The 12 (email) myths of Christmas

FIRST PUBLISHED ON PHRASEE.CO

On 25 December this year, a large man in a red suit with white fur trim will fly around the world in a sleigh pulled by eight magic reindeer. This man will sneak into billions of homes in a single night and load each one of them up with presents (all the presents were made by elves, BTW). He will do all of this without making a sound or being seen by anyone. Oh, and he’s also been doing this every year on the exact same day since the beginning of time. 

Yes, it’s myth season. A magical time when we fill our children’s heads with utter nonsense to make Christmas Day the premiere event on their collective annual calendars.  

Myths like these can be helpful. They fill our homes with joy, delight our progeny to no end, and give parents around the world the perfect opportunity to offer empirical evidence of the many benefits of good behavior (good behavior = good presents). 

Other myths are far less helpful, particularly those perpetuated within the common consciousness of the email marketing community. In the email game, where we don’t have the considerable benefits of magic reindeer and helpful elves at our disposal, they can actually be quite harmful to the crucial quest of accomplishing our marketing goals.   

So, much like many of our parents had to do at a certain point in our lives, we’ve decided to dispel a few of email marketing’s most enduring myths this holiday season. It is our hope that our revelations will result in far fewer tears.  

Now, let’s have a look under the tree and unwrap the email marketing truths Santa has left for us. 

Myth 1: Email is dead (or dying).

The myth: New user interfaces, social media platforms, and messaging services have made the email channel obsolete, and people will stop using it altogether in the near future, thus rendering email marketing completely useless. 

The gift of truth: For every dollar a brand invests in email marketing, it receives 42 dollars in return, according to Litmus data. Despite the doom and gloom predictions that have plagued the email channel for the past decade or so, it remains a key revenue generating channel for many brands. Virgin Holidays, for example, indicates that (with a little help from Phrasee) the brand’s email revenues have actually increased in recent years to the tune of “millions of dollars” in increased email marketing revenue. 

Myth 2: An email’s subject line is the primary reason subscribers decide to open your email.

The myth: A good email subject line always means more opens.

The gift of truth: Optimized email subject line copy is a crucial element in subscribers’ decisions about opening/ignoring a marketing email. However, data compiled by SuperOffice has shown that it is actually the second most important factor in this ROI-critical decision (47% of people open an email based on subject line). In truth, the same data showed that 69% of email users credit the sender name (or “from name”) as the primary driver in their email opening decisions. In reality, both a positive perception of your brand’s sender name AND effective subject line language are of crucial importance in driving robust open rates.

Myth 3: Certain keywords alone make emails go straight to the junk folder.

The myth: Words you consider to be spammy effect deliverability.

The gift of truth: Let us be clear on this point: there are DEFINITELY some words that should never be used in an email subject line or anywhere else for that matter (hint: if you wouldn’t say it to your mother, don’t say it in an email). Spam filters use advanced machine learning technology to identify junk mail. While individual words are factors, these words alone are not determining factors. A variety of other criteria such as subject lines, sender name, historical engagement rates and so on combine to trigger spam filters. So, a subject line like “Free viagra delivered by Britney Spears” will most certainly be flagged as spam but mentioning the word “free” in a line won’t necessarily.

Myth 4: Click-through rate is the most important email marketing metric brands should test and optimize for.

The myth: All email campaigns should be optimized toward click-through rates, because that’s where the money is.

The gift of truth: A campaign’s click-through rate is extremely important. After all, driving customers down the path to purchase is the ultimate goal of every email marketing campaign. However, in subject line multivariate testing, open rates generate much more robust and useful data for predicting how a campaign will perform in many cases. This is because open rate is correlated with other performance metrics such as click-through rate and conversions. Further along subscribers’ journeys after they open an email, the sample sizes get smaller and performance data becomes less reliable. Thus, optimizing a campaign toward open rate is a much better approach than optimizing towards clicks-through rate.

Myth 5: The more emails you send, the more you annoy recipients.

The myth: If sending three emails per week generates $100 in revenue, it stands to reason that sending six emails per week will generate $200 in revenue. Therefore, sending more emails is always the best strategy.

The gift of truth: Campaign Monitor reports that 45.8% of email subscribers who have flagged a marketing email as “spam” did so because that brand “emailed too often”. Email frequency is much debated but the important thing to consider is the relevancy of the content within those emails. If you are a valued brand that respects the relationship it has with subscribers, increasing the frequency of the emails you send won’t necessarily damage the brand-subscriber relationship.

Myth 6: Including an emoji/offer/first name etc. in a subject line always boosts results. 

The myth: If you want better email subject line performance, add in an emoji, a specific offer, or a subscriber’s name and watch the increased opens roll in. 

Emojis, offers (i.e. 50% off!), and subscriber names work… sometimes. Modern digital audiences are fickle, and their tastes and preferences change all the time. That’s why an ongoing, robust multivariate testing strategy is so important to email subject line success. Every brand should be experimenting with different language variants, but without scientifically sound methodologies in place to allow them to learn from their results, such tests will accomplish little and show diminishing returns over time. The good news is that Phrasee’s deep learning engine can do all of this at scale for any brand.   

