On October 27th, we hosted Yosef Silver of Fusion Inbound on SEO From Home — Yosef discussed email marketing and content promotion and answered questions live to help attendees plan their email and content strategies for the end of the year.
Webinar Recording
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Show Transcript
0:00:05.7 Ben Jacobsen: Alright, cool. So we are live, we're just gonna wait a few moments here for people to get settled in. Alright, there we go. It looks like we got... We're live now. Alright, welcome back, everyone. Thank you for joining us again for another SEO from home. My name is Ben Jacobsen, I am the digital marketing strategist, as well as the host of SEO from home. And we're back with another episode of SEO from home today, we are actually going to be sitting down with one of our good friends... Yosef Silver here, and we're gonna be talking about email marketing as well as content promotion, and we're looking really forward to it. We're gonna be opening up today's session for more of an AMA, so we do encourage you guys to ask questions, and you can do so by clicking on that Q and A box down at the bottom there. So for those of you guys who are joining us for the first time, welcome. SEO from home is our attempt to keep the SEO community connected, what we're kind of in this different from home environment, what we're doing is we're talking with a variety of different industry reading experts inside of SEO, and we're talking about a bunch of different topics we're talking SEO...
0:01:30.2 Ben Jacobsen: We're doing PPC on Thursday, we're talking about PPC in Spanish actually. So that one's a huge divergent from what were normally are discussing, so we're trying to blend those and branch out a little bit more, and then also bring it back home to some of the more key things like we're talking about today, which is going to be content promotion, that's something that we talk about quite a bit. So we're super excited to go in and be talking about that, we have a few questions up here today, but again, as I mentioned, if you guys have email marketing built into you or any part of your strategy, we wanna discuss that with you and also beat up some of those strategies and see where maybe we can make some marginal improvements as well. Before we get started, I did wanna mention that we did also release our e-book that is out actually now available for free, that discusses link building from start to finish, so everything from planning and concepting and keyword research, all the way through the full implementation. I've put together an awesome e-book, it's for free, I'm gonna post it in the chat real quick for you guys, if you are interested in that, go ahead and click that link.
0:02:47.2 Ben Jacobsen: Alright, I’m gonna shrink my screen down in there... Okay, there we go. Alright, it's in the chat for you guys there, and all of that being said, we are going to get... Jumped right into it here today, again, like I mentioned, our guest today is the owner of fusion inbound marketing Yosef Silver, and we're gonna be talking about email marketing and content promotion, so without any further ado, tell us a little bit more about yourself and what we're gonna be talking about today.
0:03:14.4 Yosef Silver: Absolutely, thank you for having me, Ben. It's a pleasure to be here. I love the SEO Home series, I think this year, especially, it's a great way to get online and keep that community going from home. So I'm very excited to be here. My name is Yosef Silver, I own an agency, intensity, confusion, inbound. We are a full-service digital agency, but we really work to try and make sure that our clients include email in all of their campaigns, we found the email really does have a great return on revenue, and it's easier than most people think to get started. So I've spoken about email in Digital summit, and I'm excited to answer everyone's questions today. I'm gonna go ahead and share my screen now. If that works for everybody. Perfectly. Okay, you should be seeing my screen now. So what I found overall, is that email is often seen as this long haul trek, a lot of people think that it's difficult in those compliance issues and this building issues, but really, it's really not difficult once you dive in and understand how to make it part of your content distribution process.
0:04:36.3 Yosef Silver: So what we tend to do, what we tend to see is often people will invest a lot of time and money and energy in their content creation, and I'll do the research and I write the long form content, I create the book and then I'll hit publish and every wants to celebrate and go on by drinks and treat the team a round, but really that is when the hard work begins hitting publish is not completion. It's really, really just the beginning, and I think people understand this when it comes to social, but email is a bit of a gap. Email is accessible to everybody. Whereas, we've seen Facebook and Twitter's algorithm change, and they've shifted more to a pay-to-play other than the introduction of tabs a couple of years ago, email really hasn't changed a bunch of her the years. And most people check the email on their phones at their computer throughout the day, and it's a really, really easy way to reach hundreds of people and yet there’s still fear. That still is fair of like, Oh, is it spam? Is it compliant? Does anyone really read it? Well will people read it, and if you're writing emails, we'll see 30 to 45% open rates on or any more campaigns, we'll see very healthy click for rates, and if you're in the e-commerce space, it can drive a ton of revenue, but you must have to be interesting.
0:05:53.2 Yosef Silver: To get results like that, you can't just send spam. Another way that email running becomes quite effective is if you're a small company or a smaller campaign and you're already watching your budgets, often you're competing in some spaces with a big company that might have money to burn on their campaign. So email gives you a really cost-effective edge to reach a lot of people when you create a piece of content and it stands alone, that's great, you've created this sort of stand-alone wonder, but when you look at your content alone, it's just going to get lost online, essentially. And the reason the email... I mean, a lot of these steps that I've got up on the screen now, I don't wanna read through all of them, but we've seen over and over again, people want email campaigns as part of their business, they're effective, you get 6x more clicks than you would from a tweet, it's overall proven to be very, very effective. And the reason we encourage all of our clients to on email is because the same way, there's a very much a mindset that SEO shouldn't exist in a silo, you need to talk to you...
