Automated lead nurturing for Shipping

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hello everyone happy Thursday thank you so much for joining us for this America outdoors with webinar today this is Hilary wicks here with America outdoors in case you're new to these webinars this is a new member benefit in 2019 this is the sixth webinar we've done this year for our spring series and we do have one more left so if it's not already on your calendar make sure that you have it saved for Wednesday June 5th we're going to be doing our final webinar with a 29 studios the final first spring which is all out of here ROI and choose which marketing strategies you want to do for your business put your money so we will be starting the webinars also in the fall again so you can just have that in mind that you'll be looking out for a postcard and also I just wanted to make sure everybody kind of understand that this is a really good way to get education but we are also going to be expanding upon some of these concepts at the conference that we have this year in Salt Lake City which is the week of December 9th so make sure that's also marked on your calendar all right so today's webinar is all about email and nurturing leads we have Caitlyn she's the director of inbound marketing at 8:29 and she's an expert in this stuff so you're gonna be in really good hands for this webinar as she's going go ahead and write in your questions I'm gonna be monitoring those and we will plan to answer them at the end but you can write them in whenever you're ready so you don't have to hold the questions to the end if you are having any trouble hearing or anything like that also let me know so that we can handle it for you and I'm gonna go ahead and hand it over to Caitlin and take it away hey everyone thanks so much I'm Caitlin marolla as was just mentioned I work at 8:29 Studios as the director of inbound marketing so everything that is related to and kind of under the umbrella of lead generation and lead nurturing primarily through automated email campaigns so I'm going to walk you through this set of slides that I've produced for today's webinar first I'm going to kind of just walk you guys through some definitions some concepts some common sort of pillars of an effective automated email strategy and then I'm going to kind of dig in and show you guys some of the more effective tactics that are a part of an effective email program then I will touch on some email best practices just in case you know you guys are sending emails even today and you want to infuse some newer best practices that are aligned to sort of 2018-2019 trends we'll go over some of those things and then we'll talk a little bit at the end about how to measure success of an email campaign and what we look at on my team so to start off I like to throw this up just because this is a super common conversation that I have with clients especially at the very very beginning learning about their business learning about how they leverage email marketing currently and a lot of our clients say you know we use email marketing and we you know we send a newsletter and then I of course have some follow questions about how that's working for them is it effective does the newsletter help turn leads into customers and most every client that we start with is you know that's a dark area they're not completely sure they have no idea the newsletter is even working if it's helping in any way it kind of know that it's giving them exposure to a certain list of people but they can't really measure the success they're not really sure if that effort is really working for them so what we do then my team and myself we take a look at our client we say okay what are your business goals where your objectives what are your priorities you know for the next three months six months a year out and who are you trying to ultimately target with a meaningful thoughtful branded campaign and I'm going to talk a little bit more about sort of what a full email strategy includes what that should look like a lot of people kind of are doing part of it or they're doing one type of email marketing but there's a bunch of different kinds and I just want to spend some time talking about that so first and foremost we have automated lead nurture email I'm going to spend a lot of time today talking specifically about this tactic but in terms of a full email program you want to include behavioral triggered emails and I'll define what those are and then calendar-based timely emails as well calendar emails meaning those that are sent based on a certain day of the year whether it's a holiday or it's specific promotion you're running that's timely and relevant to only a certain time period that's what I mean when I talk about calendar based emails so let's dig in a little bit so what is a lead nurture automation what is that so an automated campaign is designed for the purpose of identifying qualifying and converting leads to customers it's that sort of steady drumbeat of content of value driven messaging that you can then kind of sit back rest assured that all of your new leads they're funneling into your system from your website from social media from events that you go to they're all receiving that same foundational set of content from you when they are a new organic lead just learning more about you and we can set this up we can have it kind of run automatically that is the purpose of an automation so these campaigns are comprised of strategically positioned email communications created with the intent of course to propel a lead from where they are currently in their purchase journey to ultimately becoming a customer and booking a trip with you so I actually have an example here just a snapshot of some of our emails that we've done for oars as you can see and have you'll sort of see throughout this presentation our emails follow a very standard layout and that is all aligned it's a best practice these are the most effectively designed emails based on our experience based on what we've seen work in the past so you'll kind of see how this is a pretty steady design throughout all of our campaigns across all