Myth 7: The best time to send your email is on Tuesday at 10 a.m.

The myth: There is an optimal day/time to send marketing emails, so you should always send your emails then.

The gift of truth: There are dozens of blog posts out there that tell us that X time on X day of the week is the optimal moment to launch our latest email marketing campaign. The thing is, though, each one says that a different day/time is the best. How can this be? There are two reasons. 1) The data used to determine optimal send time may not be of a scale sufficient to determine this definitively, leaving the resulting insights open to random variance. 2) Every brand, and every audience, is different. That’s why testing such things at scale on your brand’s own unique audience is the only sound way to learn about how/when/where your subscribers interact with your brand’s emails.

Myth 8: Nobody checks their email when on the toilet.

The myth: The best time to get people to read emails is when they’re at their desk at work, sitting on their couch at home or using their laptop.

The gift of truth: In a survey among 940 Americans about their smartphone consumption habits, 38.7% of respondents said they check their email on the toilet. And due to a little thing called social desirability bias, we believe the percentage of people who do this is actually much larger. So, the next time you check your inbox on the porcelain throne, don’t think you are alone. This is the dirty secret of the modern age.

Myth 9: Short subject lines produce better results.  

The myth: There is an optimal email subject line length, therefore all your subject lines should be exactly that long.  

The gift of truth: In the wild, short subject lines can perform well and longer subject lines can perform well. The reason so many people like to shout about “optimal” email subject line length is because it is easy to measure. Subject line length is but one element of many that can impact email subject line performance. In isolation, however, the length of a subject doesn’t make a subject line good or bad, nor does it have a statistically significant effect on how it will perform. 

Myth 10: What works this week will work next week.

The myth: A subject line structure that performs well on your audience will continue to do so in future campaigns. 

The gift of truth: Using similar language from campaign to campaign results in something we at Phrasee like to call “subject line performance decay”. Put simply, as a brand uses the same (or similar) subject line language in several campaigns, the impact of that language (measured by open rate) declines over time. By contrast, our data has shown that using diverse language and regularly multivariate testing subject lines results in an average open rate uptick of between 5% to 10% per campaign.

Myth 11: Anything that boosts the performance of your next campaign is worth doing. 

The myth: If you can increase KPIs for your next campaign with high-pressure or dishonest language and other spurious tactics, you should go ahead and do it.

The gift of truth: There is no shortage of tricks and sneaky tactics that a brand can use to increase email marketing performance over the short term. However, measured over time, such tactics result in little more than loss of brand value, sender reputation damage, and higher unsubscribe rates. Targeting negative emotions such as guilt, fear, and anxiety in your brand’s audience is not a sustainable email marketing strategy. Taking the long view and protecting the valuable relationships you’ve built with your subscribers is of infinitely more importance than a short-term uplift in opens and clicks.

Myth 12: AI-powered copywriting can’t write email marketing language in your brand's voice effectively.

The myth: AI-powered copywriting sounds robotic and won’t engage human consumers effectively. 

The gift of truth: There are plenty of examples of amusingly bad AI- written copy, nonsensical AI-generated stories, and terrible AI-composed song lyrics out there. However, these do not reflect the current capabilities of the AI deep learning technologies available today. Here at Phrasee, our AI-powered copywriting technology has been generating short-form copywriting that is indistinguishable from copy written by humans (and performs better in 95% of cases!) for quite some time. Our AI is capable of writing copy in your brand’s unique voice and accurately predicting which language will perform most effectively on your brand’s unique audience. 

A return to ethics

FIRST PUBLISHED ON phrasee.co

The North Face’s recent Wikipedia hijacking shows that there is still a lack of understanding of a basic tenet in digital marketing: just because you can do it, doesn’t mean you should.  

Marketers have always tried to game the system. Think back to the days of black hat SEO tactics, involving techniques like keyword stuffing, cloaking and private link networks, used to gain higher site rankings in search results.  

We’re still seeing unethical marketing practices if recent attempts to top Google’s image search results are anything to go by. And amidst a stark political climate and a growing wave of tech criticism, a flush of scandals have occurred, the most famous of which being none other than the Facebook and Cambridge Analytica data breach.  

But what is the difference between what happened with Cambridge Analytica and something like Amazon recommendations gone wrong, for example? This is a question addressed by Professor David Weinberger, an American technologist and author. He asks if the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which was characterized as taking personal agency and autonomy against people’s personal will, was really all that different to what digital marketing does today. After all, the practices used by Cambridge Analytica and digital marketing are alike in that they are both data-driven, they target users and they trigger behavior.  

The difference between them, he argues, comes down to this: the misalignment of interests. With Amazon recommendations, users are shown what influenced the recommendations – the user’s data – and are allowed to remove the sources of data. Amazon acknowledges agency, is transparent about how it works and gives some control to the user. The example is also low value and represents a shared interest between users and Amazon: users provide their data in exchange for better and more personalized product recommendations.  

With Cambridge Analytica, on the other hand, there was no shared interest, there was no personal agency, control or transparency and the stakes were high.  

