Name: Email Academy: Ask us anything - live Q&A with Mailjet’s experts
Uploaded: 2025-03-19T16:16:04.006Z
Duration: 1 h 1 min 8 s
Description: Email Academy: Ask us anything - live Q&A with Mailjet’s experts

Transcript for "Email Academy: Ask us anything - live Q&A with Mailjet’s experts": Hey. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Good afternoon. Good evening. My name is Thomas Tiberk, Canary, the one, the only. The rest are imitators. And this morning, we are back from spring break. I'm gonna call it spring break because a lot of that's going on in The States right now. So people are taking the week off, coming back, lovely and refreshed. And we got some more email academy stuff coming to you live this morning. So we're super excited about that. So today is the ask us anything live q and a with Mailjet's experts, and my experts are here. My two favorite people in the email marketing world that I get to work with all the time, ladies and gentlemen. Natalie Lynch, the senior product manager over at Century Mailjet. Hey o, Natalie. What's going on this morning? Not a whole lot. What are you up, sir? Feeling pretty caffeinated. So I keep throwing in extra heyos. So we're gonna have a whole lot of heyos this morning. So just keeping it lively. Keeping it lively. And you probably receive her emails in your inbox all the time. Some of the favorite emails to ever receive. Ladies and gentlemen, I present you Julia Ritter, senior email marketing manager from Century Mailj. Hey, Julia. How's it going? Hey, yo. It's going good. We're ready to do this. Good. Love it. Love it. Love it. And, the bird is the word. I heard, we may have a special guest later on, so I'll keep that quiet until that person shows up. So let's see who that person is gonna be. So, ladies and gentlemen, I'm gonna go ahead and let our amazing experts take it over. I'll probably be back towards the end and, to talk about some other cool stuff. So I will let y'all take it away. See you in a little bit. Yeah. See you in a little bit. Okay. So let's get started. Ask us anything. I have Q and A. So as Thomas mentioned, I'm Natalie and she is Julia. And today, we also have with us whoop, I'm clicking buttons too fast here. In the chat, some supporting actors that really we couldn't do it without. So, you're gonna see them in the chat answering your questions. Reminder to throw all of those questions that you want us to answer at the end and in the q and a tab, but a huge shout out to all of our, support in the chat and our supporting actors that make this a dream come true for all of us. So Yes. We appreciate you. Julia, what do you what what are we doing today? We're talking about a lot of things today. So we asked y'all to send in questions. You did, you really came through. So there's a few overarching themes that everyone wanted to discuss, industry trends and AI, deliverability, strategy and reporting, and a lot on email development. And luckily, we had a very lovely ask to do an email critique so stay tuned for that. Hopefully that, submitter is here so very excited to get through that. And then, we're gonna talk a little bit about, go through your Mailjet functionality questions as well. Okay. So let's figure out what's trending. Mhmm. Alright. So we had a handful of trending topics come up. Changes. What do we see for changes in DMARC in the next five years? This is a hot topic and has been for quite some time. Really, what we see changing is authentication requirements are gonna continue to become more and more increasingly strict. That means SPF and DMARC are mandatory or sorry, SPF and DKAM will be mandatory, DMARC will be increasingly mandatory. Get ahead of it now. ISPs and inbox providers are cracking down on unauthenticated senders to reduce the phishing and spam. This makes the inbox a better place for all of us. We're also seeing some regulatory and security pressures that are making authentication nonnegotiable. Again, GDPR, CCPA, that's the California Privacy Act, and CAN SPAM. So, again, we're trying to make that inbox a safe place for all of us to click when we can trust and not be put through security training every ten seconds at our organizations. And, domain reputation, surpassing IP reputation and importance for deliverability. This one is an increasing trend. We've been so used to our IP reputation being the thing that drives, part of deliverability, but we're gonna start seeing it to be more of domain reputation, which I personally think is a great thing. Many of us are sending on shared IP pools, and moving it to domain reputation really gives us the ownership over our own deliverability. So with that, I say, start doing it now. Authentication means getting it in there, setting up your SPF and your DKIM records with your registrar for your domain name, getting a business domain name if you're don't already have one, not sending from a free mail like Gmail, and then setting up the DMARC policy to p dash none, we do have documentation on this if you need assistance in figuring that whole thing out. Yeah. Yeah. Get ahead of it. Chat, actually. Yep. Look at that. They're amazing. We couldn't do it without them. Nope. And start building your domain reputation right now. Right? Focus on those engagements, that authentication. And that way, when this becomes a bigger and bigger thing, you're good to go. Mhmm. Again, it gives us more control over our individual deliverability, and and we don't have to worry about things we can't control as much as we see this go forward. So I see it as a positive thing. It takes a little bit of work upfront, and then and then we're gonna see great results from it. Yeah. I see, authentication and even regulations as a good thing, even for email senders while they're frustrating sometimes. But, Natalie, we did get a question. Are there any regulations coming that email senders should be concerned about? Yeah, I think the biggest one we see on the forefront of 2025 is the European Accessibility Act. So you'll see this referred to as EAA, and it's requiring digital accessibility for businesses that are serving EU customers. That does mean that even if you're located in The United States, if you're sending email to people in Europe, you need to be in compliance with this. Now it does follow the WCAG, so many acronyms, man, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. So it's pretty similar to that, but it will apply to your email content, your designs, and the functionality that you put in them, and they need to be accessible. So things like missing alt text on images or poor contrast will be impactful. This is fully rolling out in June of twenty twenty five. There will be a little bit of grace period. There's a lot of information online. If you Google the EAA specifically, you can see the full report on it, but it's just ensuring that our our emails that are landing on the inbox are accessible to everyone, that, you know, screen readers can read them. And, honestly, again, another great thing. This is something that has been on the web for a long time. We're seeing it become more and more mandatory, and this just means that your audience is gonna be broader. With that being