of our clients so what is the behavioural trigger Dino so these emails are sort of that second pillar of your full email program these emails are designed to meet your buyers where they are in real-time to drive a micro conversion so a behavioral email it sort of puts the user first and puts the marketer second so it's not the marketer saying here are all the things that I want to say to a new lead let's automatically send this content to that lead it's more based on the lead is raising their hand on your website and saying hey I want to learn more about X and then the marketer can then take that behavior and foster content based on that so actions that can sort of work as effective trigger points meeting at a campfire or an event somewhere where you're meeting prospects a form submission on the website obviously making a purchase on her website viewing a specific webpage downloading pieces gated content reading a blog post I have this example here that we've done for Mikado safaris this email goes out directly after somebody requests a brochure on their website and it's just a kind of a clever way to make sure that Mikado is confirming that you've requested your brochure we're going to be sending it to you we're super excited learn more so this is just a really effective email that we send for Mikado and it's based on the behavior that the lead has shown by requesting a brochure what is a calendar based email so a calendar based email is of course pasted on the calendar so anything that's going on that's related to your business model an event invitation a registration deadline a customer anniversary a customer birthday holidays anything that's related to a specific day on the calendar or a specific week on the calendar we want to make sure that our email program takes that into consideration and we're not forgetting those pivotal points in the year I know that a lot of our business models a lot of our clients have seasonal sort of ebbs and flows in in their business and we want to make sure that we're capitalizing on those really hot times of year with calendar driven emails as well so those are the three types of emails but I want to get into the foundational sort of framework that 8:29 lives by and that we educate all of our clients on and sort of in the beginning of our engagements so then it can kind of set the stage for what we create with all of our clients so this is our framework this might be a little bit hard to read but these slides will be available to everyone after this webinar is over they'll be sent out to everyone as well as the recording of this webinar and so you'll be able to kind of dive in and read this in more detail but this is our framework this is sort of our Bible when it comes to how we structure our campaigns what our ultimate goal is and so again propelling a lead from being an unknown visitor on your website to then revealing themselves through a form submission and saying hey here's my name and email in exchange for content or in exchange for a brochure once we have their email address we can start to kind of funnel them down through this purchase journey to becoming a decider and saying I'm going to go on a trip and I'm going to go with vendor X my customer going on the trip and join the trip and then ultimately becoming a customer champion we want to make sure that our automated email campaigns are supporting and encouraging a lead to go through this process every single time we send an email there's a place for it this journey so next again super conceptual but this is a 29s content architecture again this is sort of one of those reference documents that we are constantly going back to with every strategy we recommend with every tactic we execute on ultimately at the end of the day at the top here you'll see the customer journey and we know that a customer journey isn't necessarily linear for every business but we do know that there are common threads throughout every customer journey and that's what this depicts we want all of our sales and marketing internal processes as well as the content that we're externally disseminating to roll up into that customer journey at every stage and you'll see here too as well that there are questions that a lead might have when they're on your website certain pieces of information that we know a lead is going to ask at some point let's answer those within our campaign let's make that lead feel super secure give them that peace of mind that we understand that they might have questions or concerns or you know any sort of issue that they want to address regarding a trip I mean these trips are expensive they're life-changing in a lot of ways this isn't purchasing something through Amazon for $5 this is a big purchase and we want to make sure that all of our leads all of our prospects feel super excited and secure and have that peace of mind that we're providing them with the content that they need to purchase that trip and feel good about it so let's kind of walk through then that journey and each of the different tactics that my team will execute on to achieve that strategy of propelling that lead down the journey so let's look at the top of the funnel so when a lead is just becoming a lead on the website when their visitor maybe they visited your website a couple of times but they haven't submitted a form yet they haven't downloaded any content quite yet how do we get them to ultimately do that how do we get them to take that action and you know give us their name and email address first and foremost I like to set the framework here for this sort of top of funnel conversation just making sure that identify that buyer personas are super important making sure that our website and every top of funnel asset we create is always keeping that buyer persona top of mind we always want to be thinking about who we're targeting when we're thinking about lead generation what do they care about who are they where are they in the purchase journey so we might have completely different content that we're creating for a prospective traveller versus a past traveler versus the current traveller versus an alumni all of that content could be