Conversion Collection Emails

PRESENTED BY
PRESENTED BY IMPACT
IMPACT BRANDING
BRANDING && DESIGN
DESIGN
Generate Even More Leads

from Your
MARKETING EMAILS
Written by:
John Bonini
Marketing Director, @bonini84
As the Marketing Director at IMPACT Branding & Design, John oversees

the company’s entire lead generation and branding strategy, utilizing
blogging, premium content creation, social media marketing, search engine
optimization and video marketing in order to help grow the company and
expand its reach.
Under John’s direction, IMPACT has experienced significant growth in its blog
subscribers, social media following, as well the company’s overall traffic and
lead generation.
In addition to his work at IMPACT, John has also been interviewed and
featured in several industry leading publications, including the Wall Street
Journal’s SmartMoney, MarketWatch, as well as the HubSpot blog.
Layout and design by Christine Austin (@caustin0821)
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Generate Even More Leads from Your Marketing Emails
Right now, take a look around you. Seriously, go take a look. I’ll be here when
you get back.
...
Notice anything?
People are starving for conversation.
Walking around, heads bowed slightly, waiting for the next engagement in
whatever conversations they’re currently having.
Facebook. Email. Twitter. Snapchat. Instagram.
But if people are so starved for conversations, why then, are marketing emails
so hard to get opened?
It’s simple; because most emails are not vehicles for conversation. They’re
megaphones when they should be walkie-talkies.
Yet despite this, marketers still list email marketing as a lead source that’s
become increasingly more important. (Source: HubSpot)
create
Connections
If this is true, marketers should be making a more concerted effort at sending

remarkable emails.
Let’s get to work.
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CONTENTS
Building Your List ................................................................................6
List Segmentation ...............................................................................15
Send Time Optimization ...................................................................22
Improving Open Rates .......................................................................27
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BUILDING
YOUR LIST
When Facebook began hitting its stride in Silicon Valley back in 2005, the
team was still relatively small in comparison to what it’s become now.
Noah Kagan, employee #30, said he used to bring all kinds of new ideas to
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. There was no consistency or focus to
them. Just ideas.
“Finally, one day Mark pushed back,” Kagan wrote on HubSpot. “He
proclaimed to the entire team that we would not entertain ANY idea unless it
helped Facebook grow by total number of users.”
The lesson? Focus on one metric at a time. And for Facebook, that meant
building their email list.
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I D E N T IF Y TO P PAG ES O N
YO U R WEB S I TE
The top pages or blog posts on your website should help assist your list-
building efforts. But first, you’ll need to identify them.
We use HubSpot’s Page Performance tool, which allows us to identify the

most viewed pages on our website in any given week, month, year, or custom
date range of our choosing.
You can also use tools like Moz’s Open Site Explorer or Buzzsumo to identify
some of your most popular and most shared content.
Got it?
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Now optimize these pages to ensure you’re making the most of your
opportunities to collect email addresses. What better place to do this than one
your most visited pages?
Next we’ll discuss some different techniques for doing this.
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O P T IMI ZI NG YO UR
PAG ES
The Banner
On The IMPACT Blog we feature a banner subscribe bar on all of our blog posts,
which using some unique code, sticks to the top of the page even as the user
scrolls down. It’s also smart, so if a reader is already subscribed, they won’t
see the bar at all.
Our blog receives over 50,000 unique visitors per month, and this subscribe
bar converts at a .5% rate, resulting in over 250 new leads every month just
from this banner alone.
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The Welcome Gate
It should come as no surprise that after working under Zuckerberg’s mantra,

Noah Kagan would employ some great subscription tactics for his own
company.
Upon visiting Kagan’s OkDork.com you’ll be presented with the following

sign up proposition prior to seeing any other part of the homepage.
Gutsy? Sure.
Tasteless? Well, not quite.
Kagan does a great job of conveying the value – which I’ll vouch that he does
follow up on – of his newsletter so that visitors don’t feel as if they’re being
pitched immediately after landing on the site. And it works. Kagan boasts an
email list just shy of a million.

