Episode 176: Email Mistakes Killing Your Open Rates (and How to Fix Them) w/ Michael Barber
Massive changes are reshaping email marketing in 2024! From evolving privacy regulations to Apple and Google’s new email categorization rules and stricter spam filters, these updates are directly affecting your email open rates, click-through rates, and sender reputation scores. If you rely on email for lead generation, customer engagement, or sales, you need to stay ahead of these critical shifts.
In this must-listen episode, we break down the latest email marketing trends, how to improve your email deliverability, and actionable strategies to boost open rates and increase conversions. Don’t let these changes hurt your sales—learn how to optimize your email strategy today!
The Power of Email Marketing in 2024: What You Need to Know
How email marketing gives you full control over customer relationships
The 0.3% spam complaint rule and how to maintain a healthy email list
Why cleaning your email list regularly is more important than ever
Segmentation strategies that drive higher engagement
The right way to repurpose content without devaluing your email list
How AI Can Help Write Better Emails—If Used Correctly
Email marketing is evolving fast, and staying ahead of these updates is crucial for maintaining strong open rates, engagement, and revenue. Don’t let privacy regulations, new email categorization rules, or stricter spam filters derail your success! 🚀
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Resources Mentioned:
Join the PR Secrets Masterclass
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Connect with Gloria Chou on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/gloriaychou
Join Gloria Chou's PR Community https://www.facebook.com/groups/428633254951941
Learn more about Michael J. Barber:
Website: https://michaeljbarber.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaeljamesbarber/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/michaeljbarber/
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Transcript
00:00:00 Gloria: What's up, small business heroes? Welcome back to Small Business PR, where we make marketing and PR super accessible for the everyday small business underdog. I am so excited for today's episode. So a little bit of a backstory. I was in Washington, DC a few months ago for my friend Veronica Romney's event. Little did I know that this one session from this guest today, Michael Barber, is going to blow your minds because I was taking furious notes where I literally, you know, like the cartoon, just taking so many notes where he couldn't catch up. That was me during his session.
00:00:31 Gloria: And I said to myself, we have to have him come on the show. So a little bit of backstory about this amazing guest. He is a CMO. He is someone who I sent, oh my God, 500 million emails for e-commerce. He is someone with nearly 20 years of experience in email marketing. And I cannot wait for him to share all the insights and especially how email is changing this year. So welcome to the show, Michael.
00:00:54 Michael: Oh, so good to be here, Gloria. Thanks for having me.
00:00:56 Gloria: Your session was so good. It is the one session that I just couldn't, I literally was like, I still have notes that I wish I could have taken. Because the presentation was so good. So obviously we can't go into all of it today, but can you just give our listeners just a little bit of a quick and dirty about kind of your experience in email. And honestly, like why should we care about how email is changing right now? Like this year.
00:01:21 Michael: Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I was super lucky, got out of school and went to work for a tiny little ad agency. Little did I know that that agency was at the forefront of email marketing, leveraging this tiny little platform at the time back in 2006 called Exact Target. If you have any listeners who are super familiar with the email marketing and email service provider space, they will know that that is now the backbone of Salesforce Marketing Cloud and got to do some incredible email work, particularly within several e-commerce brands back in the day.
00:01:49 Michael: And I've stayed close to this channel for 20 years. It is of all the marketing tactics, I think, my favorite, and I've stayed close to the industry and just really enjoyed a lovely career helping both B2B and B2C brands on their email marketing strategies. I'll tell you, I think what's really interesting to think about for any business over the next year or so and beyond as it relates to email is the impacts and all the changes that are happening in the inboxes themselves, whether it's Apple Mail or Gmail.
00:02:19 Michael: You're starting to see a lot more AI and machine learning come to the inbox and that's going to impact where your email is delivered, when it's delivered and how it's delivered. And I think it's important for us as either marketing or business leaders to understand those changes because it's going to impact the experience that someone has with all of this email that we're sending into the inbox.
00:02:41 Gloria: Oh my gosh, okay. So you're someone who has sent, you said over 500 million emails. You've used every single email server we've probably talked about. Way more advanced, but I think that email is one thing that doesn't get enough attention when we all know that the money is in the email, like hello. And we're always like sales page and tweaking this. So why, like let's say if I'm an e-commerce store and I'm like, oh, I'm not sending 500 million emails, why should I really focus on email this year?
