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Dela Quist, Founder and CEO, Alchemy Worx

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Maximise the ROI on your email by applying a proper strategy

Speaker
Dela Quist, Founder and CEO, Alchemy Worx

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https://vimeo.com/532438998

Transcript

Dela Quist 0:27
Hi, everybody, Good afternoon, and welcome to my session. And big thank you to Inbox Expo neck or unbox Expo, this has been a fantastic event. And I was very proud to deliver the keynote. And I'm also proud to be delivering this presentation to you. There's a couple of things that I just want to say, before I begin, first of all, being on stage is such energy, right. And so it's very challenging to do this sort of presentation. And so kudos to everybody who's managed to do it. And I suddenly had a brainwave about 20 minutes ago, and I thought, stand up, because that's what I do. And I move about a bit and all of that sort of stuff. The second thing I want to speak to you about is, I'm only using one screen. And as a result, I can't really see what the next slide is coming up. And good as I am, I'm not that good. So I'm going to probably keep this in this mode. So I can keep track of where I am. And hopefully you'll get a better experience. I typically when I'm doing email, I speak about why people should listen to me. And there's the first typo, two years, in 20,000 hours, it's actually 20 years and 20,000 hours looking at email data. Now, if you think about it, 20 years ago, is a very, very long time ago, I'm always horrified when I realise how bad it was 20 years ago, Tony Blair was Prime Minister, so was George Bush, this Netflix was sending emails, and they were actually sending pretty good emails, but they actually stood out, they had HTML images, and data driven marketing. And that's one of the reasons I like them. And Amazon, I mean, it's just so hard to believe that 20 years ago, they pretty much just sold books. And it's something I'm kind of proud of being in the industry this long. And one of the things I'd like to kind of show you, just for fun, is back then that's the phone I was using, it was a Samsung, it was state of the art, I keep every phone I ever had. So it had this wonderful poke of folding pocket, which double does an extra battery. This is the phone. I think that's so cool that I'd like to make it work again, and I might switch back to that kind of phone again. I don't know if anyone else is that geeky, but kind of that's me.

Um, I'm learning interesting world where marketers have this fear of inactive people. And yet they're everywhere. The average mailing list, as far as I know, typically has between 50 and 80%, inactive subscribers on it. And that hasn't changed for 20 years. Everywhere I look, there are inactive subscribers, and everybody is terrified of them. And they typically go The best thing to do with inactive subscribers is take them off your list and stop mailing them. I've got a different view on that many of you will understand that. And I think today you will you I'm going to give you a sense of how audience management which means looking at your whole list, that's a subscriber level. First of all beat segmentation. But secondly, reduces the number of those dead people, it reduces the number of the inactive people, and it should be everybody's goal that they should remove inactive people and I I know that people tend to sort of assume that I don't care and my idea is just batch and blast everybody. And that's a bad thing. It's a bad thing. Because batch and blast is dead, we've moved to segmentation. segmentation delivers you a more engaged audience, it stops you being an idiot. And best of all, you don't annoy customers and your deliverability goes up. That's the theory behind it. And most people do a lot of segmentation. everywhere I go. I mean, I very rarely see clients that effectively send one whole email to the entire list. And yet, we have exactly the same number of inactives. And to me that says one of two things Either no one's looking at inactives possible. Or, as in, no one's doing anything with an active, which is possible. Or there's an immutable law that says, no matter who you are 50% of anybody on your list, no matter where you got them from, how long they've been there, etc, etc, will be inactive. And I don't believe in I certainly don't believe in the latter. And I do believe that it's really because we are failing to do a number of key things. And those key things are addressed by audience management, as I say, which is a subscriber list. So you're not looking at segments, you're not looking at 1000s of segments, what you're basically doing is looking at the entire list and saying, who's doing what, at any given time? And how do I respond to that behaviour or that movement? And in a sense, what I'm going to do is also, why is it that segmentation doesn't actually deliver the promised land of 100% engagement of your list. Now I'm going to be controversial. And by the way, I forgot to invoke my standard disclaimer, and that is hashtag DDS, which means I assume my audience is smart, and no one's going to do anything stupid. So you can read hashtag BTS is hashtag, to be smart, or hashtag, don't be stupid. And if I'm speaking at a conference, which I am now, the way I describe, to be smart, is if I say it's safe to leave the building, don't go not if you jump from the fifth floor, that isn't smart. What that means is if I say it's safe to leave the building, then you leave the building in a sensible, orderly manner, and you will be safe. So I'm assuming all of you are smart. And that's where I'm going to go. And the first place I'm going to go as to why things haven't changed. In all the time I've been in email. Instead, actually, we reply to sending the same email to the entire list to sending the same email to the entire segment. And anybody who says differently, you do move segments around. I agree, lots of people move segments around, and not everyone's always going to segment. But once the segment is identified, everybody in that segment gets exactly the same email. And that's Problem number one.

