What I Wish I Had Known About Email Marketing

Over the past 6 years, I’ve had the honor of shifting and adapting our tech infrastructure at Stupid Cancer. With a nimble team, I’ve enjoyed quick deployments, and minimal consequences if things went awry.

In 2009, I was given a contact list and keys to the email service provider we used back then. Our list was a catch-all of friends, family, and stakeholders. This list was the export of email contacts from our CEO. Knowing what we collectively knew about email back then, we didn’t blink twice when uploading them and sending out our year-end donor appeal.

This particular communication was a blatant ask for donations and not what would be considered a “transactional” email. The email was sent out and several things happened that ultimately led us being booted off the service.

Email Marketing 101

Success in email marketing can be measured in a number of ways, which are sequential in nature. First, you have the percentage delivered. If every single person on your list receives the email, you’ve got a 100% delivery rate.

Let’s say you send the email and an email address has been deleted. This happens when someone changes jobs and the company removes them from the system. This is called a hard bounce. Most, if not all, ESPs automatically remove hard bounces from your list since there is a very slim chance they will be reinstated.

The other issue that can affect deliverability is called a soft bounce. A soft bounce is when an inbox is completely full, the recipient email server is offline, or your email is very large in size. Too many soft bounces can trigger an ESP to consider that address a hard bounce.

When someone opens an email and clicks, that’s known as a click-through. Ideally, the majority of subscribers will open and click. If this number is really low for you, keep reading.

What Actually Happened

In hindsight, we were horrible email marketers. We took a list of emails that we passively accumulated and used them without proper permissions. The contact list had been accumulated over a decade, and many of the work e-mails on the list came back as a hard bounce. This was the first step towards being booted from the service.

For the emails that did make it into our the inboxes of the list, many of them were surprised to get the email. People get defensive about their inbox. Think about it…what was your reaction the last time you got a random email? Ultimately, we skipped a series of communications, known as a welcome series, that would have properly set us up for a donation ask.

The best case scenario when someone receives an unexpected email is that they will take a moment to review look at where it’s coming from. If it’s a person or company they know, they’ll likely open it. For many of the people who received our email, they knew our CEO, but didn’t know why they would receive an email from the organization. It’s easy to think that just because you’ve had an exchange with someone, that you’re welcome in their inbox.

If you email someone who is loosely connected, chances are they are going to take the path of least resistance and hit the spam button. Ideally, they will unsubscribe and honorably discharge you from their lives. If they’re familiar with receiving emails from companies, they could possibly update their preferences page. (This is the best best case scenario)

What We Should Have Done

In our case, we went from a guy with an idea to a company. When the organization came to fruition, we should have started fresh with a blank slate. The mindset of “we should start with something” was the wrong one to have. By implementing readily accessible signup forms and driving traffic to them, we’d have been better off in the long run.

When building out your email program, think of the roles your subscribers might fit into. For Stupid Cancer, we typically use Cancer Survivor, Caregiver, Healthcare Provider, and Advocate (or other). By putting people into four different buckets, we can segment and communicate with each vertical more relevantly. This segmented approach will engender a more focused relationship, and people won’t feel like they’re just a newsletter recipient. If customer roles are well identified, you can go crazy with allowing people to self-select what’s most important to them.

Once you’ve got people on your mailing list, make sure you empower them with the ability to decide how much or how little they hear from you. Your preferences page is an important part of your email program as it can be the difference between someone unsubscribes or not. More and more, I’m seeing companies offering the option to receive less emails.

Moving Forward

Once you’ve got some momentum in your email marketing campaign, you can really begin to leverage the data within it. As people open your email, their Geolocation is stored. You can use this to segment to people in a certain location. At Stupid Cancer, we use this to promote local events. If it’s a New York City event, we will promote within 5 or 10 miles. If it’s a Cody, Wyoming event, we’ll promote within 200 miles.

By taking a responsibly curated and more segmented approach (vs the traditional batch and blast), you’ll have higher open rates, more click-throughs, and happier subscribers.

What You Can Do

If you’re somewhere in between where we were and having issues. You may want to consider having your list cleaned. Depending on the size of it, you can pay a fee and have the list scrubbed of hard bounces, as well as role-based emails. Role based emails are bad because they aren’t attached to a person, and can drive down your open rates.

If you’re looking to increase overall deliverability, you can utilize the services of an ESP like Kevy, who ensure that you are properly set up that Internet Service Providers like Gmail, Yahoo, or Hotmail know that the email is sent from a trusted source. Using ESPs that have less checks in place will result in your emails ending up in the spam folder.

Final Thoughts

Sending mass emails is a big responsibility. If you lose the trust of your subscribers, it is nearly impossible to regain it. Furthermore, personal contact information should be highly guarded and never considered to be leveragable for third-party financial gains or frequent and poorly planned communications.

Drinking from the Data Firehose

When I started with Stupid Cancer in late 2009, the organization had just invested in a SugarCRM database to manage relationships. I had used pharmacy management software since ’02 in my former life as a Pharmacy Tech, so I was familiar with the core functionality. SC had just hired a dev company and spent a considerable amount of money on what was then a worthwhile investment.

Being new to the organization, I didn’t want to rock the boat by accelerating development in ways I knew it could go. I also knew that at any given moment something could happen that would result in some kind of database related disaster. I didn’t have the keys to back up the database regularly. I probably didn’t think back then that I should have been.

Long story short, our self-hosted CRM wasn’t the right fit. We could have made that instance of Sugar work for us, but it was kind of doomed from the start. Before long, we landed on Mailchimp and our Sugar lead forms were replaced by Mailchimp signups. Our contacts became more valuable as subscribers and their journey with us carried on as such.

