Tim’s Tips...

Facebook News Feed  has done email marketing a big favor by helping business owners realize that they are building on someone else’s turf and it is better to build on your own turf

Pretty emails aren’t always the answer. It pays to write better copy

If you can test your emails, that’s great, but it takes some numbers to do it effectively

“Offers” make a big difference to email open rates and click-throughs, so test those too.

Frequency, how often you send an email to your list matters too and is context specific

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FACEBOOK NEWS FEED HAS DONE EMAIL MARKETING A BIG FAVOR

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FACEBOOK NEWS FEED

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Doug: Welcome back, listeners, to another episode of Real Marketing Real Fast. Today I've got a guest joining me from across the waters. He's ... I guess the closest major city would be London. I've got Tim Watson. Tim operates a company called Zettasphere. We are connected through an international group called Only Influencers and that group is the world's leading community of email marketing professionals.

Tim is an email marketing consultant who has over 14 years as a specialist in email marketing, experience working with blue chip brands mainly in the US and the UK. In addition to strategic consulting services, Tim is also an email marketing trainer and frequently speaks at industry events. He's an active blogger, so you'll want to check out his website, and he doesn't just report on the trends but he provides thought leadership on the opportunities and the challenges that we're currently facing in the industry.

As well, he's a regular contributor to the DMA Email Council and Smart Insight blogs as well as a guest blogger for other marketing sites. He is an elected member of the UK DNA Email Council, supporting the email marketing industries, and chairs Legal Best Practices Hub of the Email Council, authoring and reviewing DNA whitepapers and best practices.

Tim spends 100% of his time focused on email with over 12 years experience in email marketing and he's very knowledgeable and I'd like to welcome Tim to the Real Marketing Real Fast Podcast today.

Tim Watson: Hey, Doug. Thanks very much for the intro.

Doug: We both share a similar passion and obviously a similar group. We're excited about email and so let's get into it. Do you want to share with our listeners a tactic or a major success or something that you've found has worked really well for yourself and/or your clients using email?

Tim Watson: Yeah, sure. It's that they happen on an almost ongoing basis but just recently an interesting one, and it's a simple tactic, and this was for a B-to-B client, in this particular case. I cover a lot of B-to-B and B-to-C. They had been putting out some emails. They hadn't really had a great deal of response from them, to some of their prospect bases.

They came to me and I had a look at what they were doing and rejigged the campaign. Relatively simple, actually. Most of it was switching the emails from being kind of like an advertising graphical flyer and changing it into a plain text, personal outreach type email with some really nice engaging copy. What went from virtually zero response was to a 5% reply rate on the campaign so they were extremely happy with that, needless to say.

It's playing to the strength of email as being a communication mechanism between people rather than just having something which looks like a graphical flyer and people go, "What's this?" and ignore it.

Doug: It's interesting you mention that because there's always that conflict. I was working on a campaign for a client and he said, "Where're all the images,