bears repeating: Don’t send crap!
And PLEASE don’t ever call it a blast. That sounds like something I don’t want to be anywhere
near!

Good email is:
By, for and about people
(not robots)
The best e-mails have the right tone: conversational.
E-mails come FROM someone, and speaks TO someone, this is not an impersonal medium.
It's person to person even though it's going out to thousands of people.
It's always a good practice to read emails out loud, to make sure they make sense.
Include pictures of real people, wherever possible.

Email by, for and about people
Read your email aloud to check
tone/language
Include pictures of real people
‘Sign’ your email with name(s) and
a picture
The best e-mails have the right tone: conversational.
E-mails come FROM someone, and speaks TO someone, this is not an impersonal medium.
It's person to person even though it's going out to thousands of people.
It's always a good practice to read emails out loud, to make sure they make sense.
Include pictures of real people, wherever possible.

Good
email is:
All about them
(not you)
I ﬁrst want to thank the person who put themselves up for this by sending in
their email - it takes a lot of guts!
What do we notice about this?
It is about offering value, asking for opinions, and does have photos of people.
But it’s a bit busy: we need to remember that people scan email, they really
don’t read them!

Good email is:
Based on what you know about the
recipient (segment your list)
What does a segmented list mean? It means the list is divided into useful categories based on
the audience.
You can segment by location, language, how the email was acquired, or previous action taken
(link clicked etc.) Segment by whatever makes your emails more valuable to the recipient.

Ask for:
email*
ﬁrst name*
postal code*
There are three things you want to ask people: email, ﬁrst name and postal code.
Email is obvious.
First name allows you to personalize the emails
And postal code allows you to segment based on geography

Measuring Impact
How many people recognize this pie chart?
I love it. IF you have seen a presentation of mine in the past 18 months, you
have seen this pie chart. It sums up the traffic to every single site on the
internet. Traffic comes from one of three sources: referrals from other sites,
direct visits, and search.
That’s it.
You want more people on your site? They will come one of these three ways.

Avoid Drowning in Data!
But I get it: Google Analytics is really really confusing.
The documentation is pretty opaque, there’s a ton of jargon, and no real way to
quickly discover what’s important and what you can safely ignore.
This is a word cloud of a typical Google Analytics screen. It’s a lot.
So I am going to give you two quick tips to get started, something that will
crack the nut of Google Analytics and make it all click into place. Hopefully.

Avoid Drowning in Data!
Tag the links you send out via email
and social media as ‘campaigns’
Set up goals in Google Analytics
These are two simple things you can do to make Google Analytics make sense.
Track your outreach efforts. Every time you send out a link in social media or
by email, tag it with a few simple codes that Google Analytics provides and you
will be able to track the behaviour of visitors from those outreach efforts.

Track your outreach
This is the same pie chart once you start tagging the links you send out
through email, social media, advertising, etc. Google Analytics calls any
outreach you do a ‘campaign’

Once you have
set up goals
you can focus
on your
highest value
visits
Note that this is one (not atypical) website, it’s not ALL websites!
But this is the kind of thing that happens once you are using Google Analytics
properly: you have set up goals and you are tracking your outreach - aka
‘campaigns’

A more social
media based
campaign
This is another example of a campaign that’s more focused on young people
and petition signups.
I am showing you these because you can easily get this report - called a ‘Multi
Channel Conversion Visualizer’ IF, and only if, you set up goals in Google
Analytics and then tag your links you send out via email, social media and
advertising.

Recap
1. What do superpower do you have to
offer?
2. Email is by, for and about people
3. Track your results
Here’s what we
covered.

Questions?
eric@squair.ca

Engaging your Email List & Measuring Results – Slides from Net Tuesday Toronto

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