completely different messaging completely different offerings and we want to make sure that we're really keeping that top of mind when we create our assets as part of our campaigns so just like to make sure that that's something that I address but first and foremost when it comes to lead generation and sharing that all of your lead capture forms on your website is optimized if super important we want to make sure that every field within every form whether it's the brochure request or contact us is optimized and that every field has a purple and so what we do what my team will do is we'll say okay we want to develop these automated email campaigns to go to all these different personas and we want to tailor the content as much as we can based on our architecture and we want to propel that person down the funnel but how do we get that person to reveal themselves to begin with before we can even do any of that through thoughtfully designed lead capture forms is a great place to start so will typically will run like a little bit of an audit we'll take a look at your current lead capture forms on your current website and say hey is this field really necessary this might be causing some friction let's reduce the number of fields overall maybe this form that's super long could be split into two forms like we'll just kind of like take a look at what you have and see ways that we could optimize that for an increase in lead gen that's our ultimate goal of course and this is just an example of one of our clients we did their contact form they had a ton of field and we narrowed it down to really just the ones that were super important and we did say that the submission rate increased after doing that so just little changes like that can make a big difference pop-up forms so another tactic that's under the umbrella of lead generation are these pop-up forms that we've employed these have been really really successful for a lot of our clients and I have a couple of examples here to just show you what I mean by this pop-up it just gives you as the business the ability to capture that person's information in real time as they're viewing content whether it's on your blog or it's on your home page or one of your you know sub pages this can pop up at the most opportune time the right pages to ultimately get that person to convert right there on the spot we like to include very few fields as few fields as possible to reduce any sort of friction that might be present for somebody to click off of this we ultimately want people to of course be filling this out we like to keep them super sleek not a whole lot of design elements to these we want it to be something that's not too distracting that you know lead somebody to bounce off the website entirely or click out of this so that's why these sort of looked this way and these are really really really effective at just generating leads to then funnel into our campaigns for nurturing so it's a really cool tactic event forms this is another really cool way to capture people's information digitally a lot of our clients I mean most all of our clients are going to events they're meeting people in person and they either have a booth or they have somewhere where they're meeting prospects and they don't have any way to really capture that person's name an email address beyond a piece of paper and a pen so what we'll do and what we're able to do is design these custom landing pages with first name last name email address phone number any field that the client wants to capture at these events they're going to and these funnel directly into our campaigns right there on the spot so the person fills out their information and then based on who they are based on the information they fill out they're going to get emails or relevant to them because it's already automatically set up so that's a really really cool way to make that user experience just super flawless and really seamless um custom landing pages is another really cool way to tailor your content to the buyer persona that you're targeting let's say your priority for the moment is getting those past travellers to book a second time so you're trying to upsell you're trying to get those travelers that you know had an awesome time with you to book again you can tailor these web pages to them with specific messaging so that messaging might be completely different than what you would want to say to a brand new organic lead who's never traveled with you before and these landing pages they don't live on your website they're not in your navigation their pages that are specifically created for when somebody receives one of our automated emails they can click through that email and show up on the page that's hyper relevant to them so these are super cool they're all completely dynamic so the content changes based on who the person is whether they're a lead or a path traveler or an alumni so that's really cool and then lastly under lead generation we have gated content I can't stress enough how important gated content is having content that's available on your website for download is a great way to generate leave anything from a packing list to a map to a guide to an e-book anything like that that you can create that just is a PDF whether it's two pages three pages 20 pages anything that's kind of beyond your website that you think is of value and is in a PDF format you can place behind a form and ask for people's first name last name and email addresses exchanged for that and it's a great way to generate leads and just get more names more eyeballs viewing your content so it's a kind of summarized lead generation and these best practice tactic thoughtfully placed lead capture forms on your website really important strategically positioned pop-up forms on your website event form for that real-time data collection custom landing pages so you're able to present unique content and thought leadership gated content these are sort of those five micro pillars that fall under lead generation that we are always keeping top of mind with our clients when we engage with our clients to think about new ways to generate new leads for them so that's top of funnel