Catching Feels: Achieving Engagement Through Emotion

Transcript
Rickey White 0:00
Doing fillings is achieving engagement through emotion so welcome to the stage Jen is there a way for us to prep the next person with microphones?

Jen Capstraw 1:35
Thank you Is this thing on? Who went out late and got hung over this morning? Anyone here? Are the stragglers still rolling in? Wait, who said that are professional? Ah, well done. I’m Jen Capstraw. Hello, I think you’ve already been informed of that I sent my first email marketing message in 2002. Before can spam was a law. I’m coming up on my 20th anniversary. I was really bad at it back then. I’m not much better now. But I’m super enthusiastic about it. And that’s why I’m here to talk about it today. I’m best known as president and co founder of Women of email, which is the largest formalized organization in email marketing history. Any members? Anyone? Yes, thank you. And thank you, Karen for giving us a shout as well. I’ve got a big old stack of women of email stickers I got to do is ask me for him. I’m showcasing one on my lapel today. Something that none of you know about me that in fact, nobody in email knows about me that I’m launching a podcast called humans of email. And my co hosts slapped together a landing page and an email signup form and a welcome email that I haven’t seen. And apparently they are terrible. But if you would like to be on our mailing list, check out humans of email.com. We’re going live next month, sponsored by Aweber. And I also consult with some of the most incredible marketing technology platforms in the email space, including Freezy, which is really rad. It’s artificial intelligence for language optimization. And there the fine folks who are sponsors of Inbox Expo it made my appearance here possible today. So shout out to my Phrasee friends, that’s friends with a pH. I hope you liked this slide. I spent an inordinate amount of time creating this. Alright, we’re gonna kick things off with something fun, we’re gonna play a game of which test one we love a B tests, right? This was an image hierarchy test that was conducted by a member of Women of Emal, an emerging thought leader in our industry. Her name is Naomi West, she works for a company called invoices to go and she posted this on LinkedIn. And she said I’m about to do a test. And I’m going to test the hierarchy of my template. So version A, we’ve got a video and or hero image up at the top right just below the logo, then the headline then the copy then the call to action version be I rearranged it. I’ve got the headline up higher, push the video down. You can see that call to action button there appears above the fold dish in this version. So show of hands. Which test one version A who thinks version a one. All right, just a handful. All right. What about version B? More of you think version B one. Does anyone know I have a different point of view on this. The same? What was that over here? The same, it was an inconclusive test, Naomi discovered, it didn’t matter at all way she arranged the hierarchy of this message. So then she decided to do a different test.

She tested a call to action, in which you were told about the features of a new product versus a call to value, the value of these updates in product. So version A, here is the new feature, here is what it does. Here’s how it works with other features, version B, new features. Here’s what this will do for you. It will save you time, it will be practical, it will help you make more money. All right, who thinks version A was the winner in this round? How about version B? Anybody think that it’s a wash? Once again? Just a couple of votes. It was in fact version B. Oh, my transitions are not functioning. There was like a cool kind of zoomy zoomy? Oh, well. All right. My cool animations are not going to be working today. But you’ll get the gist. So it’s, it’s version be that statement of value. And she had an unquestionable statistically meaningful result in this test. Why is that? Because what matters most is the message. The brand language that we’re using everything else that makes email, weird and wonderful and challenging the design, the dev, accessibility deliverability. All of these things, aim to support brands language, support the message and create a relationship with the audience. And even if you don’t touch brand, you don’t touch Copy. You are a gatekeeper of the email channel and you do have an obligation to protect it. All right, so I am an old person who is trying to retain what’s left of my youth by using catchy young folk slang. So what does it mean to catch feels? Is anyone familiar with this phrase catching feelings? What does it mean? When you fall for someone, anyone else have a anyone else know what it means to catch feels? Does anyone actually use that phrase in their day to day life? Who knows? I do, because I’m a complete weirdo. So I grabbed this from urban dictionary.com, which is where I go to learn all things that young people are talking about. And they described it exactly as you did, ma’am. Liking someone having an emotional connection to them really digging on them. And that is what you want to do with your audience. You need to create an emotional bond with them if you want to inspire engagement, loyalty, retention, and advocacy. So what are the ways that we are achieving this in the inbox right now? When I got my first job that was entirely dedicated to email strategy, I didn’t even know you could specialize totally an email until after I’d been doing it for nearly a decade. But at that point in time, the conversation was all about personalization, right? You’ve got to personalize, you got to deliver relevance, then it was empathy. We talked a lot about humor and the brands who are doing hilarious things in the inbox but something that I’ve been talking about a lot is building a sense of solidarity with your audience. You don’t necessarily have to be ultra personalized in every single message to create an emotional connection. Emotions can be achieved a number of different ways. Now, there are some other ways we have been achieving engagement in the inbox. Quotation marks engagement. negative sentiment, urgency Fear Of Missing Out trickery, manipulation, evil clown image here.