00:03:10 Michael: Yeah, it's the channel you can own. It is a direct relationship with your consumer. You look at what's happening in our space right now when it comes to social media. TikTok may or may not shut down at any given moment. We may have another popular app that's taken away and out of the marketplace. Email is one of those marketing channels where you have a direct one-to-one relationship with a consumer. It is an area, nobody's going to take your email list away from you unless you're doing something really damaging to the inbox. It is a way for you to have a direct relationship to the consumer. It's also the big value to that email address is well beyond just being able to send them an email.
00:03:45 Michael: It's also being able to take that email address and then target people outside of the inbox based on all the behaviors they're having with your business. What pages are they visiting? What things have they left in their cart? What products have they looked at? And then target them with campaigns, whether that's like a display ad or any type of advertising really, or an additional email that sort of regenerates their interest in that product or service.
00:04:08 Michael: So it is one of those channels where you have, again, that one to one relationship and the value of the email address is just so much more important to your business rather than just a follow or a comment or like on social media.
00:04:20 Gloria: Ooh, 100%. I'm clapping right now because I try to tell this to people all the time. And I think a lot of times we want that quick dopamine hit and like, let's make another reel. Like literally, TikTok is being banned y'all. It is actually happening. So we know that algorithms are down 30% because they want us to pay for our stuff to be seen. So email is the one thing that you own like Michael said.
00:04:42 Gloria: So let's talk about what is changing in email, and then let's get into how do we actually do email right as an e-commerce store so that we can get people not only opening, but actually buying.
00:04:51 Michael: Sure. Yeah. Let's talk deliverability to start because all the work you're going to do inside the inbox is basically for nothing unless you actually get that email into the inbox. So we'll start with deliverability. Two big things I want you to think about is in February of last year, in February of 2024, Gmail, which is the largest consumer-based ISP that's out there. So they have more people that are reading from Gmail addresses or Google workspace addresses than any other ISP, internet service provider. And they came back with two specific regulations that all email promotional providers and brands need to pay attention to.
00:05:25 Michael: If you are sending email volume into Gmail, over 5000 email addresses for at Gmail addresses, you've got to make sure your email is truly authenticated in three ways. It leverages what are called SPF, DKIM, and DMARC authentication records. Now, I'm not going to get into the technical nuances of those, but you can just Google Gmail deliverability requirements. And there's an entire breakdown there from multiple different places that can help you understand what those three things mean.
00:05:53 Michael: But it is a requirement now for any business or brand that's sending more than 5000 emails to Gmail addresses moving forward. If you don't actually have those authentication protocols in place, that again is the SPF record, the DKIM record and DMARC record, you can be essentially blocklisted from Gmail. In other words, your domain cannot send me emails into Gmail.
00:06:16 Michael: The second thing that they came back with as a part of those requirements is that you must maintain a mark as spam threshold lower than point three percent. So if you violate that spam level threshold, that's that little mark as spam button that's in Gmail and that it goes above 0.3%, you can be blocklisted again from sending campaigns from your domain into Gmail. So two specific requirements. And they're starting to monitor that.
00:06:43 Michael: And we've already heard of businesses that are being blacklisted or blocklisted outside of the Gmail domain. And that's again, at the end of the day, Gmail cares about that someone on the other end of that inbox inside of Gmail is having a great experience. And because of all the challenges with spam, that is something that they've put in place to try and reduce those spam complaints. So that's the first thing to think about is deliverability.
00:07:04 Michael: On that same point, Apple has layered on a whole layer of AI into their inbox, and that's going to reward those brands that have better relationships with their subscribers. So Apple is going to do things like bring specific promotional messages that people have paid attention to in the past, that individual subscriber and bring it into their primary tab.
00:07:23 Michael: They're also going to thread messages depending upon if you've been ignoring things lately. So just a couple of key implications as you think about what's happening inside of the inbox that's going to really impact senders over the next year. Now, once you're past and you get into that inbox, you've got to realize that people are not spending as much time looking at individual campaigns as they were in the past.
