Danielle Gallant – 00:00:03:
Welcome to Email After Hours by Sender Score, powered by Validity.
Guy Hanson – 00:00:09:
We’re your hosts. My name’s Guy Hanson.
Danielle Gallant – 00:00:11:
And I’m Danielle Gallant. And this is Email After Hours. Hi, everybody. I think it might be an understatement to say that the last few years have been a little bit crazy. We’ve had a global pandemic, there’s a war happening in Ukraine, and most recently, the economic downturn has left many people with tight budgets or temporarily without jobs. And these shifts have revealed the true importance of marketing with empathy. More than ever, consumers expect brands to take a stance on key social issues, particularly younger generations. But the question is, how do senders achieve this in a way that is authentic and credible? And how do brands establish the right tone and strike a balance between promoting their products and showcasing their corporate ethos? And we have someone perfectly capable of talking about this with us today. Right, Guy?
Guy Hanson – 00:01:07:
It is such a pleasure to be able to welcome Kate Barrett to Email After Hours. Now, Kate and I go back years. We’ve worked together, we’ve been to industry events together, we’ve drank and partied together. Right, Kate? But before I steal all of your thunder, would you like to do a quick introduction and tell our audience who you are?
Kate Barrett – 00:01:30
Sure. Thank you, Guy. Yes. We’ll keep all of the partying on the down low. I’m Kate Barrett, the founder of eFocus Marketing, and we are an email marketing agency, helping brands to use the channel more intelligently. I’m also the author of the best-selling book E-Telligence: Email Marketing Isn’t Dead, the Way You’re Using It Is, and the full word of that book was actually written by Guy Hanson.
Danielle Gallant – 00:01:55:
You’re both in it together. We can see you’re conspirators.
Guy Hanson – 00:02:00:
It’s a fantastic book. I mean, I have to say to our audience, if you haven’t read it, get yourself a copy. It is just chock full of great tips and practical advice for email marketers. So grab a copy now. Kate, we joke, but I mean, we go back probably more than 15 years since we first met. And I think when we did first meet, the world of email was a very different place. I mean, it was almost like the wild west of marketing. So give us your take on it, how’s email changed over all that time.
Kate Barrett – 00:02:27:
Yeah, well, I think what’s really interesting and actually hooking back into when we first met, the company that I worked for straight out of university was actually a B2C lead generation company. You certainly don’t get those very often anymore. So it was all about competitions and getting people to sign up and then sending third party mailings out to them. So for me, and then working with you guys RESP at the time, it was really a baptism of fire. And I think if you can make that work, you can make anything work. And for me, that’s where it really connects into the difference, moving very much from let’s just gather as much data as we can. It doesn’t matter where it’s coming from, it doesn’t matter the quality, we’ve just got to send as much as possible and send volume. For most companies, I won’t say all, but for most companies that’s the biggest shift that has moved forward. And certainly Post GDPR, all of the best practice that we would put in place and say to do a lot of that became the law of what you need to do in order to handle that data and communicate with your customers. So I think that quality of data, thinking more about how we’re using it, what we know about our audience, and then connecting that in now as to how we can use that to be empathetic and deliver the right message to the right person at the right time in the right way for them.
Danielle Gallant – 00:03:53:
You’ve given me a perfect segue with that, Kate, to what we’re here to talk about today, which is just more and more specific beliefs and values or maybe staying out of the conversation.
Kate Barrett – 00:04:04:
Yeah, I think at the first stage we’ve seen it from a data side. So again, particularly Post GDPR, a lot less of those third party sign ups or if you have them, they have to be very specific, even if it’s within the same umbrella brand that you’re operating. So I think we’ve got a lot more transparency there, I think, in terms of empathy and values and communicating that to your audience, if that is your brand and your overall brand tone and way that you communicate yes. If you suddenly switch from what you’ve been doing and you’ve been very serious and you all of a sudden make a shift to something else, it might not be right for your audience. They might have that jarring effect. So I think, yes, we need to be empathetic, but the way in which we do that changes depending on who you are, what your business is, what your brand is, and who your audience are most importantly. So yes, but be careful with it.
Guy Hanson – 00:05:02:
So let’s dig into this a little bit. I mean, it’s great talking about empathy, but there are some specific tactics which you can use in your communications to your customers and subscribers, which are practical demonstrations of empathy, if you will. And one which immediately comes to mind, and I know you’re a big fan of it, is the idea of using snooze emails for key marketing events. Why are they so effective and what’s good about them?
