Challenge: First Impressions, Few Insights

In most databases at most companies, the majority of prospects never leave the first stage of the marketing funnel. This non-movement can be attributed to one key reality that is inconvenient for marketers everywhere: Prospects need to engage in order to move down-funnel, and most people, by definition, do not engage with most marketing.

No matter the reason people aren’t engaging with a brand—an unfavorable economy, stiff competition, low consumer confidence in advertisers—its impact is the same on marketing strategies. It creates a maddening feedback loop. Since engagement is crucial in building brand awareness, connections with consumers and conclusions about the preferences and needs of audience segments, its absence means it’s all the harder to understand why it’s absent.

Complicating matters is the fact that, at this top-most stage, Katoa Frames (like any brand) almost certainly has the least amount of data about prospects it will ever have. That includes first-party data, which is information a brand gathers through interactions with people (e.g., website visits, app usage, and product purchases), as well as zero-party data, which is information prospects explicitly, deliberately supply in direct response to questions or requests from a brand, as might be provided in a survey or opt-in preferences.

Both types of data are hyper-valuable to businesses seeking to understand their customer base and provide them with intuitive, personalized experiences. These insights would enable Katoa to make more strategic outreach decisions about everything from timing and testing to segmentation and content. But without it, we’re navigating in the dark.

Solution: Best Practice Marketing

Best practice is the lighthouse in a data void. By leaning on proven techniques and guidelines, we mitigate risk, reduce errors, promote excellence and efficiency, and increase the odds we make good marketing that resonates with consumers. With this in mind, Katoa should:

1. Emphasize broad appeal and high-level benefits without delving too much into product comparisons or pricing (which are more appropriate for further down the funnel). Now is the time to build trust with prospects, help them connect with our brand, preemptively overcome some of their likely objections, and even try to evoke a sense of desire or need or memorability. We can do this by clearly communicating our value propositions:

   • We believe everyone deserves to feel and look good.

   • We are unique in that we create sunglasses for all face shapes.

   • We make it easy for people to try on sunglasses at home.

   • We donate a portion of each purchase to meaningful causes.

2. Consider targeting recent or highly engaged individuals to leverage that momentum. “Objects in motion will stay in motion,” Newton said famously. In marketing, the same is true for warm prospects. By speaking to engaged prospects, we not only increase the odds the campaign will succeed at converting them into customers; we also increase the odds that, even short of conversion, prospects will interact with the campaign in ways that help us fill in the data void.

3. Identify optimal days and times to deliver this campaign to prospects based on industry and product focus. This maximizes performance metrics, enhances relevance for prospects and reduces annoyance (and thereby negative metrics like unsubscribe rate and spam report rate). It even optimizes for mobile engagement: Since people often check their messages on the go, understanding when folks are most likely to be using their mobile device improves engagement potential.

   • Sender found that Tuesdays and Wednesdays are the best days to send marketing emails for both B2C and B2B companies. Brevo agrees with Tuesday but proposes Thursday as the second-best day for e-commerce brands. CampaignMonitor analyzed over 30 billion emails and gives the third endorsement for Tuesday, especially for travel and leisure purchases (which would include sunglasses).

   • Timing is in even closer alignment. Brevo proposes 10 a.m. OptinMonster highlights “the morning hours” as peak times for engagement. HubSpot also reports that 30.9% of the B2C marketers it surveyed said the most engagement happens between 9 a.m. and 12 p.m.

   • Accounting for time zones is critical. According to the United States Census Bureau, the top three states for eyewear sales are New York, California and Florida. These states are in two different time zones, Eastern and Pacific—three, really, if we count the western part of the Florida Panhandle, which is actually in Central.

4. Personalize each email to make it as relevant as possible to the prospect base as individuals. While at the top of the funnel we may not have the data needed to unlock advanced personalization, we can still implement a degree of tailoring that has a positive impact on people’s perception of Katoa and this campaign. For example, even if with just the {first.name} personalization token (as it is called in most marketing automation platforms; they are called variable tags in Salesforce), we can personalize the salutation line to make outreach feel that little bit more human.