0:07:02.4 Yosef Silver: SEO team in your PCC team. I think it's very much the same that you're content, your SEO and email, your social, your PPC, it can work together. So instead of having this stand-alone piece of content, you really build a forest from your content efforts when you are including email as well. It's also really measurable for some of my clients, they're just happy to email goes out on time, like, Oh, Tuesdays, our email day. Great, so from a business point of view, clients are very happy, and when you stay on schedule and deliver the email, but everything is very, very trackable, can see what people are collecting away, it's so easy to test, and ultimately you can tie the dollars back to email very, very easily. When you're thinking about email campaigns and how to create content from email, these are some of the recommendations that we provide internally with our team, and this is a slight of shared at other events too, but you wanna make your content stand out, email is really... It's not about creating new content for email, but how can you leverage your existing content efforts to use social media efforts and drive more people to it, so you wanna keep it...
0:08:04.1 Yosef Silver: A lot of these guidelines apply for your content creation overall, not just for your email campaigns, I like to keep it simple, I like to answer questions, I'd like to provide value and everything we do, I think providing an estimated time at the start we see this is a very effective tactic and blog posts, a lot of what we do from email as we are applying methods that work across other channels, and we're applying to our email campaigns too. If you have a long form piece of content, think about the ways you would cut that up for social and apply that to email campaigns, use maybe teases, or you could even use the email to drive people to your most effective social content. That’s something that we do for our clients, if they have some social content that's getting a lot of engagement, we will leverage email as well to drive more people there, and you see in me just like, Don't be scared to seek images. One of my favorite tools for creating effective images in your emails, one look, is essentially a reverse image search engine, so you can see how many people or how often that email has been an image has been used in other campaigns.
0:09:14.2 Yosef Silver: For one of the rings I stuck out for me, I was on the London Underground once, and there was an ad for a dentist clinic, and they had just used the same images that we had used for a dental clinic, and I was like, That's not cool. It was funny to see the same images, but by using 10 IU reduced the like that happen, 'cause as marketers we can get fatigued by images, but consumers too, they might even confuse the brands if they don't realize what they're looking at, Excel and ansbach. I think are pretty popular resources for three images to... This slide is really more relevant to how we approach all of our content creation, again, a client buy-in is key, and then we build our content using keyword research, we invest in the content, we make you stand out. And then content distribution is really why email is so front and center of every campaign we do. To this point, I've covered some of the high-level overviews of why we do email and how we approach it, I'd love to open it up for some questions from everybody and see what problems and pain points you're having with your email that maybe we can dive into and solve.
0:10:21.7 Ben Jacobsen: Awesome. Yeah, yeah, definitely, if you guys have questions or if you have... Tell us what you're doing in your strategy that you find to be effective or maybe areas that you're... Maybe getting stuck in. I had a couple of questions, even though I just came up with as we were listening to that, I actually, interestingly enough, previously to where I'm at at Page One Power, I was with an organization and I actually was reading their email marketing campaigns. It was a small team, so it was something that I was entirely in charge of, and when I went into it, I was extremely surprised at how viable it still was, I think I was stuck in that mindset of email is kind of a dead media in that time I was focused solely on advertising and paid advertising, on social and things like that, can you... Maybe since you are so immersed in the space, maybe you shed some light on why people so often kind of discount the effectiveness of it, especially in e-commerce, I've seen huge results, but why do you think that it is that people are so often discounting that...
0:11:45.2 Yosef Silver: I think that it gets pushed aside 'cause it's just simply not as sexy... I think people want the Instagrams, so they want the latest trends, we've seen a rise of our clients even asking for tiktok recently, and... Yeah, let's cover a big success before we go and do the new shiny thing, let's go ahead and make sure we're covering our basics. I don't remember the stats off hand, but back in the day, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, you put something on Facebook and 10-20% of your followers would see it, now that's down to fractions of a percent because it's become pay-to-play. So if you're just doing organic social without any paid, you're not gonna see the results you used to, and you're gonna pay for your ads, now.
0:12:24.6 Ben Jacobsen: Year's not like a consistent... Especially if it's a semi-basis, it's not... Every single day, three times a day, right? Exactly. It just crushes everything.
0:12:39.6 Yosef Silver: Great, 100%. And just think about your own behavior with the email, for a lot of people is the first thing they check during the day, I'll check it if they're waiting for public transit or if they're even in the restroom, people check their emails. And you have tools like boomerangs, so if your email maybe people can't act on it right away, but I can put it back and you can bring the attention back to themselves when they want it. We as an agency, and we use email for client communication, but not for any internal communication, internal communication is all Slack and Asana, but... So I email my inbox as either things my clients need or it's things that I want to see, get to opt in for email, you're not waiting on an algorithm to serve you what it thinks you wanna read. I don't know if how many people in here have seen the social dilemma, I think a lot of people are talking about that right now, but users are opting in for emails, they wanna see... Not algorithms. Yeah.
0:13:41.6 Ben Jacobsen: And I think also, I think the point has been brought up a few different times, but if you look at... Let's look at social media specifically, if you think of the video space, like you look at something like a vine that was insanely popular and created overnight influencers of people that previously didn't have any necessarily advertised talents, they're not out there necessarily as much as they were before. There's people that their entire career and booms and busted on a single app, and if you look at some of the people that survived through something like that through an app shut down are the people that were able to diversify. And the one thing that I also wanted it to layer on top of that is not only are you diversifying, but with email, to your point, that's something you're opting in for, it's something that you kind of covet I feel like people are like, they don't wanna get rid of their old email address because they're so much tied to it, whereas I think social media people do weigh on that pretty quickly when a new thing comes along. Absolutely.