Right? Can you get a reaction in the inbox? When you leverage negative sentiment? Yes, you can, you can artificially inflate some vanity metrics with negative sentiment and negative emotion. But in the long run, it does you no good, right, because it’s going to associate an emotion with your brand. That’s not positive. And that is not good for the KPI of ultimate truth for customer lifetime value for loyalty for retention. And consumers don’t like it, they’re telling us, marketing makes us angry sometimes. It makes us feel inadequate, it makes us sad, gives us anxiety. It is stressing us out. Freezy does tons and tons of amazing research. And I’ve cited a lot of it throughout this session. So you can look for my short links. There’s a variety of them, I try to make it memorable and easy for you, because I’m going to be banging through these slides. But if you want to download this particular study, Jen dot tips slash ethics is the short link for that one. All of this matters because we never forget emotions, we we lose details over time we lose specifics. But we never, ever forget the way that someone made us feel the way that a brand made us feel. There are some brands that have been suffering for years, from negative backlash that they have since corrected and overcome but people retain this negative sentiment. And it can just have consequences that are insurmountable. Consumers say they don’t like this, they don’t want to buy from brands that are making them feel bad. Right? Personalization. That’s about me, that’s relevant to me that makes me feel good humor, that amuses me, that makes me feel good. Empathy, you care about me, that makes me feel good. A sense of solidarity. We believe in the same things that makes me feel good. anxiety, sadness, anger, that feels bad. And I don’t want to feel bad, I want to feel good. I want positive emotions in my marketing. There’s a ton of awesome stats in here. You want to do the download. This is essential to our success. This is essential to creating those long term connections that support a long term relationship with our audience. customer lifetime value is the price that we are going after we want to maximize that number opens don’t matter. Clicks don’t matter, conversions matter. Second, conversions matter. Third conversions matter, costs more to get a new customer than to retain an existing one. So building solidarity through our shared values is a huge trend right now. I’ve been talking about this for years. And it really came to the forefront around the time that Donald Trump was running for president it became a very big deal in the United States. Social and Political messaging existed in our marketing, but it kind of reached its pinnacle in recent years, especially in 2020 This is just a few of the emails that I received last summer concerning the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States. Police brutality is a problem in the US police brutality against people of color is a huge issue. And there were a number of murders of individuals of color. And it came to a peak at the height of the pandemic summer 2020. And all of a sudden brands are saying, Wow, we care about this too. It’s time for us to say something. And in fact a lot of them did a good job with their messaging. It was thoughtful, it was heartfelt now we made a lot of messaging.