00:07:45 Michael: Pre-pandemic, the number was about 10.1 seconds per campaign. That was about the average time when someone opened how much time they would actually spend inside the inbox. That has gone down approximately about 13 to 14% in the last couple of years. So almost a full second less, meaning we've got to make a get to the point of what our campaign is so that as someone opens, they actually understand what we're trying to sell them or the message we're trying to get across as quickly as possible.
00:08:14 Michael: In an era where someone can just scroll past and the thumb is king and can immediately move something out or delete it or mark it as spam. We've got to get people's attention and really hone in on making sure that the first couple of words, the graphic we use, the size of our headlines, body copy and text is all easy enough for our subscribers to read so they can ingest that message and understand what we're trying to sell them.
00:08:35 Gloria: Oh, so I hope you all are taking notes because this is pure gold. So what I'm hearing you say is that Google is being more and more strict than ever. And so we need to be more and more scrutinizing on what we're sending because we could be blocked from sending emails if it's not a good experience, right?
00:08:53 Michael: Yeah, you really need to maintain your list. So what does that mean? It means that you only send campaigns to people who have opted in to your campaigns, right? A lot of individuals, a lot of businesses are in the business of buying lists or scraping lists from public places. We definitely got to make sure that you are generating your subscriptions, your subscribers from your opt in forms, your landing pages, your footer modules on site of your website or in social media and then immediately being able to send that individual a campaign.
00:09:21 Michael: So you warm up that relationship or use what's called a welcome automation, if you will. We can talk about different automations that are really important to e-commerce and small businesses as well. But making sure that we get those emails, addresses from first party places like our dot com, like our storefronts from social media so that you're not purchasing those lists.
00:09:42 Michael: The other thing you've got to make sure to make sure that you've got this as healthy as a list as possible is if someone stops paying attention to your campaign, you're sending them a sunset or re-engagement campaign. So what does that mean? It's essentially a campaign that says, hey, are you still paying attention? It tries and gets their attention back so that you can continue to send them campaigns. And if we don't see someone open, click, or engage with those re-engagement campaigns, then we take them off our list and we stop sending campaigns to them.
00:10:10 Michael: By doing that, you're gonna make sure that you've got high open rates as hopefully high click-through rates, keeping all of those engagement metrics as high as possible, which is going to ensure that you get into the inbox in the future.
00:10:20 Gloria: Ooh, I need to do that. So you're basically saying now the frequency of how we clean and organize our list needs to be increased. We can't just kind of let us sit there anymore.
00:10:29 Michael: Yeah, the best practice and it depends on the business. This really depends on what your sales cycle looks like. But if someone's not engaged with one of your campaigns in about 90 days, you're gonna wanna kick off that re-engagement flow and you can automate this all in the background using your email service provider, kick off that re-engagement flow and if they don't give you some indication that they wanna continue to receive those campaigns, then you put them in a list that you just don't send campaigns to in the future.
00:10:53 Michael: Now, they can always come back if they decide to do business with you again, then you pull them out of that re-engagement flow and you put them right back into your promotional campaigns. But key there is just think about some timing windows that work for your sales cycles. The 90 day window is a best practice, but it really depends on what kind of business and what your sales cycle looks like.
00:11:09 Gloria: I love you're getting my butt into gear because that's literally something on my list that I need to do. Just really quickly, what is the simplest campaign to kind of just say like, hey, do you want to be honest? So that way I can make a decision to get them off for an hour. Y
00:11:21 Michael: eah, for sure. Just go straight into the point. You need to make sure your subject line, pre-header, and that copy is all on the same things. Are they still interested in listening and getting your email campaigns? There's a brand out there called Framebridge. They make on-demand frames. If you're not familiar with it, super cool brand out of Washington, DC. They have a great re-engagement flow. And essentially it says, are you paying attention? Question mark in the subject line.
00:11:43 Michael: You open the campaign, it says, do you still want to receive high quality frames? Got a big button that says, yes, I'm still interested. Big red button. It's massive. You can't miss it. And someone can click on that button and say, hey, yes, I still want to receive your campaign. So just make it simple to the point, get someone's attention. And if they don't actually do something to engage with those campaigns, then move them off into a list that you're not continually sending campaigns to.