I asked Kagan about this recently:
“If you have one priority, make that action loud and clear on your homepage. For me,
it’s email subscribers.
I found that when people had to commit an email address, they were more likely to
engage even more with my content than people who didn’t. If you look at the most
popular sites on the internet, they all have one clear call to action on their main pages.
Facebook makes you register. Google tells you to search. Dropbox tells you to sign up.
OkDork asks you to join.”
The Giveaway
Nothing persuades people to take action quite like “free.”
Some of the most successful blogs entice readers to subscribe by not only
conveying the value of their content, but also by offering a freebie for signing
up. Take Jay Baer’s Convince and Convert blog, voted #1 content marketing
blog in the world by Content Marketing Institute, for example.
Not only am I
persuaded to join
21,000 of like-
minded peers, but
I’ll also receive a free
ebook with insightful
quotes based on Jay’s
book?
As far as value propositions go, how does yours stack up against this?

The Opt-In
We’ve been using this one at IMPACT for a long time, as it’s one of the most
effective (yet often overlooked) ways of building our email list.
Every one of our lead forms on landing pages contains a checkbox where
people can opt-in to our email list with just a click before submitting. There
may be no better time for asking for people to opt-in then when they’re
already filling out a lead form, as they’ve already found your content to be
helpful.
Here’s what it looks like, located at the bottom of all of our forms.
This has been paramount in IMPACT’s list building efforts, converting at a

28.4% rate, resulting in over 4,200 new subscribers in just one year. Just from
one tiny little check box.

The Call-to-Action
Traditionally, the real estate below blog posts is reserved for calls-to-action
promoting ebooks or others offers. However, if you’re new to blogging, or just
launched a new product or venture, it’s wise to use this space to build up your
email list first.
After all, what good is it to promote your offer if very little people are even
seeing it in the first place?
Sidekick, HubSpot’s new email tracking tool, has put this into practice in
order to grow an email list comparable to its parent company.
It’s safe to say that it’s working, seeing as they’ve already accumulated
22,000 subscribers to a relatively new venture.

LIST
S E G M E N TAT I O N
Once you start building up your email list, the natural tendency seems to
include emailing the entire list any time you have something new to promote.
These are often referred to as email “blasts.” The fact that this tactic sounds
violent should be an indicator that it’s one you should steer clear of.
Not only has it proven to be less effective – as you’ll see in a minute – but it
also turns people off to your brand. They’re less personal, and in a time where
people crave more personal dialogue (social media anyone?) it’s important
that all of your communications work to provide more context.
List segmentation is about breaking up your contact database into little pieces
based on behaviors or demographics and sending only emails of relevance to
these specific segments.

I TS E F F E CT O N OVER ALL
P E R FO R M ANC E
According to data from Lyris’ Email Optimizer Report, 39% of marketers saw
an increase in open rates by segmenting their email list.
Here’s more data from the report:
It should come as a surprise to no one that sending more relevant emails

results in improved metrics in just about every category.
List segmentation is a commitment to serving your audience. It’s a shift

in mindset from getting as many opens as possible to getting a higher
percentage of clicks per email send.

Why it Works
Targeted emails receive more clicks. It’s really that simple.
When you’re thinking in terms of click-through percentage rather than a

high volume of opens, list segmentation is really your only solution.
When people receive emails more relevant to their specific needs and
interests, they’re more likely to click through to whatever you’re promoting.
Email blasts are assumptive generalizations. Ultimately, they turn away more
of your audience than they help.

How to do it
We use HubSpot’s lists tool to segment our contacts and send more relevant
emails.
If you’re using another platform or software, the process will be similar.

However, we love and highly recommend HubSpot.
So here’s how to successfully send a segmented email:
Step 1: Using the list tool, I’m going to create a list of marketing directors in
our database that are interested in learning more about SEO. As you can see,
I’ve chosen the necessary criteria based on the information they’ve provided
in form fills. This list will propagate anyone who has labeled themselves a
marketing director AND downloaded our ebook, How to Rank Higher in Search
Engines.

Step 2: Now we’ll review the list to make sure the set criteria propagated the
list we were looking for. For this particular list, 145 people meet the criteria
we set in step 1. Now we can send a more personalized email to this list. We
know they’re marketing directors who have taken an interest in learning
more about SEO. Any content or promotion that’s focused on SEO, Google
algorithms, or driving organic traffic can be promoted to this list.

Step 3: Lastly, we’ll want to send an email to this segment of contacts that
provides context based off of what we already know about them. Once we’ve
drafted up the email, we’ll choose the list we just made as recipients.

