The Effective Marketer

I just attended “The Science of Email Marketing” online webinar, hosted by HubSpot and presented by social media scientist Dan Zarrella.

Slides should be available for download soon here.

Key takeaways:

1. Businesses are consumers (the boundaries between B2C and B2B are blurred when it comes to reading email)
2. Try sending emails on weekends
3. Send very early in the morning
4. Optimize for mobile
5. Use lots of links
6. Include reference information in your emails
7. Serialize and label your emails
8. Give your subscribers special access
9. Send email from someone they’ve heard of
10. Don’t be afraid to send too much email
11. Your newest subscribers are your best
12. Make them want to get your emails
13. Ask people to follow you

The presentation was based on data collected via focus groups and from MailChimp’s email database of over 9.5 billion emails sent.

I like Dan’s presentation for its brevity and focus on key action items based on solid data. What I wish he had shared is how the data from focus groups and MailChimp is broken down. How many B2B vs. B2C companies, industries, and even job titles. It’s easy to say that B2B and B2C email patterns are similar, but without seeing the data underlying that assumption I’m very skeptic. Also, MailChimp is now known to be used by large corporations (they focus on SMB market) therefore the data may not take into account larger organizations.

As with all analysis and reports out there, you have to take all of the recommendations with a grain of salt. Test them, see if they work, then be the judge. No one knows your industry and customers better than you.