00:12:08 Gloria: Love it. So for a lot of our listeners, I imagine they have less of this problem because they probably have a smaller list. So let's talk about actually getting them opened and excited. So let's talk about the first touch point. How do we get people excited? And then we can talk about the actual specifics of images and banners and do's and don'ts. But what's the best thing to send? The first email that we should send the best etiquette.
00:12:27 Michael: Yeah. You've got to send the welcome campaign, right? You've got to have some sort of automation that kicks off that relationship with that subscriber. There's a couple of key things you're going to want to do in that welcome campaign. First, get into their inbox within about an hour of them subscribing. So you can do that right away. You can delay it for a few minutes, but make sure that you generate that first email campaign when someone subscribes within about an hour of that subscription window. That's because you've got sort of top of mind awareness that someone has said, yes, I'm giving you my email, and then you're sending that welcome campaign.
00:12:57 Michael: Next is really focus on setting the stage. So what type of content are you gonna be sending and how often? So just bullet point out if you've got a monthly newsletter, a weekly newsletter, a weekly product release, whatever that cadence is, tell your subscribers this is exactly what they're going to receive from you and maintain that cadence. So if you're promising to that subscriber, to that consumer, I'm sending a weekly or a monthly or a biweekly deliver it because their brain will actually start to remember and see that cadence come into their inbox.
00:13:24 Michael: Next is you're going to drive for a couple of key engagement metrics. Ask them simple questions in that campaign to try and drive for a reply. A really simple one you could ask is like, hey, why did you subscribe and what do you hope to learn from our business or our product or our services? Or is there a particular thing we could help you or resource we could generate for you as a business that would keep you coming back? And monitor that inbox for those replies. That reply is a super strong signal of positive engagement and it will help keep your deliverability as high as possible.
00:13:53 Michael: Next. Go for the click. Maybe you have your top five blog posts or your top five products listed so that people can start to see that. And then it'll just allow that relationship to start to move from there. So depending on the type of business, you may have one email campaign that you're sending. You may do three or four, depending upon the type of thing that your business sells. Just make sure that you're again, setting the stage, driving for that reply, opening up that dialogue with that subscriber so they can start to get interested in continuing to read your campaigns.
00:14:21 Gloria: Love it. And it doesn't have to be like crazy long emails. I mean, now with AI, it could just, you know, they could whip it up for you in three minutes. So there's no excuse people. There's no excuse.
00:14:30 Michael: Yeah, not at all. Yeah, you can have those those welcome campaigns set up really easily and quickly.
00:14:36 Gloria: So let's say I'm an e-commerce store and I want people to buy my candles and I have lots of images. I have lots of different types of candles. I have photos of me as a founder. What's the best way to put it all in an email so that people are actually getting through the email?
00:14:48 Michael: Yeah, for sure. So the first thing I would back up and make sure that you're asking the right questions to deliver something interesting in that welcome campaign inside of your subscription form. So for the sake of this example, a candle company that has got a lot of different scents and whatnot on different options, ask what type of sense that individual likes when they're subscribing to your email campaigns.
00:15:506 Michael: And then in that welcome series, deliver sense or specific types of candles that meet the answers to those questions or they answer the questions you've asked inside of that subscription form.
That's a really great way to deliver something that's super timely, super targeted and relevant for someone based on the answers that they've given you. You just want to make sure hold yourself to about an eight to ten second reading rule. So whatever you're trying to get across, whatever that if it's the new scent of candle or new product release or whatever that is, read that email campaign.
00:15:36 Michael: Anything beyond eight to ten seconds, you've got to assume that more than likely, that subscriber is not going to read beyond that threshold. So get to the point, make sure that they can look at the headline, they can look at the image, they can look at the body copy, they can get to that call to action in about eight seconds so that that average reader, that average subscriber can get through all that content and understand what you're trying to get across as quickly as possible.
00:15:59 Gloria: So visually, I know that some of you are watching on YouTube, some of you are not, but during the presentation that, you know, when I met you, you gave me a side-by-side comparison of two different newsletters from big Fortune 500 brands and it was, can you talk a little bit about visually what is a good example and what is not so good?