Problem number two, is, the more complex our email programmes become. And believe you me, we work with some very complex ones. I'm sure many of you listening in the audience are running with or running very complex programmes, or have clients that are running complex programmes. But the problem is, is that the more complex those programmes are, the more subscribers we miss. How does that happen? Well, the first is suppressions. Right? If you're pulling 2530 4050, even 10 different segments, you just want to make sure that no one gets the same email twice. You want to make sure that a message going out to a segment doesn't contradict another message. And those suppressions are absolutely key, some of the permanent and very rarely do they get reviewed on a mailing by mailing basis, we tend to for our businesses, usual emails, assume that our rules are correct. And they're up to date. They typically are not. And one of the things I'm going to urge you to do is an incredibly simple test, which is a KPI that we run a How can we works that so surprisingly simple. Well, it's kind of there's a wrinkle in it, that makes it not simple. But in in essence, in theory, it's so simple, everybody should be able to do it. What we tend to do is we look at how many emails we send the segment, right? So we go our VIP segment, we send them two emails a day or two a week, or for a month, the number doesn't matter. And then we have another segment that maybe gets fewer emails because they're slightly less active. And then maybe we've got a less than inactive segment, and they'll get very females at all one or two. So take the total number of emails that you sent to a segment or list and divide it by the segment size. The thing that's difficult and the thing that's surprising is that because we pull segments on a daily basis, it's very hard for anybody to go, oh, how big is the actual segment or having the actual list I'm actually astounded by that. But it's everywhere, it's very, very hard to get someone to give you a number and say that segment has that number of people in it, partly because it moves. And partly because people don't know. So a good proxy for that is to look at the largest number of people, or the biggest list that was sent to that segment in the week. And typically, that's one or the biggest list that been sent to that list ever. And that could be one way you remove all your suppressions because you've got a big sale on or it's the holiday season, or maybe once a week, you go deep into the file, whatever it is, you need to take that big number and divide it by the number of emails sent. Now, if you sent seven emails to the list, then email sent over list size should is near as damn at least seven. That's the average number of emails that someone on the list got. We are constantly amazed to find that that number is out by a huge amount we send seven to the list, the average number received is three or two or even one. And when you look at that, that means a tonne of people within that segment got absolutely nothing. Why? And that's a question that everybody needs to ask themselves. If you say you're going to treat everyone in the segment the same. And you're gonna send the same email, you're basically going to in inverted commas bathroom lost the segment, unless you deliberately suppressed people. Right? Which also because you deliberately suppress people, you may find that not everybody in the segment. Got the email? Is that what you planned? And best of all, is what you planned to a highly valuable segment that they got no emails at all. I suspect the answer to that is not. The other reason is the way we look at life cycle marketing. The traditional view is a graph that looks something like this. And it's again talking about it. This is kind of very segmentation orientated. So right here you have your very best customers, and they'll get the most emails, your average customers, and they get an average number of emails, and these are your worst customers. And so you don't mail them because they hate you.