let's move a little bit further down the funnel into that middle portion where somebody is a lead now we have them in our database we have their name and email they're in our system we want to start nurturing them through an automated campaign what does that look like so this side here is just kind of reiterating everything we've talked about up to this point things to include in an automated campaign of course sort of creating that brand boosting buzz inspiring adventure and nature any differentiators things that make you super unique anything that you feel that new organic fresh leaves should know about you when they're in their evaluation process we want to include in our campaign so what does that look like this is what that looks like this is a super complex slide but basically the depiction here is that we can create on the backend complex pathways for a lead to bring themselves through based on their behavior so if they view a specific web page if they click on an email if they open an email if they felt a forum if they read a blog post all those activities we can track and we are dictating which content comes next in their pathway based on that behavior so everything they are doing as a lead as a website visitor is helping to inform what they're receiving from us everything's tailored everything is as personalized as we can make it based on whether they're a lead whether they're an alumni whether they're an active lead versus an inactive lead we can change the messaging based on the fact that maybe they haven't opened an email in 30 days we can change the messaging there so we are all live as a team at a 29 refining and tweaking these funnels these pathways for our leads ultimately to of course convert as many leads into customers and also keeping that brand top of mind and presenting you in the best light possible with tailored content that's highly relevant so that's sort of just what this is here it's a depiction of what one of our campaigns looks like a couple of snapshots here for you to just get a sense for what the emails within our campaigns look like um Seco puzzles is a good example of how we have taken their product which is done a lot of cases a seventeen dollar puzzle which in a lot of cases doesn't necessarily mean that somebody needs to be nurtured for a while to make a decision like that so just purchase the puzzle but this campaign was super successful for the client talking about puzzles in different ways how to glue a puzzle best ways to do a puzzle all the different kinds of puzzles they had I mean all of this content that goes beyond just by now by now by now is really really imperative it really just sets you apart from your competitors and we saw that with Seco Mikado safaris here's another snapshot and again these are just snapshots these campaigns I mean Mikado's campaigns have 2030 emails in them a lead could be within a singular campaign for six months so this is just a snapshot just to show you what the emails look like again you'll see that standard format with the logo at the top that beautiful hero image the really compelling relevant header text the body copy and then that one button at the bottom so you'll see that throughout all of our work this is the most effective way to structure an email if you have too many calls to actions within your email each new button decreases the effectiveness event email so you really want to make sure that you have that one primary button it's really really imperative and I feel like I'm a broken record sometimes but it's so important to remember that you have three to five seconds to get that person to click through to your website from an email so if you have too many links if you have too many stories too many pictures and it's super overwhelming and there's too much in there for somebody to possibly read in three seconds you're going to lose them they're going to delete they're going to unsubscribe or they're just going to ignore completely so that's why you'll sort of see this standard layout obviously we can't do this but I wanted to include it here anyway because you'll have these slides after the webinar and you could perhaps do this with your team internally I think this is a really good exercise to do if you find that an automated email campaign is something you're interested in doing you can totally start to build that framework on your own and this is sort of how we do it with our clients we help walk them through this we sort of hold their hand each step of the way but identify your audience first and foremost I know that I've said that several times now identifying the persona that you're targeting whether it is alumni past travelers current travelers that's really really important you can't necessarily build an effective campaign if you're just targeting it to everyone and that's what we've seen with a lot of our clients who come to us for help they're just blasting everyone with the same content and expecting front results but that's not how it works and so identifying audience number one every single time number two outline the desired action for that audience so a lot of our clients don't necessarily have the same exact desired outcome for each campaign some of our clients say I want somebody to contact me directly I'll close them once I get them on the phone but I want them to contact me and then other clients say I want them to book online I don't need them to talk to me on the phone I want them to book so it really does depend on what that ultimate action is that you want these people within our campaign to take that will really help drive all of the content we create how we structure the campaign how long the campaign is so that's really really important that we iron that out early on number three this is where we can get creative and this is where the fun part starts you can really start to put yourself in the shoes of the people receiving this content and think about all of the pertinent pieces of information that they would need to know to take that action that you've outlined in step two so this is really important and it's fun to sort of lay out all the different content pieces whether it's