greetings everyone this is rob sanders with simply learn thank you for joining and today we're going to cover the email marketing interview questions and answers so thanks for joining again and here's how it's gonna work so if you have any questions to these questions or answers feel free to just comment right below this video and we'll get back to you as soon as possible we're going to go through a series of questions and i'm going to answer those questions for you so email marketing's traditional digital marketing channel it's been around a while and you're going
to be asked some questions that are going to encompass a lot of things related to the delivery of emails we all check emails on a daily basis we all receive them sometimes we receive emails unsolicited sometimes we sign up to receive emails sometimes we receive emails from friends sometimes we receive emails where we're working or previously worked so most people have an understanding of email however as a marketer there's a little bit of a different twist to it so we have to understand the intricacies of how email marketing works so you're gonna be asked some
questions and really the first question here is what's the difference between a hard and a soft balanced email so if you're a digital marketer you're in charge of sending out lots of emails let's just say thousands or i mean it could be in the hundreds of thousands of emails you're going to get some bounces and so you really want to know the difference between a hard and a soft bounce so a soft bounce just means that the email message reached the recipient's mail server but bounce back is undelivered so think of it as delivering actual
mail to a post office so it actually reached the post office but it bounced back because maybe the you know person's email box was full maybe their account was temporarily disabled or maybe the email server wasn't necessarily able to handle that email now hard balance is an email that that is rejected because it's an email when it happens when the email has been permanently rejected so for example maybe the the the account is no longer valid and so let's look at some reasons again as to why a soft bounce would happen so for example the
inbox is full or the recipient server's down so reach the post office but there was a problem actually getting it into the hands of the owner so to speak where the hard balance a little bit different let's just say that person is no longer working their email has been deleted or you the email has been blacklisted somehow okay a spam or something to that effect so the email server is going to identify that and it's not even going to reach the recipient so a lot of different ways in which an email may not make its
recipient so now the most important thing to know here i just the important thing to know is listen when you send out an email you got to pay attention to how many get bounced back and so next question here what would you do to improve the click-through rate of your email so click-through rate is simply how many people have seen your email and how many people actually clicked on a link in the email so if 100 people saw your email but only one person clicked then it would be a one percent click-through rate so we
want to be able to make sure we have a high click-through rate so remember emails are going to people who likely signed up to receive your email and even if they are expecting an email or they're not expecting an email you still want to follow some of these best practices here one is to create a compelling subject line so you want to make the subject line something that people are going to notice take note of or take an interest in and say hey what's this all about that's pretty interesting and open the email so use
preview text effectively obviously you want to make your email mobile friendly because most people look at their emails on their mobile phones you want to create engaging content okay so the content that's in the email obviously is going to have some links so put some strong call to action in there and that's one of the bullet points down below place a cta where it's easily visible so keep in mind mobile users most people are going to check that email on their phone so you want to make sure you have compelling content with good ctas in
a visible location so always check mobile as well as desktop obviously in your emails you want to make them as visual as possible don't make them so text heavy you can always segment your emails meaning if you're sending out an email let's just say to 100 people okay maybe you want to divide it up boys or girls maybe older or young maybe you know living in one part of the country versus another part of the country i mean those are examples of segments so break up the email don't send it to one mass email to
everyone that way you can personalize the email if an email is personalized the chances of somebody clicking on it are going to be greater and then a b test your emails and when we say a b test you know you could send out the same email twice except one segment is going to say get one version of the email the other segment is going to get another version of email and what are the different versions maybe the subject line so the subject line is different on version a versus version b or maybe the call to
action is different so you always want to send out different versions of the same email to a different segmented audience that way you can actually see which segment or which version got the most clicks okay so next question here is how to inform your customers about company news and establish a relationship with your target audience okay so again how do you inform your customers about what's going on in the company and how are you going to establish a relationship with that audience who's receiving that email well newsletters are always the best answer here so somebody
