“Email is not dead.” Dan Zarella, Social Media Scientist from Hubspot, uttered these words during his entertaining and informative webinar, “The Science of Email Marketing.” I’ve become a Dan Zarella fan ever since I heard his webinar back in December on “The Science of Blogging.” Refer to previous post to read more about this other wonderful webinar.
I try to watch webinars on occasion since they are a great resource to get the most up-to-date information for the latest trends on whatever field you may be pursing a career in. But sometimes they can loser your attention after the first ten minutes. This is not the case with Dan Zarella’s webinars. If you are looking for an engaging and entertaining webinar to follow, Dan’s is the one to look into. He is a part of Hubspot; a company that provides services to help generate online activity for various social media outlets and provides tons of resources to help you receive the latest in marketing and social media research.
The reason why I chose to watch this webinar besides Dan Zarella was hosting was because as a Marketer I have had used email extensively to generate leads and create awareness of one of my clients, Vietnamese Public Radio. I felt this webinar would be a good after action assessment of what I did right and wrong when working with this client.
But enough about my reasoning for watching this webinar. I want to relay some (I want people to actually watch this webinar) of the key and informative takeaways from this attention-holding webinar. Please see below:
- Inboxes: 88% of people do not use separate work and personal inboxes. This means it generally does not matter to what email address you send your email too; that person will receive your message whether at work or home.
- Timing: Saturday and Sundays Mornings are the best days to send emails, especially marketing emails.
- Perception: Most people perceive email as something like homework. If you send emails during the week, you’re adding on top of their current workload; this may aggravate your receive and they will most likely ignore your message.
- Smartphones: 81% of people read emails on smartphones. Therefore, optimize your emails to be readable on mobile devices.
- Links: Use a copious amount of links in your emails. This raises the persuasion factor and interesting-ness of your email. People think, “hmmm, I wonder where this will take me.”
- Reference: People treat their inbox like a library. If your emails contain information they can include in their “library,” then they’ll most likely stash away your email as a reference tool. Include reference information in your email.
- Follow: Avoid using the words, “Tweet” or “Forward” in your email. Instead use “Follow.” This helps people feel as though you’re not asking too much of them.
Those are just some of the key takeaways I took, well away, from this webinar. There are plenty more you can find by watching the webinar.
One thing I have to add which I think could have been included in this webinar is organization of email distrubtion. It can be quite confusing to know who you sent emails out to and when. One way to help keep track of this is Google Docs. I used it extensively in my past project with Vietnamese Public Radio and it greatly reduced the amount of confusion I endured while sending my emails. Try it and refer to my previous post for how well this worked for me.
Also below are the Slides Share version of the webinar but please watch “The Science of Email Marketing” by clicking here and become a Dan Zarella fan like me.
