Slow Emails Volume 3
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
A/B testing (I know, again!?)
If you were here last time, you'll remember I threw a big rock towards useless A/B testing. A/B testing without a purpose or just for the sake of it is about as useless as my manager at an old job telling me I needed to "poke around in Google Analytics before being able to be promoted". Both scenarios make me want to scream WHAT'S THE POINT?! Sure, it can be fun to test and poke around in GA and run a one-off A/B test with no purpose. But most oftentimes it's a complete waste of time and resources.
Does my hate for A/B testing mean I never do it? No. Last week, I ran an A/B test on a one-off campaign that pitted two variants with different image placements against one another. One variant positioned an image at the top of the email, and the other, padded the email with a header and some copy before the large image spanned across. I have results in now, and ta-da, zero statistical significance between the two! I was completely confident that my strategy was a solid one and not a waste of time. Yet alas, I am proven that most people care less about email than I like to think - and that's okay! It was a great learning experience and I was able to educate and work with my internal team on developing this strategy, and how it's okay to pivot if it doesn't work out.
Growth Marketing as a career - yes, this is a rock
I began my start in email in 2016, as a Digital Marketer wearing 17-other hats (as one does) cofounding a small tech startup with two others, and since then I've been fully focused on email through the below:
Customer Onboarding Manager at Braze - focused on email migrations and deliverability best practices
Email Marketing Strategist at Later
Email Marketing Manager at Invoice2go
& I do freelance email & lifecycle consulting on the side for other SaaS and e-commerce brands
But, what comes after this level of my career? On a day-to-day basis, I touch on more than just email, working with push, in-app messaging, and SMS. I eventually want to lead strategy & a team at an organization. Pondering this thought, I've realized my distaste for "Growth Marketers" (as a title of course... nothing personal here). Isn't the whole point of marketing to "grow" the company whether it be through brand, paid, social, email, etc? Is it a glorified title above "Digital Marketer" that also enforces you to wear 17-hats? That's my career-path-confusion rock of the month!
Cool Tools & Other Cool Stuff
Sendview.io
This is a tool that I use at least once a week as I work to create a large directory in Notion of emails that I don't want to lose in the depths of my inbox once received. Simply forward an email to esp@sendview.io and it spits back the ESP used to send said email. But wait, there's more!
They've relaunched on Product Hunt this week with updates that are worth checking out. Creator Gregg Blanchard writes:
"The gist is that SendView generates special email addresses you can use when you sign up for competitors’ email newsletters, products, offers, etc.. But instead of going to your inbox, emails sent to these addresses are parsed into dashboards of insights about how, when, and what they send."
Excited to dig into some brand-spying with these dashboards. Super cool.
Litmus Live
I have been eagerly awaiting my first conference back IRL later this month in Boston (clearly I was DREAMING thinking Covid had run its course). However, it's moved to live stream as of two weeks ago and I will still be excitedly tuning in. Litmus Live is like the Christmas Eve of all email-related conferences. It pairs together developers, strategists, marketers, and deliverability experts that have shaped some of the most important policies we all abide by in the email world. Sessions that I'm most excited to hear about are:
Kristen Bond - Email Careers: How Did We Get Here (and Where Do We Go?) - a frequent thought of mine, as detailed out above.
Chad White - Apple's Mail Privacy Protection: How Email Marketers Can Adapt - because honestly after mid-September the email engagement world is going to be in chaos with the death of email opens. Chad's expertise will be greatly received I'm sure.
Stephanie Griffith - SMS: New Channel on the Block - Stephanie has become an industry leader in moving the thought train away from SMS as an invasive channel and is shaping the narrative around it to be much more positive, as the ROI is phenomenal. If you are a brand NOT leveraging SMS you are falling behind.
If you are a marketer interested in email and have some year-end budget you could put towards something, I'd highly encourage it to be this conference. The learnings you'll take away are priceless.
Tooting my own horn
In less than two weeks I'll be speaking at the Vinyl Siding Institute's annual conference on unique email marketing strategies. Vinyl Siding and manufacturing businesses, in general, aren't your average e-commerce business. In a B2B space, you can't do email marketing the same way you do in B2C, so I'm really excited to discuss this very specific vertice and how brands can still leverage email marketing, but in the right way. There's a time and place for email marketing. Even if your brand only sells something once.
Until another time,
Naomi :)