said, we are definitely gonna be doing Sent Your Email will be doing a lot of things around accessibility to get you prepared and informed. So stay tuned to webinar updates that are coming for that, as well as a special episode of Emails Not Dead podcast with our very own Megan, who's an email developer that will be dropping on this topic. So it's upcoming, it's important, and it's one of those things to get ahead of. Absolutely. Yeah. Okay. So iOS 18. We got a lot of questions about this one. Yeah. A lot of people. Yeah. So, basically, the question is, is it causing a disagreement and conversions, and how can engagement be increased because of iOS 18 or in spite of it? What do you think? Yeah. Well, I think it's gonna change some things when you're when you're sending to Apple specifically, and this is gonna definitely take a look at your stats on who you're sending to, they're gonna be changing the play the preheaders with these AI summaries. Mhmm. This can be negative because they might be summarizing enough to the point where they they don't necessarily feel the need to open if it's all there. And then they're introducing the new inbox categorizations like primary, transactional, and promotional. We're all very familiar with this with the the Gmail look and feel. So that will change a little bit, and it could decrease your engagement if you don't get ahead of it and if you don't think about that when you're developing it. I will say there's still a way to optimize for this. I think optimizing your subject lines and that first line of the content to ensure that AI is really capturing your message and getting that action based summary. So something that inspires them in that summary to click to open can be utilized to your benefit. And, again, focus on personalization and in that activity to make emails really stand out and encourage those opens. So that summary really could be to your benefit if you are creating it with that in mind. Yep. Yeah. I know you're sending to iOS all the time. What are you thinking about this? I think you should pay attention to what happens after the engagement. So if clicks, what happens after they click, and pay attention to clicks more than opens. Obviously, with Apple, rolling out the last Apple update, opens up in a little unreliable. So, now it's just looking at a different, a different statistic there. Yeah. Yeah. Apple is really coming at our game, man. Mhmm. I know. I know. We just have to roll roll with the punches, I guess. Yeah. I will say Apple's kinda making the headlines on this, but, Gemini exists there there's already existing AIs and, like and I know I have it in my Gmail as well. It's not as prominently promoted, I guess, or maybe I I just don't notice it because I'm so used to it by now. But this already exists. So, just just keep that in mind that your content needs to be AI consumable now. Yep. We have to essentially write for the humans to engage, but also the AI to get our point as if it wasn't, you know, hard enough to really think of creative content. But it's just about how how does it summarize. Play the game, but don't, yeah, don't let it, like, dilute your creativity or your emails. You know? Not at all. Well, that I mean, that's a great segue actually into our next guest. It's like she knows what we're gonna talk about, guys. I didn't even plan on that to be honest with you. How can AI help or impact email marketing? So AI obviously has infiltrated all of our lives in this crazy way lately. What is it? Has it been, like, a year or two? I don't even remember when when chat Yeah. Didn't exist. Like, it just became such AI interactions became overnight, something that we did. Mhmm. But I will say it's accelerating design and content creation, enabling faster audiences. Sorry, engagement. Yep. Audience engagement. But I will say it it's not a replacement. Let's not be building emails or content with AI because I don't know about you guys. I think there's, like, a special and I I will stand on this. There's, like, a special, like, millennial sense where I can just spot AI. Like, I look at a picture, I'm like, AI. Voice, AI. I just know it. So you can tell when something is written by AI. And, sure, they're trying to improve it, improve it, but it's never gonna have the same personality or same tone. So it's a great jumping board jumping board to, like, help you kinda break through and create that content. But always refine it. Please ensure your brand voice is in there. Ensure your personality is in there. I I also it can really help with personalization and segmentation, but I'm gonna be the big scary person here and say, please do not put personal information into any AI. Do not take your contact lists and dump them into AI. No. Let's let's let's not do that. I will say you can leverage AI with your statistics on your campaign statistics and such. Those just general numbers that don't have personal information in there. AI is really good at quickly analyzing that. Challenge the ideas, make sure that what it's getting you is accurate, but it can really quickly optimize, like, in analyze those metrics for optimization and performance to help you cut out some of that work. So I think I think when used as a tool, it is an amazing help helper with email marketing with anything in life, to be honest. It's it's just, you know, like having a little personal assistant. It's just I use it for Excel functions. Oh my god. More than anything. Yeah. Honestly, I yeah. I'm a huge user of AI. I I struggle when it goes down, which is rare. I think. But it it's just it's to me, it's like having, like, it's like I don't have to bounce ideas in my head anymore. I can do it with AI. So I'm just having out loud conversations more often now. Just whatever. You're still talking to yourself but with AI. Exactly. Now I feel like there's another participant in the conversation. Okay. So yeah. Yeah. I don't think it's a foe. I think it leveraged as a tool is great. I think the more we work it into our everyday, understand how to utilize it, but utilize it ethically and utilize it correctly, it'll only boost our productivity, our engagement, our creativity. It's just it's not a replacement. Nope. Nope. Okay. K. Next up. Yeah. One click unsubscribe header requirement. So we saw this again with the the stricter regulations that were coming. There's a one click unsubscribe header requirement in the top of your emails. Mhmm. And it ensures that represent recipients can quickly one click to unsubscribe. This is a requirement that was enforced by major ISPs we saw with Google and Yahoo and Outlook. I will say someone asked how to implement it, ESPs do it. We're putting it in our headers. So when you give us when ESPs are handed the content to send your emails, we then put the header in there and are handling it. Even email developers sending through ESPs, that is handled by the ESP. You can definitely learn how to do it from a coding perspective out there on many forums, but you shouldn't need to know how to. Because if you're sending through an ESP, it's done for you. So, yeah, that's great. That's what I get. That's what you got. That's your req. We love it. Simple and easy. I