The capabilities of technology and marketing today mean that we need to learn about the alignment of business and customer interests. Don’t do it just because you can. Don’t do it just because you think it’s good for your business. Only do it if you can make both your business better and your customers feel better.   

That’s why Phrasee launched Emotions Matter, a campaign that is part of our mission to remove fear, anxiety and doubt from marketing. In 2019, marketers are still actively encouraging the use of negative emotions to sell more and, as an industry, we need to do better.  

As part of the second phase of the campaign, Phrasee carried out an online survey with Vitreous World into attitudes towards unethical marketing among consumers and marketers. Over 4,000 consumers and 400 marketers split evenly across the UK and the US were surveyed and the results really do prove that ethical marketing is a no-brainer. 

The research shows that unethical marketing not only leads to the erosion of trust for a brand, but it’s also bad for business. According to the findings, 68% of consumers say that they would not buy from a brand that used negative emotions in its marketing. Furthermore, 69% of consumers say they would buy more from a brand over time that used positive marketing.  

Phrasee calls this impact that marketing and communicating to customers in an ethical and responsible way has on a business Return on Ethics (ROE). Brands wanting to boost sales, customer loyalty and team morale should swap pressure for positivity and put ROE at the top of their priority lists.   

Responsibility and good practice in marketing = better business results.  

Stay human and reap the rewards.  

Minding the digital skills gap: top tips for aspiring modern marketers

First published on econsultancy.com

At Marketing Week Live I listened to panellists speak about the skills required for today’s modern marketer and their advice for career progression. 

In today’s business landscape we are witnessing a transforming job market. How are marketing roles and responsibilities going to change and develop in the future? How does the human element of brand building evolve in a world of emerging technology?

These are some of the questions that concern us as modern marketers grappling with a fast-moving and uncertain environment.

Data from The Marketing Society shows that the average tenure of CMOs in the UK stands at just 18 months. All this means that marketers are having to work even harder to prove their worth to the board. With zero-based budgeting and increasing pressure to prove ROI on marketing spend now commonplace, the onus is on marketers to show how marketing affects the business bottom line and how it ultimately drives a business forward.

A shift in how marketing operates means that finding and nurturing the right talent is often difficult.

Panellists Julia Porter (Origin Housing), Liz Curry (Comic Relief) and Luis Navarrete Gomez (Lego) reflected on this issue at Marketing Week Live and spoke about the challenges and opportunities of the skills gap for the modern marketer.

Here are some of their top tips for aspiring marketers.

Data is your friend

Data is now a central part of marketing for the future, which means that marketers need to be comfortable utilizing it. Creativity is no longer enough; understanding data is essential if a marketer wants to develop their career.

Don’t lose focus on what’s important

Functional skills such as ecommerce and CRM as well as channels skills such as programmatic and social were cited as examples of the type of know-how now in demand.

That being said, while data literacy and a basic knowledge of technology is important, the tech revolution has perhaps resulted in marketers losing sight of what’s really important: the customer.

Porter (Origin Housing) admitted that marketing to people has become a bit frenetic. Instead, marketers must focus on how data can be used to add value and provide a better customer experience.

A hybrid mix of skills

The expectation for marketers to embrace both innovation and data analysis reflects a new reality: marketers need both left and right brains; a competency with numbers but also a creative mindset. In actuality, a combination of skills is essential for marketers to truly progress in their careers.

This notion can be extended to the need for marketers to possess both functional and soft skills. Proactivity, adaptability and leadership are increasingly valued. As professionals with more technical backgrounds continue to join the ranks of marketing and the requirement of proving ROI to the board continues to increase, stakeholder management, aligning people with business goals and team building are important capabilities for the modern marketer.

Curiosity never killed the cat

So while recruiting for attitude and behaviour is considered just as important as hiring for skills and qualifications, panellists were in agreement that curiosity is one sought-after characteristic in the search for marketing talent.

With rapid technological advancements demanding more continuous links between education and employment, lifelong learning is an imperative. Reading to keep abreast of the industry, the rising popularity of MOOCs and online classrooms and joining the gig economy are some of the ways in which marketers are taking ownership of their learning and shaping their own career and personal development.

Finally…

Panellists offered some other practical tips on staying ahead in the era of modern marketing and how to improve knowledge and skills.

Curry spoke of the benefits of making contacts with people who are at the same level as you in their career and mentioned the data council forum of which she is a member. Networking with peers in such forums is a valuable means of exchanging information and learning from one another.

Finding a mentor was also referred to as a useful step towards boosting professional development. Mentoring schemes are provided by professional bodies such as the Chartered Institute of Marketing, for example. The Marketing Academy also provides one-to-one mentoring and executive coaching from CMOs through its UK Scholarship Programme.

But Curry also emphasised the importance of being clear about what it is that you enjoy doing. There’s no point trying to make yourself a data scientist if you hate maths or statistics. It’s important to understand what an organisation needs as well as what you need.

Deciding what you are interested in and building a portfolio of skills around that is a sensible approach to maximising opportunities and getting the most out of your career.