Kate Barrett – 00:05:30:
It gives your customers, your subscribers back control over what they’re receiving from you so that you can make sure it’s right for them. And certainly something that we recommend to our clients, Guy, I know that you recommend it, is having those snooze emails for events that have an emotional connection. Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, we’re actually starting to think about our numbers on our list as people and what they may or may not want, what might make them sad or make them happy, all of those feelings. What’s really interesting, though, this year is that for all of us as consultants that have been saying for the last couple of years, we’ve got to get more empathetic, we’ve got to treat them as people. All of a sudden, this year there’s been an influx. And I literally looked at my inbox yesterday of, do you want to unsubscribe from Mother’s Day emails? Now, the issue that we’ve now got is that that’s actually extending the advertising period for Mother’s Day. It’s almost calling it out even more and now causing a problem where two weeks before the marketing would start, we’re getting a load of emails saying, do you want to unsubscribe from Mother’s Day? So I think that if you’re the first to do it, doing that individual email, that worked. It worked for Bloom and Wild when they were one of the first to do it, that’s great. But now it’s becoming more mainstream. We need to adapt how we’re doing it. We need to have empathy in the way that we’re now implementing it. Maybe it’s a more subtle just before your footer, you have a call out for it for a couple of weeks before Mother’s Day. So anyone engaging with those emails will see it. If people haven’t engaged with your emails during that time, maybe that’s when you send the individual, would you like to opt out? But again, dig deeper, understand your audience. So snooze emails love them. They give back control, they show that you care and you’re thinking about your audience. But we’ve now got to think about the empathetic way in which we deliver the empathy of allowing them to do that.
Danielle Gallant – 00:07:34:
I love that. It’s a really great point, right? Because if you are relentlessly asking, it can almost come off as insincere too, right? So even maybe at the beginning of the year, promoting your preference center, offering the opportunity at the outset, but leading away from that is the reality that brands have targets to hit. There is revenue associated with a lot of these campaigns, especially when I’ve been working with clients where it is relevant. Right. They do want to hit that balance between commercialism and empathy, but often they have to make the case to the higher ups or their executives about some of these empathetic measures that might seem at odds with those revenue goals. Is that something that you have encountered with your clients as well?
Kate Barrett – 00:08:20:
Yeah, definitely. And I think this comes back to not very sexy, but we can make it sexy. But data in two ways. Having a look at what has happened with those emails, what the results are of what you’re sending out and using that, but understanding what are those results that you’re actually looking at. Because if you’re sending out an empathetic email, the chances are that that one email isn’t going to drive a whole load of clicks. It’s not going to drive a million pounds or a million dollars in revenue and that’s not the point of it. So putting a conversion metric against that as a KPI doesn’t work even at a basic level. So we need to start thinking about those kind of full funnel metrics, as I like to call them. So from right there in the email, what’s happening? How are people engaging, looking at read rate, looking at click rate, if you have a call to action in there, if not, read rate is going to tell you how long they stayed in your email, did they read all of your content? Connect the right KPI at the right level for that campaign. So we have to think about the holistic impact as well as the direct email impact on what we’re doing and building that brand loyalty, building that community is something that at the moment is really important. And if we just sell, sell, sell, without any context to it, without building that community around that we’re using, how we’re connecting together, if there’s something that’s sustainable about our business or something that does speak to a specific audience and have a specific benefit, hook into that, but do it in a helpful, interesting way. And then the other side of the data is you’ve got your KPIs, you’ve got what’s happening in your email and then there’s the other side, the strategic side of who are your audience, what’s your data telling you, what are they engaging with, what are they not engaging with? We’ve got to listen to the data that we have about our audience and also the wider market. What do they need? At the moment, they’re worried about recession, they’re worried about being able to put food on the table. So how can we help them? Yes offers, but it could be helping them more with how they do that research, connecting them to your brand, your story, what you mean, how you’re helping in the world, whatever that is for your brand. So KPIs and analysis, but also who is your audience, what data have you got about them, what do you know and connect that together?
Guy Hanson – 00:10:59:
That’s absolutely right. And I think you talked about the importance of tone of voice. That kind of leads into my next question because I think when you talk about empathy, empathy goes hand in hand with authenticity and credibility. And when you get an email going, hey Kate, we really care about you, your immediate response and perhaps your slightly cynical response is really prove it. So it kind of begs the question, how do senders ensure that the empathy is viewed as being sincere, i.e. that it’s read as we genuinely care about you and we really want to help, versus we’re faking it so we can make some more money out of you?