That's absolutely fine. But as you can see, it perpetuates the idea that one size fits all. Okay, everybody who's the best customer is the best customer and everybody's an average customer is an average customer, everyone is a bad customer is a bad customer. The truth is actually slightly different. This is how we look at lifecycle marketing. And it's based on a travel company that we worked with. And the reason why this is such a good case study is we were delivered somewhere in the region of five years worth of data. In fact, you can see it's actually closer to seven years worth of data. And so we were able to look by date when purchases were made. And what you'll see is that every 12 months, there's a huge spike now travels another great case study for the simple reason that people tend to travel at the same time every year. So Thanksgiving, Thanksgiving, they will travel any other holiday, the summer vacations, spring break, you name it, if they make a holiday this year, the chances are they'll do the same thing again. And as you can see, this is the inverse of the life cycle chart that I showed you, it's going downwards. So the number of people who make a second purchase is higher than the third which is higher than the fourth, which is higher than the fifth, which is higher than six, which is higher than the seven. And basically that issue and that chart, what that shows you is that people move in and out of activity, which is very, very different from the idea that they're in a permanent state. And we found that engagement is a dynamic process and to optimise and understand that you have to have subscriber level data. You just have to have it. So you have people moving from engagement to unengaged. You have people moving directly from unengaged to purchase you have the moving from engagement, not purchasing and then purchasing. You also have acquisition coming into the funnel and people can come straight in and become unengaged. They can come straight in and purchase they could come straight in and just open your emails and do nothing else because they don't have a life. But basically it's a very, very dynamic process and people are moving backwards and forwards within all the states. And it's very, very hard to deal with that or work out what to do if you pull or are delivered by an AI tool, or your platform, a list of people and say, these are your ex, right. So these are your best buyers, these are your 30 day openers, because what we don't know is are they the same people who were there yesterday, what we don't know, is the rate of movement between those states. And something that might surprise you. If you track it. The percentage of people that are becoming inactive after a period of activity and dropping into your unengaged file can be as high as 5% a week. Which means that in order to stay still, your acquisition has to be at around about the 5% rate. That's a very large number to have to buy, again and again, week after week after week. And so you want to slow down this movement. And you want to increase this movement, you want people going back to the slide before and I'm going to jump back to this, what you basically want to do is you want to make sure that depending on your product, or depending on the service, that people spend as little time as possible in this bit, and as much time as possible there, especially with regards to opens and clicks. And you need to focus on that. And you need to make sure that all your activity and your thinking is driven around that. The third reason is that no matter how many personas you have, one of each exists in every segment, right? So basically, that's it. And the people who are very active or about to become reactivated as a result of you know, either seasonality, or need a change in need or running out of product or whatever it is, if they're buried in your inactive file or your unengaged file, the chances are you're going to miss the signals, because you won't send them email. You can't engage with an email you never got. That's something I've said over and over and over again. You can only get engaged if someone asks you. I mean, you can ask them, but someone has to do the asking. And so marketing is about creating a situation where you get asked

or asking and creating a situation where they say yes, silence gets you nowhere. And the problem with the way we approach segmentation or our list is that we kind of classify people in one place. And once they're there, we can't think of them in any other way. And until we change that, it's going to be extremely challenging for us to actually change anything about the way we market. I've been asked Is this the future? And I go, absolutely. Is it the future? I've been told, but we do this anyway. And I go, I'm not so sure about that. You have segments? Correct? You send the segment's different emails. And so you're therefore more attuned to where someone is in the purchase lifecycle. Yes. What you don't do is have a KPI that says the average length of time someone stays engaged is 15 days, I want to make it 21. The average length of time someone stays in my unengaged file is 60 days, I want to make that 45. And that's how important it is. So for every segment you have you, in effect have to be targeting people in as many ways as you have personas, which kind of takes you to a place. Well, if that's the case, why do I have the segments in the first place? Why am I not marketing to marketing to personas? And that's a conclusion I'll let you get to. But I think most people will say to you, yeah, marketing to persona is good. Not everyone's got the same persona and we need to market in a way that takes into It takes into account the different personas that we have on the database. But the key is, there is no such thing as a segment that only has one persona in it. And so every segment needs multiple different approaches. And so you might as well call your list the segment, and send the different personas, different messages, rather than making your life difficult. if let's say for the sake of argument, if you have seven personas, and three segments, that's 21, things you need to think about, you will be better off looking at the whole list. And just saying, I've actually got seven personas, those personas are doing different things at different times, or those personas represent different behaviours. And I think that's more important than personas that are based around demographics. You know, male or female lives in the south lives in the north, purchase ones, etc, etc. and giving it a name like Sam or Joe, right? What I mean by personas is more around where they are in the lifecycle. So purchase before about a purchase, again, purchase before about become inactive, inactive about time, because it's 12 months since their last purchase, or six weeks or four days, or whatever your product cycle is. That's another persona. And we're actually managing personas in a dynamic way rather than a, Bob always does this because he lives in the north and has a car and does something else. That's not kind of what we're talking about here. And what does that mean? What it means is that if you look into a segment, you will find that I and I'm trying to show you what the cost of this is, if you look deep into the segments, and this is a valuable segment, and this is actually based on true numbers. If you look into this segment, you will see you've got two times buyers, and one time buyers, both are very, very valuable. And typically have a high open rates. So the segment open rate is somewhere in the region of 15 to you know somewhere in the region 15%. But when you look at it by open rate from time or left last open within the segment, you will see that people who've opened within the last 15 days, the open rate from that list is 22.6% call it 20% on average between one times and two times buyers. After 16 days, that open rate drops to three and a half percent. That's an amazing drop. After