00:16:16 Michael: Yeah, for sure. So there are two different types of sort of design layouts that work really, really well for campaigns, particularly in Western societies. We'll talk Eastern societies in a second, but on Western societies where people are reading right to left, there's two different layouts that work really well. One of those is the zigzag. So you go from essentially your logo or headline across the left corner and you go back and forth across the email.
00:16:37 Michael: So this could look like headline, then image, then you bring their attention back down to some sort of subhead, and you've got a two column layout that goes down the email. So someone's eyes go right to left, right? The other one that you will see super popular and is repeated nine times out of 10 out of all promotional campaigns is this inverted pyramid. So headline to image to body copy or subtitle, right into call to action.
00:17:01 Michael: You can also do, and we've seen some data that suggests that a better way to sort of architect this inverted pyramid is to do headline, body copy, call to action image. But why that works is because everyone is accustomed to essentially utilizing their thumb and their eyes to go down a page. So that inverted pyramid allows for someone to understand really simply what's most important down to the thing you want them to do, right?
00:17:25 Michael: So it's taking you from headline, a little bit of copy, down to that call to action, and you try and drive for that click. So consider a couple of different layouts depending upon your business and your brand, because different brands are going to have different brand standards that they want to hold themselves to inside of the inbox and decide or test what works for you. But that inverted pyramid or zigzag patterns from left to right are two ways that you can use from a design layout perspective that really are repeated over and over again so people know what to look for inside of your campaigns.
00:17:55 Gloria: Can you give some examples? I think you said Lululemon, but are there brands whose newsletters are like, okay, this is exactly on point?
00:18:01 Michael: For sure, yeah, I think Apple is the easiest and obviously, probably an example that's used everywhere, but they are just very, very good, simple slimmed up header, so you're not taking much and creating much noise at the top of the campaign. They've got a headline, you wanna make sure those headlines are at least 48 pixels in size from a font perspective. Your subheads are about a third of that, so somewhere between 28 to 36 around there.
00:18:24 Michael: Your body copy, no less than 16 and you've got to make sure that those buttons are at least 65 pixels in width so that someone can take their finger and click on things. Another example, the brand you just mentioned, Lululemon, incredibly good job. These are their newest campaigns. They did a redesign in the last few months that's very different than what they had before. They're seeing some really good success from that redesign. Some other brands that you may want to look out there, smaller brands, e-commerce brands that I think are doing an interesting job.
00:18:53 Michael: Aimé Leon Dore, which is a fashion label, of course, in your hometown in New York, does an incredible job at email layout, really driving for that call to action down to that click. And there's a ton of examples out there that are really good. The best place to go look for some design inspiration, you can go to reallygoodemails.com. And there's tons of different emails that have been submitted. They're all categorized. You can click a filter and see kind of what other brands are doing out there from a best practice perspective.
00:19:20 Gloria: I love it. So just to kind of sum up, it's like it needs to be dynamic, right? It can't be like one big photo. You want with the first screen to have a couple of different things. You need text, maybe an image and then a button. Is that true? Above the folds?
00:19:33 Michael: Yeah, you're going to want to make sure whatever call to action you're driving for, and that may be inside a large image. There's pros and cons to that strategy. But if that's what you're sort of getting out there and people know to load the images, then that's fine. But you're going to want to make sure that whenever someone opens, can they take a... Is there a decision point they can make? Can they click on something, whether that's the headline, the image, or the call to action? And you've got that within about an eight second threshold of them being able to digest the campaign themselves.
00:20:01 Gloria: Okay. So now I have a little counter for you. So my emails are very kind of storytelling. So I usually don't have something that they can click until they're kind of get through half the story. Is that good? Is that bad? What about this whole school of thought that's like, it needs to be storytelling. Don't just give them a product brochure.
00:20:20 Michael: Yeah, I think it's different for thought leaders and business strategists like yourself, because you've set an expectation that your content is storytelling format, where you're giving some learnings, some lessons, you're helping business leaders make better decisions inside of their organizations, right? You've set that expectation for your subscribers. They know that's what they send, that's what they've signed up for, right?
00:20:43 Michael: So for those individuals, and there's plenty of individuals that are out there that are doing this, they're doing significant storytelling inside of the inbox and it works for them. What we're talking about here is specifically brands that people are not going to pay attention to for a significantly long email campaign.