0:15:02.1 Yosef Silver: I mean, we all talk about diversifying our assets or our income, if you're a brand or business, your audience is an asset, so having it all on Twitter, while Twitter probably is not going away over night, but we never know these are privately your own companies being shut down with not much notice, so, as well as doing this for clients, I used to have a food blog, and I had tons of following followers, tens of thousands of email addresses, but my goal was always to go after email accounts, email addresses. And those were the people that were engaged the most with me, and it's also something to where you are...
0:15:46.1 Ben Jacobsen: Your email is something where you... People are protective of it because they don't wanna get spam, obviously, but think of how many times you've changed your phone number versus how many email addresses you've had... I've had a lot of email addresses, but I can tell you one thing that there's still one that I use on a regular basis for my Google Drive that I got when Google first announced private accounts. I've had it for... And it's been over a decade, I...
0:16:16.3 Yosef Silver: You know how long people have been in the tech space or the marketing space, if their name is their email address and they got in early... Yeah.
0:16:24.3 Ben Jacobsen: Exactly. And it's just interesting to see that it's so quickly toss a side because I think so many people are worried about becoming spam, but I think they're afraid of people actually, 'cause honestly, I understand that, because I get email fatigue for sure, I get so many emails on a regular basis, and 98% of them are automated. Like junk, even if it's things that I subscribe to, but it's like notifications for Asana, and it's... All of these things that are important. Yes, but it's like, I'm not excited. It's like when you get a real piece of mail in your mailbox, someone to something, and if you can be effective with your email, there is some truth to the fact of people are interested in... They're wanting to hear from you.
0:17:22.9 Yosef Silver: Right, exactly. You have to provide value. I think there's two things that you just just touched upon, one is people think it's spam, if anyone watching hands listening has an old list, you shouldn't just go and send out a list, send on the email to a bunch of people who if you haven't engaged with... There are steps you can take to clean that up and re-engage and to do so in a way that's legal and effective, the number of times we can get asked by clients or you're gonna buy a list... no, that's useless. If you have a body of emails, and that's when you do a targeted social campaign, for example, actually on that vein, you email us if you have a healthy list for any segment of your most engaged subscribers, it is a great way to target people from an ad point of view and create a look-a-like list also, your email doesn't have to be... One of our largest clients is in real estate, and we don't email about the listings ever, we email about local events, new content, when we all went into lockdown back in March, we put together an article for this client 151 things to do during lockdown and it was the most effective email campaign we've ever sent for him, his fund was ringing off the hook and there wasn't to sell houses, it was to connect with his audience, quite literally connect with them at a time of uncertainty as people sort of freed up and started going out again, or started moving house again.
0:19:04.1 Ben Jacobsen: I think that that's part of what people get scared of too, is they're not really entirely sure how to come across as authentic or as... I think people get stuck in the mindset of advertising and marketing in general, to where it's like I have to be selling something, I have to be selling something, and something that my eyes were open to just from being inside of the SEO space longer is just how much of it is important to engage on the non-transaction of things... I knew that before. I think everyone knows that in your heart, you know that you shouldn't just always be trying to sell people, but I don't think it ever really, truly resonated until I started understanding the value of writing real content that actually people want to find and they want to engage with and they're looking for... And meeting people where they are, and if you can be that person where you're meeting them where they're at, where they're at that intersection of trying to figure out how to do X, Y, Z. And you're like, Hey, I can show you how to do x, y, z, and they're like, Wow, awesome, thank you.
0:20:16.4 Ben Jacobsen: Can you help me with other stuff? That sort of ability to where it's like you're just offering the ability to help people in some sort of way, and then if you can establish that trust and that relationship, they're more willing to engage with you in other ways, if the first thing that you put forth is trustworthy and it's beneficial to them. Absolutely, I think that that can be applied across the spectrum for just about anything with marketing, obviously there's different tactics, but I think that should be a good core principle to keep in mind when you're putting together any campaign...
0:20:49.0 Yosef Silver: I agree completely, and I don't think anyone would say, no one's gonna take social and say, Oh my god, all social is terrible. Yeah, there are some social campaigns that really do suck, but that doesn't mean everything is terrible, and I think email has this bad reputation for being spammy, I've had clients be like all the way, we're just gonna span people right now, that's not what we're here, we'll send emails gonna be effective and they'll open, and if they're not getting the development rates, I'll click for rates. Well, that's when we revisit the strategy, we revisit the design... There's one client we work with who was quite resistant, they do emails throughout the month, and then they do a monthly recap, like a newsletter, and they were adamant they wanted... the monthly newsletters led us to be September update to our update, November update as the subject line, and I kept pushing back, and actually this month, we convinced them to do an AB test, but have an effective subject line versus the month subject window. We have the data to say, Hey, this is why we've been pushing on this, we need to do it differently.
0:21:56.6 Yosef Silver: And I think the power of email is like the data can be there 24, 48, 36 hours after a campaign, you have some hard numbers, can can have it sooner as well, depending on size and what your goal is, having the data... It's one of the things I love the most, and just changing the verbiage or the colors of your culture, actions, all the types of emails can have such a massive impact. Yeah.