45 days, it drops two to 2%. And after 45 days that drops to like one and a half percent open rate. Now these people are in the valuable engage segment, and yet their open rate is one and a half percent. And I would probably guess that very few people listening here have an average open rate in their inactive segment when they do mail it that's lower than that. The reverse is also true. And one of the things that's interesting is if you look at the less valuable segment, this is not a totally low valuable segment. It's like non buyers. And if you look at non buyers who are less valuable than buyers, what you'll see is that the open rate for non buyers is actually 25% if they've opened within the last 15 days dropping to 2.2 and right down to 2.3. But ironically, non buyers actually open at a higher rate after 46 days than buyers do. And if you're thinking about this from an engagement perspective and you're looking at your list, it might want to make you think about how you manage your sendings from a deliverability perspective it's not just simply don't mail the the unengaged just mail your most active because a 40 day active could be as unengaged in the in the 40 day, sorry, a 45 day inactive in your engaged file could be less engaged in the 45 day non opener in in your unengaged file. And that's something that I would urge you to look at. So, this is the audience management funnel. takes a lot of thinking charts like this a really, really difficult and I want to make sure that everyone understands what I'm saying. But I also want to say thanks to the team back at alchemy works for helping me put this together. Helping me think this through. When you're thinking of audience management, the top of the funnel is reaching frequency, right? Reach being, how many people got at least one email? The answer should be as close to never zero. You really don't want that to be zero. Because as I said, if you don't send an email, you can't engage someone, folks say, Yeah, but you can engage them another way. You can bH them through search, or you can engage them through SMS. I'm like, why would you pay more? Why would you pay more to engage someone who's already on your list? Why would you choose to pay Google to give you someone back when they're sitting in your database already, and have not unsubscribed. So the key things are reach how many people get at least one and frequency within that, how many get 234567. And that will depend on the sorts of personas and the profiles that you deliver, or you devise, and very much will be it will influence movement between the segments. Ultimately, if you reach people in the unengaged file, they're more likely to engage, you also have to work out how often you can do that without creating deliverability problems. But more importantly, you actually have to start figuring out what makes them reengage, what stops them being unengaged for a long time. And that's where you come to things like subject lines and pre headers and your your, your from address. All the stats say the number one reason why people open an email and don't answer is unsubscribe from address pretty much closely behind that, if not at the same level is subject line. Timing is another thing that a lot of people think make a difference. I'm kind of like not so sure about timing, because I sometimes think that we drive the timing thing ourselves, and we can train people to open at different times should we want to. I also asked myself other questions as to is the timing focused on because they actually into purchase? Or is it because that's the time that they clean their inbox and delete emails that they don't like. Once you have those things done, you probably have an open, you certainly have more opens and I can talk about that in a minute. And so you now move to calls to action. The offer offer types do