00:21:00 Michael: What I would suggest for those individuals that have got these long form storytelling formats inside of their inboxes, inside of their campaigns, is make sure you're doing just simple links, text links inside of things. So you… If you've got a lesson that's coming from a brand on a post you've read, you're linking out to that, that click, just because it goes to a different website, still generates an engagement action with your campaigns, which rewards you as the individual sending that email, right? That helps with all of the deliverability things we're looking for as a business.
00:21:30 Michael: But linking with those, you know, those tried and true since 1996 hyperlink blue text links, right? Pulling those things in, allow people interact with that campaign content is certainly a way you can do that. But if you've set the precedent that this is the way that you do it and that's what your subscribers expect, then there is no problem having that call to action all the way at the bottom, if that's what your subscribers have come to expect.
00:21:53 Michael: But unless that is the type of brand you have built as a business, sending someone a long form email inside of those campaigns for something that's a simple product or service you're just not going to have people that are engaging on, you know, as easily as making that call to action as simple as possible. But for you, works incredibly well, continue to do it.
00:22:13 Gloria: I like the hyperlinks thing. I think, do you think there's such a thing, because what I'm hearing you say is that there's a hierarchy of engagement actions, like Instagram, right? They prioritize saves more. So are you saying that open is like root, the first, and then click is better. So we should always try to get people to click, right? Is that the highest reward?
00:22:32 Michael: Yeah, there's a hierarchy. Certainly, open is down way below like any metric that we should care about from an engagement perspective, but it's still sort of hovering there depending upon which platform you're on. The click is next, but the single biggest positive impact that you can have on engagement perspective from both this deliverability and just for saying driving relationships for your business is the reply.
00:22:55 Michael: So make sure you're asking questions inside those campaigns and encouraging people to reply with their questions or just getting an understanding of did they like this campaign or not? Is there more that you could have done? You're starting to see a lot of not only thought leaders, but businesses put almost like a customer satisfaction score at the bottom. How did you like this email campaign? There's the happy face emoji, the sort of so so face emoji and the unhappy emoji.
00:23:19 Michael: Again, that's generating a click, right? So it's helping from a deliverability perspective, from a sender reputation perspective, but it's also giving you super valuable feedback as to whether your content's resonating to your readers.
00:23:30 Gloria: Yeah, I love that so much. What about like, you know, the school of thought that e-commerce, it's not enough to just give them a product for sure. There needs to be some sort of storytelling about the founder.
00:23:40 Michael: Sure. Yeah, no, I think that there's something interesting to do that. You've got to layer on the right sort of storytelling, right? So if someone comes to your website and you're offering them a discount for getting that subscription, right? For driving that new subscriber, they probably don't want to know about the founder yet. They've clicked on some specific asset, in this case, a discount or a certain percentage off. They're looking for something very specific.
00:24:02 Michael: Now, if inside that subscription form, you say, hey, learn about the business and receive the latest and greatest offers from our organization, then you can do some more storytelling there and start to layer in offers and discounts and things like that. But just be really careful that depending upon how you message, how you actually show what's the value of someone subscribing, you're gonna have subscribers that are looking for very different things.
00:24:47 Michael: I don't think that takes away from the opportunity to do storytelling inside the inbox, but your brand has to be built around that storytelling aspect. In other words, if I find out about a product and I come to your brand and you're doing long form storytelling and you've got really interesting videos and really interesting blog posts and you've sort of got this magazine experience inside your, around your brand, then I'm gonna expect that that experience comes in your email campaigns.
00:24:51 Michael: One of the brands that does this uniquely well is Tracksmith out of Boston or tracksmith.com. They're this super niche, sort of high-end running apparel brand. You go on their website and it is storytelling from top to bottom. How their runners interact with their products, what type of experiences they have with those products. So I know based on just going onto their website, what those email campaigns are gonna feel like, because it needs to tie back the brand.
00:25:14 Michael: But if I go to like, hey, I'm scrolling through TikTok and I see, I don't know, a screen protector and they're throwing a discount at me, and I've got to subscribe to your campaigns. I'm not looking for storytelling, right? The context of where people subscribe is really important as to what we're going to deliver into those campaigns. So if your brand is about storytelling, bring that into the inbox. If it's not, you're not going to get traction by bringing it into the inbox. People are, depending upon the context, people are looking for something very specific when they sign up for your campaigns.