think we're moving on to my favorite question that we got. Oh, yes. So what? Oh, wait. Sorry. Yeah. That was it. That was it. I missed it. Okay. So we got the best question. If email marketing were a Disney animated movie, what would it be? And would there be a difference between b to b and b to c? So naturally, Natalie and I spent too much time contemplating this. Natalie, please explain your choice. Yeah. So we split it up. I took b to c and she took b to b. I selected Dumbo, and I selected that because and you can see I don't know if you can see my annotations, but, essentially, the circus would be your customer's inbox. And then your smart email strategy is the mouse. And then personalization and data would be the feather. And then your brand strategy is Dumbo. Right? So your emails could be overlooked. They could be overseen. It's a crowded inbox. But when you lean into your unique voice and really find who you are, you utilize those tools that you have with you to optimize for engagement. You can turn what seems like a weakness into a strength and you can start soaring. That's how Dumbo learned how to fly. So, yeah, I think the moral of the story here and of Dumbo, clearly, this is what they meant. Embrace what makes you different, your brand different, so that your emails will fly directly into that inbox. Adorable. The best metaphor I've ever heard, I think, to be honest. I've never seen Dumbo, but, I do I know. I know. I wasn't a Disney kid. I'm sorry to say. I know this is gonna be hot topic. I am. I like Dumbo, man. I know. Hang on. My choice was Toy Story, obviously. I did see that one. Thank you. So I put emails reliable and fun. You can get you know? But then these new kids on the block are coming and try to threaten its reputation, threaten, you know, all of its reliability, but no. No. Everyone always comes back to email. And then you learn to work with the other channels. Not twice, as I said, to create the better experience for the user for I forget what his name is now. Andy for Just like I'm saying this movie. What's his name? On the book. To create the best experience for your user and fight against the other bad actors like Sid. So, you know, I haven't seen it first. You said you've never seen Toy Story? We're we got it. Okay. We should talk about that. We're gonna have a movie marathon at RealJai. Yeah. Sid is definitely a bad actor. Okay. Next. And thank you for whoever asked that question. We had an amazing question. I hope you're here and you got to see that. Yeah. This was a genuine question. Like, this was not something we made up. What is the most overlooked aspect of a successful email marketing strategy? And I made it a whole section. And she's like, oh, do I've got thoughts on this? We all have thoughts on this. It's deliverability is the most overlooked. Natalie, what do you think? Absolutely. And it's just you can create the perfect email. You can have the perfect brand voice. You can do everything right. But if no one's seen it, did it happen? Did it happen? If a tree falls in the woods? Yeah, this is the tree metaphor. Like if it falls but no one's there to see it, did it fall? We don't know yet. No one's answered that question. So we got a few questions about this and how around deliverability specifically. How do you improve a low sending domain reputation when sending out bulk emails? You know, and then how can I avoid the spam folder or being marked as spam? Overall, the message I wanna convey here is that everything is connected to deliverability, just like Natalie said. The quality of your list, your domain name, how often you send, how your audience engages or doesn't engage, your email design. It all goes back to email deliverability. So just keep that in mind when, you're planning out your campaigns and setting up your email strategy in general. So for, the bulk sender, make sure you're segmenting. Make sure you're monitoring your engagement. Give the people you're sending what they want. Don't send them stuff that they're not going to enjoy or that they didn't ask for because then they're gonna mark you as spam. Send consistently and regularly. So even though you're sending out these quote unquote bulk emails, you should be sending sporadically too. Like, don't just, you know, wait a month then send another bulk email. Wait a month because that looks spammy. And regularly clean your list. We, recommend at least once a quarter so that your bulk emails turn into more segmented, personalized, clean sentence. Yeah. Mhmm. I think I really like, for one, like, landing in the same filter, going back to authentication again Mhmm. Continue to be a broken record. Like Yep. ISPs are gonna flag you as spam if you're not authenticated because it's so hard to tell. But if you're authenticated, they're gonna be able to know there's a level of trust built in. Same with SeaMark. When you start building up that policy, there's just a level of trust built in because they know you have access to your DNS records for that domain to send. You gave the ESP the, authority to send in your behalf. So it's just I mean, it's like the fundamental and then engagement. I think there's so many aspects of deliverability and you can almost get overwhelmed. And I think the non bulk senders who are just, like, starting to really build it up, focus on that engagement. If you're not getting high engagement, the less people engage, the more likely ISPs are gonna assume that you're spam. Yeah. So you want engagement. Maybe that means more segmentation. Maybe that means you need to kinda rapidly change your content to find what works. But that engagement piece is so important. Like, once you authenticate and you're getting in the right folder, you then need the ticket them to engage to continuously land there. Yeah. Exactly. And Mailgun is coming out with a very new, Deliverability Academy. The first session is on Wednesday, March 26. We will be sending that, webinar landing page in the chat if you'd like to register, and we'll also, send that out afterward. But it's gonna be with, Thomas and some other deliverability experts so you can get other questions in there. And we also have a wonderful email academy from the past, and Emily and I have talked about email deliverability. So, lots of resources for you to keep diving in. Okay. Moving on to strategy and reporting. So there's a lot to cover here. We're going to I'm gonna keep this brief, keep it moving, keep it swift, like Taylor. So is it worth to send cold marketing campaigns, and how do I do it without getting block listed? My short answer for you with love is no. It is not worth to send cold marketing campaigns, and you will get blocklisted. This is going back to what Natalie just said. Authentication, the engagement. If people are not engaging with your cold emails, it because they don't know you, they don't know who you are, they don't know why you're sending them something, you're gonna get marked as spam, and then you're gonna get block listed. It's not gonna be a good look. When was the last time you answered a phone number you didn't recognize? My phone's already blocking them as junk. You know what I mean? So, like, that's gonna