signs up for your email let's just say they actually purchase a product from you newsletters are great way to reach out to that audience to get them to stay up to date with the latest product or an improved version of the product they purchased and then that way they can come back and continue to purchase the product so newsletters are great way to reach out to your audience and actually talk to your audience and you're not talking verbally you're talking to them via email so you send out that email campaign maybe it's once a month
hey we noticed you bought this product we have similar products just like the one you bought or hey you know if it's a software maybe hey we've got upcoming updates to our software make sure you go to the website and get the updates or we have a new and improved version so all these things you want to communicate to your audience via email that's going to get them to get to the website and that's going to get them to you know purchase more update upgrade whatever so newsletters the way to go so again some basic
tips here you want to create your newsletter with 90 educational and 10 percent promotional so remember you're sending out a newsletter to people who likely signed up so you're educating them about your products always create interesting subject lines you want whether they know you or not you want to create the subject line so somebody's going to click on it so make sure you design your emails appropriately okay so if you know you're sending let's just say baby products to mothers or expected mothers in fact this is a real life example because i used to work
at a gap and baby gap was you know one of the emails groups i was responsible for so we created an email template with softer colors your yellows your your light blues you know it wasn't black or dark red or anything that's going to be you know heavy we knew who our audience was and we designed the template accordingly and of course using compelling images so for selling baby products you're going to put baby product images in there i mean it's common sense but you'd be surprised you gotta pick and choose your images carefully especially
if you're sending to an international audience because images can be misconstrued and just like we mentioned with the click-through rate you always want to have a clear cta always make sure you have a cta in a visible position because most people are going to look at that email in a mobile phone okay and then always make sure you include your contact information in the newsletter so somebody knows where to find you how to contact you where to go maybe they have a product they want to return okay so you always want to put that contact
information normally it's at the bottom of the email but these are all best practices so here's some examples okay we got you know check out the latest cosmetics from our new collections notice the image and notice the call to action so you can see trendy collections you know we got some other products you may want to buy okay five important skin care products that everyone should have view more so you always want to have that call to action in a very visible place so define following metrics open rate click-through rate and response rate and forward
rate so these are metrics related to email marketing so you're gonna have to know what these are so we already mentioned click-through rate before when we talked about best practices for improving the click-through rate so for those of you that remember what that is go ahead and put that in the comment section below just a little pop quiz for you if anybody remembers click-through rate but let's take a look at open rate so open rate is the percentage of the total number of recipients who actually open the email so if you send it to x
amount of people how many people opened it that would be the open rate so how many people open it but you're gonna take out the people who bounced it whether it's a soft bounds a hard bounce okay you're not gonna count those people so if you have let's just say 20 people open the email and you sent it to a hundred people then and you had nobody balanced then it would be a 20 open rate okay click-through rate again pop quiz it's just how many people actually clicked on any of the links in your email
and that's just divided by the number of emails you've sent out a response rate okay so response rate is the percentage of the total recipients who clicked on the link of your email campaign and actually completed an action so what is that action well it could be downloading something watching something purchasing something so that's the response rate similar to conversion rate if you're working in a digital marketing channel and you're driving traffic to the site you want that traffic to do something well it's no different in email marketing we want people to take action we're
just going to divide that by the number of emails delivered and that gives you your response rate so let's just say you did send in 100 emails you did get 20 open it and of this 20 let's just say one person went on to purchase well you'd have a one percent response rate and then a forward rate simply the forward rate refers to the rate at which your subscribers share your email uh with others friends family etc and you may have that as a call to action in your email in fact that's a best practice
so it's just the number of clicks on a share divided by the total number of delivered emails and you're going to multiply that by 100 to get the percentage and so most email marketing platforms do measure forward rate okay let's take a look at how to recapture inactive customers what you want to do here is re-engage subscribers with gamification opt for subject lines like we have been missing you or did we do something wrong you want to run a poll or a competition and re-engage their subscribers again trying to get people involved these first three