top of that top of the email, bottom of the email, free delivery, how important is that? And by the way, all of these things actually feed into the top, which is the subject line and and the pre header. But But you're really thinking about, okay, what are the things I do that make different types of people buy? It may not surprise you, if I was to say, for example, things that are cyclical, are much more likely to benefit from kind of things like free delivery and replenishment, they kind of work out, they work better on that. And that's why you get so many reminder emails, if you do insurance. That's why you have so many anything that has a cycle that's really, really easy to work, those kinds of calls to action work. The other thing is, you know, buy one, get one free 50% discount. Very important to work out which segments or which personas or whether one works better for people moving up, or works better to stop people moving down. That's something that you may want to think about. And last, but by no means least, please no trolling, no hate from designers. Design is absolutely critical. Design is what makes a brand design is how you convey consistency, brand design, it's about consistency, but it's also about providing a pleasant experience. And it's a very, very important thing to do. So why is it at the bottom, it's because actually, this funnel kind of replicates your conversion funnel, right? You start at the top where people are coming in reach and frequency, then you start pushing them down the funnel, engaging them more with subject lines, making them open, etc, etc. Then you move to conversion, and then you start to tweak the conversion. The other reason is what you'll see is that for the amount of effort that it takes, it takes a lot less effort to send more email. Don't be stupid, do be smart than it does to optimise the design of an email because the numbers are getting smaller and smaller and smaller. number sense, number opened, number clicked, number of people considering number of people purchase it, and the design piece tends to be very valuable, the final piece of the conversion. So whilst it might be give you like 1% lift across the whole campaign or an invisible lift on conversion, that could be 30%. And it's very important to think about that as you go through this. So with audience management, what you're doing is you are, I like to think I'll just say marketing, drop the email, what you're doing is in marketing, you're saying, I'm going to reach as many people as possible, I'm going to make sure that I engage them. And when I do engage them, I want to give them a good customer experience. And I'm going to use that to build to make a conversion. And once I've done that, then I do it all over again, the more times you do that, the more loyal the person you're you're working with. The next thing, the next thing is that we have a case study, how can you have a presentation with the case study. This is some work we did for a client. And the specific goal was if you're thinking holistically, if you're thinking about managing your entire list, then the question would be when would be the best time to have the most engaged audience. And Surprise, surprise for many, many people, that's the holiday season. So we started working in April, with a view of delivering the biggest engage list that we could for the holiday season. And so we looked at the number of people who hadn't opened an email or interacted with an email for 180 or more days. And compare that with the engage list. And Surprise, surprise is 3070. It's pretty much what I said at the beginning 30% of the list had engaged within 180 days 70% of the list had not by October, we had actually made that as near as dammit 5050 by a tiny amount. This client had more engaged people on their list than they had unengaged people, we had reduced the inactive file and increase the engaged file. And best of all, if you look at it, the amount of open emails was basically up 52%. And

that was for actives. And even the inactives had opened more emails than they did before we started working with them. And in terms of revenue, 66% of their revenue came from people that were inactive in April, they had not opened a single email in 180 days in April. So I'm going to flip view so that I can see some questions. And hopefully I can answer a few questions. If anybody wants to ask, before we end the show and move into the other room.

Right? We've got some questions. I'm just waiting until I can see them. And I will try and address those questions. And by the way, tell me I'm wrong. I don't mind. You'll give me a chance to hit it out to the park, I hope.

Great question. How do you deal with a legacy list when you're new to the company? And you don't know how the contacts were acquired? If they're traps, recycle traps, etc, etc. And what's the best approach? Um, excellent question. I think the answer is with care. Um, I've always said this, if deliverability is so difficult that no one can fix the problem. Right? Then the industry shouldn't exist. It exists because problems are fixable, it just means they're not easy to fix. Never, ever, ever. Just take your inactive file and mail it. I never said that. I never will. If anyone says I said that they're lying straight out. So you need to try and do as much investigation as you can. Many espys will give you a sense of when someone came on the list. So start by looking at your inactives and breaking them down into how recently they joined the list. Mail test mail very, very small portions and portions of them at a time. And by the way, going back to it Why did they join the list? Now I think one of them parts of the question is we don't know how they were acquired. Well, I'll tell you this. If that email address is associated with a credit card, because they made a purchase, I would bet that it's it's highly likely to be good. In fact, I would say it's almost 100% certain to be a good email address. How do I know this? I'll just put the question back to you. When was the last time you change the email address that's associated with your credit card? I know many folks in this audience have different email addresses for everything so they can work out who's spamming them, and blah, blah, blah, but that's because we're in the industry. But do they have a different email address for the one that they use to make purchases? And the answer is probably not so great them and start testing deeper and deeper into it. So start with the most recent start with ones that have ever made a purchase, start with ones perhaps that ever opened. And just go into that and do test. You can also go to list cleansing services, there are many of them around, and you know, pay to double check or find out whether that person is active on another file. So there are ways of doing it yourself, which needs to be done with care and their ways of doing it with partners, which means go to a less cleansing company, clean your list against those, and that will tell you who's there and who is not. And so going back to it with regard to traps it if you're the address, and the reason someone gave you an address was a purchase, it's highly unlikely to be a trap. So unengaged purchases are really really easy. Then you go up to unengaged clickers, and then you go to openers, and then you start worrying about unengaged, never open Neff don't know where they came from. And they've been on the list for five years. I hope that answers the question. Any others?