be you in an inbox, with love. But With love. But don't do it. Please don't do this. What is the minimum audience that need is needed to get actionable results for an AB test? At least a thousand contacts. So to get statistical significance such a tongue twister. So whether you're running a fifty fifty, split test and then everyone's getting at least one version and you're waiting to see what the, results will be. Or if you're doing a percentage test, so, like, 10%, to 101010%, and then you send the winning version out, it's up to you. But, a thousand is the starting point. What is the best way to start segmenting and cleaning my lists? I would start with using behavior. I I think that opening and clicking the last email that you sent if they've visited a web page, can't speak, if they've made a recent purchase, use their behavior to start segmenting. Also character or contact attributes. I think it's you have use your own data to, obviously, to segment and get closer to personalized campaigns, and use Mailjet validations to remove any invalid email addresses. Right, Natalie? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, when it comes to segmentation, I think a lot of it is trial and error, not necessarily in sending, but on getting in there and playing around with, like, what the audience what it creates when you segment different ways. Like, is it a small audience? Is it a big audience? Like Yep. Based on your own data, there's a lot of ways to split the pie. So I would say get in there and see what kind of segments you can create and then and see what those audiences are. And based because a lot of the segmentation, especially on Mailjet, will give you kind of the estimate of how many people within that segment would or how many people within that list would qualify. And so you can kinda kinda see that level of segmentation if it's too granular or not granular enough based on that output. Exactly. Do you think it's better to send to for the sender name to be the company name or a salesperson's name? I think you have options. I would encourage you to look at, like, what was their source of sign up? If they signed up for, like, a sales pitch or, like, to get a demo, I think salesperson at company is your way to go. If they signed up for a webinar or, a piece of content or something, I think the company name is the better route. But when in doubt, you could be Test it out? Test it out. Sorry. This actually it sparked a pretty fun conversation between us, as the group as we're doing the run because there's a lot of different ways people do it. And some, we're talking about, like, you know, we've received emails where it's just the name of the person who's emailing me. And I'm like, who is this person? I don't know who yeah. It almost feels like a cold email because I'm just like, I don't know who this I don't know who this is. Yeah. So, yeah, I think I think it depends on a lot of factors. You know? Unfortunately, everything is so industry or company specific, but, like, how recognizable is your brand? Is the person of the name you're sending? Is it someone who routinely gets emails from you and engages? Do they know your name? Do they know the company's name? So really making that best decision based on engagement and, like, and and where they come from is important because yeah. It it's it's hard when you when I just get, like, a just a name, and I'm like, I sign up for so many things. I wanna get a billion billion emails because that's what we do. And I'm just like, it was I guess I will get jump scares in my inbox because I'm so I'm planning my wedding and I signed up to a specific website, and someone will email me and say, Julia, ninety days until the day. And I thought it was one of my vendors saying they needed something. And, no, it was just like a new piece of blog content, with, like, things to think about for your wedding day. And it's like, that that is scary. I don't know who you are, Michelle. I'm sorry. Or she had the same name as my florist. So it was like, I it was very scary. Yeah. We don't need jump scares in our email. No. We don't. This is a big question. What is the best way to answer the century old question for management? Why should we invest in email? Send them to me now and we'll have a talk. Yeah. Imagine if you're different, jump up and run and demand it and throw a full tantrum until they do. Just, you know, cause is Don't take that advice. No. I have this whole letter. Don't take that advice. Email has the highest ROI of any channel. So prove this with your own campaign metrics and your ROI. Prove that your emails are created causing a difference in your marketing strategy. And, you know, advocate for what you're doing. Advocate and show them that people are engaging. People like what you're sending them. And if, you know, you're having a hard time doing that, of course, email us for, you know, more discussion. But I there's plenty of opportunity, I think, to keep investing in email. I do see. I think there's the conversation of, like, what channels to invest in and stuff. Right. Really ask them, like, who doesn't have an email? Like, okay. Some people are on social media, some people aren't here, but, like, you have to have an email to interact with the Internet. Like, it is required everywhere to sign up for, I don't know, like, online banking. It's required for purchases. Like, everyone's got an email. Some people saw the email that they created when they're, like, in middle school, and we we see really silly ones. But, like, that's everyone everyone has an email, and it feels it feels like an like, I don't wanna say it feels like it's like an old outdated technology, but that's not the case. I guess Yeah. More relevant than most communication platforms because of how utilized it is for transactional emails. So everyone's got an inbox. The majority of people have inboxes. I won't say everyone, but it's just the most consumed communication platform. Exactly. Yesterday, you referenced it as a passport to the Internet, and I completely agree with that. You need it to get anywhere. Yeah. We're gonna move on to reengagement. I'm just wanna be cautious of time, so we're gonna keep going. Any tips on how to build the best working reengagement journey? How do I use my own data to do this? So I know this sounds obvious, but I want you to consider what is disengaged, what you consider to be disengaged, And, like, if they haven't logged into an account, if they haven't made a purchase, they haven't engaged with one of your emails, something like that. And then what you want them to do to be considered reengaged. So, you know, and then regularly check-in without overwhelming. Use their past behavior and interest as a guide to, like, keep your to keep stay in touch with them, and know when enough is enough to remove them from your lists, because you don't want someone who's disengaged on your list because at that point, it's just dragging your engagement and your metrics down, which leads back to your deliverability. Right? So, I think you can consider a discount, a promo, consider, like to bring them back into your world. Consider involving other channels like social