Whether you are a business owner or a manager, you should keep in mind that Email marketing is an important tool that will not go out of fashion anytime soon.
It is one of the few ways to get in touch directly with prospects, clients (B2B), customers (B2C), partners, and newsletter subscribers.
Thus, Email Marketing is a necessary component of a company’s overall marketing strategy.
However, not knowing the right messages to convey via email or where to put the right Call-to-action (CTA) links can result in a higher number of un-subscribers, lower Click-Through-Rates (CTR), or simply ending up in the Spam folder.
Cloudswave has invited Mad Mimi’s founder, Gary Levitt, to answer a few questions that a lot of Email Marketing newbies and users are wondering.
Mad Mimi is one of the best email marketing software available that allows users to create, send and track email campaigns in a fresh novel way without using templates. Every day, over 40 million emails are sent, shared and tracked using Mad Mimi.
Gary Levitt Q&A:
1. What is the value added of an Email Marketing service for small business, as opposed to larger companies with a much longer contact list?
Size of the email list doesn’t matter, when it comes to value added, relative to the business size. For a small business, an email list of past customers is an easy, simple way to generate repeat sales, ask for referrals or reviews and just stay at the top of their minds. Another simple way of looking at it is simply by proportion: having a small engaged email list generates way more positive results, than a big list that may be largely unengaged. It also costs more to maintain a larger list. At the end of the day, you want a “happy” list. If lots of folk on your list aren’t thrilled to hear from you, there isn’t much value there.
2. What are some tips for building a pertinent email list?
Be proactive in asking permission! Adding customers to your email list is great, but you can also ask prospective customers to join your email list. Sweeten the request by offering a discount or pre-sale opportunities via your email list. Once you have a list, you want to be your own guinea-pig in checking in whether your content makes a recipient smile, or jump to do something, or simple respond and say, “I love these emails!”
3. What are some tips and tricks you use to optimize your email campaign? How to get concrete results from your Email Marketing campaign?
Keep your emails short – the average reader attention span is about 8 seconds!
Use one of two strong subject line approaches: 1. Be a little edgy, compelling and enticing (eg. “No. We’d Never Do That.” or “The Andy Warhol Edition” and you’re a plumbing service.) 2. Be really clear and capture the essence of the email in the subject.
Always have a very clear, single call to action that leaves your readers clear on what they should do next.
4. Do you think email marketing or twitter more effective to reach potential users?
Definitely email 
Email marketing’s return on investment is tremendous. I won’t give numbers here but they’re easy to find from reputable analysts with a simple Google search. Email marketing comes in the highest of any marketing channel. It makes sense when you think about it… Twitter is a constant stream on content. Blink, and you miss something. Email, on the other hand, connects with the reader in a place that’s sacred and personal: their inbox.
5. How often should you email your subscribers?
My recommendation is once a month, minimum but there are no hard and fast rules. I’d be careful of emailing more than weekly, unless it makes sense for your content and business. Ultimately, it boils down to what your readers expect. Test some frequencies and monitor your view rates and unsubscribe rates too. It’s worth noting though, if you’re comparing weekly view rates or click through rates to monthly, you may get a lower rate per email but a larger rate overall, per month.
6. Is it better to personalize the sender of the Newsletter email? (i.e. First name + Site name or First Name + Last Name or Site Name)
Personalized subject lines get more views! However, I personally feel that it’s not a sustainable strategy. I recommend sending from a personal email address instead – that way you get that personal connection but it doesn’t feel icky or fake.
7. What is the maximum number of characters for the subject line?
I never counted characters but in my tests, subject lines of 10 words or less perform significantly better. I’d aim for 5 to 8 words but if a longer subject line fits the email content better, it’s worthwhile making sure that the first 8 words are still clearly indicative of the content. This way, you still improve your chances of getting views.
8. Does using special characters in the subject line improve its open rate?
Not that I’ve ever found. As a rule, I’d steer away from special characters though I don’t think it has a significant impact either way.
9. What makes an email go to the Spam folder?
Reputation! IP reputation and sender reputation are the major influencers so if you have a history of sending permission based emails with decent view rates and low abuse rates, you’ll be fine.
Sometimes, link shorteners and other tricks to obfuscate the destination of a link can seriously wreck delivery.
10. What would be a reasonable click-through rate (CTR) for an email? What are some of the best ways to improve it?
Aim for 5% but anything above 3% is respectable. The best ways to improve your CTR is place your link “above the fold” and have a clear call to action.
11. Is the CTR of newsletter or other business emails higher or lower on mobiles than on computers?
I haven’t run comprehensive tests on this but my assumption is that they’d be close enough as makes little difference. Rather, focus on the landing page’s analytics. Is your landing page optimized for mobile? What are the bounce rate and conversion rates on your site? The question I’d ask of myself is this: Am I optimized for mobile traffic?
12. In general, what is the optimal time of day to send emails?
This can depend on the audience and content and there’s a ton of conflicting data out there. As a rule, I avoid sending on weekends but I’d encourage any sender to test. Some e-commerce senders have seen lower views and clicks but higher conversions and higher revenue per conversion by sending on weekends.
13. If there are multiple links in your email copy, how do you balance the attention you give to each of them?
This one is hard! The top link tend to get most of the clicks. The second link receives about a third of that top link. Thereafter it just gets smaller. Strong call to action or some particularly compelling content can change this pattern but it’s unusual. Rather than balance it, I’d make sure to separate important content across multiple emails.
14. What are the new trends for Email Marketing this year? What should we expect for the upcoming years?
A majority of emails are now read on mobile devices! This means that email newsletters should be simpler, consumable on small screens and make sure your landing pages are ready to welcome mobile visitors.
15. Are there any new services or features we should expect from Mad Mimi?
We’re experimenting with expanding the types of marketing you can do with email, and adding an automation layer that can help emails react to stimuli that we’re able to track on people’s websites, online stores, or any other trigger-like data. We’re also always improving and modernizing those features we have. We also have some stealth ideas we’re testing out, and we’ll have lots more integrations in the coming months… include a big Salesforce integration.
16. One last question: Who is “Mad Mimi”? What’s the story behind this project?
That’s a secret! Kidding. Mad Mimi was originally meant to be a marketing/booking application for musicians. When I came up with a UI that seemed fairly good and generic enough to create any type of vertically “stackable” content, I decided to take on the email world and be the arch-nemesis of “templates”, which just didn’t give me very much creative juice. The story is long, and we’ll save it for the next interview!
Special thanks to Gary Levitt for taking the time to answer our questions, and to the Mad Mimi team as well.
I hope these few questions will better guide you when it comes to your Email Marketing efforts!
About Gary Levitt:
Born in South Africa, Levitt moved to Boston in 1998 to study music. Early on, Levitt was a skateboard pro turned bass guitarist. Levitt worked for a couple years while in New York (having moved there to play jazz) as a busboy. Following an illustrious bus-boying career Levitt produced a bunch of music for the Oprah Show before realizing that CSS was fun.
In 2007, Levitt founded Mad Mimi, an email application that was acquired by GoDaddy (GDDY) in August 2014. Levitt currently serves on GoDaddy’s leadership team and spends time with his family in Jerusalem, Israel.
Levitt is an active angel investor and technologist, focused primarily on consumer internet technology and product-design.
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