0:22:23.8 Ben Jacobsen: That stuff is always so fascinating to see when you can compare side by side and do testing inside of email is just a beast in and of itself, it's interesting because you can use social media and you can use Audience builders and Facebook's audience tools to build out and predict what is gonna happen inside of your segment, but when it really comes down to like an email list is a very unique set of people that have taken a very specific action, whereas social media is like your blasting ads to new people that you don't fully understand what they're interested in. You can do research obviously, and you can make sure that you're taking your best guess, but the people that are inside of your audience is a very unique imprint. One thing that I wrote down, I just wanted to mention real quick, you alluded to a couple of times, making sure that you're not spamming or you're doing things illegally for anyone who may not know, if you have an old email list and you send that out through MailChimp or SendGrid, something like that, there is actually an organization, they call The ICANN, I-C-A-N-N, and they actually...
0:23:57.3 Ben Jacobsen: They actually monitor email, and so if you are doing things and you're sending it to too high of a percentage of people that are not active anymore, you get too many balances or too many spam reports. So every time that you're in Gmail and you flag something as spam, that actually does have a real effect, and so you should know like You need to go through and you need to make sure that your list is clean first and... There's a number of ways to do that. A lot of people recommend paying for a list cleaner, it's a service online, and they go through and they kinda filter out and find the dead emails. I'd be very cautionary, I've seen a lot of nightmare stories from that and people still get their account shut down, so just do your best to make sure that you're using as active of emails and you can... Even if that's asking for re-opt-in from your list, that's one option that you can do to where you can ask people to re-confirm that they wanna be a part of your list too, so having things like that in place will make sure that your email account won't be completely suspended, which is super important if you're trying to build your company up.
0:25:16.7 Yosef Silver: We've had clients reach out as a result of, they thought it could just reactivate and their spam rates go through the roof. I think it's part to... There are some of those lists cleaning services that are better than others, there are some that we will use for campaign like that, but whenever we're doing a reactivation campaign, we generally do it for a different email servers provider, and then we import all the users who have reactivated, that's good. Into the main account, not that we're trying to do anything black hat or shady, but just that extra level of protection. Prevent, if something does go wrong, if the spam rates are unexpectedly high, you don't wanna end up messing with it.
0:26:03.4 Ben Jacobsen: Exactly, exactly. It's not necessarily... And I've had to do that before as well, with... Some providers are more stringent and strict than others, and you'll find your levels if you have to research that, unfortunately, you'll find your levels of granularity there, but it's essentially... You're trying to let people go, honestly, don't look at it as like you're trying to game the system, like you're trying to let people leave your list so that you can not bug them.
0:26:40.6 Yosef Silver: If someone doesn't wanna hear from you anymore quit emailing them, I'd rather have... Let's say you call your list by 25%, you're gonna see your open rates now converts go through the roof, and then you have a... You have a better way of identifying prospects to target, either through social ads or major through better understanding of the content that resonates, but losing subscribers is not always of a head thing, and you have to look at... There is such a thing as positive churn inside of the list as well. To your point, you're kind of thinning the herd, you're trimming the fat, if those people are not interested in hearing from you.
0:27:22.3 Ben Jacobsen: Right, then you want them out of your list because in a lot of cases, you're paying for seats on your email list, so if you have 10000 people, and you go to 10001, that might bump you up another 200 bucks a month or depending on your service, so... I know that's a dramatic example, but the truth is there, the numbers are true, you want to have the most potent list possible. Yet another question I was going to try to bring up just for anyone that might be interested in trying to get back into pushing email marketing and trying to help promote their content, what should they be doing? Let's say that you have an email list right now that maybe you send... Maybe once a month, you do a November update, December update. So the list isn't necessarily dead, but it's definitely not thriving. What kind of changes do you think people would be able to make? And what kind of budget would you expect for a smaller business to be able to kinda get things up and going so that maybe... Let's think of something like a local... We always use the example of a local plumber, what would someone like be able to do to where they have content that they're getting produced regularly, but what can they do from an email standpoint, they could kinda get their traffic and their conversions up...
0:28:57.9 Yosef Silver: Sure, that's a great question. I generally think once a month is not frequent enough, or email, if your list is healthy and you're providing valuable content then, emailing weekly every other week, I think it should be a minimum. I generally think that the same way, you might have a content calendar for social and you might produce different content for different types of days of the week, you would have different content of your email, so I would divide... Let's take the plumber example, let's say we wanted to do four emails a month, I think one email campaign could be a monthly special, one could be a seasonal update to do with freezing pipes or... I'm not a plumber. So this is where my keyword research would come in and my background information would come in, but you wanna do seasonal updates, if the team is large enough, having team spotlights... People like to know who they're working with. We're actually onboarding a new HVAC company right now, and they have a great idea in that before your technician arrives at your house, they're going to email you the name and photo of your tech as an added layer of security.
0:30:07.1 Ben Jacobsen: So let them do that. I had my windshield replaced and they texted me a picture of my technician ahead of time with his ID and all of his credentials and how long he's redone cars, and that was awesome 'cause this person was in my car.
0:30:23.8 Yosef Silver: We take... Exactly. So email doesn't have to just be... We think about email as transactional emails and marketing email, so you have transactional emails that would be your appointments to be scheduled or your receipt or things like that, but it doesn't have to be boring like that, you're hoping, or if you ever have a buddy that needs a new windshield or a... For some reason you needed it again, you're probably like, Oh yeah, this was a great experience. Also, given the memory of Gmail, a friend of mine asked me just this weekend, the name of the company I used when we shipped my dog over when I moved to the States, like what company do we use. I was like, Oh, it's gonna be my Gmail somewhere, and I mean it was... And I was able to go back in, so I'm thinking of email to create those connections and experience and be memorable with your emails as well, and another thing we've been... I wouldn't only think of email for a plumbing company as these sort of weekly marketing emails or bi-weekly post-transaction, like are you doing a review solicitation and you're doing that by email, or in a text...