SMS. This is up to you. I think after three to four emails that they haven't engaged, again, depends on how often you're sending and how frequently, you have to find the right balance for you. But, obviously, my my advice is always to test these things. So, okay. What is the best approach to reengage industries with long buying cycles? I mean, this person gave the example of, like, travel or automotive. I immediately thought mattresses, but we'll go with automotive. Consider this like a keep in touch. You wanna be, like, in the back of their mind when they need something. So, like, anniversary emails, tips about their purchase, ask them to leave you a review or a referral promotion. While they may not need a car for another couple years, their sister might, their friend might, and you wanna be top of mind because they had such a good experience with you. So, I think include discounts when possible just to bring them back in. But I think say I bought a car, I would love to know I would love reminders of when I needed serviced. I would love reminders of, like, what kind of wax to use on the wheels or what. I've I don't know the car. I don't, you know, how to I love to say I don't know how to wash a car. But, like, you know, these things that, like, are needed and necessary, you want to, like, be their best friend, but in a not annoying way so that they Yeah. Able to do. Yep. I'm gonna start sending her information on how to wax a car. I Yeah. I mean, it's an interesting one. I it's you said mattress. I literally just searched my inbox to see if my mattress company has emailed me. They have not. They have not. No. It's interesting. Thank you. Yeah. Especially, like, it's with with travel, I think it's super easy because we're all, like, kinda wanderlusty now out here. Like, inspirational, like, based on your trip, you'd like this or, like, tell us about your feedback or I I think those there's just so many topics, like restaurants in the area and stuff like that. With cars, I think it depends on your audience. I if you send me an email on how to wash my car, I'm gonna giggle and forward it to Julia. Well, I mean not like how to wash your car, but like all of the time. Promote or something. Yeah. I get emails on my car all of the time and everything because, they're not about washing my car. Yeah. Right now. It's essentially about how do you find the the best way to educate your users post purchase to keep in mind. Because I think we all love to learn, but we're all super busy. So, like, being able to to micro learn with that engagement can be a really helpful way of keeping them engaged. I'm learning so much about Julia today, you guys. My dad will be so disappointed me when I tell him that. Okay. So how long do we wait before following up from an abandoned cart? So a study by rejoiner, and this is according to Shopify, look this up. Sending a follow-up email after one hour resulted in, an average conversion rate of 16%, and that was the highest percentage of conversion versus and then like I think a half an hour was the second best, the, waiting twenty four hours was the least least converting. So, and they also recommend like a series of, a series of abandoned carts to kind of push people back in. I left something in a cart, address and I've been getting emails every day and you know what? I'm probably gonna go buy it. So, it, cause it's just sitting there and it's like, oh, you, you don't like the subject line. You forgot this. But, you know Squeaky wheel. Squeaky wheel. If you're b two b, this might be different. It might people might need, like, approval to make a purchase. So just keep that in mind that your times might be a little bit longer, but doesn't mean you should wait. It should mean you should still keep in touch. I will say this is another one that sparked an interesting conversation when we were we were going through all of it, and we all kind of unanimously, like, don't email me right away. Don't don't email me. Right away doesn't work. It's like wait at least an hour. Because we were joking about the fact that like, you know, I've ADHD, I'll get distracted, I'll walk away and then like ten seconds later I'm like, oh my gosh, come on. Like, I just left the tab open. I forgot that sale is going on. Go back. But, yeah, I I I would say, like, that the hour mark makes total sense. I've made too many purchases at that hour mark. Okay. So, next, I sent a weekly reactivation email to old clients. What are the pros and cons of creating in batch, the fifty two weeks of the year and scheduling it versus more personalized ones? I think you should combine what you're doing. Add your personalization using your contact fields, dynamic content, and then set it up all at once. Obviously, check back in, consistently so that, you know, you know how it's performing. Check-in every week. AB test a lot of things to see so that you get the most out of it. And then also consider if weekly is too much based on your audience. Just read the room, see what's happening. You could start off with weekly and then kind of like separate, spread it out a little bit more from there. Take people out if they're not engaging, things like that. Okay. Next reporting. Big question was how do you analyze email metric behavior or email metric reporting the most effectively and how do you measure if the emails are good or not and when should you make adjustments? I love this question. I'm really into reporting lately. And I've just recently overhauled all of our reporting. So, this is very top of mind for me. So I would first look at, like, key metrics, just just like a baseline. If your delivery rate is low, delivery rate, once you get, like, in your normal ESP metrics and your bounce rate is high, this is the sign of a larger deliverability issue. Because something isn't right. Something isn't, going where it should. If you're click like, and take a look at your clicks. If there's, if you're seeing, like, many more clicks than you think you should, you may have bots in your list, which is fine. People are gonna have bots to check to see if your email is spam. That happens. But like with Mailjet, you can you wanna look at to see, like, how many bots were removed from your clicks so that you can actually see, like, a more accurate number of how many people are engaging with your email. Always use a reply to email address so that you can get feedback, compliments, questions. I'm managing our inbox when you all send us questions and for these webinars, for our product, everything. So I'm behind there. I'm paying attention. AB testing. When you're looking to see which performed better, what made a difference. I I love an AB test, obviously. I'm a broken record, but, you're looking to see, like, what what is happening after that click as well. So just keep in mind, for when to make adjustments. I'm sorry. I'm looking at the chat. I'm getting distracted. When to make adjustments, you're gonna see if your goal of the campaign is being met. Did they do what you want them to do after they clicked? If, your audience is not engaging with a specific message, like in your reengagement campaign or in your recent, go to market your recent sale