blog posts or landing pages or deeded content or a video or a podcast recording whatever you have that is relevant we're going to use and we're going to repurpose for this effort and a lot of times too we're also recommending new content that we feel would be really effective and would work so we're constantly also working with our clients on creating new content as well so once you have all of your content laid out and you know what you're going to include you can start to put those pieces into an orderly fashion for your email campaign so what should come first what should come second you can kind of think about somebody moving their way through and receiving all of this content from you and what would make sense to come earlier on versus later on in a sequence you again this is a worksheet that I'll do in person I'm with people but I wanted to include it in case any of you wanted to do this internally as a project for you and your team this is just a worksheet that I use again coming up with all of the things that you would want to include that you have already and then of course I have a call-out that not all of the call to actions need to exist yet you could say to yourself I wish I had a blog post about that topic because so many people ask me about that and I know that it would be something that would be highly viewed let's just create it or you know I love when people say great things about our guides maybe we should do like a Q&A with one of our guides and post that on the website that would be a really cool piece of content we don't have yet let's get that created so it's also a really cool way to sort of brainstorm about what's next in terms of your content development so we cover topless animal we covered sort of the middle of the funnel now let's start to talk about customers again your email campaigns don't and once the person takes that desired action once somebody does both we want to make sure that we're still keeping ourselves top of mine but we're still sort of eliciting that excitement and that our brand doesn't just sort of stop communicating with customers after we take their money who we want to make sure that that's not the sentiment and that people feel like really connected to you especially because these trips are big purchases and like I said they can be life-changing in a lot of ways so we have a new customer we're super excited we know a little bit about them based on their purchase so we know what trip they're taking we know the destinations they're going to whether they're bringing their spouse or their family we know that information based on their booking so we can tailor the content we send to customers based on that so I have a couple of examples so this is the part where customers are the focal point what would be sort of example communications we would want to automatically send at a certain cadence to customers leading up to their trip how to best prepare any cultural tips to respect the locals in the environment prior to their trip items to remember when packing a discount for referring a friend all of these little tidbits are great ways to stay connected to your current customers and here are some examples that we've done actually first of quiz mo clásico a couple of informational emails that specifically go out to customers that have a trip coming up basic cycling tips a checklist for what to pack they have a really awesome super comprehensive pre-departure packet so we send that out multiple times to all of our current travelers who have a trip coming up so that's really really effective people are really digging that the engagement is really high there and so these are also really important so I hope I just covered the entire funnel for you all I'm talking about top of funnel generating those leads nurturing those leads with tailored content based on who they are and then ultimately once you have them as customers continuing to nurture them leading up to their trip and then of course post trip as well I'm getting their feedback maybe if you have a photo contest or you have a place where they can upload photos they took always just staying connected to them and fostering that sense of community is really huge for travel companies and we've seen that just be really effective that whole strategy but right now I'm just going to switch gears a little bit and talk about some email best practices so a lot of our clients or prospects or people that I talk to at events webinars say we're already doing email marketing and we're trying to get better at it we're not totally sure if we're ready to work with an agency but we at least could improve what we're currently doing internally so I like to include a couple of tips that you could perhaps start to infuse even today in your own email marketing strategy that you currently have first and foremost have a goal for each email this is huge for me and my team we're constantly thinking about this with everything that we put together for our clients but if there's no clear goal if there's not that one click that the recipient knows they're supposed to do the email will get lost in the shuffle so short sweet what is the purpose and I have an example here there's really nothing more to this email beyond the couple of words and the get started button it's super easy to consume as somebody who might be viewing this on their phone or when they're on the go they know that there's only one place to click there's only one thing that the company is asking of them and that's really important and so have a goal for each email ask yourself when someone receives this I want them to do X I don't want them to read 20 articles I want them to do this one thing and that's really really helpful personalized as much as possible of course is a line where personalization can become a little bit creepy but including the person's first name including that first name in the subject line or at least in the email itself really does help to boost engagement it just fosters that personal connection and then of course as always with every email send personalized that from account having a no reply of the email address that pops up when somebody tries