InboxExpo 2023. Kate Barrett’s Keynote Presentation: Summary
I was recently honoured to give the closing keynote at InboxExpo 2023 hosted in Valencia, Spain (February 2023) to round off a truly fantastic event covering a wide range of email marketing topics, centering around deliverability.
With sessions focussing on legal considerations, technical set up including DMARC and BIMI, Apple MPP, and strategic insights from a range of brands including Paul Smith (with Dotdigital), the event was jam packed with fantastic insights and email marketing tips.
As the closing keynote, I wanted to offer an insight into what deliverability means to us at eFocus Marketing and how this links in to make YOU a better a CRM Marketer…
The STRATEGY of Deliverability
For me and our expert team here at eFocus Marketing, deliverability is very much a strategic issue.
We don’t want our customers to feel overwhelmed, irrelevant or ignored by our email marketing
efforts, but instead to positively engage them and drive them through to our desired conversion.
At it’s heart, that IS the strategy of deliverability – delivering the right message, to the right person, at the right time, in a way that is accessible to all.
In my keynote I spoke about 3 core ways in which brands can do this:
1. Listen
Listen to your customers and potential customers – listen to the wider market, listen to your email (and other marketing channel) results, as well as your known, behavioural and purchase data to give you insights into your audience.
By listening in this way you can pick up a lot of cues as to what your audience do and don’t want from your brand and your email marketing.
2. Learn
You can then use this data to start learning what works and what doesn’t for your audience, and different segments therein.
Run strategic A/B split testing to determine specific techniques and learn from statistically significant results to inform your strategy and tactical implementation going forward.
Use this information to adapt, optimise and further personalise your campaigns to increase your relevance and engagement.
3. Implement
Optimise the way in which your campaign displays your content to your audience in the inbox.
Getting your emails to your subscriber’s inbox is the first step.
Making sure that the email then displays as you intended when it is received, is the final critical step to ensuring your message comes across properly and can be positively acted upon.
When designing and building your emails consider the following elements:
- How does your email render across different devices? Platforms like Litmus and Email on Acid are great for email render testing and picking up any potential issues with how your email displays (particularly on Outlook desktop!)
- Gmail clipping – is your email too large? Once your email code weight reaches over 102kb Gmail will likely clip your content; potentially removing important information and your footer including unsubscribe link. Ensure your email code weight stays under this to allow your entire message to be seen.
- Make your emails accessible. It’s important to consider accessibility in your design and code such as colour contrast, ensuring GIFs don’t flash at a rate that would cause photosensitive seizures, or coding for screen readers.
- Mobile device light/dark mode displays. How does your email look when displayed in these different ways – can all of the information still be clearly seen?
- Design for images off display. Ensure your images back up and don’t completely contain your content. Remember, if images are turned off by default or a weak internet connection stops images from loading, your entire message will be lost and CTA buttons won’t be able to be acted upon.
- Consider adding interactivity to your emails to create in-email mini experiences
By focussing on all three of these elements, you bring deliverability into your strategy and day-to-day implementation, as well as putting your customer at the heart of everything you do.