that maybe that's not working for them. If they're unsubscribing, that's a big red flag too. If you're getting a high unsubscribe rate, for something you didn't expect, obviously. It could be that you need tweaked. You need to make some adjustments. So okay. Moving on. Wait. Something really exciting coming up, you guys. Are you guys ready for it? I want a drum roll. Can you give me a drum roll? I can. I'm kidding. She's like, no. Yeah. Okay. So we are inviting a special guest up to to talk about email design and development. We had a lot of questions on this. So, the round of applause is gonna be with the audience, or the drum roll is gonna be with the audience since Julia is now playing around. Megan, please join us on stage. Hey there girl. Yay, Megan. Here. Hi. This is Megan. We're so happy you're here. Yeah. She's a senior email developer with Cinch email, and she is here to answer some of your hard hitting questions. Hard hitting design or not design development questions. Okay. We got a ton of email development questions, so we brought in the pro, obviously. The most popular question we got this time was dark mode. Everyone wants to know about dark mode, Megan. Tell us your tips. Dark mode. So first of all, if you're in a drag and drop editor, you probably will not have access to controlling dark mode in any way whatsoever. So I guess just don't worry about it. If you are coding your emails though, use your dark mode media query to control dark mode wherever you're able to. That's mostly the Apple clients support that media query. Use your transparent background, so your PNGs, where applicable. Do that pretty much everywhere unless you're using a full width image where there is no transparency, then use a JPEG. But, otherwise, lean on your PNG images so that when the email flips to dark mode, whether you're controlling that or not, you can still see what's going on the image. Throw in, you know, borders or glows if you need to to make sure that image remains viewable when that background flips to being dark rather than light. You can also, apply some hacks. There is a Gmail blend mode hack where you use some divs and apply some classes, to try to control your text and your background color a little bit. It doesn't work all the time, but it can be very helpful. You might need to finagle with your design a little bit to get it to work. There is a, article on email developer, Remy Permontier's website. We have have that link. We can send it out. So I would definitely check that out. There's also a really great article by Nicole Marlin that you can find online about tackling Outlook dark mode. There are lots of helpful things there with VML and whatnot can also be very tricky. So if you're in code, there are ways to control this at least a little bit. Not always totally, but we can at least control it a tiny bit. And I recommend and encourage you to do whatever you can to control that experience. I'm gonna just quickly mention that while in email editors you can't control, like, the dark mode switch, always make sure you're using previews and design against that because you absolutely can optimize your design and email editor for both. So, yeah, just the developments, you know, has a few more levers to pull. So just wanna throw that out there. Just a few. Just a few. I'm a little miss mail dread over here. So So I'll miss mail that. Oh, okay. Megan, we need some of your some advice on a few more topics. Yes. HTML emails worth it? What are your best practices? Well, I'm an email developer, so, of course, I say it's worth it. The more complicated responses, it depends on your team, your business, your use case, all of that. So if you're a business that really needs to hold close to your brand standards, you will be able to do that more easily and control things a little bit more tightly with HTML. You can get really close with a great editor. Like, the Mailch editor is fantastic, so you can get really close with it. You can control a lot of things in accessibility a little bit better. There are some things that drag and drop editors can miss with accessibility in their code that you can add as an email developer. So that's another reason to code your emails. But if you're a very small business, a one person team doing it all, you have tight turnarounds. Drag and drop editors are so robust now. You are probably gonna be okay with your drag and drop editor. If you're a bigger enterprise business, maybe you're dabbling in interactive email. Maybe your brand standards are incredibly strict, you need to be able to control for dark mode, for every break point on mobile, maybe you have some edge cases, then that's where your, developer comes in. Maybe you need to hyper personalization that's more robust than whatever your ESP is using can handle. That's where your coding comes in. Perfect. And I know so you've mentioned a lot of touch points in the other questions here. So just keep going with your bad self. Tell us more about the interactivity and, including video and things like that in email. Yeah. I can just I'll just keep running down this. Go ahead. So, yeah. So Natalie is gonna talk a little bit more about MJML shortly. It's great for rapidly building emails. My opinion, learn to code using HTML and CSS first so you know how the underlying code works because MJML will take care of, like, a lot of the Outlook code and whatnot for you. So once you learn how to do that, take yourself, jump into a framework. I use a homegrown email design system and framework. I'm not coding everything by hand, so it really, you know, speeds you up a lot. And moving on to GIFs and video. Video is not supported well enough in email. Don't try to use it in email. It's supported in Apple. That's pretty much it. Use a GIF to simulate a video and then send that person to a landing page. That's better for your conversions anyway. Send them off to a website in a landing page where you have that video play, and then ask them to take another action. And then get that conversion and get them more embedded with your brand. For your gift size, keep it under one megabyte. We do a little bit more leeway, on image size for gifts because they naturally can get bigger really fast. Other things you wanna keep an eye on, don't have flashing images, put a little bit of a pause at the end of your GIF before it repeats if you're having a GIF loop infinitely just to help people's brains, and our status of interactivity and email. Checkbox hack still works. Not a whole lot has changed there. So you can do checkbox for the Outlook, Outlook web, radio inputs for Apple devices, AOL and Yahoo. The way you code for the different clients change a little bit, like, between Apple and Yahoo slash AOL, but you can still get them working in those areas. And then, obviously, we still do have AMP for email living on its own, not doing checkbox hack. That's this whole owned beast. Perfect. Yeah. I know, like, you get questions all the time. Can we put a video in an email? I've gotten asked so many times. So many times. Yeah. Stakeholders, you know, and it's like, no. We still can't do that. Still can't. I have to say, consider what they're viewing it on. Like, if