Kate Barrett – 00:11:41:
Yeah, the first thing that I would say is, actions speak louder than words. Generally, actions speak louder than words. So even from a basic level, if you’re collecting a piece of data on sign up and they’re not using it to personalize your content from that very first email, that’s already proving that you’re not listening to them, that you don’t respect them. If somebody signed up to your email list and they come onto your website and they’re still seeing your pop up saying, sign up to our email list, or if they want to download a resource or sign up for an event or whatever it is, they have to fill out the form again. All of those actions are showing your audience you don’t care. So then when it comes to looking at tone of voice and what you’re saying in your emails, if you haven’t got that bit right, you’ve already got a disconnect and they’re already going, well, why should I believe you? What you’re sending me isn’t relevant to me. I’ve given you this information, you’re not using it. That data is valuable, and they’ve given you permission. So I think we need to connect together those actions in order to then say, okay, how do we then present this to our audience? And again, going back to our data within our audience, you’re going to have different segments. You might have different countries that need different tones of voice and different information. You might just have different levels of persona within your audience. Perhaps someone who’s never bought whatever it is that you’re offering before versus somebody who’s bought it lots of times, perhaps with other brands. So we’ve got to think about all of those elements before we can connect an empathetic tone of voice that makes sense for them.
Danielle Gallant – 00:13:26:
I agree. Actions speak louder than words. And certainly, something we see really commonly in the email channel when there’s an apology that should be issued is an Oops email, or what we’ve called an Oops email. This is when a sender has made a mistake that may unintentionally frustrate or offend consumers, and they’re becoming more popular too, just like those Snooze options. Any advice for senders to get these apologies right? Or maybe anything that they should avoid?
Kate Barrett – 00:13:58:
Guy, I remember sitting in meetings with you probably 8, 9, 10 years ago talking about this. And the thing is, they usually get higher open rates, at least they do, than normal emails. However, is that the KPI that we’re going for? We’ve got to think about those full-funnel metrics and where we’re driving people to. And I also think that if you use them in the wrong context, if you use them at the wrong time purely to try and do that, to trick the opens, again, we’re not going back to being genuine. We’re not going back to being authentic. Actions speak louder than words. You’re trying to trick somebody into opening your email. They’re going to have a much lower propensity to actually click through and do anything at that point anyway because there’s then a disconnect between what they’re seeing in the inbox and what they’re going into. So I think that you’ve got to have that connection. That would definitely be my standpoint on it.
Guy Hanson – 00:14:58:
I agree. So we’ve talked about where empathy has some really strong use cases when you’re communicating with customers who might be financially distressed or emotionally vulnerable, but there’s other ways that can be used as well. I mean, for me, I think about as we go into the festive season, and a lot of people are just under stress because they’ve got 25 different family members to buy the perfect present for, and the whole family is going to descend on them on Christmas Day. And what the hell are we going to cook for them? And you see brands that do what I call inspiration emails, it’s like, hey, we get it and here’s some brilliant ideas for all those presents. So here’s like the perfect recipe for an extended family gathering. And that’s empathy too, isn’t it? And any other tactics which sort of cross your mind in a similar vein in terms of other ways that empathy can be employed as part of a good email strategy.
Kate Barrett – 00:15:53:
Yeah, I think, again, it’s understanding your audience and what they need. It’s being able to be helpful, valuable, interesting, relevant, comes back to looking at your data, what are they telling you, what do they need? But I think definitely in terms of those messages, whether you’re B2B or B2C, you can hook in that help, that information, that authority building, that community building. I think connecting people into your other channels as well, connecting over to social media. Come and join the conversation, share with us. I think that’s part of empathy building that community, connecting people together that certainly brands can do nowadays. One other way that I think brands can do this is definitely within kind of welcome, nurture, onboarding series. This is a great place to start with that. Or if somebody hasn’t made a purchase from you, let’s say they sign up and within six months they haven’t made a purchase from you, reinforce it, bring that back in, help to build that USP that you have, that no one else has. So I think definitely welcome onboarding, that’s a great place to connect your values, what you stand for. If you support a certain charity, for example, as long as it connects in with your branding at a higher level, then start bringing it into those communications and being helpful.
Danielle Gallant – 00:17:18:
I mean, I think about every three minutes we’ve said data, data quality, right? And it’s true, there’s no way around it, right? And part of what comes from the data you collect is personalization, right? So making sure that, especially if you’re trying to communicate empathy, there might be segments of your audience that need to hear something that other segments maybe don’t. So what is the role of personalization in thoughtful, empathetic email communications?