0:31:32.9 Yosef Silver: There's all sorts of ways to just connect with clients, and a lot of it would play into what are you doing for content creation to... If we have a very engaging social post or for doing a social contest, give away type thing, Well, email about that, and we'll email that to a segment if you're using a MailChimp-type platform, and every email service provider has their pros and cons and their nuances, the merchant in particular can look at who is on which social platforms from your subscriber base, so you can segment...
0:32:13.8 Yosef Silver: They have social data that you can pull in, so you can look at like, Well, maybe you have a segment of people that are gonna engage better on Twitter than on Facebook, send them that content, there's great ways to just... I like to refer to content creation a little bit. You are trying to be the babel fish between the customer and the business to put a babel fish. So my British roots are coming out, but you put the babel fish in your ear and it would translate whatever language someone's speaking to you and you can understand... So often companies emails will be, we did this, we did this, we did this, we got this award, or, we do his preseason, we hired someone. Well, is that memorable? Is that interesting and how can you shift that language, how can you translate it into something that people want to open...
0:33:05.8 Ben Jacobsen: Yeah, I think so often, and I'm guilty of this entirely myself, but I get so in the weeds of like, Okay, we need to make sure that we talk about this promotion and this guest, and we gotta talk about this thing, and it's... At this time, I gotta make sure it's the right, time zone, and you're so in the weeds of what you're talking about, that you forget to even think, Does anyone care? Does anyone actually wanna read this? What I wanna read this, if you're looking through your email and if you are not enticed by your own email, like, is anyone else going to be…? And it sounds like such a silly short-sighted like, Oh, well duh. And of course, but at the same time, seriously, I really think about it, if you were not involved in this business, would you be interested in reading this... Right, and I think that's a serious question that people should ask...
0:34:03.0 Yosef Silver: One thing I like to do whenever we get a new hire, if someone is new to team, I'd like them to look at some recent email campaigns, I just want their feedback, do they understand what we're selling, do we understand what the campaigns about… Is there any language in there that is very cooperative or a buzz word that doesn't make sense, I used to work at a very, very large corporate organization, and I used to sort of ask the question like, would someone's grandmother, understand this campaign. Is it easy enough for... Interesting enough, that someone who is not tech savvy, you would get this, and that's no offense to all the tech savvy grandmothers, but... the other thing is, is I think there's an overall, there's a good understanding of how powerful a headline can be in an article or a blog post, social posts, and people are testing A B testing... Social posts on Reddit or on Facebook? I think too many people neglect to give their opponents the subject way. I think it's a really important... It can make or break your open rates, if you have a boring subject line, is it gonna get attention the from name, are you sending it from Ben, are you sending it from the company name, and these are things that can make a massive difference to your open rates and your conversion.
0:35:23.6 Ben Jacobsen: So what would be... I know this is like a one-size-fits-all, I'm sure where a line, but what would you kind of maybe... If there is a question that you could propose to whoever is composing that email, is your subject line x or something that you could do to make that subject line have teeth, is there a question you can ask yourself... The reason I keep saying that is I keep thinking of, Do I wanna read this? Is there something that you can think of that would kind of help give that subject line more teeth and allow a higher click-through rate by being more enticing?
0:36:10.5 Yosef Silver: I'm gonna answer that with three points, 'cause I think that is... number one, trying to tease... And even if that means pushing the boundaries and being a little bit of edgy and the content, but trying to tease open... Open up your thought process. We wrote a guide to swampland lakes in Kansas City. This was last time I pre-covered and it sort of someone who wrote this guide to swimming pausing weeks, but we called it... The client's name is Blake... We call it Blake’s Guide to Getting Wet in Kansas City. And in people's curiosity, people saw that and this update in the inbox and they... It wasn't like, Oh, there's a lot of pools that you can visit... I was like, What is he talking about? Where can we go? So think about your content creatively, another thing, there's a website called five-second test, and you can write two, three headlines, subject lines, and you can pay, I think it's a couple of pennies, but you can pay for people to just choose the one that resonates better. It might not be called five-second test anymore, it could be what it used to be called, they’ve got a start-up name.
0:37:31.6 Yosef Silver: The five-second test is used for... We used to just A B test stuff before we send it, and then finally, probably a good 10 years ago, I attended a webinar with... It was actually... Marsan Upworthy did a content training webinar, and one thing that stuck with me was, and people can Google this if they wanna find out more, but upward, the approach to writing headlines, and for each piece of content that they would public... And this was back in the day when BuzzFeed was defining and going viral and everything was fictional and Do you know, and Oh my gosh type of headlines, but they would write 25 headlines for every article they published, and they would say The best performing headlines, the first dog would be a bit silly, they kind of get burned out in the third, second, third, and then the third third, they would always find their winning headlines. So I really like it when my team spends time writing 25 headlines or subject lines for an email, and it sounds ridiculous, it sounds like, are you kidding me... Subject lines, the last thing you're gonna put together, but if you're talking about the difference between a 15-18% open rate, I am personally a little disappointed, if we get less than a 35% open rate, I'm disappointed on what I'm seeing.
0:38:45.7 Yosef Silver: We get good open rates, that's a great over, but that's from segmenting the audience, whittling it down, but also really investing as much time in your subject line as you would building the email.
