With the explosion of customer retention and engagement tactics, and the laser-focus on performance marketing over the last few years, you’d be forgiven for assuming that email is on its last legs. But that couldn’t be further from the truth. This old-school staple in the marketer’s growth arsenal is actually a power player if you know how to use it. And Susan Su knows how to use it.
Watch the full webinar here:
From leading growth at Stripe, running growth and brand marketing as part of the founding team at Reforge, and advising startups in-house at both 500 Startups and now Sound Ventures, it’s safe to say that Susan truly gets growth. Her perspective on the role email can play in a startup’s growth strategy is relevant to anyone trying to scale companies right now. That’s why we asked her to sit down for a chat about all things email. We kicked off with some frank talk about metrics, discussed how to fit email into an overall marketing mix, and explored ways that young brands can start utilizing this underrated channel today.
The webinar is absolutely worth a full watch, but here are the key takeaways:
Email plays two key roles in growth.
What we think of as “growth” is best described as an ongoing process of building positive, ideally self-reinforcing, feedback loops. Email plays two key roles in that effort: First, it’s a tool that helps you accelerate your feedback loops to drive conversions and slow down churn. Second, it’s a channel that connects your product and your user, carrying information from brand to customer and back again.
Companies operating in different categories will use email as part of their growth strategy in different ways, but the one constant is that email is a tool that can span the entirety of your funnel. From prospecting and on-boarding all the way to customer retention and success, email has a role to play in every stage of growth.
Knowing your metrics isn’t as obvious as you think.
Most early stage operators are likely familiar with the metrics that accompany email but too many don’t understand how to actually use these numbers. Susan recommends getting really familiar with the governing framework she calls “KYM” (as in, “know your metrics”). Here’s the crash course for how to look at those numbers:
Open Rate
One of the most fun and familiar metrics we have for email is also a bit of a vanity metric. Try to go beyond that initial thrill of watching numbers start to come in right after you click “send” and look a little deeper. Beneath the surface, open rate is actually telling you about two vital things: First - deliverability. Are your emails actually getting through (more on that later). Second - favorability. Do people like your brand, message, value prop, and timing? A low open rate indicates a deliverability problem or a favorability problem. Think of open rate as a leading indicator for either conversions or unsubscribes.
Click Rate
Probably the second most popular metric with those who’ve dabbled in the inbox arts, click rate indicates two things: actionability and trust. If you’ve created the conditions for conversion before showing them the CTA, people will take action by clicking. If people trust your brand and message enough, they won’t feel as though they’re taking a risk by clicking. A low click rate means you haven’t created the conditions for conversion or gained enough trust with your audience.
Deliverability
The gatekeeper to all other email growth metrics is probably one of the least understood. Deliverability is very dangerously and commonly confused with delivery rate. Delivery rate measures the number of emails delivered to any inbox, and any modern email tool will keep this number in the high 90s on your behalf. The metric growth marketers should really be paying attention is deliverability - which measures the visibility (think: open-ability) of your emails. This number tells you whether your emails are reaching the recipient, instead of their spam box. Taking care of deliverability issues is not quick or glamorous, but it is critically important.
Unsubscribes
Finally, we come to the dreaded unsubscribe. This oft-overlooked metric is important because this number indicates people voting with their feet, walking away permanently from your ability to re-engage them. People unsubscribe for many reasons (they don’t like your content, brand, campaign structure, product), many outside of your growth team’s control. With Gmail now keeping tabs on your subscribers’ engagement levels - they recently rolled out automatic unsubscribes right in the inbox - many brands will see an uptick in user churn. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. A good way to think about unsubscribes is this: if people are walking away, they may not have been the right subscribers in the first place.
Every email needs a CTA.
Your call to action - or CTA - is typically a button or link that goes to a destination page, shopping cart, or deep links to a mobile app. If you don’t include a CTA with your email, you’re wasting your recipient’s (and your own) time. This means you must ask yourself with every single email - what am I trying to get them to do? The best performing CTAs are repeated throughout an email in different ways. This may seem overly obvious and repetitive, but those are the things that lead to conversion. So don’t be shy about linking multiple text, images, and buttons in a single email to one destination - all roads should lead to Rome (because that’s where the revenue is).
The 2020 case for email
Here’s a question a lot of young founders have. “Email has been around forever and it’s kind of a pain to do - is it actually worth the investment anymore?” The answer here is a resounding yes. Here’s why: some channels are rented and some channels are owned. Performance marketing (ad) channels are rented - you have to pay “rent” for the right to access their users. Email is your opportunity to bring those users over to a channel that you control, so they become your users. Email also edges out other channels in certain areas. For example, behavior-based segmentation, surveys and polling, and even longer-form storytelling. Emails these days resemble mini-landing pages, allowing readers to take many actions within one place. It’s no secret that well established brands use email very heavily. They wouldn’t be sending that volume of emails if it didn’t work on enough subscribers to make it worthwhile.
Where early stage company should focus
It’s vital for early stage companies to own that direct connection with their audience, so it makes sense to incorporate email into your growth strategy as early as possible. A good place to start is with automated drip campaigns. These are great for young companies because you set it up one time and let it run. An on-boarding drip campaign can cover the first 7 to 14 days of a new customer’s experience with your brand. This is your window for setting expectations around what they can expect from you and what value you’ll bring. Email is an important actor in creating a positive relationship with your customer and in training them to interact with your product, your brand, and your marketing experience. One easy way for emerging brands to punch outside of their weight class is to steal ideas from more established brands. Open your promotions tab and take a look at what the big brands with a lot of resources are doing. Then think about how to create a lightweight version. Susan suggests setting up a separate Gmail box and subscribing to anything and everything you can.