Andrew Bonar 37:14
Hey there, how's it going? Thanks. It's great presentation. The feedback? Am I on mute? Okay. Oh, sorry, I'm being distracted by the one minute delay in the background, I'm seeing something and think there's a problem, there is no problem. My processes are very, very long day. And the feedback in the channel. Much as same as mine is Sally was a great follow on follow up to the original opening keynote. This was in fact keynote as well, because we had nothing scheduled alongside you. So it was a great turnout. And I can see that everyone's very, very happy to have had your second time and lots of great feedback from Lauren, skip, and dozens of others. So I can't thank you enough for having done this. It was brilliant for you to get out and get it done early yesterday, and then expand on that today. Because it's always, it's always better to have more time and we were able to schedule that. So I'm glad that we were able to do that. So thank you for joining us, as always yet do follow dentaquest. He has started tweeting now, he never used to tweet. But I have seen he started tweeting so he's not completely anti social media anymore. And of course Alchemy Worx and check out what is the name of that free tool for subject line testing?

Dela Quist 38:41
touchdown. Well, touchdown, touchdown, touchdown test.io.

Andrew Bonar 38:48
Okay, and so that's a really useful tool for email marketers, because it's first started, is there a free testing for anything or it's just paid?

Dela Quist 38:58
Yeah. As far as touchstone is concerned, there is a free trial, I'd recommend everyone who wants to do it, use the free trial, because we're about to come up with a major upgrade. I can't give you a date or time at this moment in time, but suffice it to say within a free trial period, you will probably get the notification that you've moved on to the beta and the free trial will continue. And yes, that URL is correct. touch them. tests.io

Andrew Bonar 39:29
fantastic. So yeah, thank you for that, check out check out touchstone test. We have April mulling woollen coming up later for the closing keynote. And before that, we have Mariana Santiago, who's doing a quick email workshop. I do want to just get two quick messages out because I forgot to do the earlier. One is well if you really like this presentation, the good news for those that have upgraded anyone who's upgraded to get the live downloads or have actually got permission to republish and share those, you do need to speak to the speakers in each of those presentations. But I'm sure much like, I'm sure Taylor would be happy for you to share his presentation on your site. Anyone who has access to the downloads, there will be an embargo period, obviously, for probably like 30 to 40 days after that anyone who has access to the downloads, which includes obviously all the speakers will be able to be free to use any of the videos anyway, it's really great. They'd like, had a meeting with me today. And we agreed it was the right thing to do. There's so much fabulous content there. So much donated in terms of time, by people like della and over 100 other speakers, it's not fair for us to try and profit from it. Hopefully, by the end of today, we will have broken even. And that's more than enough for us. We're building something brilliant here. And it's with all of your help. And so we would like to share that with everyone. So those will be available. And I'm sure, in no time at all, everyone will be sharing everything everywhere, and so everyone will have access to it in a short space of time. The other thing I wouldn't say is, um, check out when the bills are no skips bangs on about this, in particularly might want to drop by map and tap the button there. they've paid silly money for the right Stuart Forrester report comes out in about two weeks time. Anyone that's paid for first two reports? No, they're expensive. If you tap that button in the booth and let them know that you're interested, they will share their Forrester report. It's going to be published in about two weeks time, I think, completely free of charge with you. So there's another little bonus for being at the event. So again, thank you, della. And thank you everyone for being here. It's been a fabulous event so far. Thank you, Deborah. And yeah, really looking forward to the last few hours and of course we've got Elliot playing a two hour music set so you playing late into the night, and we've extended for that. So um, thanks everyone, and enjoy

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