Slow Emails Volume 1
Missed a slow email? Catch up below.
Subject Line: Slow for some, fast if you just signed up
A slow email that probably took longer than it should to write, and send.
Thanks for subscribing! You're in for a treat for this email. As always, I break my email up into two sections:
Throwing Rocks in which I throw metaphorical rocks at email-related topics and break down concepts with said rocks. To be clear, this is not meant to be negative in any sense, and is meant to raise questions of "is this update really that bad?" or find answers to "should I be sending a newsletter because everyone else is?".
Cool Tools - meant to be self-explanatory in nature and highlights great email tools that have caught my eye over the past month or so.
Throwing Rocks
Apple’s privacy update announcement which aims to hide opens of those who opt-into it, and fetch all other opens regardless of actual engagement is slotted to launch in September of this year. Since the announcement was made on June 7th, talk of it has been swirling amongst marketers, and there has been lots of huffing and puffing for what this means for the open rate metric most marketers use to define engagement for their email campaigns. Just as the “mark as spam” and Gmail promotions folder has rocked the email world before, this too shall pass. Here’s my recap if you want to read it.
Klaviyo announced last week that it now offers SMS for Canadian-based clients! I’m thrilled to start seeing more brands expand into SMS as a channel, as from what I’ve seen so far, has conversion rates 10-fold from that of email. You know what I will not be thrilled about however? Brands texting me out of the blue asking me if I want to repurchase the deodorant that I bought 6-months ago. There's something so invasive about a text message, that just isn't the same as email... maybe it's that I can't turn notifications off for SMS as I similarly can with email? I haven’t exactly formed a full opinion of what I think SMS will be great at, but I think for me it will be leaning towards the more transactional-esque type messages and less so broad-based marketing ones. In the meantime, I will continue to browse Texts We Love, for examples and a greater understanding of what others are using this channel for.
Cool Tools
My full-time day job is working as an Email Marketing Manager at Invoice2go. It’s a SaaS, B2B company, with one of my main goals being to push email subscribers towards a paid subscription of our tool, and nurture them throughout it via email. The impression a user has during email collection is crucial, and as a consumer myself, I know how easy it is to fall out of the signup process if the company asks too many questions, fields are confusing, and the UI is difficult to navigate.
Here are some tools or websites that I’ve been wowed by during my research phase of the above:
Nice, Very Nice has offers a fantastic directory of clear signup forms that are easy to take inspiration away from. I would definitely recommend glancing over if you work in SaaS.
Material Design has a well-thought-out review of various onboarding layouts a user can take when signing up to your program or platform. I’ve found it interesting to read through the three categories of onboarding including the self-select model, quickstart model, and top user benefits model, all of which I see benefits with and at current have no rocks to throw at any.
The last thing I want to highlight is something completely unrelated to the above, but a neat niche email marketing area that I think if done well can truly shape the experience of the consumer. Pre-arrival emails for hotels. We've all received a very plain-text version of a hotel confirmation that doesn't spark much joy for any upcoming vacation. When I stumbled upon How to create the best hotel pre-arrival emails by Tom Brown at MEWS, I was wowed at the personalized experience you could create, in an of the hospitality industry I haven't touched that much. Worth a read.
Until another time,
Naomi :)