Master Email Campaigns with Kelsey Johnson’s 3 Simple Tips, Ep #81

How do you make your email campaigns successful? How do you get your list to open your emails? Is there some secret strategy you need to embrace? Kelsey Johnson—the Product Marketing Manager at AWeber— helps entrepreneurs make more sales in less time through automation, effective subject lines, and email copy. In this episode of The Content Callout, Kelsey shares three things you can implement immediately to master email campaigns.

Outline of This Episode

• [1:00] Learn more about Kelsey Johnson
• [2:25] Kelsey’s rapid-fire tips for marketers
• [5:46] Tip #1: Simplify your language—write fewer words
• [12:13] Tip #2: A conversation on social proof
• [16:48] Tip #3: AB test your copy
• [22:47] Successful email campaigns in B2B
• [30:05] What makes email campaigns effective?
• [33:30] How to properly structure a welcome email
• [35:05] Automated functions you should use
• [38:00] How to overcome writer’s block
• [39:25] Where to connect with Kelsey Johnson

Tip #1: Simplify your language + write fewer words

When we interviewed Jesus Corona, he said that the average attention span is now only seven seconds. How do you simplify a complicated message down to seven seconds? What is Kelsey’s solution? Write fewer words and simplify your language. Easier said than done, right?

Write down what you’re trying to get on the page. What is your point? Email it to yourself. What words are you excited by? Are there conjunctions and elaborations you can remove? Keep your email to the essentials. A lot of research needs to go into the first seven seconds, the first sentence, or the headline of email campaigns. You have to choose a great hook, competitive advantage, or solution to someone’s problem.

Marketing teams at SaaS companies know 85 million things that their product can do. They’re tempted to dump everything about their software into an email. But all you need to do is identify the pain point—and what you’re solving—and introduce those key things in the first seven seconds.

But the pain point might not be the same for everyone you’re sending an email to. You might have enterprise customers with different pain points than a mid-sized company. You may be sending emails to office directors and CEOs. All require a different approach. The messaging has to be different.

That’s why segmentation is 100% necessary to capture your audience’s attention. Identify pain points, segment the groups, and send out emails based on those pain points.

Tip #2: Put social proof in every email

Gather reviews, testimonials, a tweet about your company or business, etc., and put them in all of your email campaigns and newsletters. It’s a quick way to legitimize the content that you’re writing. It’s also something everyone trusts: someone else’s opinion.

You can use social proof in emails and on your home page, landing pages, product pages—everywhere. If someone is critically analyzing you versus a competitor, yes, they’ll go to a third-party, unbiased source for that feedback. But seeing a testimonial on your site saying, “This worked great in these specific ways“ can be highly influential. Specific social proof is convincing.

How should you structure social proof in an email? Kelsey likes using a high-quality image to help people see a real person. When you add stars—even though it’s always five stars—people know what’s coming. Kelsey likes to put the testimonial toward the middle or the bottom of the email, so you get your message across first. She also prefers to put a different background behind the social proof, so it grabs people’s attention. They can read it or move on if they’d like.

Tip #3: Test the copy of your email campaigns

Kelsey believes that a less than 10% open rate per email equals poor performance. If you’re at this point with your email campaign, Kelsey implores you to start AB testing. Craft two completely different emails. Split the emails between your audience and track the metrics to see which one works better. Then go with whatever email is performing slightly better until you improve your open rate.

If you need ideas, look at what your competitors are doing. Ask your customers what they want to see or hear from you. Content is data-driven. Testing the copy you send out is a great way to hone in on what works.

A 20% open rate is a good average. If you can’t improve your open rate to this point, it’s time to clean up your list. You may likely have people subscribed who will never open your emails. Why does it matter? Gmail, Yahoo, etc., pay attention to people who aren’t opening your emails. You don’t want your emails to end up in someone’s spam, promotions filter—or reported. People on your list who aren’t engaged are vanity metrics. It looks great on a graph but means nothing without conversions.

Once you hone in on what works for your audience and have decent open rates and click-through rates, you can begin to run additional tests. What about different copy in a subject line? Can you toss in an emoji? Use benefits-based versus features-based language? What are people excited about? Double down on that.

What makes an effective email campaign? How do you properly structure a welcome email? What automated functions should you use? Listen to the whole episode for more of the latest and greatest email marketing tips from Kelsey Johnson!

Resources & People Mentioned

Connect with Kelsey Johnson

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