are all about getting people involved so personalize your emails talk to that person as if hey look i haven't heard from you in a while how about coming back and taking a look at our new products just as you would a friend say a design always matters especially knowing that you're talking to customers who haven't been active okay this is a segmented audience somebody who's inactive so you want to have the right design the right message the right subject line that fits with that customers and activity so you want to try and do everything you
can to get that customer back and then you want to follow a consistent schedule okay so ideally when you schedule an email you want to schedule the best time so you have to know your audience obviously and then you can always ask for feedback why are they inactive why haven't they purchased in a while so the whole idea here from gamification like trying to you know make a game out of it so make it competitive to adding polls to really personalizing it these are all things that you can do to get your customers back so
what are the different ways to segment buyer personas so again when we talk about segmentation we're talking about taking a smaller piece the entire pie so what's one way to break up that pie if you will by geography okay so with geography you could target your audience based on that area and it could not necessarily have to be by a part of the country it could be all the way down to the province the state the actual city the county okay if you live in a small village okay all the way up to the continent
okay so think about how you would break out the segment by geography now obviously if you break it out let's just say the united states to the southern part well the southern part you know in the winter in the united states the southern part is not going to be as cold to say the northern part so that should tell you hey we're going to send an email in the winter we're not going to use snow and blizzards as our theme we're going to use probably a little bit of sun so breaking it out by geography
helps you understand where your audience lives you also have demographic segmentation and this is simply just age education income gender you know where people work okay nationality anything that's going to identify that user so this is the best way to segment if you know who your audience is by income or gender i mean you're talking to a group of like-minded people if they're all the same age from the same generation then you could talk to them appropriately and you're not going to talk to an older person the same way you would a younger person so
think about demographic segmentation because it really helps you hone in on your messaging then you have behavioral segmentation so behavioral is based on your audience's behavior have they purchased before have they never purchased were they searching for something how long did they stay on the site what products were they looking at are they a lifetime customer so you can look at behavior and decide how you want to break out your emails by behavior and this is a really good way if you're not even sure who your audience is or where they live and how old
they are you can certainly break out your audience by behavior because you know who these people are based on what they've done previously because you're going to track that information with analytics so you know one way is obviously if somebody's purchased that's a good way to segment because you know these people believe in you believe in your business believe in your product so the way you can message to somebody who's purchased before is going to be different than somebody you don't even know who they are if they purchased or not okay so behavioral segmentation to
me is one of the easiest things the easiest ways to segment your email list how would you drive repeat customers through email marketing for the below scenario okay so this is a pop quiz if you will again for those of you that got click the rate correctly kudos let's see if you can go two for two here okay so if you know the answer to this go ahead and comment below but let's just say give a few examples of subject lines to drive engagement for audiences based on the following provide an audience between 20 and
30 years old that were female and the product were sandals okay what would some of your subject lines be so i'm going to give you a minute to think about that and put it in the comment section below now remember this is an interview based question so you're gonna have to think on the spot i'm gonna give you a minute but if somebody presented that to you in an interview you need to be able to you know react fairly quickly and come up with some really attractive subject lines here okay so here you go here's
another one uh so give a few examples of subject lines to drive engagement for 20 to 30 females for footwear so you got friday sale coming up buy branded sandals at the lowest price okay so i like this one because it's got a strong call to action buy here you go this is even better because 50 off on branded sandals and free shipping i mean who can't beat free anything including shipping and if it's 50 off i mean these are key things so you're putting the promotion and percentage off all in the subject line so
that's really going to grab somebody's attention we can see how for women starts now okay with a little emoji that never hurts so those are all good subject lines they all tend to work because they all have an element of a best practice in there so here you got you know the friday sale coming up is just giving people notice okay the stronger call to action on the buy you're putting the promotion in the subject line and you know using an emoji to really just drive home the point so all these subject lines will work