Mistakes earlier in the pandemic right. We sent a lot of unnecessary emails we send To a lot of emails, nobody cared about, it made headlines. There was an article on cnn about how bad all of the pandemic email marketing was. But by the summertime, brands were getting their act together. And they’re thinking more about the world that we’re all in. We were stressed out. And we needed to come together. And this was a way that brands were doing that they were explaining what meaningful action they were taking how you can take meaningful action why this is important. And this is not really anything new. This woke marketing. Hmm. There should be video playing here. Is it know what happened? Is this morning on PowerPoint? All right. Well, there was there’s a video here it is. I’d like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony. Like to buy the world a coke that was 50 years ago this year. That woke messaging these woke marketing was born. But we’re still not getting it right. All right, so we’ve got a few videos that are just not going to work today. It’s unfortunate, but I will describe them in detail because I spent a lot of quality time with them. So although this has been something that’s been going on for 50 years, and although brands were doing a great job of explaining their point of view on social and political issues, by the summer of 2020, the NFL, the National Football League in America, posted a message about their point of view on the situation. Now, if you’re unfamiliar with what was happening in the US, prior to 2020, with the National Football League, there was a football player, very famous football player named Colin Kaepernick, who spoke out against police brutality, in a way that he considered quite respectful. He would take a knee at the beginning of each game. And eventually, more and more players would take their knee, they they’d come down on one knee as a unified statement to say police brutality is a problem. And this is my way of bringing attention to it through my celebrity and the platform that I have as a football player. Now the National Football League, never supported this. And eventually Colin Kaepernick lost his job. So fast forward to 2020 Roger Goodell, who leads the National Football League makes the statement. Oh, gosh, this is a problem. And our heartfelt condolences go to the families of these individuals who have been murdered. But there’s two things he didn’t do. One is he never acknowledged Colin Kaepernick, and two, he never said the phrase Black Lives Matter. And Americans lost their minds. And he had to backtrack days later and say, Okay, I screwed up. I said the wrong things. I’m gonna say the right things now, but trust had been lost. And here’s a fun fact. I worked briefly, for the NFL Alumni Association, I had access to Roger Goodell’s chief communications officer, and his number one advisor. And this was 10 years ago. And around that time, they were having problems with football players assaulting their significant others on video and I asked them about that. Why is it that the league waits for these things to leak, sits back and watches the outrage before finally stepping up and saying oh yeah, eating up your fiance in an elevator is a problem. And they told me why. The NFL does not have values. The NFL does not believe in anything. The NFL does. What the fans want.

They blow with the wind. They are going in whatever direction popular send cement is going and that is a mistake that they will now never ever recover from. This is another video you cannot see right it needs to play on a PC in PowerPoint. So did anyone see Bo Burnham inside this year? Any anyone else? Okay, Bo Burnham is a millennial American comedian. And he was feeling the effects of locked down isolation. And he spent that time making a film length, cost sketch comedy sort of presentation for Netflix, of all of the emotions he was feeling. And I sat down and I watched the show. And I was enjoying it. I was relating. I was feeling the isolation, but then he did this skit, where he identified himself as a brand strategist. And he said something along the lines of it doesn’t matter what we fins can do for you. But will you join Wheat Thins in the fight against Lyme disease? Yes. I tell JP Morgan, you need to be honest, let the world know that you’re against racism in theory, what do you stand for? And I had an emotional reaction to this skit, because I have been talking about this for years, the social and political issues in marketing, the ways that brands are doing it, right the ways that brands are doing it wrong. This is important to me, and he just dagger in my heart and gave it a twist and said, You’re silly, You’re ridiculous. But that I processed it. And it’s not that it’s silly and ridiculous, it’s that we’re often getting it wrong. And when you get it wrong, it’s because we don’t trust you or you’ve said something that has an emotional connection but knew here’s really bad, trust. Risk. Don’t trust us. This is more this is research from last month from Fraser, Edelman and Forrester. In the US consumer confidence has reached an all time low 40% of consumers. They’re no longer loyal to brands that they have been loyal to before because they have lost trust. And marketers are concerned, shocking. Anyone concerned about trust in the inbox? I know you don’t want to admit it. I can feel your hands racing in my heart. These are just a few messages I saw in my inbox over the past week. No wonder they have trust issues. For some reason. We think it’s okay to play games in the inbox, we abandon our brand voice and our brand standards to get the open to get the click. We are eroding trust when we play these games. But at the same time, we’re terrified of saying the wrong thing. Vast majority of us have a greater fear this year than last year, it’s become more and more difficult to strike the right tone. And we don’t know how to say the right thing because we’re not even trying to optimize for it. We’re not testing for it. We’re testing the hierarchy of our email template. We’re not testing our brand voice effectively. When we are trying to test brand voice we’re often doing it poorly. Very rude mentally, with no statistical confidence or meaning. So what is the right thing to say in the inbox? We saw that example from Naomi, right she did a simple test and she did have significance and that’s a great starting point.