0:39:01.1 Ben Jacobsen: If you think about it, again, I did come from a background, more of social advertising, and you start thinking about how much time are you spending on a caption, subject line is your caption, and then your preview text is your... I guess the sub-caption or whatever...The header in your sub-caption, your header in caption, so how much time do you think you spend writing out captions for something that you're gonna be spending... Maybe you're doing a 500-dollar Facebook ad spend, maybe it's 5K dollars, like how much time are you spending on that and how much importance are you placing on something like that? It's the same thing because if you're spending 500 bucks, you might get in front of, let's say, 10K people or 20K people, if you have a good email list, you might hit that four, five, six... eight times a month. Great, and so why would you not have really potent, really edgy or not edgy, but really just kind of juicy subject lines that are helping get you in front of that full audience, 'cause otherwise it's the same thing as spending that 500 to 5K on a social budget, and not doing any targeting or not doing any research ahead of time, or not using your custom-built audience and just throwing it out there, not doing that research or putting in that effort for your emails, then it's the same thing as not completing the full task of doing your Google ads or your Facebook ads.
0:40:39.4 Yosef Silver: Right? One thing that I've heard people talking about in the SEO world is if you have a really effective click for your PPC, one of your ads is performing really well, well, should that influence your title tag, do you wanna apply those lessons to organic search? Similarly, if you have something that's very effective, it should be your subject line, so again, closing that loop, I had that slide about everything working together, and those slides are kind of a short version of an Alan presentation, but really using that data... Let's stop thinking about email as like an add-on in a silo, but let's make it part of... You wouldn't not write a meta description for a new page on a website, you wouldn't not optimize your image, titles and tags, deal, you don't wanna be like... And let's say you've got some really effective guide, you've launched your e-book, you know it forms well, you're getting great conversion on search, maybe pull some of that data might be like, Oh, 4500 people have already downloaded this ebook. Well, that's interesting, I wanna open that email, I don't just be like, Oh, our new e-book is her...
0:41:50.3 Yosef Silver: Great, good for you. You did something over the weekend, but if you want… all of the lessons we have kinda applied to email, for some reason email is forgotten as part of ready effective campaigns.
0:42:10.3 Ben Jacobsen: And that actually dovetails perfectly, is one of the things I wrote down when you were speaking earlier is how is it that we integrate SEO, advertising or PPC and an email into this kind of symbiotic relationship? And I think that... I think you really hit on a great segue into how to get started on that, taking the data that you are already deriving from whatever source, if you already have great organic information and you have awesome organic traffic. Awesome. We find those keywords that are performing well for you, find the content that's performing well, use some of that data in order to influence what content you're writing for your email, and vice versa, if you don't quite have that organic traffic yet and you're looking to build that it might be time to show up a few bucks and see what kind of information you can get out of doing some paid ads to see where your audience is at, and where you can find that intersection of what you're providing and what they're looking for. And that can... Again, to your point, I think you mentioned this earlier, that should also help influence your content strategy, all of those things should be working together to create one vehicle heading in the same direction.
0:43:37.7 Yosef Silver: 100%. When it comes to content, I like to build long-form content for our clients, guides, glossaries, very informational-based, answering questions, but what we can see, obviously we measure that with our traditional SEO metrics and our rankings, our traffic, our conversions, but we can also learn from that is which is the most effective email content? And it varies by client, one of our clients, we get great engagement by email, we get great open rates, but his audience, his customers text him, so we've changed our quantities to be... We don't try to get people to apply because we've learned that they just won't, but we make sure they test and we try many types of things, but you learn from each campaign and each client what's gonna work, and it's gonna be different in different cases.
0:44:40.6 Ben Jacobsen: How do you feel about marketing through text messaging, like SMS marketing or…? I do see more people are beginning to do that.
0:44:53.7 Yosef Silver: What are your thoughts on that? And you said that you had some experience in that, Have you delved very much into it or... We've got a couple clients that have asked us to do it, and we have usually for event sign-ups in very relationship-based businesses... I struggle with it. 'cause you see stats like, Oh, Ms has 95% open rates. Great, it's a text. It's another notification. Yeah, you pick up your phone. I don't know how… my phones was buzzing throughout this, and I don't know if it's a notification or text, I think... And I'm speaking with personal experience, I almost have a notification fatigue, I don't really go through... I get notifications on what's at and I get notification on text and nothing else, because it's too much, so I think part of that fatigue could be season. I think in the run up to the elections, I have had so many political-related texts, I've started unsubscribing from them all... Whether I'm supporting or not supporting that. Yeah, every day, all day long. Right, so I think texting might become the new spam campaign if it's done wrong, but what we do see is those open rates are effective, but that has to be a call to action.
0:46:12.0 Yosef Silver: We had a client do an event and they did a text invitation, but as an FYI, they didn't wanna include a calendar on it, not wanna include an RSVP, it was just like, Hey, we're doing this thing. And because there was no clear cut call to action, it was just a notification, whereas in other campaigns, we said, Hey, this event is happening or, this thing is happening, this is how the outreach was text for them was a clear call to action. So I think, I don't know that I've done enough text messaging to really speak to it effectively, one campaign we're looking at putting together right now, we have a client, who before things giving area gives away, his clients can choose an apple pie or pumpkin pie, and every year, we've done that through email, it's really easy to track, all the client has to do is click, and it records what pie they want, so with the being doing that by text this year, but it's really affected by email and ultimately our devices aren't a single channel anymore, but I think back 15 years, and I watched Honey, I Shrunk the Kids with my children, and their response was like, Why is the phone attached to the wall with a wire...
