Better #15

Kia ora,

I love email. There, I said it.

And I hope you do too, because today you’re going to be reading an email all about email - specifically, why email still rules and how you can make better use of it as part of your content and channels mix.

For me, email has a few major advantages over social:

• You own the audience. Unlike social media, you’re not hoping and praying for the algorithm to connect you.

• Higher engagement rates. People are way more likely to open an email and take action than they are to engage with a social media post.

• A direct line of communication. This can be crucial for delivering important information without the noise that comes with social.

The thing is though, you still have to make it engaging and interesting. Because while most public sector organisations have newsletters, a lot of them are simply dumping grounds for random updates and events.

That’s partly because their content strategy isn’t well-enough defined, and partly because the newsletters are much too ‘news’ focused and, as a result, quite impersonal and self-centred.

As Ann Handley puts it, if you’re putting out a newsletter, focus much more on the ‘letter’ than the ‘news’. People want to get to know you, to feel like they’re having a conversation with a friend, not being bombarded with key messages.

That’s how you build relationships - and trust - over time.

Cheers,
Seamus Boyer 👋

Jenni Guzman is bloody awesome.

I worked with her at Wellington City Council, and I love how passionate she is about great content creation - the technical as much as the editorial aspects.

She was always happy to share her knowledge of email marketing, which made her the first person on my list when I thought about diving into the world of email and newsletters.

In this interview we talked (over email, of course) about working at Trade Me, testing, personalisation, resources, and examples of great newsletters.

I hope you enjoy it.

👇👇👇

Firstly, where do you work and what do you do?
I work at Wellington City Council in the Social Media and Content team. I’m a Content Creator and spend my days developing content for the Our Wellington news channel. I also look after the weekly newsletter, This Week in Our Wellington, which has led to me becoming overly invested in the way we use email communications at the council.

How long have you been involved in and interested in email marketing?
I guess it all goes back to my first job after university. I started off working at Trade Me as a Campaign Manager in their Marketing Automation team. I looked after automated and tactical emails for Trade Me Motors (which was an interesting experience for someone who barely remembers the name of her own car model). Towards the end of my time there, I also worked on Marketplace and Jobs, so got a feel for how email automation works across the organisation.

I’ve got to say that when I first started off in that role, I had a very basic knowledge of email marketing but I had a strong interest in written content, which is such a key part of email marketing. By the end of my time in that role, I was a full-on email nerd and now can’t seem to stop picking out email errors in my own personal Gmail inbox.

What is it about email content and marketing that appeals to you most?
I think that people have this idea that emails are boring. That you only need a subject line, a few paragraphs and maybe an image. What I love about email content is that it allows you to personalise your content for the person reading it.

A lot of the time people often write content for a generalised audience, but with email marketing you can get into the nitty gritty details and only send things relevant to certain audiences. That personalisation is also a really big asset to organisations – not only does it make your customer feel known, it also gives them the information they actually want to see.

I think for a lot of people newsletters come to mind - is that the extent of it? How else can email be used in communications and marketing?Newsletters are only a small part of email marketing! There are so many other ways to use email. Like when we talk about ‘Tactical’ and ‘Automated’ emails, that means we can send one off emails or emails that are triggered when someone completes an action. For example, if you have a site that sells products such as Trade Me – if a person has just signed up to the site, then a welcome email could be sent to them. Or if they have had a listing that has been on the site for too long, you could send them an email with tips on how to boost their listing.

It's all about looking at the bigger picture and your customer’s journey with your organisation. It’s likely that they will interact with you over years and years, in many different ways. Email should be something that guides them through their journey with your organisation as a way to remove speed bumps and barriers.

At WCC, how does email fit into the content strategy?
At Council, we use emails across all business units. Whether it’s for rates notices, or consultation and engagements or our newsletters. While it’s a core function, the team are on a journey to improve our emails so that they are more targeted and engaging for the people receiving them.

I feel it’s a technical as much as creative medium - how much effort should you put into crafting subject lines, CTAs, A/B testing etc?
I’d say a lot of effort, but it depends on what your overall goal is for your email. There are a lot of key elements you want to get right, such as your subject line and your CTAs. But think about what your overall objective is for the email and what you want to achieve. If you need people to be opening it (which is something we all want!), then A/B testing could be a priority.

I would recommend slowly introducing improvements to see how they work over a few months – don’t do too many different things at once or else you won’t be able to track what is making your email better.

There are also great options for automation, such as welcome or nurture sequences, what are some ways to save time and get results using automation?
Think of the bare minimum. Identify your key audience and then figure out what points they are interacting with your business the most. Use that to figure out the key moments that you should be contacting them and then build from there. You want to build a strong foundation before you try to get too fancy.

What are the metrics that you think matter the most? And what are some tips for improving them?
I am a nerd and love to compare my open rate to my click through rate. I find it fascinating when I can see that I’ve had a great open rate and hardly any clicks, and I can start the process of trying to figure out why that would be the case.

My biggest tip for improvement is to say no to content that you know your audience won’t like. If you are getting asked to include things and they don’t interest you – push back or think of how you can sell that content in a better way. I’m guilty of letting a few things slip past in my newsletters and I can clearly notice a difference in the stats afterwards.

I also love seeing the total opens/total clicks – it shows if people want to come back to your content after they’ve read it the first time.

What providers have you used and how do you rate them?

I’ve gone from two opposite platforms – Marketo to Mailchimp. Marketo was a complex beast and we needed designers and analysts to be able to work the system. While it was hard to use, I absolutely loved the creativity of the platform and how you could design your emails.

Mailchimp on the other hand is incredibly user-friendly, which means you can get a lot of people on board and using it. This is great when you have an organisation as large as Council with so many different units within it.

Can you share any favourite online resources that we can check out?
I love Really Good Emails. It’s a fun way to see how different companies design their email content and often gives you inspiration for future emails.

I also recommend getting a Litmus account. You send your email to Litmus, and then you can see how it looks across multiple email providers. While you may think your emails look great on your work’s Outlook account, it might look terrible in Yahoo. Not everyone uses the main email providers.

Finally, how many newsletters do you subscribe to, what are your favourites, and why?

I wish I could count the amount of newsletters I subscribe to! I went through a phase of subscribing to absolutely everything when I first started learning about emails and now there’s no escaping.

There are a few newsletters that cut through though – and these will likely expose my interests. I love receiving emails from Goodreads. They’ve nailed the genres I like and I get really excited when they send through recommendations. Nothing is better than when I’ve finished a book and I get an email that says ‘You’ve finished X, what’s next?’ with a whole bunch of ideas for me.

I’m also a huge fan of Mecca’s emails, they tell me when I can get free products as well as letting me know when my favourite brands have released a new product.

I’ve got to say I’m a fan of Wellington City Council’s This Week in Our Wellington too … the person who puts it together is pretty cool 😉 [Agreed - Seamus]

Thanks for reading.

If you feel like replying or forwarding this email, it all helps with old mate algo 😆

And if you made it this far, here’s an email joke for you:

Why did the email go to therapy? Because it had attachment issues. 🙄

See you in two weeks for more tips on how to get a little bit Better 👋