and hey at the end of the day remember you want to test your subject lines okay moving on to the next question speaking of testing what is a b testing and give some examples of a b testing okay so we talked a little bit about a b testing with subject lines so simply a b testing when it comes to email marketing it's just a method to analyze which of the two email campaign strategies is most effective all right you know you're gonna do it based on open rate you can do it by saying click rate
you can do it based on response rate and remember you're putting one version of the email against another version whether that be the subject line whether it be the content call to action whatever so that's ideally what you're trying to do you're trying to figure out what works for your audience that's the end goal for email for a b testing and email marketing what's going to work and i would highly suggest you should always do a b testing for subject lines always so some of the variables that you can test again subject lines okay you
always want to try if you got a promotion hey will the percentage off work likely it will but let's test it up against something else like you know a generic word like discounts you can always test the design you can always test the personalization the preview text you could try out images call to actions exclusive offers what particular offer is going to work okay so if you're testing offers then obviously that's going to be response rate if you're testing ctas and that's going to be click-through rate if you're testing subject lines that's going to be
open rate so you want to be able to test different elements of the email to figure out what works and what doesn't work okay so how to prevent email from getting into spam so if you're an email marketer this is your worst nightmare you don't want your emails to get spammed so that doesn't bode well for you so most email marketing platforms like mailchimp or constant contact measure spam so some of the important ways to prevent this is hey improve your open rate remember going back to the first question second question you want to have
really good subject lines here okay and you want to segment your audience so if you're if you know who you're talking to and you have a cool subject line that's going to get somebody to react and open and that's going to prevent somebody from spamming your email okay you can always customize your from to make it look like it's coming from in this case rob sanders check if you have included an unsubscribe link okay so give people the option to unsubscribe they don't have the option to unsubscribe they could just report you as spam make
sure your emails work on different devices okay you want to optimize your images for email make sure they're not big and they don't fit on a mobile device okay prefer more text and fewer images and then avoid grammatical issues you want to come across as professional you don't want somebody looking at your email like who sent this why are you sending this to me i don't want to hear from you again i'm going to spam you you want to prevent that and that means a professional looking email professional content with a really good subject line
and some imagery to go along with that hey you may just get somebody to open that email and get them to convert that's the idea behind it so these are ways to prevent somebody from actually spamming you and then what are the best practices for email subject lines so the subject line is the most probably the most important element in email marketing so we talked about that little pop quiz with the sandals targeting 20 to 30 year old women you know to me i like the subject line with the 50 off so that was a
number in the subject line so people can actually see hey wow i get a whole 50 that works better than just a discount okay remember one of those other subject lines had an emoji so don't be afraid to include emojis in there for example when i send out emails using you know during the spring you might want to use flowers perhaps to signify hey it's spring winter's over so personalize the subject lines remember that goes with segmenting so if you know who your audience is your your subject lines can be a little bit more personal
okay so opt for title case subject lines okay so instead of making it grammatical for example okay you want to keep your subject lines short and to the point remember you want to say something that's going to draw somebody's attention if you make it long and drawn out and boring then people aren't going to open it develop a sense of urgency like hey we got 50 off through friday so that's a little sense of urgency so people know hey if it's thursday i better open this email and check it out and again grammatical mistakes that
goes without saying you always want to preview your emails before you send them out so if you preview your emails before you send them out have somebody else obviously receive the preview they can be another set of eyes for you to prevent any mistakes but also give you feedback on the imagery the design etc okay so these are all best practices for good subject lines okay so subject line is the most important element for email marketing so just keep these in mind subject lines and having good subject lines is the way to get people to
open it and from there that's half the battle somebody can open the email then you've just set yourself up for better performance if you have any questions feel free to visit us at simplylearn.com i want to thank you for hanging in there and good luck and we'll see you on the next video hi there if you like this video subscribe to the simply learn youtube channel and click here to watch similar videos to nerd up and get certified click here