SEND TIME
O P T I M I Z AT I O N
We’re going to start this section off by saying this: there is no globally
accepted time to send emails that you’ve been missing.
Every industry and vertical will yield different results.
But there is a best time for you and your company to send emails.
This doesn’t mean that we can’t analyze high-level data in order to get a
general idea of what typically works on a large scale. To do this, we’re going
to look at some data gathered through MailChimp’s Email Genome Project, a
“service that uses software to constantly analyze millions of email lists and
billions of email addresses, and uncover stories and trends that are hidden in
the data.”
Let’s dive in.

DAY OF T HE W E E K
While there’s no clear winner here, it does look like the middle of the week is
generally more preferable when it comes to getting email engagement.
Now, when you’re measuring data based off of billions of email addresses, it’s
expected that you’re going to see inconclusive data like this, so it’s important
to test this all for yourself. But for the sake of argument, let’s talk psychology
here.
Perhaps there’s more engagement toward the end of the week because
people’s to-do lists have gotten shorter. After all, when you come in Monday
morning, you’re probably less likely to engage with a marketing email given
the amount of things you need to get in order for the week.

And while weekends look to be the least preferred time to send marketing
emails, this is largely dependent on the type of industry you’re in and who
you’re sending emails to.
As expected, business-related content has a much lower percentage of

subscribers whose optimal send time is on weekends than eCommerce and
retail content. People love to shop on weekends, so this isn’t too surprising.
However, given the relatively low percentages of all the industries included,
it’s safe to assume that it’s always most preferable to send out emails during
the week.

TIME OF DAY
As expected, there is no magical one time of day that’s going to work for all
of your subscribers. While peak time is 10 am, this still only represents 7% of
subscribers’ optimal send time
You’ll need to continually test and measure your email sends in order to have
a better idea of how to cater to the majority of your list. It’s actually good
to see that the data shows there isn’t one preferable time, as this should
force you to consider your entire database and how you can execute more
personalized email campaigns.
It’s about testing, measuring, executing, and repeating this process all over
again.

IMPROVING
O P E N R AT E S
You could’ve just written the world’s greatest email, but if no one opens it,
what good is it?
So much focus is spent on the content of an email, as it should. However,

equally as much time should be spent on ways to get your email opened so
recipients can see the value you’re offering.
Here we’ll discuss some ways for optimizing those emails you work so hard to
put together for improved open rates.

T H E S U B J EC T LI NE
Ah, finally – the subject line. The holy grail of email opens. The one place
where we get to exercise our creativity, snark, and overall affinity for
sexy words.
…or not.
Think of yourself in conversation in any high-anxiety environment, like an

event you’re hosting or after speaking at a networking event. There is lots of
noise, questions, and dialogue being thrown at you.
This is everyone’s email inbox.
Clarity is key here, as it’s our natural defense mechanism for dealing with
confusion in large volumes. Make it actionable, as people picture themselves
doing rather than hearing tips. Action is tangible.
• Exclusivity: SEO tips that all the best marketing pros are practicing.
• Opening a knowledge gap: Do you know these 3 tips that could help you
rank higher in Google?
• Scarcity: Registration for the SEO webinar closes tomorrow!
• Empathy: Sick of fluffy SEO tips? Here’s how to actually rank higher right
now.
Each of these achieve clarity while also appealing to psychological tendencies.
People like feeling part of a specific group. They can’t help but search for
ways to fill their knowledge gaps. They have a fear of missing out.

Most of all, people like feeling understood. Like there are others who feel a
deep connection to their interests.
This is why people are walking with their heads buried in their devices all
day. It has nothing to do with the device itself. People have been starved for
connection long before phones.
Are your marketing emails satisfying their need for genuine engagement?

A D DIT I O NAL TI P S :
Character Limit
I’ve often said that email subject lines are the hardest things to write in
marketing. In my opinion, they’re much tougher to nail than the email itself,
as you need to convey value and action very quickly.
Take this study conducted by Return Path for example. Open rates were 12.5%
higher for subject lines with less than 49 characters, and click-through rates
were 75% higher.
People are much less likely to open emails with longer subject lines, as there
are too many other distractions. Not to mention that most providers only
show the first 30 or so characters of a subject line.
Keep it brief. Keep it actionable. Convey value.
Avoid Spam Trigger Words
This can get tricky, as every email client is different. Not only that, but
algorithms and interfaces change, so there’s never really been any definitive
case for words NOT to include in your email subject lines. But there are some
general guidelines.
The following chart was published by HubSpot in 2012 and includes some
commonly used marketing terms that can possibly trigger the SPAM filters of
your recipients.