0:47:27.2 Yosef Silver: They were like, What is that thing on the wall? But now everything, this isn't a follow, it's my emails, my text, it's games, it's internet, taxes from my cell phone if I needed to... So I think you need to know your audience, 'cause ultimately, most of their channels are coming through to the same device.
0:47:46.8 Ben Jacobsen: Sure, yeah, that's a good point. I guess it's really where... I'm always left feeling whenever I think about SMS messaging as a marketing tactic, I'm always thinking of when I receive messages that are from a business that aren't hyper-relevant to what I'm wanting in that moment for me, I have a guilty pleasure of ordering, we have... I don't know what it is, but for the last year, we have these cookie shops that have opened up all around Boise, that are like just these giant massive cookies and every single time there... It's awesome. So we have a bad habit of every once in a while, I tell my fiance, if she says cookies three times, she has to get them because of that, when I order them, I get a text message on my... That's like, Hey, we got your order. You're good to go, so I don't have to worry about... How did it go through? Is it working? 'cause you order it from your phone, and then it'll be like, Hey, we're on our way to your house with your cookies, and it's like, sweet... And then it's like, Hey, we just arrived here at their door, whatever it is, and then afterwards it's like a text message, it's like, Hey, how did you like him? Like 15, 20 minutes later, it's like, did they arrive hot and were they good? And it's like, that is really effective to me because it's what I want at that moment.
0:49:24.4 Ben Jacobsen: I think that the same thing could be accomplished if they had their own app, but these are a very small little bakeries, so because of that, I don't see if I did a Nordstrom thing and I got a notification from Nordstrom that's like, Hey, we have sales on shirts, I don't care, invade my text messages for that? It seems invasive.
0:49:52.4 Yosef Silver: I think one of the rules of social media that I like to apply is speak to your audience where they're at, so if you know that you have a ton of people on Facebook, don't go on LinkedIn, you know that you have a great audience on Twitter that's where you need to be. So as you were speaking through them and the cookies, there's a brand of mask, I've come to really like this year, it's called Strata their masks, it's a Shopify website, and I get a text notification about my delivery updates and those are like, Oh, okay, whatever. On the flip side, I'm doing a lot more app-based shopping and target delivery or Instacart and those texts I like... So I must feel like you kinda need to know where your audience is and how they order, they almost feel like if someone ordered on their mobile device and paid with Apple day, maybe they're gonna convert better to a text than if they were someone who ordered online did everything on a desktop and then you start texting, I wonder if there's any data around that...
0:50:58.9 Ben Jacobsen: Yeah, that's actually a great question because if you think about it, we've also been... I think a lot of people... We've been doing a lot more like gardening and stuff, and so there's... Gardening nutrients that I got, where I'm like, Oh man, I'm really looking forward to this 'cause I really need it. And I'm anticipating that even though it's a 7 purchase, whereas, I might have something where it's like, We have to get a new air purifier and that's 200 bucks or whatever, and it's like... I guess I'm excited for that, but I'm more excited for the thing that I'm actually looking for. I'm more interested in getting text notifications about this tiny little bottle of nutrient rather than this sizable valuable... Very important thing as well. So it's weird because there's a lot of kind of individuality behind that, I almost wonder if you could give the option of... What if it's an email or a notification?
0:52:06.1 Yosef Silver: I personally do not check email on my phone, evenings or weekends, like I made a ROTH myself, I set that down with myself... Email is something I do on my computer. So a delivery notification for something that I'm... It's a time sensitivity. I did a target order because I don't wanna take the kids to the grocery store type thing. Whereas, I don't know, I feel like 80% of my ecommerce spend is with Amazon and the system, and I get the notifications and there's usually an Amazon book showing up.
0:52:43.7 Ben Jacobsen: I think maybe... And I've been kind of sitting on this for a little bit, I feel like maybe SMS marketing and SMS updates, I think that is a really cost-effective option for people who are running small businesses that don't have 50 grand to fork over to... have developed for them. I think it's a great opportunity for people to have an additional layer of connectivity to their audience without being relocated to the spam filter in their inbox. I think it gives them a great opportunity if you can use it properly, and I think it's the same thing with the email, I think it all ties back together with the same thing that we're working with is where is it that you are providing value in your email campaign. You focus on that, cut out the things that… look at the numbers too. To your point, you said you really enjoy looking through the data and the dashboards... That's a great thing to do. That's your friend. That is your guide. That's your lighthouse, because if you are getting a low click through rates, if you're getting lower opens, if you're getting higher unsubscribe, if you're gonna expand reports, yes, those things are not all inherently bad or good on their own, but what it does is it helps weave together an overarching story of where your audience is heading and what types of things that they're interested in consuming.
0:54:24.8 Yosef Silver: And I do think if anyone is new to email one to SMS marketing, the barrier to entry for both of those platforms has never been lower, and some of the features that used to be very... The first time I got involved with an automation campaign, the software cost was in the thousands, and now you're signing up for a MailChimp account for less than 50 bucks a month and be signing for the same level of automation.
0:54:51.1 Ben Jacobsen: Yeah, these... I think even there's some options that have a free up to 100 contacts in your list, there's a lot of options out there, and I think I was talking about it a little bit earlier, but the budget for getting involved with email marketing is very low, it's very very low when you look at the cost per interaction with the actual people that have chosen to engage with you, it's a very great value... One last thing I wanted to touch on that maybe we can close out on it looks like we're getting just about the top of the hour for those who are maybe hearing all of this and they're like, Yeah, I wanna get involved, like I want... How could I build a more powerful email list, what can I do, and how can I start heading down the right path toward the building my email as to where it becomes a viable sales channel for your business, what sorts of strategies would you maybe suggest considering for someone who's looking to really build that list of...