to reply to the email just really breaks that trust that you have with somebody if they're about to reply and they know that it's just going to go to some automated inbox it's not a real human being it just doesn't feel good so a lot of times will create alias email addresses that look like it's a person and then the company internally when they receive replies can manage that however they need to but it's nice when a prospect feels like they're actually emailing a person be thoughtful with your subject lines I can't stress enough how important subject lines are and I know with how many things were all juggling and how quick we have to kind of move through our day with all the projects we're working on a subject line for an email can really become an afterthought but it's so important you can really dedicate your time to creating an awesome email with really cool content but if no one opens the email to see it it's a lost effort and there's no ROI there on your time so subject lines are really really really important some tips on subject lines keep them genuine don't try to get clickbait tea with your subject lines make them as true and as genuine to the purpose and relevance of the email itself you want to fulfill your promise to the person by making sure that subject line is tied directly to the content that's within the email keep it between 40 to 60 characters and limit the use of CAP special characters there's still some research being done and it's kind of an active study right now in the field of whether emojis are good to use in subject lines it's the verdict is still out on that we're not completely sure yet it's kind of based on industry but I think from my perspective adding an emoji here and there is okay especially if the emoji is like super super relevant to the subject line itself leverage preview text and so everything that I've been talking about is more or less tied to HubSpot so we're a HubSpot agency 80% of our clients are on HubSpot I know that a lot of people use MailChimp or Constant Contact and some of those systems limit you and your ability to personalize certain things certain elements HubSpot has the most flexibility the most personalization sort of tools but if you can through whatever platform you're using personalize your preview text when you can it's just a great way to complement your subject line keep these preview text snippets between 75 to 100 characters the first five to eight words are the most crucial and of course write write this in a way that provokes action so if you have a discount or something that's within the email that makes it timely and important include that in the preview text see TAS are arguably the most important piece of the email itself so the call-to-action button cannot be something where you just throw it in have it say learn more it needs to be a little bit more thoughtful than that for the email to be effective so placement of the call-to-action color of the button the words that appear in the button this uber example here is a really awesome one you can't miss this button it's completely contrasting to the colors of the rest of the email the words are exactly relevant to what the email is about there's even a little arrow here so it's sort of indicating to the person that when they click they're going to go somewhere to see all the gift cards so this is a really good example of how to do this the right way you also want to make sure that your button appears as high up in the email as possible keeping your email short sweet concise consumable with that button viewable to the person is really really important so those are my tips for just elevating your current emails that you might be sending and I do want to touch on success metrics and what we at 829 sort of used to measure success of a singular email a series of emails or a campaign at large the success metrics really don't change dependent upon sort of how granular you're looking at your assets let's sort of dig in just a little bit here with success metrics so what's a measure and why email by email performance as well as website activity attributed to email marketing and I'm just going to kind of walk through what those are so deliverability deliverability is of the list of people use let's say you have a list of a thousand contacts that you send an email to how many of those contacts was that email delivered to so this is basically just the total of total people on the list - any bounces is deliverability and you really want to make sure that that deliverability rate is 97 98 99 percent so you want your bounce rate to be as low as possible so we of course look at that that gives us a really good sense for the quality of our audience and how many email addresses might be bad within our list how up-to-date the list is so that'll give us a really good sense for that open rate of course open rate is a huge indicator of whether the subject line was effective so we look at open rates as an indicator of success based on how we wrote our subject lines so that's a huge piece we look at of course quick rate quick rate is more an indicator of the effectiveness of the email itself and our call to action button the wording that we chose for the email the photo we chose for the email I also like to mention here that a bee testing is something that's really really cool and important and if you have the ability to do so I would just to kind of understand how your audience engages with email marketing coming from your business so everything every business is different every business has a different audience you know every audience engages with email marketing in a different way so a/b testing certain things button color image that you choose header text you can a/b test all those elements to see what works best click-through rate so click-through rate is a little bit different than click rate click-through rate is how many people clicked out of how many people opened where as click rate is how many people clicked out of how many people received the email so click-through rate is a little bit of a better indicator of how effective the email was for those who opened it so we like to look at