00:25:43 Gloria: Yeah, one thing you said that really resonated with me was save your best stuff for emails.
00:25:48 Michael: Oh yeah, the red velvet rope.
00:25:50 Gloria: Can you talk to me a little bit about that? Because I think so many e-commerce founders and me included, we tend to just prioritize social media or just repurpose social media onto email. And you're saying, no, no, no, it needs to be email first. There's an exclusivity. Tell me about that.
00:26:03 Michael: Yeah. When someone gives you their email address, they're giving them, they're giving you your brand and you access to them to a really intimate space. Right. Their inbox is a private space on social. When we follow something, we can very easily block it out and not pay attention by just scrolling past it. But in our inbox, that's more challenging, right? And you're giving someone access and a little bit of data about them.
00:26:26 Michael: So in order to ensure that someone has some really big interest of continuing to subscribe to your email campaigns is make sure the best deal, the best story, the best thing or whatever the newest product launch you're doing, make sure whatever you do, you pull back that red velvet rope and your inbox subscribers. Your subscribers are the people who learn about all the best things happening with your business first.
00:26:47 Michael: Why does this matter? Number one, it drives word of mouth. Word of mouth for our businesses is super important. There is a reason people share email campaigns and it's because when they take that screenshot and share it, it's because they have access to something that somebody might not have access to on social media, right? The brand that I just mentioned a few minutes ago, Aime Leon Dore does this extremely well. They have what I think are about three or four segments. Someone that's spent a significant amount of money, that's a VIP subscriber.
00:27:13 Michael: Someone that's only bought one product, that's just a paid subscriber, what they deem like a converted subscriber. Then they have people that have signed up for their list that have never bought a product. They drip out their campaigns over the course of about a week to their VIPs, then someone that's only bought one product and then to the rest of their list. And the reason why they do that is this whole red velvet rope idea. You deliver value to those people that are driving business for you.
00:27:39 Michael: That helps on the word of mouth. It helps certainly keep people and subscribers interested to always make sure they're not unsubscribing right. It keeps that sort of re-engagement flow down to a minimum. It also just makes sure that people know that this is the only channel where they're gonna get the best of your brand. If they can get it everywhere, they have no reason to sign up, right? You're giving them exclusivity and a reason to stick around in the inbox is the place because it provides a ton of value for you as an organization, a direct one-to-one relationship.
00:28:10 Michael: A little bit of data about your consumer or your potential consumer that you can use in really interesting ways to continue to target them and continue to build that relationship. And it continues that ability for you to communicate with them in a one-to-one experience that you're not going to get elsewhere on social media or other channels.
00:28:28 Gloria: That's so good. There's so many reframes and aha moments that I hope that the listeners are getting as well, because this was a huge one for me, actually. I was like, repurpose, repurpose. And I would just kind of plaster screenshots of my email onto my blog. And what you're saying is has fundamentally changed the way I do things. So you're saying it's not that I can't share it, but maybe have a delay, right? Like a two week delay or something.
00:28:48 Michael: Yeah. Have a delay or you have some sort of hierarchy, right? That your subscribers are going to be a different type of community or you're going to name them a special type of group of people, right? You can do this in really nuanced ways. It could be, hey, only certain products are released to my subscribers, whereas everybody else gets a different type of product or something that's lower value, right?
00:29:06 Michael: You can do this to make sure on timing you have done. So your inbox subscribers get the best of you first, and then it slowly drips out on social media. You can do it from similar to kind of how Aime Leon Dore is doing it, where depending upon what type of consumer, how much money or share of wallet that someone has spent with your brand, they get access to the newest collection or the newest thing or the biggest product launch sooner than another subscriber does.
00:29:32 Gloria: So, I mean, obviously I could talk to you for hours about this, but just rapid fire, quick and dirty like do's and don'ts that you're still seeing people do that just like they should stop doing.