I see that video on my tiny little screen, I'm gonna have to expand it. Email, I need to expand it anyway. So just send me to it. Yeah. Send it to and then you can include more information on that web page. Oh, my computer is freezing. Okay. Now I'm back. It's time for an email critique and I'm so excited. Okay. So just a little background on the email critique. So we, a fellow webinar registrant, sent this over and asked us for opinions on an email that they've sent. This is one of their onboarding emails, and so we just take, we have questions from them. We're gonna give them some feedback. This is supposed to be very constructive and helpful. Not supposed to, I'm not telling this to Natalie and Megan. They know. But I'm just saying this is supposed to be constructive and helpful helpful. We're not gonna say anything that, you know, that they don't know already. Don't let her gas at you. She's trying to tell us to be nice. No. They're always nice. Okay. So a little bit background from this about this email. It's the first email in their onboarding series. The subject line and preheader are there for you to see. Great open rate, great click rates. Obviously, like, that's gonna be for their first email welcome series. I think that's, I mean, amazing and expected. And they're doing great conversion wise. So they are this is from their conversions are calculated after people click on the email and actually set up their account. So they're getting a 20% conversion, which is very good. And they send this Monday through Friday, ten to 11AM. Okay. Ready, guys? So excited. We're gonna move to the next page, and, I have the questions that they asked for on here. So, who would like to kick us off here? Does this email follow best practices, and is it accessible slash mobile friendly? Megan, can you give us some, insight there? Yeah. So I noticed a couple of things with this email when it comes to accessibility. I did pop the code into my HTML editor where I can check accessibility and whatnot. I know this was created with a drag and drop editor, so it was missing things like the lang attribute, which is important for accessibility, and the direction attribute, which tells the email whether it's a left to right language or a right to left language. So those were missing. There's not a whole lot we can do about that with it being a drag and drop editor. The biggest thing I would do in this email is at the top there, I would let the line all that text, and I would bump the body text all up to 16 pixels. When I looked, it was all at 14 pixels. We want that at a minimum of 16 pixels to make it easy to read. Other than that, you have high contrast, which I think is really great. Makes those buttons easy to read, and those buttons are big, which also makes it really easy to click on or on mobile tap on. So that's really great. And those are my quick thoughts on accessibility. Natalie, what do you think? Do you have any, comments on their questions here? No, I was reading through the notes and we were talking about this yesterday and I just fully on board with Megan here. Okay, great. I think, they did ask about the footer specifically. I think using a so there is a note that says, like, please do not reply to this. I think, a reply to link is gonna help you a lot. People wanna get in contact with you. If if they don't, know how to get back to you I was trying to read it. If they don't have a way to contact you, they're gonna get a little bit annoyed, I think. They wanna know how to ask questions and follow-up with you. So, just consider that, and maybe added reply to email. The CTA, the login or register, I think you could basically split those up and have it dynamic based because you should know, right, who has registered with their account and who or who has not. So that could be dynamically switched out just so that it's one option. Log in, slash register. So it's it changes based on the recipient. I think having both is a little confusing. Okay. Gals, any other comments to share? I have a I have a couple questions for the team for them to, like, get their brains thinking, but any other questions you wanna share or comments? Sorry. The the last comment I would make is I would switch this layout around a little bit. Mhmm. We'll show it in a second. I actually took this design, and I popped into the code. And I made a couple of adjustments that are very easy to make in the drag and drop editor to just make this email shine a little bit more. So what I did is that I took that body text up at the top, and I actually popped it underneath that hero image and put it in the gray body, with the rest of the text. Something else I would consider with this layout is instead of doing the two columns with all the information, I would consider more of a z pattern where you have an image on one side, and I would consider photography just to just to bring the pink down a little bit because that's a very bright pink, and it's a lot of pink. Mhmm. So I would either consider looking at some secondary colors or use some photography with some cute animals. And do that z pattern. So you have your image on one side and then your text and your CT on the other, and then you can swap the layouts around so that you have an image on the left, image on the right. And it makes the email longer, but I would see if that's a little bit more engaging in connecting via that photography like you have in your, like, in your, hero image versus having these icons. Great. Yeah. Yeah. And yours are before and after. This is before and after. Megan did a little bit of a update of it, which I I like a lot. Yeah. Any notes about it now that we're seeing it? I mean, what I did here is that I bumped all the text up to 16 pixels where applicable. I left aligned text where applicable. My general rule is any text over three lines gets left aligned. And you can see how it's much easier to read here. Like, I feel like this flows just a little bit better. I made our padding a little bit bigger to have the text breathe a little bit more, and it'll make that scannability and readability much better for this email. Yeah. I think scannability and readability is a great point. I also just wanted to point out a couple things. I think this, set up your online account, I could be wrong, is kind of the same thing as log in or register. So maybe you could take that out and just have three, touch points at the bottom. And, I think there was I'm gonna go back to here to show it. There's a feedback link here that I think you could follow-up in a separate email, and you only wanna send this to people who have really enjoyed their experience or, you know, have something to say, your most engaged people. I think putting in a welcome email, you're not gonna get a lot of conversions with that. And conversions, I mean, reviews. And one more thing. So I when you sent in the information, you said it sends Monday to Friday, ten to eleven AM. Say I sign up for something at Tuesday at 2PM. I'm not gonna get that welcome email until the next day is my impression, and I think, that should be immediate. If you're welcoming someone to into your program, that should be pretty immediate so