A tip I picked up on in some crazy research Direct This is always a winner. They studied all of the subject lines that their clients had sent out in all of 2021 up until October, November. And they found that when you communicate directly and clearly it strikes the right chord. It builds trust. You’re being clear with me you’re not playing games. You’re not giving me that fake FOMO that’s for sure. This is the most direct subject line I received in 2021. Corgi butts inside the emojis or the preheader, peach emoji, pup emoji peach emoji. That is the subject line I can trust they delivered on that promise. Split. Does anyone know what a split is? You do? You do? I did not know what a split was I had to read about it in the me undies email. Oh, it’s not scrolling for us. But it explains it’s when the dog is splattered out like this, right with the bum out. It’s a split, they’re comfortable. And you can buy underpants, with a corgi but on them. Free we don’t have to be serious all the time to create trust. If you’ve ever been to one of my keynotes, you know, there’s always gonna be a dog email in there. Dogs always create positive emotional sentiment. But you can only cram so many dogs into your email marketing. Your audience may get on to you, maybe they’ll enjoy it. I did declare it like the 2018 trend of the year at some webinar. But they never stopped being amazing. But to achieve trust, language has to be optimized. But it’s very, very difficult to do at scale. And as I mentioned, Naomi did that very simple test. But can you do that all the time? How do you refine from there? How do you read? She knows that value driven statements are better than just product descriptions and features. But how do you dig deeper? How do you go further? How do you truly accomplish optimization at scale? requisite plug for Freezy which achieves this with natural language processing. AI technology. It’s rad. Check it out. I’m not going to bore you any further with the commercial bid. The components of trust according to psychologists are benevolence, integrity, predictability, and competence. Does this describe what you’re doing in the inbox? Can you say with absolute certainty that every campaign seeks to uphold these pillars of trust? Can you think of any brand that upholds these trust these pillars of trust? Can you think of any person? I can. This is for UK because I think I think you’re gonna like this. There’s there’s one person I could think of. And it’s Ted lasso. Are there any Ted lasso fans here? Add just a couple. This is iconic in the US. It is available on Apple TV. Ted lasso is a phenomenal TV show. My brother in law dressed up as Ted lasso for Halloween. There are these incredible articles that explain why do we love Ted lasso because he’s, he’s caring. He’s empathetic. He is optimistic. He is an unrelenting Lee. Good and positive and hopeful. And he makes that contagious. He’s the manager of a football league, a British football league. What is the correct terminology for soccer? Football. So he’s an American who’s come to the UK and he they’ve hired him as a joke. to tank this team,

but he doesn’t give up. And he brings so much joy to everyone around him. Even in the face of insults and abuse, we see compassion and humility. This is a man of honor. This is the kind of person who makes you feel good. And that is why when Ted lassos sent an email, an email geeks community lost its mind. So Apple sent an email announcing the second season of Ted lasso. And this email made the rounds because it was from the desk of Ted lasso here, we’ll zoom in here. I’m gonna read this because it’s amazing. My second season with AFC Richmond starts today. And I’d love it if you could watch our journey. That’s the link to the second season of the show. See, believing is kinda like when a crowd does the wave. It starts with one person throwing their hands up, but then someone else joins them in before you know it. That wave is waving all around the dang place. It’s like seeing a big yawn because you can’t help but do it too. And it kind of takes your breath away. So I’ve made a little yellow sign to help you help remind you to believe in us greyhounds that’s the name of the team. But hey, I ain’t precious. Use it to believe in whatever you want, like athletes from your hometown, or someone from work because they get the quivers when they have to present their monthly reports. Let’s start a wave of believing. Get AFC Richmond, back on top, there it is, there’s your yellow believe sign. Maybe I didn’t give the speech quite as good as Ted last. But I love this you can feel his character here. And this is an amazing example of, of that positive sentiment, that emotional connection, bringing joy to the inbox, bringing joy to your audience. So what are our takeaways today? It’s really not that hard, be ethical. Free Freezy has a kit. None of this is gated on this page Gen dot tips slash emotions. And it is basically a how to guide how to not be a jerk in the inbox, how to be a marketer with integrity. And that is step one, if you want to have positive sentiment and emotional connection in the inbox, also focus on brand language. As I mentioned, design, Dev, accessibility deliverability these are all amazing and important. But all of them serve to uphold the message to uphold the brand language, which should ultimately aim to build the connection to grow loyalty, to create advocacy, and to be successful in the inbox. So if you are already doing all of these things, two more calls to action for you. Freezy can help you say it better achieve brand language optimization at scale through natural language processing, artificial intelligence. It’s really rad. And I’ve got a big old stack of women of email stickers, come see me I am happy to give them to you. You can share them with your colleagues. You can have as many as you want. And thank you so much In box Expo for having me for my first time in Spain. Thank you