I’m sure you recognize the moral here: don’t sound like an infomercial. Most
of these phrases are also company-focused rather than customer-focused. In
any of these words, can you discern any value? What’s in it for the recipient?
Staying away from words and phrases like these will not only keep you out
of the SPAM filter, but it’ll also force you to convey more value and ensure
you’re writing for the customer.

The “From” Name
This is one area that seems so blatantly obvious that it’s constantly
overlooked.
After all, if the email comes from me, shouldn’t the from name be John
Bonini?
Sure.
But consider using a “branded name” as well. For example, rather than
recipients seeing my name and thinking, who the hell is that, they’ll see John
from IMPACT as the from name instead.
“Ohh, right! I read their blog all the time.”
It’s the little things like this that contribute to people opening your emails.
Most of the time, however, we’re not keyed into these small things. We’re
more worried about the far sexier subject line – which we’ll get to – and the
number of people on our list.
But this has real implications. I recently A/B tested this on an email to our
mailing list of just over 20,000 people.
“Variation B” is from John from IMPACT, and as you can see, has just over a
1% difference in opens. Seems minimal, sure, but consider the fact that this is
sent to 20,000 contacts who have already been receiving our content, and still
there were 380 more opens when I branded my name.
Even more interesting is the fact that people who received the email from
my branded name were also more likely to click-through to our website,
presumably because they opened the email with a greater expectation of what
was inside.
Try it out for yourself. You may be surprised at the amount of opens (and
clicks!) you’ve been missing out on.

Ready to learn more about improving
your online marketing?
S C H E D U L E A F R E E C O N S U LT A T I O N W I T H I M PA C T
Managing all of your online marketing can be

pretty overwhelming
We’ l l Hel p You F ig u r e I t A ll O ut
We’re showing professionals like you what works, and what

doesn’t, in today’s digital landscape. It only takes 45 minutes to
change the course of your business.
I M P R O V E M Y S T R AT E G Y

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PRESENTED BY

Generate Even More Leads

As the Marketing Director at IMPACT Branding & Design, John oversees

Layout and design by Christine Austin (@caustin0821)

2 Share this Ebook:

People are starving for conversation.

Facebook. Email. Twitter. Snapchat. Instagram.

If this is true, marketers should be making a more concerted effort at sending

Let’s get to work.

4 Share this Ebook:

List Segmentation ...............................................................................15

Send Time Optimization ...................................................................22

Improving Open Rates .......................................................................27

5 Share this Ebook:

7 Share this Ebook:

We use HubSpot’s Page Performance tool, which allows us to identify the

8 Share this Ebook:

Next we’ll discuss some different techniques for doing this.

9 Share this Ebook:

10 Share this Ebook:

The Welcome Gate

It should come as no surprise that after working under Zuckerberg’s mantra,

Upon visiting Kagan’s OkDork.com you’ll be presented with the following

Tasteless? Well, not quite.

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I asked Kagan about this recently:

Nothing persuades people to take action quite like “free.”

12 Share this Ebook:

This has been paramount in IMPACT’s list building efforts, converting at a

13 Share this Ebook:

14 Share this Ebook:

16 Share this Ebook:

Here’s more data from the report:

It should come as a surprise to no one that sending more relevant emails

List segmentation is a commitment to serving your audience. It’s a shift

17 Share this Ebook:

When you’re thinking in terms of click-through percentage rather than a

18 Share this Ebook:

If you’re using another platform or software, the process will be similar.

So here’s how to successfully send a segmented email:

19 Share this Ebook:

20 Share this Ebook:

21 Share this Ebook:

Every industry and vertical will yield different results.

Let’s dive in.

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As expected, business-related content has a much lower percentage of

25 Share this Ebook:

26 Share this Ebook:

So much focus is spent on the content of an email, as it should. However,

28 Share this Ebook:

Think of yourself in conversation in any high-anxiety environment, like an

This is everyone’s email inbox.

Each of these achieve clarity while also appealing to psychological tendencies.

29 Share this Ebook:

30 Share this Ebook:

Keep it brief. Keep it actionable. Convey value.

Avoid Spam Trigger Words

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32 Share this Ebook:

The “From” Name

“Ohh, right! I read their blog all the time.”