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Hello all,

I came across @dayn.johnson and his work with JO a while ago when I read his hearty introduction on our Beginner Admins in Training group.

I knew immediately that Dayn would be a great community friend who could share some practical experiences with us here.

 

First off, let’s meet Dayn!

 

 

Let’s plunge into some of Dayn’s personal arsenal of tactics to help achieve high email deliverability & open rates with JO.

 

While both of these are separate, they depend heavily on 3 crucial pillars:

  1. Clean data
  2. Planning & coordination
  3. Continual experimentation & Iteration

 

Ensuring high deliverability:

  1. Focus on Bounces - 
    1. Work with customer facing teams to tackle email bounces effectively by taking an action when it happens
  2. Focus on Unsubscribes - 
    1. Avoid spamming recipients. You can do this easily by aligning efforts with your marketing team to ensure you aren’t emailing on top of each other.
    2. Offer an opt-out option always, in case they want to. 
    3. Ensure you aren’t sending mails on behalf of CSMs to distribution accounts

 

 

Cranking up those open rates:

  1. Craft Engaging, Relevant Content: It's the secret sauce.
  2. Snappy Subject Lines: Hook them from the get-go.
  3. Harness the Power of Preview Text: Make sure the header image alt text aligns with inbox expectations.
  4. Timing is Everything: Sync up with the marketing team for strategic scheduling.
  5. Don't Forget to AB Test: Keep the creative juices flowing and set up an internal AB checkbox for seamless experimentation.

 

Before we end this, Dayn’s got a quick question for all of you👇

 

Is there anything else that you have done that has had a significant impact on your deliverability & open rates? 

If you’ve got any further questions for Dayn, comment section is all yours!

 

@dayn.johnson thanks for the tips here! @debora_nunez this is worth a watch!

Amazing tips @dayn.johnson 👏 , definitely looking forward to many more 😊

Thanks for sharing @dayn.johnson! These are great tips.  For us, a major initiative that has helped increase engagement rates has been enhancing our customer profiles (SFDC Contact Records) so that we’re sending relevant content to the appropriate users.  I think before diving into the content, timing, etc. that it’s critical to ensure you’re targeting the correct audience! 

For us, a major initiative that has helped increase engagement rates has been enhancing our customer profiles (SFDC Contact Records) so that we’re sending relevant content to the appropriate users.

 

👆 THIS, 100%!

Clean and accurate client profiles is absolutely one of our priorities, but unfortunately outside the scope of our team’s bandwidth. All we can do is ask our CSMs to make sure the records are as up-to-date as possible. We’re trying to use the “Role” field more, but even accurate contact names would be awesome.

If I had a dollar for every time someone shared an email draft that started off “Dear {{first name}}...” 🤣

@dayn.johnson Love this!  One thing I do is consistently ask what stats they are going to want to track from this email. If they don’t care so much about clicks, I tend to turn off Link Tracking in the hopes that will help with deliverability.  Of course, they often change their minds. :)

If I’m running a survey program with an inline question, I sometimes make the reminder or escalation email have a link instead of the inline question to see if that helps with responses/deliverability as well.

We also seem to get better responses from emails that are from a person they are familiar with instead of a group email address.

Interesting idea on turning off link tracking, @heather_hansen! We’re typically trying to drive CTA clicks once they engage with the email, whether it’s:

  • Opening a section of our product portal
  • Viewing a support article for more product update info
  • Registering for a self-paced training course or live webinar
  • Completing a survey (Typeform)

I haven’t worked with Gainsight surveys yet, but it’s definitely on my radar to explore them.

And a big ➕💯 to emails from a person for better engagement. The senders for our training and community emails are the respective leaders of those programs, and we’ve started sending a few from our recognizable product owners (with great success). Having the reply-to on those emails really helps manage any responses, especially if a team effort is needed. 😃

Definitely recommend considering when and if the personal touch is warranted -- but in certain situations, it’s hugely beneficial. We’ve seen an almost doubled open rate in some cases, which dramatically increases potential CTA engagement.

We also seem to get better responses from emails that are from a person they are familiar with instead of a group email address.

That’s also what we observe and why we’ve gone in the direction of DCS engagements being systematically sent by a real, accessible human. I receive the cutest responses : people are just happy to be considered by another human (and they mistake our automated engagements for 1:1 which is a measure of success of the engagement in our eyes for the relationship-building goal that we attach to all programs). 

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