As you may have read in our blog, 3 Content Marketing Tips from INBOUND, our marketing team recently attended HubSpot’s virtual INBOUND conference and had so many takeaways from the valuable content presented that we felt compelled to share some key insights with our fellow tech marketers!  In this blog, we explore four awesome email marketing tricks from Jay Schwedelson that your team should consider when planning your email strategy:

  1. It’s all in the subject line: A large portion of Jay’s INBOUND session focused on arguably the most important part of email marketing: the subject line. After all, even the most groundbreaking content won’t have an impact if no one opens your email. Fortunately, Jay gave a number of concrete tips to improve your email marketing campaigns. First off, Jay shares that exaggerated subject lines, like “IT’s HEEERE!” have an increased B2B open rate of 14%. On the other hand, he reported that words like meeting, chat, training, and quick have shown decreased open rates in the last 6 months. And perhaps most interestingly for us long-winded marketers, Jay said that subject lines with less than 20 characters have a 27% higher B2B open rate, because only 9% of subject lines are so succinct, and therefore they stand out.
  2. Optimize all links: Moving on from subject lines, Jay touched on some important factors to consider in the body of your marketing emails. First, he said that marketers HAVE to have a link associated with images in the body of their emails. Why? Because if not, when users click on the image expecting a link, they will prompted to download the image. And if there’s a chance for interaction, that’s likely not the preferred action for users to take. Secondly, Jay recommended to have every link in your emails go to the offer page – including logos. He shared that there is a 57% higher rate when all primary links direct users to an offer page, and that’s not an opportunity any marketer wants to miss out on.
  3. Send more!: As marketers, it’s always a balancing act between getting the attention of potential customers without driving them towards that “unsubscribe” button. While many marketers air towards the side of caution, Jay suggested that being more aggressive will actually pay off. He used the example that a three touch offer in 2 weeks will increase performance and response rates, so send away! He recommended even using the same email, but changing the color, subject line, or making other small tweaks to increase performance. And, if you really want to stay top of mind, he reported that 2 offers, 2 days in a row increases response rate by 24%.
  4. Timing is everything: We’ve all heard the saying that timing is everything, and in the case of email marketing, it couldn’t ring more true. Because at the bottom line, if your email – no matter how spectacular it may be— reaches your target at a bad or inconvenient time, you will not see optimal results. Fortunately, Jay took some guess work off our shoulders and discussed optimal times to send, and others you may want to avoid. For example, Jay shared that as of late, deploying emails on a Friday may not be the best choice. Why? Because these days, people are just worn out and done-in by the end of the week, so recipients may be less likely to open another email before starting the weekend. On the bright side, Jay shared that Mondays are now a big day to send as professionals are well-rested and kicking off their week. Of course, it’s important to test what work best for you, so be sure to test, test, test!

INBOUND always provides us with keen new ideas to up our marketing game (or at least gut check we are on the right track). We hope that these tips will help you, too!

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