5. Make its emails as scannable as possible by:

   • Using accessible color combinations “so that everyone can read the complete information provided and leverage the relevant parts”;

   • Selectively bolding words so that key phrases can influence prospects even if they don’t read the whole email from top to bottom (which is probable, given most people give emails about 12 seconds before closing it);

   • Using typography in a way that gives content a clear and intuitive hierarchy, so reading flows naturally in the mind of readers—again, a necessity in the era of 12-second attention spans; and

   • Enabling ample white space in order “to balance design elements and better organize content, [which] improve[s] the visual communication experience.”

6. Resending emails to prospects, which can be considered best practice in certain situations.

Details: The Art And Science Of Successful Email Resends

In email marketing, resends refer to the practice of sending the same or a slightly modified email to individuals who did not open or engage with the initial email. This strategy can be a strong tactic because, when used carefully, it can increase the chances that Katoa reaches a wider audience, captures people’s attention and unlocks positive KPIs for the overall campaign.

In this scenario, we'll employ resends with identical email content but different subject lines and preview text. The objective is to create more engagement opportunities in a resource-efficient way: Marketers only have to ideate new inbox-facing copy, not new body copy. This increased engagement will be vital in addressing top-of-funnel data gaps, especially if markedly different tones are deployed between each version.

For example, if the original message’s tone in subject line and preview text was more empathetic or compassionate, and the resend’s tone was more focused on creating a sense or urgency or scarcity, then how people engage with one versus the other can enable us to infer valuable learnings about how this audience prefers to be spoken to or what type of language will motivate it to take action.

Won’t prospects be offended by or annoyed to receive the same email? Not if we only deliver the resends to people who have not opened the original message.

When should the resend be deployed? Well, most emails are opened in the first hour after they’re sent, and the odds of an eventual open drops below 1% after one day has passed. This means that after 24 to 48 hours, marketers at Katoa can be reasonably sure that whomever has hand-raised as a non-opener will remain a non-opener. And based on the findings in the previous section, it appears an initial send on Tuesdays with resends on Wednesdays or Thursdays—both in the late morning, and local to each prospect’s time zone (should we have or be able to infer that data) point—is a solid strategy.

In The Inbox: Subject Line And Preview Text

[ Subject Line: Shades for all shades ]

Brevity is wit—and in this case, also efficacy.

1. This subject line is clear and concise: especially useful given the probability that recipients will engage with the email on their mobile device.

2. It aligns, pithily, with the expressed mission of Katoa Frames: to enable all people to look and feel great in their sunglasses.

3. It creates the (accurate) sense that inclusive design is a noteworthy value-add.

[ Preview Text: Our sunglasses are made for all face shapes, so you look great and feel great. ]

This preview text (also called snippet text or preheader text) checks lots of best practice boxes. It seamlessly transitions from the subject line, bridges into the email body copy that awaits for those who click, and contextualizes or more deeply explains the subject line without being redundant.

The Email

Click here to see the full email. This will open in a new tab.

The Resend: Shifting Tone To Isolate Causation

[ Subject Line: Do your sunglasses actually fit you? ]

From the initial email to the resend, a shift has occurred. Statement (“shades for all shades”) is now question, and ubuntu is now slight bite or even a knowing challenge. Prospects may ask themselves, “Wow, I never thought about that. What if my sunglasses don’t fit me? What if they never did?”

This swerve in tone is necessary to learn more about what this audience responds to; and of course, since this email is going to people who did not open the first one, it does not benefit us to echo the original, ineffective approach.

[ Preview Text: Our sunglasses are made for all face shapes, so you look great and feel great. ]

This is the same preview text as appeared in the original message. Because we are testing the effectiveness of the subject line at prompting opens, we should consider keeping the other “visible in the inbox” factor constant (preview text), changing only the variable of interest (the subject line).

It would be perfectly above-board to test different subject line / preview text tandems, but in short this is strict variable isolation. If we observe a change in unique open rate—or ‘adjusted’ unique open rate, as some platforms measure it since Apple iOS 15 and macOS Monterey introduced Mail Privacy Protection—this will help us more confidently say the subject line was the cause.

Click here to go to the next stage in this campaign: Consideration