In 2011/2012, we began to see an uptick in traction across the board due to a corporate rebrand. Suddenly, our lists were growing. In March 2012, we launched an online store and began down an interesting e-commerce journey. All of a sudden, we had rich customer data. For the first time in organizational history, we had an influx of physical addresses. We had real people, spending money and willingly giving us data.

Mailchimp, along with Volusion, were our first two SaaS engagements. We were able to negotiate non-profit pricing which was in the 20–25% off range or sometimes free.

Very quickly, we faced another dilemma. Our email marketing platform and online store weren’t communicating with one another. Luckily, I caught wind of a cloud connector called Kevy. Up until this past summer, Kevy functioned solely as an integration platform. It moved large amounts of data from one cloud-hosted platform to another via API. They have since discontinued their integration service to focus on email marketing. We look forward to utilizing their service at the end of our current ESP contract.

Before we knew it, we were generating a ton of rich data every single day, from all sides. So much so, we couldn’t keep up with it. We had analytics and longitudinal information but were only in a position to glance at it and move on. With a small staff, there was no sound way to compile reports and make informed decisions, for the most part, other than from 35,000 feet up.

Last Summer, Slack was brought to market and changed everything for Stupid Cancer, and team communication everywhere.

Slack isn’t the first team communications platform that our organization has ever used. We were loyal users of Yammer, before it was acquired by Microsoft and the platform didn’t keep up with our needs. We put our best effort into Bitrix24, which only lasted until we caught wind of Slack.

Slack was new and interesting. It came with a lot of bells and whistles that we didn’t know we needed. Slack pointed me in the direction of Zapier, an integrations company. By this point, I had already experimented with IFTTT (If this, then that). Zapier connected Slack with platforms we didn’t even know it could.

Slack became the soul of Stupid Cancer overnight.

A year ago, I wrote this post about Slack. Since then, Slack has helped us refine a lot of our internal processes by making us take a tech-first approach. Throughout our work day, we track projects, finances, social media, customer service, customer feedback, event registration, and more.

After 7 years of creating data, we’re relaunching a traditional CRM on theBase platform. Using the same workflows that we have with Slack, we’ll be able to focus less on the minutiae and have a tool that serves us well.

Migrating from Volusion to Bigcommerce

The Beginning

In March 2012, I stepped into the ecommerce world and launched a Volusion store for my non-profit, Stupid Cancer. I understood the basic functions of ecommerce, and felt like I could figure the rest out as I went. My expectations were pretty accurate, and found that navigating the unknown was a lot of fun. I picked Volusion because a colleague of mine had found success with their platform, and like any other digital software vertical, there were so many options. The sales started, issues that popped up along the way were remedied, and before I knew it, I had a successful online store.

Remember when you learned how to drive? That sense of confidence that followed? Before you knew it, you wanted to go faster.

Enter Bigcommerce: I received a solicitation to take a tour of their product by a Bigcommerce sales rep. I found myself building a carbon copy of my store on their platform within the first hour, and noticed the little things that were different than what I had been used to. I found myself building out shipping rates by weight, and entering those pesky sales tax rates by county. (Thanks a lot for that, by the way, New York State. #sarcasm)

I have to insert here that Volusion did get me off the ground with a very generous 80% discount. So, while Bigcommerce was unable to offer the same discount, I felt like I was getting much more in personal back and forth e-mails with their team, along with some on-boarding conference calls.

So here I am, with the holidays approaching rapidly and a steady flow of orders coming in, planning to abandon ship with Volusion and start on a new course.

I had everything pretty much built out on BC when it came time to flip the DNS. I say pretty much, because you’re never really ready when it comes time to go live.

Going Live

To my surprise, my new store was online about two hours later, and the orders resumed. A critical step here is to put your old store into maintenance mode, and have your provider restore it back to its original(demo) URL. Luckily, I was headed to a conference for the days following, so I had some downtime to watch the fallout, which ended up being related to the following:

301 Redirects

This is arguably the most important thing you will need to do. With a new ecommerce platform comes a new URL structure. For example, http://store.com/productname could end up being http://store.com/product-name. Anyone who searches for your product and clicks on your old URL will get a big old “Page Not Found.” Bigcommerce makes it easy to point potential customers in the right direction.

Shipping Rates

You probably set these up once and then left them alone, right? With Bigcommerce, I had an issue where I capped off my shipping rates at 2 pounds, without a price for anything heavier. This resulted in customers not being able to proceed with checkout. Make sure you test everything thoroughly, and let customers get in touch with you easily. (Install a “Contact Us” tab.)

Payment Processor

I was operating under the assumption that I had a relationship outside of Volusion with Authorize.net.  I plugged in my payment gateway info into my new store, and subsequently learned that it would be a breach of contract if I moved forward with that setup. I investigated my options, and found that PayPal Pro is a very nice solution if you're already accepting PayPal payments in your web store. It's a seamless application, and you get the great service that PayPal provides. (It's important to note that you can use a new Authorize.net account with Bigcommerce. You cannot use your Volusion Authorize.net account with Bigcommerce.)

Moving Forward

Once I had everything pretty much straightened out, I focused on getting my product offering back up to 100%. A new store offered the opportunity to audit my product images, descriptions, etc.

Having been live on Bigcommerce for a few weeks now, I am much happier with the mobile version of my store, and am seeing a lot of mobile checkouts. I was also happy to see that a lot of my favorite tools integrate just as well, if not better, with Bigcommerce. Check them out on the Bigcommerce App Store.