that they have all that information in front of them. I would consider opening up that time. So, if you wanna keep it Monday to Friday, sure, if that's when you see people signing up, but I think it should be just, like, seven days a week, ten minutes after they, max ten minutes after they sign up so that you can get this in front of more people and you might see more engagement from that. Alright. Natalie, over to you, my friend. I was on mute. Classic mistake here. Okay. So you're on my end. We're gonna quickly go over some Mailjet functionality questions. I had a handful of these questions come in to varying wording. Essentially, how do I get started? I will say before, if you're signing up for Mailchimp for the first time, we, on sign up, authentic or verify your sending, address and put that in a contact list. So if you wanna hop in, send a test email to yourself, create that campaign, get going, absolutely do that. I took this from the perspective of how do you set yourself up for success when switching to a new ESP in general. Authenticate your domain right away. Again, we've broken record. That is so important. Also build and import your contacts. And when you do so, plan your contact data from the start. Define your key properties, establish a a schema, and that'll make things like maintaining clean lists and effectively segmenting as you grow so much easier. So from day one, make sure you're really planning that out. It'll change and evolve. But if you have that structure, long term, your life will be much better. Also creating your first email templates. Make sure that you're building off that template for your brand with those consistent headers and footers. Mailjet lets you save those sections. You can use a brand. We have Brand Kit in there that'll pull all your images in there and essentially lay the fundamentals of email sending first so that you can effortlessly create campaigns in the future. Those are kind of the three biggest recommendations I would make when you get in there. Now, again, get in there, create the email, test, send to yourself, see how it feels for the full life cycle. But when you're really starting to take off, start with these three as those fundamentals. My favorite saying is the fundamentals are the building blocks to fun. I know we're running short on time, so I'm gonna start speed talking. We do There we go. Because, you know, so you can slow it down. We talked a little bit about MJML before. Just so everyone's aware, MJML is a markup language. It's a framework over HTML, and it simplifies the process of creating responsive and dynamic emails. So it abstracts the complexity of h HTML coding, and it it really allows that, native and incorrect rendering throughout emails in the inbox. Mailjet's email editor is built on top of this. You will see it a lot in the email development community as well. And we got asked the question if we have plans to improve it. We do. We are currently resourcing and building a team up to really address some key factors with it. And I have that list there for supporting AMP to enable richer interactive email experiences, improve flexibilities for columns. So improvements are coming. This is a mail a lot of people refer to it as MJML and not really using MJ. It stands for Mailjet. So know that we are dedicated to, really ramping this up and getting more functionality out. Yep. Okay. People who use MJML love MJML, by the way. It's I hear it all the time. Oh my god. Have you heard this? And I'm like, have I heard of it? If you wanna check it out more, you can go to the website. It's mjml.io, if I'm not mistaken. And then I got a bunch of questions about functionality that people were looking for in Mailjet, and I wanted to give everyone a good news while we're here. So, automations, a lot of people were like, you know, there's limitations on them, and, like, I want more statistics. I have great news for you. Stay tuned for a a webinar coming near you and an announcement in your inbox for a new feature for Mailjet automations. Sending as I've got a lot of questions on how do I send to a broader audience. Stay tuned. That is in the works. We are working on introducing new sending capabilities and audience capabilities for Mailjet this year, so you will see that coming to a Mailjet near you. Same with contact list sorting and ways to measure your contact list growth. These are so important. We've gotten these user requests a lot, and it's on our road map. So I just wanted to say, stay tuned. Watch your inbox for Julia's amazing emails. And I wanna let you guys all know that we do really build Mailjet on user feedback. So if you have more feedback for us, you can always reach us at feedback dot mailjet dot com, and that is a great way to let us know what features you're looking for, because we wanna make sure we're building for you. Okay. And I can reach that feedback page within their account as well. Right? There's a link. There is. Yeah. Within your account, it's gonna be on the left bottom left hand side. Mhmm. Perfect. Okay. So I covered that really quickly. This is recorded, but, Thomas, come on back. Alright, ladies and gentlemen. Most importantly, I just wanna give a shout out to our amazing presenters because they make these presentations, and they're so knowledgeable. So they literally are the experts with the capital e. So, also wanna give a shout out. Make sure you keep an eye on your inbox because that's the most important. I always ask Natalie and Julia, hey. Where can people follow along with everything that's going on the email world? Yeah. You can find them on LinkedIn and stuff and ask some questions. But most importantly, keep an eye on your inbox. Keep an eye on your inbox because we got a lot of good content, a lot more webinars, a lot more series coming down the line to you, and that's the best way that we communicate to you. Because why? Because we send email, and that is what we do. So And we like it. And we like it. We love it. Natalie, Julia, and Megan. I know Megan's looking around at the backstage, but I wanna thank y'all three for being and most importantly for spreading your knowledge and awareness to our viewers. So thank you so much. Appreciate you guys. Thomas. I just wanna also thank animals Animal Friends Pet Insurance for sending in our email critique, and I think I forgot to say that in the beginning when we started it. So thank you, Faye, who wrote that in. It was really fun. So thank you for letting us know. And also, I know there was a lot of questions in the Q and A we didn't have time for because this is a whole Q and A, but, if you wanna reach out to us via email or on LinkedIn, and we'll we'll make sure that those questions have answers as well. We're always here for answering those questions. Sorry, Thomas. I didn't hear you off. Keep going. No. No. And don't forget, next one, Thursday, May first. Like I say, keep an eye on those inboxes. Those invites are coming. Alright? So we're gonna go on, head on out. But thank you, Natalie, Julia, Megan, and our amazing support team, Marlena and Mahal, for helping us out in the back end. We'll see you guys next time. Take care. Thanks, y'all. Thank you.