0:56:02.6 Yosef Silver: First of all, I would say look at what you were doing to capture current email addresses, you don't wanna start off by sending an email out to people that haven't heard from me for two years, so consider how you can build your list or how you can re-opt in your list, and then start thinking about email as part of your social calendar, just to add it as a channel, think about it that way. And also, excuse me, I'm more than happy to answer any questions on Twitter. If someone has a thought after this or if they question, they would get answer, I'm happy to... just shoot me a tweet. Why Silver? I'm happy to brainstorm. I've had people as well, send me subject lines and say, Hey, what do you think of… A lot of stuff like that. But I think as gaming starts, thinking about how you can build your list and how can even naturally fit into your campaign if you're running content already, if you're doing social already, if you're already promoting things elsewhere, it instead of thinking about... It is this big bad, new scary thing. How can you integrate it easily...
0:57:08.5 Ben Jacobsen: What about on the topic of maybe list building specifically, so if you are... Let's say that you are a newer business and you only have maybe 100 subscribers and those are just people that have purchased from you before, is there a way to maybe accelerate your West growth so that you can start getting to market to new people that maybe haven't purchased for you before. So an example that comes to mind is, of course, a website pop up, so subscribe to our newsletter. Can you maybe suggest a few other outside of the box things that you've seen as far as email capture or list building to get that channel built up over time? Sure.
0:58:01.5 Yosef Silver: I think it depends on... Limit a little bit. If you are a larger business, I'm not a fan of pop-up, so you kinda interrupt, no one likes to pop-up when you come to a website to read some meets your self result. I think it's interruptive, and that's not a good thing, but weaving close to action into the content or having teasers, having guides, e-books to download the content, and it sounds kind of old school, but it's effective for us, if you're a small business, maybe you're a local plumber, who has a great relationship, asking people, the real estate client I mentioned, he's built his list, he literally text people and he's like, Hey, can we add you to our emails... this is the sort of thing we send, and it's the one-to-one outreach and just putting it out there and then integrating it into what you do already, I think review sustain has become accepted and people are almost expecting to get a review solicitation out at this point, but ask in that email, would you like to opt in or if you do a follow-up thank you, we have clients that will manually thank people for their reviews, is just send out another email thanking them, but ask them if they wanna opt in at that point, also, don't be ashamed to do it on social, we've done things on social where we've said, We're pre-releasing promotion specials, unique products, it's been pre-released to our email list only, so you get your social followers to convert over as well.
0:59:32.2 Ben Jacobsen: Gotcha, so offering exclusivity, downloads, guides, that sort of thing. So maybe even not necessarily dating content, but putting it behind a wall of low stature, which is signing up for an email newsletter. You think that it would be a good example?
0:59:54.9 Yosef Silver: Yeah, and I think just making it sound exclusive, we've done some testing with a unique discount for the first 100 people to sign up. Another thing we've found, you don't wanna have your incentive drive poor subscribers, so you don't wanna just be like, Oh, free give away, you give us your email, it's not the right audience, but we've had times will partner with a local food bank or Animal Shelter, and they'll donate 5 for every email address, that sign up for a limited time, and part of that is knowing what is your cost per acquisition for an email address? What is that worth to you? Which again, you diamante data, if you know your conversion rates, and if you know your average revenue per email campaign, get into your cost back 'cause it’s pretty easy. And then you can be like, Well, do we wanna spend this on ads or do we have a really healthy organic social presence and we can do this...
1:01:00.8 Ben Jacobsen: And there's also something too that I think if you are... For some reason, if you're able to connect with them and get them to want to engage with you on that level instead of just displaying and add to a random person that isn't necessarily already engaged with even your social media brand, it seems like those are stickier, emails for some reason, it seems like they churn less often, and they tend to be the one-to-one example that you mentioned earlier, I imagine that because that real estate agent is literally messaging people like, Hey, Carrie, I appreciate talking with you the other day. Do you mind if I send you emails when I do some updates? Like that person is probably less likely to unsubscribe than if it was just a random like, Oh, I wanted to see what listings are in my area and I had to sign up, like if you're are warning people into it, and there's not at least some volition of their own, and I feel like they're not gonna be quite as sticky... 100%. Awesome, well, I think that just about wraps it up. It looks like we actually just went a few minutes over 1 o'clock here, I appreciate you taking the time to sit down and talk with me and answer a few questions and talk about email marketing.
1:02:27.6 Yosef Silver: Yeah, I really enjoyed this too, thank you very much. And I mean it, if anyone has any questions, we can totally at to have a chat.
1:02:35.7 Ben Jacobsen: If you guys have any other questions, definitely reach out to Yosef or at Page One Power. We're also gonna be putting the recording of this up, so if you guys missed any part of it, we have to step away at any time, we're gonna go ahead and have that up by the end of the week, we look forward to you guys joining us later this week, we're actually be sitting down with our friend, Francine Rodriguez, when we're talking about Spanish PPC, it's a huge segment of the audience that's growing, especially here in the States, that might be a really good business opportunity and potential for you guys to reach the audience that you're looking for... To be able to help fulfill some of those needs and some of the things that they're looking for in search as well, so... We have you guys join us Thursday. Again, Yosef thank you so much for joining us and you guys for joining and we'll see you guys next time. Stay safe.