that and typically click-through rate you want anywhere between 20 to 30 percent that will tell you that the email was a good email and then it's one worth sending in the future bounce rate of course we want that to be as low as possible if we see a high bounce rate will absolutely flag that email will flag that account really at large and we'll dig in and take a look at the list take a look at those who bounce and remove any bad emails from our audience so we can kind of clean that up as we go unsubscribe rate of course we're always looking at that when we see any red flags with unsubscribe rate it's either an indicator of the list the list of people that were sending the email to or it's an indicator that the email just wasn't relevant and we can tweak it as needed going forward and then conversion rates so how many people took the action we were beckoning them to take through the email that's really at the end of the day what we're doing all of this for so we always like to look at conversion rate you know how many trips were booked through this campaign after these three emails went out how many people who received those three emails booked so we're always looking at things like that to kind of help us garner an ROI for the effort and then lastly just a couple of things regarding website activity pages per session so we want to see of those people who made it back to your website through an email click how many pages did they view in their session and then average session duration so if people who click through an email and get to your website through that email if they're spending more time on your website that's usually an indicator that the email did its job so we're looking at that as well and lastly I just want to leave you with a couple of takeaways of course keeping audience front of minds with really everything you're doing regarding email marketing is really really important if I leave you with nothing I hope that you'll take that away consult with a guy or a marker to get started don't be afraid to ask for help this is not an easy strategy this is not an easy program email marketing is really really hard it takes time to really understand how your audience works and what resonates with them and what drives somebody to book an email marketing when done in the right way can give you so much information about your buyers it can really open up a whole new world for you just in terms of the insights you're able to gather format your emails for best possible engagement of course and then email marketing is the number one marketing channel so you know I would of course recommend really dedicating some resources and some time to looking at your current strategy look at your current emails is it working if it's just something that every week you send your weekly e blasts and you're trying to think of things to put in it like if that that's not working that's outdated so we really want to make sure that our clients and that anyone that we have exposure to has that feeling of empowerment and kind of takes a look at their current strategy and says is this really working was how could this be better what can I do to improve this I've been sending these weekly e-blast for a year and I have never really understood if this works but it's just become part of my habit that's we hear that all the time so it's a really good opportunity to kind of just level set and see how you could improve that effort and then lastly a couple of stats but again you'll have this so you can read these on your own time so I do want to I know we only have a couple of minutes left I think we have 1012 minutes left so I want to leave time for Q and a hey Caitlyn thank you so much we do have a few questions we're gonna start with Dean's question and he is wondering how to get your reservation system connected with your email marketing platform so that somebody who's along the prospects funnel then gets turned into an upcoming customer when that happens yeah that's a good question so a lot of times it really is dependent upon whether the marketing automation platform that you're using has an API that will connect with your reservation system if not what we've done in our case you know if the reservation system and the marketing platform have to be separate because there isn't a native integration which is not uncommon what we'll do is we'll kind of create like a pretty robust training slash program for our clients to say okay here's all the information that's in your reservation system and here's all the information in your marketing platform these two systems don't talk to each other so here's how we're going to sort of manually create that communication flow and it's been working out really well actually for a lot of our clients it actually gives them more like a hands-on look at their data because they are having to kind of go into two different platforms and look at things but again that's sort of a deeper conversation into if the two platforms don't connect sometimes they do and that's awesome it really does depend on what you're using on either side what reservation platforms and what marketing platform cool Thanks another question this one's from Anna she has struggled with getting MailChimp to correctly integrate with the forum so she has on her website some of the forms seem to be working fine some aren't do you have any advice for what may be going home yeah what we've done in the past with meals because their forms aren't the greatest we use gravity form a lot of our clients websites gravity forms and MailChimp have a native integration so if you switch all of your forms to grab the forms you can integrate that with MailChimp and it'll work seamlessly and you can add as many forms if you want so that's something that we've decided is the best case scenario for employers thank you so much Katelyn thank you everyone for joining it's been really informative and if anyone has follow-up questions that they want me to send to Caitlin I can always be the middleman for you and get those answered otherwise you'll be getting an email tomorrow afternoon as the webinar recording on that for you have a good afternoon everyone