Kate Barrett – 00:17:48:
Massive. Absolutely massive. So we need to be using the data that they’re telling us on sign-up forms in preference centers, but also looking at email behavior, looking at website behavior. If we can bring in information about what they’re doing in other channels and have more of an omnichannel view of it, recognizing what they’ve done in another channel over here, that’s personalization, it’s connecting all of those points together. So I think it is massively, massively important. And where we’re at now, people don’t want generic things that aren’t for them, they want those targeted messages. However, another warning for brands, but another way you need to think about this in an empathetic way is what are the top and bottom levels of your personalization? So, for example, I regularly use one from a well known car brand. I won’t say who it is on here, but had sent out an email saying you’ve taken zero rides this year. Okay, so that’s the bottom level with your personalization. Put some dynamic content in or exclude them from that email and send them another one. If they’re under a certain number of rides taken with the business, encourage them to come back, do some reactivation on them, get them back as a customer. But also the other level, if I see that I have taken 620 rides in, I was almost going to say the company name there in brand name of the car, over a year, I might look at that and go, whoa, I’m taking far too many taxis here, I need to do something about it. So you might not want to call out that higher level in the same way. So again, when you’re doing personalization, you’ve got to think about the humans behind it. And even at that level, what are the top and the bottoms that you might want to deal with in a different way?
Danielle Gallant – 00:19:41:
I just have to say that’s me. You’re talking about me there because I was ordering some food last night and the thing popped up that was like, you’re this sushi restaurant, like top, and I was like, okay, going to close it out, I can’t do it. It’s so embarrassing. But also the blank field. I see this with a lot of cosmetic companies when they send a milestone email where those first couple of content blocks are dedicated to dynamic content. However, if the dynamic field is zero, maybe we don’t want to share that. So love those examples, Kate. Exactly.
Kate Barrett – 00:20:14:
Absolutely.
Guy Hanson – 00:20:17:
This has been such a good conversation and you’ve crammed like a whole book’s worth of tips and tricks about great ways to deploy empathy. And I really feel like we could probably carry on the conversation all day. We do like to finish up our sessions with a question that’s a little bit off pieced, sort of not related to the main topic of the day, especially for you, Kate, because, listen, I mean, you’re as much of an email geek as myself and Danielle. We know that you take a huge interest in the marketing emails that you receive personally, and you’re probably like a little bit judgmental and critical about them, same as we are. So putting you on the spot.
Kate Barrett – 00:20:56:
Okay.
Guy Hanson – 00:20:57:
What’s the worst marketing email you’ve seen lately?
Kate Barrett – 00:21:01:
Okay, I don’t think there’s one specifically because there’s always something about pretty much every email I receive that bugs me or that I would change. Okay, so two tactical elements. I looked in my inbox the other day, and there were two brands that were using all capital letters in the subject line. That’s just very silly, bang shelting, that’s a no. Any forward, anything like that in a subject line. Big no. Emails that are all images, so then they don’t load. That’s a bugbearer of mine. And when I see that, it makes me cringe. And I think strategically, I saw a brand do this actually last week that I signed up for A, it was very hard to find their sign up form on the website just to get onto their emails unless you were going through the purchase process. That was frustrating. And then when I did find a way to get onto the sign up form, there was a simple welcome email that just said thank you, and then kind of left me there. And then straight away next day, bang into sales emails. No onboarding, no empathy, no value, no relationship building alongside that sales. So, yeah, that’s something I see quite often and something I’ve seen very recently that I would say is a bad example generally, but particularly for empathy as well.
Danielle Gallant – 00:22:20:
Another one, just in case, but to twist it right instead of what’s the worst email you’ve seen lately? And to bring it back to our theme or topic for today, what’s an excellent example you’ve seen of brands executing empathy and authenticity in their marketing communications?
Kate Barrett – 00:22:37:
That’s a good one. I would say kudos to all of the brands who have filled up my inbox this year with the opt out for Mother’s Day because I’ve seen a lot more brands doing it. Obviously, we do need to think a little bit deeper about that now, but, yeah, I’d say kudos to brands who are thinking about their audience and thinking about the human side of them. So I’m going to call out the Mother’s Day emails.
Danielle Gallant – 00:23:01:
I work with a client who tested this, not for Mother’s Day, but for Father’s Day last year, and they had a pretty significant response. I think there were 30,000 subscribers that opted out just of Father’s Day communications. And then their research indicated that those subscribers were more engaged with marketing communications or promotional messages following that. So I agree with you.
Kate Barrett – 00:23:24:
It’s all about loyalty, building loyalty, treating people as people. And loyalty in today’s market is so important and so valuable. And we’ve got to work on that retention of our clients, so putting them first and putting them at the heart of everything is really important.
Guy Hanson – 00:23:41:
So good. Kate Barrett, it’s been such a pleasure having you join myself and Danielle on Email After Hours today.
Kate Barrett – 00:23:48:
Thank you for having me.
Guy Hanson – 00:23:49:
I think we’ll have to get you back at some stage. I feel like there’s enough material for you to write your next book after today’s conversation. But for our listeners, we’ll be back again in another two weeks’ time. Join us then. Be sure to tune in next time and hit subscribe so you don’t miss any future episodes.
Danielle Gallant – 00:24:11:
To all you sleepless senders out there. Thank you for joining us after hours and see you next time.