00:29:41 Michael: Okay. Volume for the sake of volume. Don't do it. If you don't say everything inside of the inbox, say what is particularly important. Don't be afraid to use different individuals inside your organization as a way to change your from names up to try and get attention. You could flip-flop from your brand name to maybe the CEO or the co-founder's name and adjust different campaigns to see what generates more interest.
00:30:09 Michael: Certainly don't bury the unsubscribe if people want to get out. Make sure that that unsubscribe is at least 10 or 12 pixels. It's not the coolest gray font so that someone can't see it on a screen, right? That is out. You've got to make it easy for people to get out of your campaigns. Don't bait and switch if your subject line or your from name is saying a very specific thing about what people can expect from this content.
00:30:32 Michael: Don't deliver something different inside of the inbox by any stretch of imagination. Make it easy for people to get through your campaigns. If it hurts mentally for someone to get through a campaign, they're not going to go through it. Make sure you've got those welcome campaigns set up. Make sure you've got things, especially for e-commerce providers out there, there's some tried and true automations, things like abandoned cart or abandoned interest. Cross sells and upsells I think are a super big opportunity as you think about for 2025 and beyond, right? You know someone's purchased something. If there is a specific thing that complements that product that they've sent, you're delivering that within a couple of weeks of them receiving the initial product to try and generate some more business. I mean, we could go on and on, but those are a couple top of mind to think about.
00:31:12 Gloria: This is so good. I mean, we haven't even touched on AI. Do you want to quickly touch upon it? Does it make my score lower or higher? Google doesn't know.
00:31:26 Michael: So they're not going to know, but I will say I think the best thing you can do from an AI perspective is a couple of things. If you're going to use it to generate content, make sure you've uploaded into whatever chat thread you're using, whether it's Claude or ChatGPT or the other platforms that are out there. Make sure they understand your brand guidelines. Make sure you've taken email campaigns of your past and uploaded them into the tools so they have an idea of how you write headlines, what words you do use, what words you don't. Make sure you're giving that AI chatbot feedback.
00:31:55 Michael: When it delivers something that's crap, tell it, I don't like using these words. I like using these words. Give it feedback. Make sure it's learning. If you're just throwing into an email, into one of your chats, develop me an email campaign for this product. You're gonna get junk. You've gotta teach your chats. You've gotta teach the AI what to expect from your brand, the language you use, the language you don't use. By doing that, you're gonna get better outputs from that AI.
00:32:20 Michael: Certainly Gmail and Apple's not gonna know that you're potentially leveraging AI unless they start to see some really crappy campaign work that's coming in there from titles and headlines. And I don't think they're layering on that like machine learning yet, but I think it's certainly coming. And the thing about it is that if you're just using AI to generate the sort of simplest of campaigns, your subscribers are going to know, right?
00:32:44 Michael: If it doesn't feel like your brand, if you haven't taught it and shown it exactly what you want to come out of that, those chats with you and those inputs to outputs, your subscriber is going to know. It's not going to feel like an authentic relationship. So just be careful there. In terms of beyond that, AI is going to be impacting all different parts of your email service provider. You're going to be able to utilize it to generate subject lines, to generate images, to generate content.
00:33:09 Michael: Again, just keep in mind that those chats that are being embedded into ESPs, they may or may not be specific to your brand. So they may be chat bots that are being created that are going to work across brands that aren't going to understand the nuances of your brand. So I'd be really careful just leveraging the bots inside of the actual ESPs, unless you understand how that email service provider is architecting the chatbot behind the scenes.
00:33:37 Michael: And, you know, leverage those tools for what they're worth. They can help speed up efficiency and certainly get campaigns out, provided those are the right types of content and campaigns that your team needs to be getting out the door.
00:33:47 Gloria: Oh, you're just so amazing. Wealth of knowledge. Brilliant, getting to the point. You're just like, the New Yorker in me loves that. So how can people find you and get into your world?
00:33:58 Michael: Yeah, for sure. I'm at Michael J. Barber in most places, Instagram, threads, blue sky, wherever you're at, LinkedIn, feel free to reach out or DM me. You can also go to my website. It's michaeljbarber.com. Little contact form if you want to ask any more questions, happy to follow up from any of your listeners.
00:34:13 Gloria: Thank you so much.
00:34:14 Michael: Of course, thank you so much.
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